The unhelpful concept of "Flat Organisations"
Why create unnecessary confusion?
“What's in a name? That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet.” — Juliet in William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet 1
Despite Juliet’s protestations, names do matter.
They matter because names evoke contexts — helpfully or unhelpfully.
Helpful names clarify.
Unhelpful names confuse — and having done so, then require the expenditure of extra effort to eliminate the confusion unnecessarily created by the poor choice of name.
Imagine if a rose was called a “stinkwort”…
“Flat organisation” turns out to be an especially unhelpful name, as we can see by unpacking the popular Corporate Rebels article by Joost Minnaar: “Flat Organizations: Companies Do NOT Need Middle Managers”.2
The problems created by the name “flat” appear early on, in the section headed “Disclaimer”:
“A quick disclaimer: I'm undoubtedly biased about flat organizations, mainly due to my previous work experience with a horrendous middle manager. However, that doesn’t mean that I'm writing this to do some random manager-bashing, as fulfilling as that would probably be.
And to be clear, I'm not against the phenomenon of middle management in general. I'm especially not against the people that fulfill the middle ranks in hierarchical companies. In fact, I'm sure there are plenty of great middle managers around that do very valuable work. I'm also sure the companies they work in benefit considerably from their genuine efforts.” 3
Despite the second paragraph opening “And to be clear”, the next statement: “I’m not against the phenomenon of middle management in general” clearly contradicts the article’s own headline: “Companies do NOT need middle managers”.
This unnecessary and unhelpful confusion is a shame, because the article goes on to describe, with links to short video animations, various interesting examples of organisations with ways of organising that avoid traditional multi-layer bureaucratic decision making.
Unfortunately, the potential impact of these examples is vastly curtailed because the name “flat organisations” implies these organisations have done away with hierarchy.
And, as the article clearly points out — they have not.
What they have done, which the article doesn’t make at all clear, is escaped the trap of conflating “hierarchy” with “decision making”.
The conflation of “hierarchy” with “decision making”.
The innovation, agility, and adaptiveness muscles that organisations need if they’re to thrive in an increasingly uncertain and unpredictable world won’t develop in an organisation dominated by traditional hierarchically bureaucratic, top-down command and control thinking.
But in practice “flat” organisations don’t actually eliminate hierarchy, because in all human communities, hierarchies emerge in one form or another…
This phenomenon was recognised more than 50 years ago by feminist, political scientist, writer, and lawyer Jo Freeman.
In her seminal paper “The Tyranny of Structurelessness”, Freeman describes how the early women’s liberation movement genuinely tried to be “flat” — completely avoiding hierarchical structures, which they regarded as patriarchal. 4
Unfortunately, whilst this lack of hierarchical structure encouraged participation and personal insights, it also made it hard to get things done.
However, Freeman saw an altogether more sinister effect — eliminating hierarchy provided “a smokescreen for the strong or the lucky to establish unquestioned hegemony over others”.
Freeman describes how “This hegemony can be so easily established because the idea of structurelessness does not prevent the formation of informal structures, only formal ones”.
She concludes that “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.” 5
In other words, hierarchies always emerge in organisations, even in organisations that try to be so “flat” that they explicitly eschew any structure.
Since some form of hierarchy always emerges, even when deliberately discouraged, the question is not should we embrace or eliminate hierarchy?
The question is what kind of hierarchy should we embrace?
Even though he doesn’t cite Freeman’s paper, Minnaar seems fully aware of its findings because he explicitly attacks them in these sections of his article:
“Rebelling against false claims”:
“I rebel against the false claims of the skeptics, non-believers, and doubters who argue that companies need middle managers to be successful. I rebel against those who portray flat organizations as false utopias ruled by petty tyranny due to a supposed leadership vacuum.
Why? These false claims ignore—intentionally or not—real-world, compelling, and well-described evidence that clearly shows the opposite.”
“Misconceptions”:
“As I wrote above, there are many misconceptions about how firms without middle managers work in practice. It is, for example, often claimed by critics that these firms are both structureless and leaderless.
They argue that these firms must be in complete chaos and anarchy due to the alleged leadership vacuum or that the firms must be run by informal cliques and "soft power" of the most popular employees.
But practice (and our animations) show something completely different.”
“Leaderful”
“The fact that flat organizations run without middle managers doesn't mean that the firms are leaderless or bossless. Flat organizations are not the opposite of hierarchy whatsoever.
First of all, these unconventional companies still have a group of top managers who possess the type of formal authority found at other organizations. This means that a flat organization still has a flat hierarchical structure.
So, technically there is still a hierarchy. A flat hierarchy, admittedly.”
Here’s what’s going on behind the unnecessarily confusing picture painted by the article, directly stemming from the unhelpful term “flat” organisation.
Minnaar says he “rebels against false claims” because he’s aware of examples of successful real-world so-called “flat” organisations.
Such examples clearly do exist, as the article demonstrates and describes.
Unfortunately, what he dismisses as “false claims” and “rebels against” also exist in the real world, as demonstrated by Freeman’s experience of people who created a genuinely “flat” organisation that eliminated hierarchy.
Minnaar and Freeman’s claims appear mutually incompatible — it seems they can’t both be right.
But that’s not actually the case — they’re simply different claims — claims that seem to be mutually incompatible because they use different interpretations of “flat”…
For Minaar, a flat organisation still has a hierarchy — labelled with the confusing oxymoron “flat hierarchy”.
The exemplary organisations he cites have senior executives who, like all senior executives, are responsible for creating organisational conditions for success.
However, the difference is they create conditions that avoid bureaucratic decision making hierarchies.
In my experience over 35 years working with organisations throughout Europe, Asia, and the US this is what you always find in the ones with future-fit cultures of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness.
Senior executives in these organisations don’t misguidedly attempt to get rid of hierarchy. Instead they find their own unique way of escaping the cognitive trap of conflating “hierarchy” with “decision making” — often without explicitly recognising that’s what they’ve done.
For Freeman a flat organisation is literally structureless — an attempt to completely avoid hierarchy, that ultimately proved futile because, as she discovered, hierarchies emerge in all human communities, even when they don’t want them.
That’s why, when organisations deliberately avoid hierarchy, it’s much more likely that the inevitable hierarchy that emerges will be dysfunctional.
The problem basically boils down to the unhelpful and ultimately unnecessary term “flat organisation”, which:
Creates confusion over whether or not there’s a role for middle managers
Prevents the key question “what kind of hierarchy do we want” from being recognised and explicitly addressed
Leads to the self-contradictory assertion “Flat organizations are not the opposite of hierarchy whatsoever” without further explanation or justification
Results in the thoroughly unhelpful oxymoron “flat hierarchy”
Perpetuates the underlying and deeply problematic conflation of “hierarchy” and “decision making”
The unnecessary confusion created by describing organisations as flat but not really flat can be easily avoided by focusing instead on creating a future-fit culture.
Then whether or not there are middle managers doesn’t matter — so long as you create conditions where sense making, decision making, and action taking are tightly coupled, rapidly and repeatedly iterated, deeply embedded and widely distributed throughout the organisation.
That’s what the exemplar organisations in the Corporate Rebels article have actually done. Each has found their own unique way to ensure that the higher someone is in the hierarchy, the more responsibility they carry for creating the cultural conditions for success.
William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Act II scene ii.
Ibid - Corporate Rebels “Flat Organizations” article.
Ibid - Tyranny of Structurelessness