[rdoherty]

I've worked at a place that had a 'flat' organization, it was a mess. Hidden power structures, informal and outside of office 'meetings' where decisions were made and arbitrary decisions made at a whim.

When looking for a job, be careful when leadership says their organization is flat. You will probably find people at the top (C level) who hate being told what to do and hate management. That will poison the structure and coordination of the company. People need some sort of structure so they know where to turn to for help, responsibilities are assigned and there is accountability.

I'm not advocating having rigid, strong management and structure at a company, just that if you don't have an official structure, an unofficial and hidden power structure will emerge. And that is far, far worse.

[dragonwriter]

> I've worked at a place that had a 'flat' organization, it was a mess. Hidden power structures, informal and outside of office 'meetings' where decisions were made and arbitrary decisions made at a whim.

OTOH, every place I've seen, corporate and government, with a visible and formal hierarchy has also been a mess featuring hidden power structures, informal and outside of office meetings where decisions were made, and arbitrary decisions made at a whim.

(One big feature of California's "public meeting" laws is to try to limit and expose this in the highest levels of certain representative government decision-making bodies, but its pretty much a universal feature of human societies.)

> if you don't have an official structure, an unofficial and hidden power structure will emerge.

That will also happen, pretty invariably, if you have an official structure.

[panic]

Sure, but if you're not part of the informal power structure, having some influence through an official structure is better than having no influence at all.

In my (somewhat limited) experience, you need a balance to get good work done: too much official structure slows things down and limits good people, but too much informal structure leads to the kind of place described in "The Tyranny of Structurelessness."

[jevanish]

It seems like what people forget is that whether you have structure or not, it takes effort to make it work well. You can't just throw someone a job title in leadership and assume they'll do a good job.

Leadership by example, training, adhering to values all matter. It just so happens that use a tried and true system of actual structure gives you a wealth of knowledge and experience to pull from.

Could a flat org work? Maybe? So far, it seems like every company that tries and gets to scale has serious problems. Maybe it makes sense stick to innovating on your core business, and sticking to business best practices in your processes. (A recent post by the former Cofounder/CEO of Brightroll digs into this: https://medium.com/@todsacerdoti/0-to-640m-non-obvious-lesso...)

[Pica_soO]

Has there been any attempt to make a periodically oscilatting structure? One that has a structure and then gives it up and regrows one, and so on..

[dredmorbius]

Sortition is one mechanism that's been used. Among the most fascinating articles I've read in the past 4-5 years was Aeon's article on randomness as a choice option (going beyond just leadership):

Michael Schulson, "How to Choose" https://aeon.co/essays/if-you-can-t-choose-wisely-choose-ran...