From C-level to sea level— on why hierarchical management fails
Whatever organizational structure you find yourself now in, whether or not you work in a traditional manager-employee company, a flatter organization or a company adopting Holacracy, there are good chances that you’re part of a hierarchy. I’ve worked for several kind organizations and I ubiquitously have found hierarchies: in different forms and all with their peculiarities, but they were everywhere. It is in fact intrinsically inevitable and part of any social structure. The intention behind this post is not to debate on the necessity nor the goodness of hierarchies. Hierarchies exist, in nature as well as in the companies we’re working in, and are here to stay.
What I would like to discuss instead is the phenomenon taking place when communication spans across different layers of the hierarchy in companies. We’ll see what happens and why it often results as a confusional process, why flat organizations don’t really exist, and how some companies face up to this better than others. That’s ultimately super important for an organization to get right as it will dictate the speed of their execution, which more than everything else is proven to be the most important factor for success.
So what is this phenomenon? It’s the two-step information degradation process that takes place when information flows down from the top of a hierarchy and up again when the feedback bubbles up in the hierarchical structure. Let’s go through these two steps.
The execution dream
Usually, there’s an idea generated at the higher level of the structure. This gets sent down to get executed. At each step, this needs to be refined and implemented at a more concrete level. Typically when an abstract thing like an idea, a cloud of ions in someone brain, get translated to a more refined and concrete series of actions that will shape the final artifact that need to fit the complexity of the real world, constraints show up.
Those could span from a physical constraint to the incapability of someone at the lower lever to execute and refine correctly from the previous stage — but this doesn’t really matter now for the sake of our discussion.
So, when flowing in this direction, the information faces the reality check phase: There are things which need desperately to find their collocation in the concrete world, but some of them just won’t fit or find the desired configuration. So, trying to accommodate all the requirements, which could turn out to be contradictory or not entirely feasible, could change quite considerably the original idea.
The report nightmare…
Now, is time to report the progress on what is being achieved, in what I call the expectation-reality gap filling phase. At this stage, information bubbles up back the hierarchy to report about the work that has been done. Optimistically, at least few requirements were translated into something to some extent different from what was expected originally, also because, as mentioned before, abstract ideas and concrete fact are very different in nature, and the justification for these gaps (when noticed at all) needs to be provided to the higher level.
On top of this, the reality-expectation delta will be more or less sugar-coated and translated into an impoverished surrogate version of the truth. Notice that this will happen several times while communications climbs vertically back. Now, at each step, the truth gets additionally distorted and the inaccuracies amplified. In a few steps, the description of what is happening barely resembles what is actually happening.
Even if I do not emphasize one phase or the other, as both forms of information degradation contribute to the final results, the expectation-reality gap filling usually results to be perceived as the painful one. It’s in this phase that the wall comes down, that things get exposed. Because the world is easy only when everything works. While our cars run smoothly and without problems we think we understand how they work. We believe we can control them perfectly, and we even perceive them as an extension of our bodies. Is only when they stop working, that the gap expectation/reality grows— that true complexity emerges and we realize we didn’t quite understand the process fully.
To complicate things, the two phases of information flowing up and down can happen in different configurations, often dictated by time constraints. For example, the two phases may also inter-lap at each tier so the information doesn’t necessarily reach the bottom before bubbling up again. At this point, and idea validated only by partial feedback, might lead to a second idea which will start flowing down again even before the first one hasn’t completed the two phases cycle or even reached the bottom of the hierarchy. This will result in the typical scenario of “why didn’t you ask this before?!”, leading to conflictual opinions to more and more decisional delays, to execution paralysis. Now, what was supposed to be a virtuous circle, seems more a good prescription for stagnation.
This is the dualistic aspect of hierarchies in organizations: on one side they made possible to co-operate with a great number of people narrowing the gap between two sitting far apart in the organization and making the communication between them possible. At the same time, it amplifies these differences, preventing distant nodes to understand each other. Hiding the chaos of complexity behind the hierarchy.
I found this particularly relevant for software companies, as M. Conway stated :
Organizations which design systems are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.
So, now that we have realized that we’re part of the problem and not the solution, what can be done in order to mitigate this phenomenon? First, we need to realize that organizations are not really structured as a tree. There’s a funny picture illustrating this:
Sure, this clearly dramatizes some aspects, but the point is that you see more connections naturally arise between people working in a company.
Just as these, many other types of relationships could be possible, and they could speed up and ease the decisional process in an organization. You need to decide if you want to leave these links being dictated by chances or you want them to be defined by some logic. Providing, for example, a structure to allow short-cut feedback across the hierarchical level — a jump in the hierarchy which spans multiple layers at once — which will help an organization to foreseen workload and react faster upon decisional changes. This is what proclaimed flat organizations should actually intend to do. Don’t deny or hide a hierarchy, but smartly shape it.
Now you might be waiting for the part where I advertise my company and I show how we adopt what just said here. But no. I don’t think there’s a Simsalabim — no magic formula that will work for every organization. You’ll need to find the one working for yourself.
