Do completely horizontal organizations truly exist? Fueled by growing excitement about self-management, bossless leadership and new governance models such as Holacracy, I increasingly hear large claims about the potential of “flat organizations”, which are being used as synonymous to “having no hierarchy”. I often wonder whether I am reading correctly: Organizations with no hierarchy at all, with real live people in them? I feel like there has been a misunderstanding here. I might be wrong, but from my 5 year experience running the distributed organization OuiShare, my conclusion is: there is no such thing.

To explain why I’ve been quite frustrated with this misunderstanding, let me describe a scenario I have been confronted with multiple times in the past years: a new person, let’s call her Lisa, joins OuiShare to actively contribute to our network. Most likely, due to the way our organization was initially presented when we started in 2012 (the first draft of our values described us as a horizontal organization), but also the way this description has been interpreted and retold again and again by people from all corners of our network, Lisa arrives with a set of expectations. She expects to find a workplace free of power dynamics, where “everyone is equal”, she can do anything, nobody will tell her what to do and often, where leadership is not tied to specific people.

Pretty soon after joining and getting to work, Lisa notices she is having a hard time putting things in motion and garnering support for their work. This is when Lisa comes to me for help. I then suggest she talk to a specific person with more “power” than them on this matter—a “superior”, which is mostly followed by a confused and disappointed reaction. “I thought you had no hierarchy. Now you are telling me that some people here are superior to others? OuiShare is just like any other organization.” The fact that person A could be superior to person B in a given situation clashes with Lisa’s expectations. The answer I give her is “YES, we do have hierarchy; I don’t remember having ever said otherwise. But there is hierarchy and hierarchy.”

It’s dynamic hierarchy, stupid!

In most organizations today and in line with much of organizational theory, job titles correspond to a specific position within the organization’s hierarchy. There is a defined path for getting into this position (a specific degree, followed by climbing the corporate ladder for x number of years, maybe skipping some steps if you are good at politics) and job titles correlate with specific lines of communication and decision making power.

Rather than having abolished hierarchy all together, what I have perceived as different about the new genre of “emergent organizations” to which I count OuiShare and the Enspiral network, is that hierarchies in these organizations are dynamic. Authority shifts based on who has the most knowledge and experience in a specific context. There is no clearly defined path for holding a specific role.

Hierarchy does not need to disappear from our organizations, but it needs to change.

In such dynamic structures, sometimes authority correlates with age or time spent in the organization, but not necessarily. A new person entering may have superior expertise on a subject to others in the organization, putting them at the “top of the hierarchy” for this area. Simultaneously, they may be answering to a person with more history in the organization in the context of another project. I can both be the chair of OuiShare Fest Paris and answer to those same team members in another context.

Without formal structures, informality rules

So why not just get rid of hierarchy all together and “declare everyone equal”? In any system with humans in it, power relations exist, whether you formalize them or not. And as Jo Freeman states in her essay the Tyranny of Structurelessness, “structurelessness in groups does not exist”. If you refuse to define power structures, informal ones will emerge almost instantly. Not expressing these can be extremely harmful to your organization.

Though I understand why telling stories of fully flat and bossless organizations is enticing for those of us working on new organizational models, I don’t think we’re doing ourselves a favor with this. That’s why my request is that we stop creating unrealistic expectations for newcomers to this field and use this opportunity to truly understand what differentiates us from traditional hierarchies and how we could help others transition to becoming more dynamic hierarchies themselves.

To distribute power and leadership in organizations, we need to acknowledge their existence first.

What happens to bosses in a dynamic hierarchy? It might just be a matter of finding a new term, but contrary to what one often reads about self-organization, I am not convinced organizations should be bossless.

Rather than removing bosses from the workplace, I think their role needs to evolve to that of a facilitator, coordinator and leader—

Stewarding and coordinating rather than commanding,
Holding space and supporting rather than controlling,
Empowering team members to do their best work,
and be their best selves.

More reflections on what it means to be a “boss” in a dynamic hierarchy are upcoming in future articles!

You don’t agree? I look forward to your comments!
These thoughts are based on my personal anecdotal experience, not academic research, so please bear this in mind when commenting.
To learn more about my experiences with dynamic hierarchy, please get in touch and check out francescapick.com.

The post Cut the bullshit: organizations with no hierarchy don’t exist appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“I felt like being part of a code, operating [within] an algorithm that is optimized for machines, but not for humans. Instead of feeling more whole, self-organized and more powerful, I felt trapped. The circles I was being part of did not feel empowering at all but taking away my natural authenticity as well as my feeling of aliveness. It was fully unnatural and we were disciplined by rigorous protocols and procedures.” 

(Source)

Some years ago, I spent some time looking at governance models, such as sociOcracy and holacracy. Sociocracy, based on interlocking circles, looked very interesting, as it was rooted in cooperative spirit,  but it was closed source and I could not afford their teaching material. Holacracy on the other hand, was open source, which is believe one of the reasons for its more rapid uptake, but I still had reservations. The first reservation was with its linkage with integral theory, which is in majority a neoconservative approach, and Holacracy explicitely re-integrates more hierarchical approaches in its reworking of sociocratic principles. More seriously though, holacracy belongs in my opinion into what I call ‘the communism of capital‘, i.e. trends towards cooperation that do not in any way challenge the very purpose of entreprise, i.e. maximising profits. At that time however, there were not so many practical experiences with the new methodology. That has now changed, and it shows that holacracy may have even more serious issues in its implementation, as the excerpts below suggest.

“Aimee Groth:”

“Holacracy was developed by software engineer Brian Robertson, who has sold CEOs like Hsieh on a product that promises to push humans to run like a computer operating system. The biggest barrier to such hyper-efficiency is the complexity of human emotion. Holacracy doctrine, in turn, attempts to eliminate or compartmentalize the ways in which our humanity interferes with productivity.

As Zappos onboarded its employees to the system over the past four years, one of the biggest complaints, far and away, was around the rigid meeting format, which provides the guardrails for the system. Tactical meetings, as described by the Holacracy Constitution, tightly govern how and when employees can speak up. The meetings, which typically are held once a week, open with a check-in round and then dive into checklists and metrics. The Constitution is clear that there is “no discussion” during the check-in and closing rounds. In other words, there is no natural, back-and-forth conversation that begets camaraderie, respect, trust, and connection. No small talk.

“In the beginning, you feel that the human element is lost completely,” Jamie Naughton, Hsieh’s chief of staff, previously told Quartz. “I remember sitting in meetings wanting to scream at the founder of Holacracy, ‘You don’t get it, you don’t get it at all!’ He said, ‘You’ve got to trust the process.’ And I thought, ‘This sucks.’ You just have to wait your turn to speak your opinion.”

Years into the experiment, Zappos employees are still unsettled about Holacracy. (Robertson says that it takes five years for Holacracy to work.) Some are uncomfortable with the way Hsieh has attempted to “gamify” the company. Zappos has explored “badging” (giving employees badges based on their proven skill sets) and “people points,” which is currency that employees use to fill roles within the company. (For example, hypothetically, an employee could designate 50 of their 100 people points to an engineering role, 25 points to a PR role, and 25 points to a more peripheral role in the company, like philanthropy. People points determine how an employee allocates their time, and it also determines their salary—some skill sets are still more valuable than others within a Holacracy.) Employees who have too many unallocated people points are sent to “The Beach” where they either need to find new roles within the company or are let go. The overwhelming feeling of instability (worrying about people points, or whether they’ll be sent to The Beach) has sparked the fight-or-flight response that Brown spoke about in her keynote.

“When something difficult happens, emotion drives,” Brown told the crowd at the Smith Center. “And cognition, thought and behavior are not riding shotgun and telling emotion where to go. When something difficult happens, thought and behavior are tied up in the trunk and emotion is at the wheel.”

As it turns out, eliminating “the human element” doesn’t make it go away. Worse, it leads to an undercurrent of resentment. At Zappos, dissatisfaction with Holacracy played a role (though it wasn’t the only reason) in nearly a third of the company walking out the door in 2015. That same year, Zappos dropped off of Fortune’s “Best Companies to Work for list” for the first time in years.” (Source: “Zappos is struggling with Holacracy because humans aren’t designed to operate like software“)

See also: Holacracy is fundamentally broken,

Photo by Photographing Travis

The post Eliminating human emotion is not working for the Holacratic management model appeared first on P2P Foundation.