[icehawk219]

In my limited experience working on teams that were flat what happened every time is a sort of unofficial structure formed. Experts, and senior staff, just sort of became the go-to people. As new folks were hired they'd see that certain people simply had more institutional knowledge or were already friendly with other parts of the org and would drift towards following their lead without being told to. Obviously there are exceptions but I've noticed this on a few teams now.

[adekok]

That reminds me of the story of university walkways:

https://books.google.ca/books?id=JEuYpTC-mQYC&pg=PA242&lpg=P...

In short, students walked over the grass, despite the "keep off the grass" signs. The solution proposed by university president Dwight D Eisenhower was "Why not let the students take whichever route works, and then build the walkways over the bare patches?"

The same could apply here. If the rank & file see person X as being necessary / useful, then give that person an official title and responsibilities.

[mwfunk]

This is fascinating, I guess it really did come from Eisenhower but I've heard many variants. The first time I heard it, it was attributed to Bill Gates deciding where the paths on the MS campus should be (this was during peak Microsoft, sometime in the '90s).

I've also heard a version (or two) in which the campus was specifically one of the top tier US schools for CS (MIT/Stanford/CMU/etc.). The common thread was always that it was supposed to illustrate the visionary status of whoever was in charge, and/or the enlightened status of the company or university. The Eisenhower version would be the oldest one though, perhaps it was the original.

[wott]

I didn't know it was attributed to someone (or many ones). I always thought it was a common reflection almost everyone develops after seeing a few of those natural paths compared to the officially built paths.

[eric_h]

Amusingly, I'd heard it attributed to Steve Jobs.

[paulddraper]

It was actually Abraham Lincoln.

[xorblurb]

There might be a problem, though. A person can be a go to for a subject because he filled a hole at one point, and then proceeds to kidnap the subject entirely and even obtains new semi-informal-subordinates to work on the kidnapped subject under their orders. Such maintainers are usually not bad, but they can at the same time make tons of dubious discretionary choices and lack random amount of theoretical or practical knowledge. Depending on the culture, the situation can stay like this during years, even decades. Bonus points if such people suffer from the NIH syndrome...

[dredmorbius]

"Desire paths". Also a form of least-cost, satisficing, problem solving / solution phenomena.

[throwaway274739]

I heard that story but that it was Einstein at the IAS campus.

[jevanish]

This is exactly what Wistia found: https://wistia.com/blog/ditching-flat

"We began to realize that by building a company with a flat org structure, we had done the exact opposite of what we had intended. We had centralized all the decision-making, and we were relying on a secret implicit structure to make progress.

Every company has a structure. If you don't explicitly define your structure, then you are left with an implicit one, and that can stifle productivity. We had hoped that being flat would let us move faster and be more creative, but as we grew, we ended up with an unspoken hierarchy that actually slowed down our ability to execute."

[sliverstorm]

Also discovered by feminist organizations in decades past. A good read:

There is no such thing as a structureless group. Any group of people of whatever nature that comes together for any length of time for any purpose will inevitably structure itself in some fashion. --Jo Freeman, "The Tyranny of Structurelessness"

http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

[vintermann]

I was going to recommend that. Whether the accusations of gender discrimination were warranted or not, either way it would be a dead-classic example of power struggles in informal structures.

[cookiecaper]

This organic emergence of an informal structure is what many anti-management advocates use to justify their stance. They say there is no need for formal bureaucracy when people will automatically follow natural leaders and good ideas.

While I appreciate the philosophical sentiment, I think it's both a little naive and a little jaded.

Naive because in practice, there are real disputes, and someone needs to be in a position to resolve those disputes and keep things organized. When the structure is informal, even with great technical people (and often this occurs more often with great technical people), effort will often be spent on duplicate tasks, and the differing implementations will compete for mindshare internally. While that's not always a problem, there are times when the structure needs to be directed so that more important corporate goals can be achieved. If the employees can't operate with unity, they may find the whole company unified with them on the unemployment line in the not-too-distant future.

It's naive because good ideas are not always received well by self-interested actors, especially when you're dealing with people of mixed experienced levels and backgrounds, as any company with more than a few employees is. The manager's role is to make a critical analysis of the proposal and make what is frequently a difficult choice about what will be in the organization's long-term interest.

It's also naive because there needs to be a designated official who represents both you to the company and the company to you. That representation ensures you always have someone to voice your concerns and needs to. It ensures that you understand what the company wants you to be doing instead of having to try to pull it out of the ether, come out with the wrong thing, and find yourself in sudden political turmoil. It ensures that you have an appointee who can advise and represent your cause in sensitive personnel matters, and argue for the value you bring to the company. A good manager serves many very important organizational functions besides just determining technical direction.

Jaded because such a massive majority of managerial structures are so comically broken and useless, that traumatized workers don't understand how they could ever be useful for anything and just want to chuck the whole thing out. Believe me, I beyond sympathize with this, but I don't think it always has to be that way. This is part of why finding a good corporate fit is very important for the job seeker.

Any time you get more than 3-5 people in a room, a political pecking order will naturally arise. That force needs checks and controls to keep everyone safe. Benevolent, mindful leadership from good, fair judges is critical to the success of any group of humans, whether organized into a corporation, nation, tribe, family, or other. We can't discard that principle just because it's hard to find qualified leaders.