Hierarchy Baby
Just because top down command & control is a dead duck, it doesn't mean you can get by without hierarchy
Traditional top-down, hierarchical command & control management impedes emergence of the kind of innovative, agile, future-fit culture that organisations need in our increasingly uncertain and unpredictable world.
But a culture based on iterative experimentation to generate and test ideas, improve sense making and create new value in new ways won't flourish whilst senior executives continue to expect, or continue to be expected by others, to make all the significant decisions.
That's easy to understand but harder to enact in a world where the terms 'senior executives' and 'decision makers' continue to be used interchangeably.
So, what if we got rid of hierarchy and went 'flat' instead?
In theory that's an interesting idea but in practice flat organisations don't eliminate hierarchy – they just eliminate formal hierarchy.
What happens when people attempt to organise without hierarchy was described beautifully 50 years ago in a paper by feminist, political scientist, writer, and lawyer Jo Freeman.
In "The Tyranny of Structurelessness" (1970)1, Jo Freeman describes how the loose informality of the early women's liberation movement created a supportive atmosphere that encouraged participation and personal insights but made it hard to actually get things done.
She describes how what started out as a healthy counter to traditional hierarchical structures ended up "becoming a goddess in its own right" as an "intrinsic and unquestioned part of women's liberation ideology".
But this ideological eschewing of hierarchy had a more sinister effect – it provided "a smokescreen for the strong or the lucky to establish unquestioned hegemony over others".
Freeman points out that "This hegemony can be so easily established because the idea of "structurelessness" does not prevent the formation of informal structures, only formal ones".
The structureless organisation "is usually most strongly advocated by those who are the most powerful (whether they are conscious of their power or not). As long as the structure of the group is informal, the rules of how decisions are made are known only to a few and awareness of power is limited to those who know the rules. Those who do not know the rules and are not chosen for initiation must remain in confusion or suffer from paranoid delusions that something is happening of which they are not quite aware."
So, given that hierarchies emerge even in flat organisations, the question is not whether to have a hierarchy or not, it's what kind of hierarchy should we encourage?
This is where it's helpful to reframe the role of senior people away from 'making decisions' to 'creating the conditions in which sense making, decision making & action taking become ever more tightly coupled, rapidly and repeatedly iterated, deeply embedded and widely distributed throughout the organisation'.
The more senior someone becomes in the hierarchy, the more responsibility they bear for ensuring that the conditions to create this future-fit culture are in place and remain fit for purpose over time.
After all, that's the reason they get paid the big bucks.
Bottom line: don't throw the hierarchy baby out with the command & control bathwater.