Kill your boss! Wait, no, don't. But maybe think about killing some of the hierarchical relationships within your organisation.
Neocos question all traditional top-down structures but never assume there is one perfect organisational framework that will work for them out of the box. Flattening the pyramid might be an ethically brave move towards greater equality and an escape from the "wage slavery" of the Industrial Revolution, but it can also stifle operational effectiveness. As you move from hierarchy to wirearchy, decision-making still needs to be fast and intelligent, and many staff report feeling stressed by a loss of direction or support when they don't know who to go to get things done.
Resilience, self-organization, and hierarchy are three of the reasons dynamic systems can work so well. Promoting or managing for these properties of a system can improve its ability to function well over the long term – to be sustainable.
– From Thinking in Systems: A Primer, by Donella H. Meadows, Diana Wright.
In leadership: Organisational success in all sectors is often merited to strong leadership, characterised by a single person or few people at the top who are decisive, tenacious and driven. But leadership doesn't have to contradict a move towards less hierarchy. Good leaders know how to lead from the back, and smart organisations know how to nurture leadership in every member.
In operational structures: Hierarchy doesn't have to involve a dictatorial top-down flow of orders from senior to junior. Consider how hierarchies can add structure and effectiveness to various areas of your operations. For instance, decision-making:
<aside> ⭐ The Gini Way
Gini is a tech company with a product that extracts data from unstructured documents. They dive deeply through their lessons and processes on their blog: The Gini Way.
The company prides itself on being split into autonomous cross-functional "academies".
They use a hierarchy of different existing decision-making processes, which are variously applied according to the need at the time. They describe the split of processes as: 1) 90% by individuals (using "safe-to-fail" and "mandate"), 2) 9% by groups (using "consent"), 3) 1% by individuals deciding for groups (using the "advice process").
See: How we make decentralized decisions, a blog post on The Gini Way.
</aside>
Whatever a hierarchical organization chart says, real, day-to-day work gets done in networks. This is why the organization of the future is a "network of teams".
– From Rewriting the rules for the digital age // 2017 Deloitte Global Human Capital Trends, by Deloitte.
<aside> ⭐ Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World
Retired four-star general Stanley McChrystal describes how Al Qaeda in Iraq was operating successfully as a decentralised network, against the rigid top-down structure of the western military forces. He orchestrated a restructuring of the Joint Special Operations Task Force (JSOC) under his command to establish what he calls "shared consciousness" (open information sharing) and "empowered execution" (distributed decision-making). Written on a whiteboard at the JSOC base were the words:
To defeat a network, we must become a network.
</aside>
Organisations that are organised and managed by their own staff or members can manifest in many forms, following different formal frameworks and adjusting accordingly to their custom needs.
<aside> ⭐ Teal Orgs
Based on the book Reinventing Organizations, a good reference point for exploring self-management – and other aspects of forward-thinking organisations such as wholeness and evolutionary purpose – is the Teal concept. Teal organisations exhibit more mature thinking and behaviours, modelling a higher level of human development.
The fan community followed up on Frederic Laloux's popular book with a very accessible wiki covering the main concepts and several case studies.
→ Reinventing Organizations Wiki → Reinventing Organizations
</aside>
<aside> ⭐ Holacracy
A complete operational framework for teams and organisations. Holacratic orgs self-organise into interconnected but autonomous teams (circles) in which people focus on fulfilling roles rather than having their personal identity tied to a fixed job title ("differentiating role and soul").
Holacracy – The New Management System That Redefines Management
</aside>
<aside> ⭐ Microsolidarity
This framework addresses how different sizes of teams have different dynamics and needs, with a hierarchy of behavioural and psychological patterns for mutual support between team members.
🤫 Disclosure: While developing Neoco, the author of this content befriended the founders of Microsolidarity and attended one of their courses. Both are recommended!
</aside>