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Comment by DoofusOfDeath | Hacker News Reader

A few years ago I joined a company with "self-organizing" teams, which have many similarities to "structureless".

It was an awful experience, for me at least. Many important choices were made by people trying to avoid ruffling the feathers of the least-mature team member.

My woes were likely compounded by being mildly affected by Asperger syndrome: First, I have an innate preference for clear organization and structure. Second, it took tremendous mental/emotional energy to navigate the social/interpersonal minefield tied to every technical decision.

Perhaps my experience was unusual, but I cannot understand the thinking that leads upper-management to think this approach is a good idea.

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I prefer the Scandinavian (specifically Swedish approach) that I experienced at a prior company. It has its shortcomings of course. But put simply, there is a clear hierarchy, but generally most decisions are made by establishing consensus or compromise between all involved parties, the "manager/boss" only steps in to resolve or veto/tie break if none can be reached. It's not structure-less, and there are certainly teams, but employees generally work towards what they feel is the best solution.

Reading suggestion WRT to this approach:

https://www.amazon.com/High-Output-Management-Andrew-Grove/d...

Can you elaborate a bit?

If I remember the section of that book correctly, Andrew Grove talks about how you want to handle decision making as a manager. According to Andrew, you want to have folks come to a decision with minimal intervention from you. Part of it is having people feel ownership, another is managing your own political capital. In terms of when you intervene, you should step in and help break ties. You should also be able to ultimately make a decision if the group is unable to do so either because they're taking way too long to deliberate, if their arguments are going full circle, etc.

If managers only exist to break ties why not simply create teams with odd numbers of members and they would no longer be required?

Breaking ties is not only between equal numbers of people. It can be between one person with a very strong point of view and five others that oppose that decision.

That's interesting. I've had the almost exact opposite experience. In my case, leadership by consensus seemed to be a way to defer decisions (sometimes indefinitely in the case of hard/unpopular decisions) and diffuse accountability. I wonder if the method works better in some cultures but not others.

I have worked in several Swedish companies, and I prefer the Swedish approach of not having several layers of hierarchy, but I really don't prefer the Swedish approach of just about everything needing full consensus, or being a total democracy.

Basically I recognise the problems described in the article.

What makes that a Swedish approach?

I don't think it's uniquely ours, but it is certainly ubiquitous here. So far I haven't encountered a workplace here that doesn't run that way.

ironically given the article title, this is basically the definition of a good monarchy..

I have the same experience in a "matrix management" organization. It seems like the managers figured out how to delegate the act of management to their reports.

This is pretty much the set of insights that led to creating Holacracy (which is all about explicit structure and process) as an upgrade to chaotic, structureless anti-manager methods. I love working in a self-managed, self-organizing company... but only because it runs on Holacracy. I would never (again) work anywhere with a consensus decision-making mechanism.

how did you manage to land a job in the first place?

Found the team member!

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