The myth of hierarchy

Complexity doesn't necessarily mean going top-down

Photo by wd toro 🇲🇨 on Unsplash

'Why can't I watch cartoons ?' 

My son routinely finds life incredibly unfair because he can’t make his own decisions about how to live his life, which, if he were to get away with it, would involve screens. Lots of them.

My answer to him is often a variation of the same thing :

‘When you become an adult you won't have anyone to tell you what to do. Until then, you don’t get to just watch cartoons whenever you feel like it’.

His tantrums take me back to my own sense of frustration growing up, when I couldn't wait to get out of the house and into the real world so I could live life on my own terms. 

Isn't that the pact with life ? That someday we'll be old enough to leave the nest and carve our own path ?

We've come to accept it as normal that as adults, we’ll be making the majority of our decisions of our own free will: where to live, whom to marry, how to raise the kids, whether to take out a mortgage or not…

But then something strange happens at work.

We walk through the doors of our jobs and all of a sudden, we find it normal to have to report to a manager who gets to tell us how to do our work. 

The manager often becomes the parental figurehead; either the rigid, disciplinarian parent in a work environment that’s strictly hierarchical or the benevolent, empowering parent in a more progressive organisation. But a parent-figure nonetheless, one who will decide whether we're deserving of our year-end bonus or not.

And right there, in a disconcertingly banal way, that agency we were so looking forward to achieving growing up is handed over to someone else for 40 hours a week, oftentimes a lot more -  for the entirety of our working lives.

I've always found that strange.

Is hierarchy the only way to go once society gets too complex  ?

The accepted, widespread narrative about human evolution goes as follows :

At the beginning, humans lived in small, egalitarian bands, but then as we evolved and those bands became bigger and bigger, dominant hierarchies naturally emerged to help cities and civilisations organise themselves.

So, primitive humans in small bands => egalitarian

Evolved humans in complex civilisations => hierarchies 

So, given how complex our civilisation has become, it's inevitable that we have to put up with bosses, presidents, kings and bureaucrats. That they're benevolent or tyrannical is just a matter of luck I suppose - the conventional view remains that unless we're ready to go back to living like our primitive ancestors, leaders and bosses (oppressive or not) are as natural as the laws of gravity.

Except that that's not true.

Archeological and anthropological discoveries of the past few decades have uncovered more and more complex cities and civilisations that seemed to operate on surprisingly egalitarian grounds.

One of these examples is the site of Catalhoyuk in what is present-day Turkey. No evidence of central authority has been found in the city that counted around 2500 inhabitants and that was around for 2000 years : no kings, queens, or elite neighbourhoods.

Indeed, there is now much evidence to suggest that the long history of humanity is one of tinkering between different modes of governance : either more egalitarian or hierarchic, with some societies even going back and forth between the two modes according to the seasons.

This begins to open us up to a different narrative than the one we've been stuck in for a long time.

Maybe we should be doing more of the tinkering too.

My experience working for a self-governing business

In January 2022, I joined a self-governing SaaS business as a growth marketer. It was a tiny business (40 people), but 2.5 years on the job were plenty to experience first-hand what self-governance is, and how it works.

In a nutshell, the common fundamentals of self-governing businesses tend to be, although are not limited to, the following : 

- There are no bosses (i.e. leadership is decorrelated from power over others):

Self-governance doesn't mean an absence of leadership. There IS a leader who translates the company vision for the teams, but that leader has no authority over team-members , i.e. he/she doesn't have the power to hire/fire and give promotions or bonuses. Also the leader is not a full-time role ; only a fraction of his/her time is devoted to managing the work of others. The rest of the time, the leader is also an IC (Individual Contributor). 

Feedback, raises and hiring/firing decisions are carried out by multiple people via a process that's been defined by the team.

- There is a commitment to transparency : 

The more egalitarian you want a company to be, the more transparent and accessible the information needs to be. Anyone can, in a few clicks, have access to company financials, meeting summaries of any teams (even if we're not on that team), company org chart with details of who does what and why that role exists.

Of course there is still possibility to withhold sensitive information (i.e. HR info), but the bias is towards information sharing rather than info hoarding and secrecy.

- Support functions are kept to a minimum

Support roles like HR, planning, budgeting, finance are kept to a minimum to make sure the company does not get overly siloed and bureaucratized. 

Whenever possible, support tasks are rotated between individuals. Hiring is done by the team, planning and budgeting are kept to a minimum (we didn't have quarterly goals for example) and done collectively as much as possible.

- Profits are shared

There is a profit sharing scheme in which part of the profits are distributed among the team every year.

Conclusion

I thought I’d experienced what it meant to have agency in some of the jobs I’d been in in the past, but this job took it to a whole new level and got me seriously thinking, and witnessing live, what a group of free individuals could do collectively to advance an organisation.

My experience there was rich, complex, challenging and liberating and I look forward to delving more into the specifics of it in future posts.

But the main thing it achieved for me is that it opened me up to a different narrative of how to see the world of work, and the world at large.

If you feel stuck in the corporate mess we're in and feel there is no alternative, I did too. 

But I no longer do, and now, when I tell my son that he will someday experience freedom and agency as a responsible adult, I'm more confident that that could actually be true.