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Comment by RubenSandwich | Hacker News Reader

Agreed. I've noticed that organizations that often times claim to be 'leaderless', just have other implicit ways of exerting power and influence. Truly leaderless is difficult, and requires humility from all it's members.

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There's possibly a good analog in data. A while ago it seemed very popular to talk about "schemaless" data systems, and I heard the perfect commentary: "If you think your data is schemaless, what that really means is you don't know what the schema is, and that's bad."

What people probably meant by schemaless: It's very easy for things to have a slightly different schema than they used to if that's needed. Things that don't all conform to the same schema can still be handled well. And it should be understood that sometimes you do need a better defined schema.

So my point? Don't focus on being 'leaderless' or 'structureless'. Focus on being flexible enough to allow new substructures in the company as needed. Make sure there's a system in place that allows people to coordinate with groups that don't have the same structure as them. And recognize when you do need a bit of structure to keep scaling.

This seems like an opportune moment to remind people about the Tyranny of Structurelessness article. If you haven't come across it before, it's definitely worth a read.

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

I was just about to post this. I find Freeman's description of successful "unstructured" groups to be an uncanny description of the idealized early-stage startup, despite her very different context.

Yep. It only works as long as everyone knows each other. I've been arguing this point for years with my anarchist friends (both left and right varieties), who seem unwilling to grapple with basic concepts like scale and externalities.

I don't think straight hierarchies are the only possible organizational structure but it does seem like more people want to be told what to do than to think for themselves. .

> but it does seem like more people want to be told what to do than to think for themselves

I just want to have some clarity around what my role is and where my responsibilities begin and end. Necessarily sometimes I'm required to reach beyond my regular duties.

In that context, then, being told what to do vs thinking for myself is a false dichotomy. The two are a nested-hierarchy, whereby I think for myself within the role required.

>I just want to have some clarity around what my role is and where my responsibilities begin and end.

This. There are two basic ways of looking at things when the organization is fluid. One, "everything is my job", which is a recipe for burnout. Or two, "I decide the boundaries of my job." That doesn't work very well either, because some people will draw the boundaries so small they never have to do anything, and others will draw them so large they don't do anything well.

My experience working with anarchist friends is that something as simple as leadership creates a certain hierarchy. Obviously if there's nothing formal everyone is pretty cool, but in the organisation of a society and a longer time frame I can see how it can lead to our historical material conditions.

Voluntary association could produce hierarchies, and it's interesting to think about what sort of societies would result. But classically government is defined as a monopoly on violence, and that formulation essentially rules out the possibility of non-coercive government, at least so long as men are capable of violence.

If you're interested, I've been toying with the idea of an organizational structure that's loosely but explicitly modeled on the human body. My basic idea is that since bodies are complex interdependent structures that mostly Just Work, social structures that explicitly recapitulate human anatomy should be inherently more robust.

Would this open the social structure to all sorts of disease states in a similar way to the human body?

Then you would need teams within the social structure who's role it is to seek out pathogenic agents / sub-structures and terminate them. An immune system, if you will. Analogy could be a police force to deal with auto-immune issues, and a military to deal with foreign invaders.

Well, in a way, our social / structural systems already do mimic bacterial colonies: reproduce by consuming all available resources until the host system dies or the infection is cleared.

I prefer hierarchy, because good boss is able to give me autonomy and responsibility without me having to constantly fight for it.

Leaderless means being bullied by the most controlling team member unless I constantly defend turf and permanently play politics.

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