
The Tyranny of Structurelessness (1973) - sillysaurus3
https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm?
======
cirgue
My experience with this dynamic is that leaders and power structures emerge in
“leaderless” organizations despite the best efforts of participants. This
leads to a lack of accountability for the excercise of de facto authority
because it supposedly does not exist, and rapidly creates toxic and
exploitative environments with zero recourse for grievance.

~~~
rixed
Isn't the solution then to make authority (and thus also accountability)
temporary and/or to spread it amongst many smaller areas?

For instance, every employee could take turn at non technical but honorific
positions. Regarding technical tasks, each person could also rule absolutely
over many small areas of expertise that they also take responsibility for?

I hope there is no need for a fixed arbitrary hierarchy for accountability.

~~~
noio
The article mentions at the end some strategies. (points 3 and 4 seem
relevant, 5 perhaps counters your argument)

1) Delegation [...]

2) [Responsibility]

3) Distribution of authority among as many people as is reasonably possible.
[...]

4) Rotation of tasks among individuals. Responsibilities which are held too
long by one person, formally or informally, come to be seen as that person's
"property" and are not easily relinquished or controlled by the group. [...]

5) Allocation of tasks along rational criteria. [...] Ability, interest, and
responsibility have got to be the major concerns in such selection. [...]

6) Diffusion of information [...]

7) Equal access to resources needed by the group.[...]

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albacur
I’ve seen flat organization work well at one organization, essentially a
consulting firm where we worked on short-lived projects. Teams had to assemble
and disassemble within a span of two or three years.

It really worked well, in retrospect. Our clients (from one branch of the
military or another) came to us with actual clearly-defined problems, and gave
us space to engineer real solutions.

I left because I didn’t want to spend my time developing tech for the
military, and I joined an industrial R&D lab. What a mess I walked into.
Layers and layers of hierarchy, all decided by political in-fighting rather
than merit, and every team is pushing mocked-up half-solutions to imaginary
problems.

~~~
azernik
I'm curious how many of these applied:

"""

While working in this kind of group is a very heady experience, it is also
rare and very hard to replicate. There are almost inevitably four conditions
found in such a group;

1) It is task oriented. Its function is very narrow and very specific, like
putting on a conference or putting out a newspaper. It is the task that
basically structures the group. The task determines what needs to be done and
when it needs to be done. It provides a guide by which people can judge their
actions and make plans for future activity. 2) It is relatively small and
homogeneous. Homogeneity is necessary to insure that participants have a
"common language" for interaction. People from widely different backgrounds
may provide richness to a consciousness-raising group where each can learn
from the others' experience, but too great a diversity among members of a
task-oriented group means only that they continually misunderstand each other.
Such diverse people interpret words and actions differently. They have
different expectations about each other's behavior and judge the results
according to different criteria. If everyone knows everyone else well enough
to understand the nuances, these can be accommodated. Usually, they only lead
to confusion and endless hours spent straightening out conflicts no one ever
thought would arise. 3) There is a high degree of communication. Information
must be passed on to everyone, opinions checked, work divided up, and
participation assured in the relevant decisions. This is only possible if the
group is small and people practically live together for the most crucial
phases of the task. Needless to say, the number of interactions necessary to
involve everybody increases geometrically with the number of participants.
This inevitably limits group participants to about five, or excludes some from
some of the decisions. Successful groups can be as large as 10 or 15, but only
when they are in fact composed of several smaller subgroups which perform
specific parts of the task, and whose members overlap with each other so that
knowledge of what the different subgroups are doing can be passed around
easily. 4) There is a low degree of skill specialization. Not everyone has to
be able to do everything, but everything must be able to be done by more than
one person. Thus no one is indispensable. To a certain extent, people become
interchangeable parts.

"""

~~~
albacur
#1 held: we defined the tasks required to solve the problem at hand, and
focused in on them.

#2 held: the teams were fairly small and homogenous.

#3 held, mostly. The project lead would occasionally withhold potentially-
useful information, which felt like some kind of egocentric power play, but
overall communication was very good.

#4 didn’t hold. We were all specialists in various areas. Fortunately, people
rarely left mid-project.

~~~
hitekker
Thanks for running your experience by these conditions.

#4 seems like almost everyone in the team was indispensable since they were
all specialists, which might not contradict the point of the condition (no one
believes they’re less replaceable than their peers)

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nemild
One reason this has been discovered as of late in tech circles is Bitcoin.

Professor Arvind Narayanan at Princeton cited this in May 2015, as the Bitcoin
community was having debates about decentralization and what it meant for
governance.

See the fifth footnote in this blog post entitled "Bitcoin faces a crossroads,
needs an effective decision-making process ":

[https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2015/05/11/bitcoin-faces-a-
cro...](https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2015/05/11/bitcoin-faces-a-crossroads-
needs-an-effective-decision-making-process/)

Also, this tweet:

[https://twitter.com/random_walker/status/1005151684807610368](https://twitter.com/random_walker/status/1005151684807610368)

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hkai
Great read for some ex-Valve employees.

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unwind
Meta/OT: Mods, please fix the missing 'p' in the title. Thanks.

