The Tyranny of Structurelessness (1970)
20 comments
·January 22, 2025sitkack
I would be curious what others would recommend as "management" books or anything related to organizational psychology in this topic.
PaulHoule
A classic essay whose significance goes way beyond women or feminism. I've been part of a few "structureless" groups which spontaneously organized around an opportunity and were initially effective because of that structureless (e.g. somebody gets an idea, the whole group moves like a military unit, opponents had no idea something like that could happen) but succumbed to the dynamics in that article on a time scale of three weeks (arguably ended a public company in that time!) to three years.
romanhn
I'd love to hear more about how an org structure (or lack thereof) killed a public company in 3 weeks.
whatshisface
There should be a counterpart to this, "the tyranny of trying to encode an entire human mind in procedure."
As well as, "the tyranny of pretending that rules are much more absolute than their authors." :-)
jkaptur
Probably "Seeing Like a State", no?
nialv7
This made me lose a bit of faith in humanity, because it seems like when a group of humans get together, no matter what kind of structure the group take, it's going to be bad in some way.
Hierarchical, flat, or structureless (as pointed out by this article); with a rigid procedure, without a rigid procedure. Doesn't matter how the group is organized, it's going to be bad in some way.
rmah
That people almost always self-organize into structured organizations gives me hope for humanity. Social structures provide people with means to make life easier. They provide support and a guide on how to accomplish things without having to worry about all the details or the "big picture". And, of course, no organization is perfect. Hoping for perfection is not only folly, it is the enemy of good.
KineticLensman
Check out Dunbar's Number [0] (you might already know this). It's a theoretical constraint on the size of successful human groupings where everyone knows of everyone else, and is approximately the size of company-sized (in the military sense) subunits. Of course, these have very explicit structure, even if they contain 'characters'
heymijo
This was a key insight Alexander Hamilton had after growing up in the West Indies seeing the worst of slavery and then moving to the American colonies and receiving a classical education.
The American democracy he sought to co-create was one that could reign in humanity's worst impulses while enabling our better ones.
jmcqk6
It's almost like you can't really make generalizations about what good human groups look like.
quotemstr
The best you can do is at least make the badness legible so you can fix and optimize your structure in an intelligent way instead of getting randomized default primate settings.
jll29
Clicked on it in the expectation of encountering an attack on schema-free databases and "NoSQL"... only to find it is about social groups ;)
velcrovan
Reminds me of the Zappos holacracy madness.
https://qz.com/work/1776841/zappos-has-quietly-backed-away-f...
qntty
The Tyranny of Structurelessness and The Gervais Principle are the two essays that I think about a lot at work.
killjoywashere
Every data structure comes with costs. You give some to get others. Nothing in here should be surprising.
treetalker
This has been posted several times over the last several years, with a total of about 100 comments.
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.jofreeman.com%2F...
eesmith
You missed the 120 comments at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7409611 because it links to https://www.bopsecrets.org/CF/structurelessness.htm .
There are about 11 other non-jofreeman.com comments at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... including some about the Wired article "A 1970s Essay Predicted Silicon Valley's High-Minded Tyranny" at https://www.wired.com/story/silicon-valley-tyranny-of-struct... .
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bell-cot
Sounds like she majored in Mathematics - but Wikipedia say Political Science.
I recommend this essay often to people, especially in a start up. When someone describes their organization as being "flat", it's often a red flag because it means that there are unwritten power structure that newer employees will likely be excluded from.