I think the question "why there are social hierarchies" is the biggest open problem in social sciences. There are many plausible explanations, but no clear winner.
This is not an open problem at all. It is a _well_ explained phenomenon.
There are many partial explanations, but all of them are flawed.
The difference is with formal hierarchies there is also formal authority and responsibilities. A lack of explicit expectations means that informal the leadership can shirk responsibility or invent authority.
And that's a software company; a military org that's ordering people into dangerous situations is going to have a much harder time without explicit authority; POUM in the Spanish Civil War comes to mind.
So while it's true that holacracies can quickly turn into hierarchies rather than democracies, it's still doesn't explain why hierarchies are preferred by humans over democracies, while the latter is obviously more acceptable on the state level.
Democracy on the state level mostly refers to bureaucratic heirarchy where the leaders are (sometimes indirectly) accountable to the electorate; heirarchy and democracy coexist rather than being mutually exclusive. Heirarchy dominates state-level organization with or without democracy, just like it does virtually all other human enterprises.
Democracy, on the state level, seems to be more reliant on formal reservation and delineation of powers and well-institutionalized means of enforcing those formalities than non-democratic heirarchy, which is perhaps why holacracy becomes informal non-democratic heirarchy rather than something democratic.
Exactly, that is my point, in the army they are exclusive though. The people lower in the hierarchy have little say in whether they trust the people upper in the hierarchy.
> Heirarchy dominates state-level organization with or without democracy, just like it does virtually all other human enterprises.
That is true, but that's my point also. Why does it dominate, if we know from our (rather limited) experience with democracy that at least on the state level, it leads to better outcomes?
We have almost no experience with non-heirarchical democratic state-level organization. We have experience with heirarchy with democratic accountability and heirarchy without it, and from that we can conclude that:
(1) the former may lead to better outcomes for those that aren't at the top of heirarchy, but
(2) the former definitely relies on formal delineation of authority and institutionalized structures enforcing those formal rules. (That is, democratic control at the state level requires formal heirarchy.)
Holacracy eschews formal structures of authority, and therefore the (informal) heirarchies it produces are not restrained by democratic accountability.
And even very small-scale democracy (which may not require formalization) still has heirarchy; people (social animals generally, people aren't special in this regard) form heirarchies.
In fact, I consider democracy to be explicitly against power hierarchies. (In this sense, it is very leftist concept.)
From my perspective, the whole problem with holacracy is the lack of rules that guarantee the distribution of power, unlike in democracy, where this is guaranteed by agreement of participants with the decision-making method (i.e. votes of all people are equal).
Finally, you still state that hierarchy is a natural phenomenon, but that still doesn't explain why people insist on it even culturally. Just like the fact that humans evolved on African savannah doesn't mean that they would like to continue do so. But humans are surprisingly insistent on hierarchies of power even in the face of f-ups mentioned in the article.
For some use cases the strengths outweigh the flaws.
Combat operations are certainly such a use case.
The existence of other, non-hierarchical structures participated in by the military does not negate their efficacy in the military.
Possible solution is more democratic control (by the people down in the hierarchy) over the people who are in charge, for example an independently elected accountability board with a power to penalize and recall the leaders.
I am not sure if it's practiced in the U.S., but in Europe lot of universities were historically actually run democratically, the management was elected by academics and students. So something like that.
The only plausible explanation for that phenomenon is that democratic group (military in this case) is more efficient/willing at asserting its own status as a group than an autocratic (hierarchical) one.
And that is, in fact, internally contradictory. If intent of the military as a democratically-controlled social group was to overthrow the democracy in the state as a social group, then it would be acting against the very existence of ts own democratic process.
There is also some research into universal values like Jonathan Haidt does, which shows that liberals value hierarchy less than conservatives. So people in fact do have somewhat different value systems.
Also, there was a fascinating story from Robert Sapolsky, which showed that in baboons, lack of strict hierarchy can actually benefit the group.
Personally, I am totally willing to take orders from my boss if I have good relationship with him, but I perceive it as helping a fellow human, I am not doing it out of respect to hierarchy. I think this can alternatively explain what you observe.
As I already stated, we have many possible explanations (and also perplexing examples) both pro and against hierarchies, but there is no clear unifying theory. The above is just a sampling.