Why Flat? Starting Points

So I’ve practiced flatness in several contexts. As a small business owner, as an activist, and as an employee. It feels right to me. It feels like the space wherein I’m most creative and productive. But why? Is it a quirk of my personality or personal history? Or am I on to something? One of my goals in writing here is to explore and challenge my assumptions about why working flat is so great.

Some of my starting points, off the top of my head:

• People are creative
• People care about each other
• People want to succeed together
• Flat means no arbitrary authority
• Flat means you decide how you work
• Flat means you have a say in the definition of success
• Flat means you own outcomes, good or bad
• Flat means you solve problems instead of being stuck with them
• Flat means your co-workers matter
• Flat means learning
• Flat means higher expectations
• Flat means nothing is safe from questions
• Flat means decisions take longer
• Flat means decisions are better
• Flat means work is challenging
• Flat means work is meaningful

Growing Up Flatlander

In my first post I acknowledged one of the barriers many people face with a flat organization: it’s disorienting. Mostly we’re trained in hierarchy, so we’re used to navigating the bumps and dilemmas of a workplace with conventional management. We’ve developed and honed those instincts. Flat organization requires the exercise of some new instincts and judgments, not to mention shaking off some habits. For many folks there’s a steep initial learning curve.

But not for everyone. I’m lucky to have had years of experience working in flat environments. When I started working at Fisdap, where a flat org model was implemented just a year prior, I experienced a learning curve around the parts that weren’t flat *enough* (to my eyes, at least). Of course, it’s nearly impossible in the US avoid a life’s learning in hierarchy.  went to public schools, played on youth baseball teams, grew up with parents who believe in rules and held a couple part-time jobs as a teenager. I’m not a man from Mars in this regard.

Yet I also was privileged with a series of opportunities to learn how to work collaboratively, without bosses. As a result, I feel quite confident and comfortable working in flat spaces. I’m not terrified of proposing an idea that fails or draws critical feedback. I don’t hesitate to take initiative to get questions answered from whoever around me seems best to answer them. I have instincts for how to build consensus and distill decisions that have to be made.

As much as some people feel tentative and uncomfortable about flat organization, I feel that much more comfortable in the same environment. A conventional office is the thing that feels me with trepidation. How did I come to be that way? Well, here’s my story working and learning flat:

• Co-editor in chief of my high school newspaper. Pretty much given the reigns to run the paper as we saw fit, including major design/editorial changes and major involvement in budget and fundraising.
• Started a tiny web development consulting company with my best friend at 18. Went right from college to doing it full-time, figuring out taxes, making decisions about clients and contracts and rates. Hiring (and sometimes firing) a small group of employees. Stuck with it for almost ten years.
• Took over as co-chair of the Macalester College Green Party after former leadership faded out. Organized a big fundraiser concert in my first six months: and failed, big time. Handing over a puny stack of 5s and 10s to disappointed bands who just played to virtually no one, kind of failed. But kept going, kept organizing.
• Helped orchestrate a campaign (including a 60+ page report) trying to convince my college to keep a need-blind admissions policy (again, unsuccessfully).
• Held an internal elected position with the state Green Party, helped devise policy, budget and facilitate decision-making processes.
• Ran for the MN House of Representatives in 2006, as a 23 year old (unsuccessfully… hmmm).
• Co-founded the Metro Independent Business Alliance, an organization of and for locally-owned, independent businesses, which continues to advocate to state and local leaders.
• Managed campaigns for city council (didn’t win).

I am really thankful for these experiences. They give you a sense of my prejudices I think they’re worth reflecting on. A few things that strike me:

• Failure and unpredictability. It strikes me that I’ve failed to achieve my goals at least as often as I’ve succeeded, despite spending equal amounts of time and energy in all cases. I think I’ve learned that you don’t have to be perfect, and you don’t have to be an expert. Nobody can predict the future. Small business and grassroots politics are both risky endeavors in environments where many of the variables are out of your control. Some humility about what I can actually affect, I think, paradoxically makes it easier for me to go out on a limb.
• Working flat isn’t that different from entrepreneurship.  Starting your own business entails a lot of the same challenges as working in a flat organization. Success depends on your initiative and there’s no one else to blame if it doesn’t happen. It’s funny that the entrepreneur is so lionized in this culture, while at the same time strict hierarchy is regarded as a norm for employees.
• All-volunteer projects are great proving grounds. If anyone can just decide to stop showing up, you’ve got to constantly be persuading and motivating the people around you. And finding the ways to work that motivate yourself!
• Success is that much sweeter, and even failure means something special. The worst scenario I can imagine working in is where nothing I do matters. For better or for worse. All of these experiences have meant a lot to me. They changed me in important ways. I think having the sense of ownership that comes with initiative, ownership and collaboration is a big reason why I’ve gotten so much of them.

And, of course, I’ve been lucky. I got the computer, the education, and the right spots where people trusted me. I think those are some of the things people need in order to be successful and comfortable in a flat org: opportunities to be trusted, the experience of failure under your own terms, and the chance to try again with what you’ve learned.

Life in Flatland

“To comport oneself with perfect propriety in Polygonal society, one ought to be a Polygon oneself”
— Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions

Edwin Abbott’s story is a satirical riff on rigid hierarchy. It’s a literal flat land – as in two-dimensional – but flatlander society is anything but. The inhabitants are grouped into immutable social castes according to their number of sides. But the inhabitants only see each others edges, within the plane they share. Never from above. Only a careful study in recognizing the subtleties of distance allows a hexagon to be distinguished from an octagon. The higher classes are granted this study, while the lower classes are left to hide their confusion behind a blanket deference to their betters.

I think one of the common concerns raised about flat organization is that it is confusing and chaotic. Anyone can be responsible for anything? How is stuff going to get done? Who do I ask about X? How do we make a decision if we don’t know who is “supposed” to make it? How do I know when I can say “no” and when I should compromise?

These are all legitimate questions! Flat organization *is* strange and confusing, if you’re inexperienced in it. But I ask you to wonder about the conventional, hierarchical organization that feels more comfortable to you. Think about the times when you’ve just gone along with a decision you thought was dumb, just because somebody higher up said so. Think about the times when you were doing work that you know was unchallenging and rote, just because that was your job. Think about the times you had to complete a task in a completely pointless, wasteful way, just because the person who made the requirements doesn’t actually know the work, at all.

How did you cope with those situations? How did you avoid getting too frustrated or confused with your lack of agency to change them? How do we accept them day in, day out? I suggest that it’s simple: we’re raised in hierarchical organization. We’re trained to navigate hierarchy deftly, to “climb the ladder.” We’re taught to accept the inefficiencies and dissatisfaction as natural, and to focus only outcomes like sales, salary and promotions.

In a polygonal society, we’re all polygons. When a sphere visits Flatland, the (square) protagonist is utterly baffled by the notions of three-dimensional space. The novel is a classic expression of the basic sociological impulse: to consider that we might seem just as strange through the eyes of another society as they seem to us.

A little dose of that thinking is necessary when making the leap to flat organization. It means suspending the immediate impulse to dismiss practices as strange, and to be willing to question some of what we have taken for granted as normal about conventional, hierarchical organizations. It’s not always easy or straightforward work.

Of course, the onus is on flatvocates to demonstrate that the benefits of flatness are worth the growing pains.

[Editor’s Note: This post is from Jesse, the newest contributor to Flatvocate. Jesse is a developer, entrepreneur, and activist in the Twin Cities]

The Right Stuff Part 1: Hiring for a Flat Org

One of my favorite parts of company ops is hiring and retention. How boring is that? It’s true though — since my skillset is largely ‘people’, I like to focus on the folks within as well as those without. In a flat org, that’s crucial. Without being able to promote to fancier titles, to give a clear ladder of progression, it’s hard to create a proper reward structure. Even if you can lure people in with promises of autonomy, ultimately, they need to know what to do with that power and responsibility. Otherwise, they’ll just end up spinning their wheels. Over the next few weeks, I’m going to be posting my thoughts on hiring, onboarding, and retaining employees in a flat structure.

Valve’s handbook talks extensively about how hiring is everyone’s most important job, and how they try to hire ‘better’ than they currently are. It’s important to keep that in mind when hiring for your team too — in a traditional org, there are places for ‘entry level’ employees and managers to keep poor performing people in line. Flatness means we’re counting on drive and peer pressure to get results.

The Trust Economy

Erik commented on one of my previous posts that empowerment is what’s important to take away from a flat org. His quote is that it’s a “culture thing, not a structure thing”. And he’s exactly right. Flat is LARGELY a culture thing, not a structure one. That’s something I’ve wanted to explore here — how do we adopt pieces of flat organizations and make them useful within more hierarchical companies?

The thing that makes flatness possible is also something that doesn’t require flatness to function — what I call the Trust Economy. Roughly defined, it’s the belief that your coworker is going to do what they said they’re going to do. More than that, it’s about believing that your coworker is going to do what they said they’re going to do well. That they’ll be open to feedback. Open to criticism.

Importantly, though, it’s also the understanding that your feedback isn’t the most important. Part of the trust economy is trusting that roles and domain specialization exist for a reason. If a job belongs to someone else, and you’re not giving a No Go, you need to know your feedback is being considered. You need to trust that even if your ideas aren’t implemented, they’re being heard.

The reason I call it a Trust Economy and not just ‘trust,’ is because when you build up trust with your teammates, you can also spend it. Someone who’s constantly questioning design decisions months after they’re made and presented, or is giving No Gos on things which aren’t actual blockers, is never going to get the benefit of the doubt from their coworkers. On the other hand, stepping back gracefully when countered, supporting projects that made decisions you publicly disagreed with, and helping other teams with resources you could have hoarded are easy ways to make your voice carry more weight. Being demonstrably altruistic earns a lot of listening.

I say this is what enables flat organizations because without a trust economy, you’ve just got a bunch of separate teams who get paid by the same people. It makes a lot more sense to protect your super sweet project than to aid the other ones happening simultaneously. A trust economy means that, when your coworker comes to you and says “can your product spare a few devs for a couple weeks? We really need to release by such and such a date”, you can trust them. You can understand that “giving up” your time isn’t being wasted. If that same coworker asks for your help EVERY TIME something needs to get done, and is making less and less effort to do it themself, you’re eventually going to say “no”. They have no trust capital, so they’re SOL when it comes to borrowing.

These transactions are good for the company. Not just because everybody pulls together or some other hippie crap. But because if people are constantly asking for and granting small (and not so small) favors, you’re avoiding siloing. Devs who need help from sysadmins have just taught the infrastructure team something new about one of the company’s projects. Support asking content/UX for help creating user forums is more intimately connecting UX with users. The Trust Economy is important because it keeps pieces of the company in contact with each other outside of structure. It doesn’t matter what team you’re on — what matters is that you’re helping the rest of the company succeed, and you’re learning little bits about a LOT of facets while you’re doing someone else a favor.

As I said in the beginning, this is by no means exclusive to flat orgs, but flat orgs can’t be healthy without it. It’s one of the aspects of flatness that can be brought into an existing hierarchy without a need to re-org. There’s plenty of concern about being taken advantage of in that situation, but as Erik said — that’s a culture thing, not a structure thing.

Thoughts? I suspect devs who prefer hyper-focus time are often left out of much of the Trust Economy because they like to get lost in flow and aren’t seen as “available.” Any recommendations on keeping them involved? Or, for devs reading, is that not really an issue because hyper-focused devs still reach out to other technologists for support?

“No Go” — Crew Resource Management as Flat Organization Training Wheels

If you’re transitioning to a flat structure, you HAVE to expect growing pains. Especially if you’re top-down implementing the change, you’ve got a really weird maze to navigate. Your final directive is that you can’t give any more directives. What happens when you get really passionate about a project? Is the rest of the company just going to bow out instead of fighting you if they feel it’s a bad idea?

There needs to be a bunch of education. I know that the Toyota Way talks about “stopping the factory so the factory never has to stop,” but I work in EMS. I don’t think about factories, I think about patient outcomes. I learned about Crew Resource Management from David Page ( http://twitter.com/davidpage ), and it’s the best framework I can find for easing your way into a flat organization.

At its most basic, Crew Resource Management means anyone can say “no go”. It comes from airlines, where everyone from the baggage handler to the air traffic control can decide that a plane isn’t flying today. Not only CAN they make that decision, but they are expected to.

In a company, and again, my experience is entirely in software, team members have to be empowered to say “No Go”. If you’re trying to transition to a flat organization, during planning meetings or any time when a major decision is made, take the time to ask the room “Is there any reason we’re not flying today?” Train your team that there is a difference between “I do not understand why we are doing this” versus “I think we shouldn’t do this”. Be willing to ask, when there is passionate discussion, if either side is saying “No Go”.

As an executive, you’ve actually got it tougher than the rest of the company. You need to be willing to back down off your fights earlier than you’d want the rest of the team to do it. You should eventually be just another member of the team whose role just happens to be strategic vision, talent acquisition, and business security. Early on, no one is going to have internalized that. You’re still the person who can fire them.

I’ve had to work with our CEO to get him used to having to walk back from lines of “what if we…” questioning. He thinks he’s just brainstorming. The teams he works with end up taking a line of pointed questions as implicit direction. Sometimes, you need someone in the room to straight up ask “is this an executive trump or are you just asking?”

It sucks. As the CEO, you’ve probably got more business acumen and specialized knowledge than anyone else in the room. And you might have the exact right way to do something. But by going flat, you’re telling the rest of the company that you trust them to make decisions. Like in parenting, sometimes that means you need to let them make mistakes. Obviously, if it’s going to be a gigantic failure, you need to exercise your own rights within Crew Resource Management and speak up—but there are times when, for morale, you need to fall on your sword. It’s World Cup time, so maybe I should say “take a dive”.

This isn’t just for executives. It’s for Product Owners and Scrum Masters (or project people and wranglers, if you’re not doing Scrum). If you’re in the transition from hierarchy to flatness, you have to be willing to lose some fights, even if you care a lot. You have to let your team HAVE the autonomy we claim we want to give them. Yes, you’re entitled to your own opinion and right to fight for your ideas. No, it’s not as important that you win as that the team gets used to collaboration.

The move to flatness is rough. Beyond the things I talk about above, you also have personnel mismatches, technology issues/siloing, and even over-communicating. I’ll dedicate future posts to those topics of course.

Let me know what’s working on the blog. I can cover whatever topics people want, and I’m happy to host posts from people who dissent or want to expand on what I’ve put up.

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ADDENDUM:

This post felt really bleak. It shouldn’t be. Flat being hard doesn’t mean it isn’t worth it.

My best friend, Eryn ( http://twitter.com/eryno ), is much much smarter than me. She condensed my philosophy about transitioning to Flat/Agile methods  into eleven words.

“I got done being bad at it. And now I’m good.”

She was talking about our shared experience of being high school speech team competitors (because theater wasn’t lame enough), but it applies to implementing a flat or agile scheme.

You just have to fucking do it. You’re going to be really bad at it. You are not going to magically NOT be bad at it if you wring your hands and over-engineer it for months before trying it out. You are going to make mistakes. Your executives are going to swoop and poop all over team-driven projects. Meetings are going to be too crowded with too many people who don’t need to be there.

It will seem like a shitshow at first. You’re going to want to re-engineer a whole system of roles and regulations. Don’t.

You don’t know what you need yet. You’re going to be bad at it, and that’s going to teach you the small adjustments you need to make to nudge the org in the right direction.

 

Then you’ll be done being bad at it. And you’ll be good.

Wranglers

I’m a flat organization heretic. This is my confession. It’s scary to say, given how much I love flat orgs and work-driven teams.

I don’t hate managers.

More appropriately, I don’t hate people-wranglers. Good managers ARE people-wranglers. It’s just that sometimes they need to wrangle too many people doing too many things. They get abstracted up out of the work and are too focused on structure and psychology. One of the reasons teams go flat is that there’s a LOT of overhead to having managers who only manage. How many people can you reasonably be accountable for – 5? 10? 25? No matter what arbitrary number you pick, you end up with a scaling problem.

The first solution there is not to scale. Why are you scaling? Do you have to, or are you doing it because it’s part of Ries and Blank’s definition of a startup? That’s a different topic for a different time, though.

I talk about people who are only hired to tell people what to do as “mere managers.” Which, I guess, is kind of a diss. But in a flat org, I think it should be. Mere managers can be CEOs and VPs of What-The-Hell-Ever in a company that needs overt structure. But most companies that choose to go flat are creative. Projects and products don’t have a 10 year spin up like in biotech. Usually, we’re software companies whose biggest bottleneck is actually getting code to page (and maybe QA). Our biggest overhead is usually salary.

So every employee matters. There’s a lot of chatter about managers vs. individual contributors lately, and ICs are where the home runs come from in a flat org. One developer with a good idea of scope can make something that disrupts a market. If you want bang-for-buck, you get the hot shit IC every time.

But people don’t always get along. ICs don’t necessarily get fired up about everything that comes their way. Flat advocates (flatvocates?) always talk about “ownership” of work, as though that feeling magically means everyone in a company will bust their ass for everything. Ownership just means you invested in something, it doesn’t mean you’re always driven. I own a Wii. I have ownership there. I haven’t turned it on in three years. Chances are next to nothing that I’m going to go home and decide to play Boom Blox for ten hours.

So, in the pool of ICs, you still need people-wranglers. It’s easy to have ownership of big, impressive projects. Especially in the early, gigantic-visible-steps stages. You need people who are willing to get excited about doing the bullshit that needs to get done. Maybe that’s writing unit tests or refactoring your code to be more modular. Maybe it’s finally polishing up rough edges that were “good enough” for the initial iterative release. Maybe it’s making phone calls to every customer who is about to be affected by a change.

Someone has to make individual contributors get excited about that shit. I don’t ever expect someone to go to work saying “I can’t WAIT to rewrite the auth on this legacy application!” It’ll never happen. What people-wranglers are good at is getting a team to band together and hate all of that shit together.

My reference point, as always, is Ultimate Frisbee. People-wranglers are coaches. They’re captains.

In the end, the team has to do work to succeed, but there’s someone there pushing them. I like Ultimate as the metaphor here instead of football or something, because usually those coaches are also players on the team. It’s not someone with a whistle yelling at two dozen people to be faster, work better. It’s someone winded at the front of the sprint line saying “God, I fucking hate conditioning. Let’s do it again!”

People-wranglers are motivators. They’re the ones who are helping the team celebrate finishing their garbage tasks. They’re the ones publicly lauding teams for doing what they’re supposed to be doing.

They’re also the ones who make sure that the balance between the garbage and the interesting work is maintained. Because we work in a field with a lot of introverts, it helps to have someone who cares if their coworkers love their jobs.

I don’t really care if these people are called managers or Scrum Masters or wranglers or whatever. I don’t think it’s important that they be able to hire or fire. It’s important that one of the expectations for them is keeping the company working—as in actually doing work. It’s hard to do that well in a flat org, because you urging a coworker to take on harder tasks is a very thin line away from telling them what to do. People-wranglers need to learn to motivate. They have to be able to influence the culture around them.

Practical Implementation:

Audit your team. Who are the natural leaders, who are the authorities on technologies you use or markets you’re in? Are they the kinds of people who are able to get excited about process? If so, you’re in luck. You can speak with them about what you need in regards to people-wrangling (and don’t keep it secret, the rest of the team can know that you trust this person to have a finger on your company’s pulse).

More likely, you’re going to find that domain experts don’t necessarily map to people-wranglers. “I know better so just do it my way” is often toxic in a flat org. You need to find the people who are excited about your company, not just their role. This is why it’s so important, when hiring, to find candidates who are all in on your company and your vision. Honestly, that’s not going to be everyone. Sometimes you need ICs who are excited to work on your projects or technologies, regardless of their interest in your company as a whole. But they need to be balanced by hires that are going to get excited about process and people.

Pursuing Flatness

I’ve met dozens of people who claim to work at Flat Organizations. Sometimes they’ll say “flat plus one” or “flatish”. I’ve met even more people who work at hierarchical companies but _really_ want to make sure I know that they’re “pretty flat”. I love working at my current job, a place that’s flat plus one, except when it’s completely flat. I’m unsure, though, as to why we all care so much.

I’m not saying “it doesn’t matter”. I’m genuinely asking – what about Flat Orgs appeals to us? What makes them such a good idea? Why do people who AREN’T in flat orgs want us to believe they are? Is it mostly just fashion? Are autonomous teams the real key? Does it matter if that team is accountable to a manager or to a product owner or to a board? I want to know what we’re accomplishing with our grand experiment in flatness. I want to know what parts are functional and what are window dressing.

My title is usually something akin to “operations guy”. I answer phones, I specialize in our specific software, and I get customers to Buy In on an emotional level. I value the flat org because, frankly, it makes my job interesting. It helps me be _good_ at what I’m supposed to be doing. My CEO spent three hours this morning being bounced around tech support at Quickbooks – they’ve got a tiered and siloed support structure, so everyone was passing the buck. That’s crazy. That’s a bunch of support people—nominally (and fashionably) “customer advocates” – who are more concerned with cranking through calls and saying “not my problem” than diagnosing an issue to get a better result.

At Fisdap, we have the benefit of not having the volume of calls QB does, so that may be part of it, but our support personnel are expected to solve the issues they’re faced with. We’re empowered to vie for developer time, to present use-case information to UX, and to make business decisions on the fly. We’re not the lowest rung on the totem pole – we’re not warm bodies. We are there to do what we have to in order to help fix stuff.

Do we need to be flat to do that? No. We could have stricter rules about exactly what is allowed – a discretionary budget we can use to solve problems, like some hotels do, or a number of hours of developer time. Knowing that I’m responsible for making the _right_ call, instead of just a _permitted_ call, though, means I’m less likely to over-promise. I need to excel, not just avoid screwing up. If I’m not doing well, I’m letting down the whole company.

As a guy who started in a position that is usually expendable and replaceable, I definitely feel more valued in a flat organization. I’m not worried about stepping on toes or becoming a manager – being good at my job makes me valuable to development teams and our HR process. My daily tasks are more interesting and more visible to everyone. I feel like a huge part of my company.

What does that feel like for developers, though? Engineering and design – frankly, anyone who has ‘deliverables’—what is a flat organization bringing you? Is it empowering? Is it frustrating? Do you have more ownership or just less guidance? I know the answers are going to be “a little of all of those,” but I want to know details. Why are we flat, or why do we strive to flatness?