zlacker

Flat orgs are very popular right now, but isn’t it a huge benefit of a hierarchical organization with subparts that rather than the President of Azure getting on a VTC and telling the whole division that the goal is velocity he can explain to his reports (a small group) that they need velocity with reliability and they can explain to their reports (more small groups) and so on and so forth?

Yes, nuanced comms don’t scale so why isn’t the answer—-don’t require scaled comms?

>>bradle+(OP)
One reason is that non-scaled comms suffer from “telephone game”. If you do it like you’re saying, then go down 3-4 levels in the hierarchy and check what people are hearing, it will have mutated away from anything you originally said.

Sometimes to get everyone aligned (as best you can) you have to give everyone the same message at the same time — but it has to be a simple message.

>>wrs+41
I wonder if you could checksum the telephone game by having a 2-level comms. That way the VP could validate that the Director didn't make a mistake when communicating to the EMs.

Eg,

n-level comms are where a CEO communicates to the entire org

1-level comms are where CEO->CTO->VP->Directors->EMs->ICs

2-level comms:

CEO->CTO+VPs

CTO->VPs+Directors

VP->Directors+EMs

Director->EM+ICs

>>wrs+41
Definitely. TANSTAAFL

I do wonder if flat is an overreaction though. Intuitively I’d expect a mixed strategy to be most effective.

Edit: reflecting more, most claimed flat companies aren’t. So maybe they are pursuing mixed strategies and comm’ing out a simplified message.

>>wrs+41
i agree with what you are pointing out.

but i wonder why non-scaled communication (if we can also call it that) works in the military?

>>tarr11+F5
An additional benefit of 2-level comms is that you get send some slightly-irrelevant information, but it's clear you aren't expected to read it. This gives you a passive awareness of some of the other stuff that's going on in the organisation, and who you can ask about it.

>>blondi+5b
I haven't been in the military myself, and I'd be curious to hear perspective from someone who's been in both environments. I think in the military there is a methodology where at each level you break up your goal into fairly independent sub-goals, communicate those sub-goals to sub-teams with an accompanying expectation of autonomy in execution, and allow them to do the same for their sub-teams. In a civilian situation, one doesn't normally have that level of clarity available, either in the goals or in the org structure. And I suspect the military culture is also less effective when it is dealing with a goal that isn't clearly defined.

>>wrs+41
It's kind of interesting that there's some kind of conservation rule at work there. The amount of effort you have to expend must scale with the number of bits you want to convey correctly _and_ the number of people you successfully convey it to. Delegating to other people will corrupt the message. Large 1-to-N blasts can only convey a few bits before people stop reading or get confused. To perfectly communicate all of the information to all of the people, you'd have to go express it to them individually.

>>wrs+41
Mission command [1] might be useful here. The main idea is you state the mission and your expanded intent and each subordinate command does the same thing all the way down the chain.

There’s several “checksums” commonly employed in the US Army. The subordinate command’s orders will contain the verbatim mission statement (typically one sentence with the five whys) from the both their commanding unit and the next level up. The order also includes the expanded intent from their commanding unit. Finally, a commander will require back briefs from subordinate commands to make sure plans align.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_command

>>tarr11+F5
Yes, this glue is important. E.g., the VP dropping by the EM's staff meeting to give a tailored version of the message and do some Q&A, and the VP doing skip-level 1:1 meetings to get the perspective as seen by the EMs. If you build kind of a mesh of redundant communications, you can better course-correct (which also means correcting the original message after observing its actual effect on the team).

>>tarr11+F5
The term of art for this practice is “skip-level 1:1s”. It’s not ubiquitous but many think it’s a good idea, particularly when stepping into a new role/org. Obviously it can end up being a lot of meetings so it’s typically on a quarterly or less cadence.

Because of the branching factor it’s not feasible to do this for every bit of comms.

>>wrs+41
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_whispers

>>sa46+ri
This is how OKRs and Salesforce's V2MOM are supposed to work... the CEO does his, then the EVPs do theirs showing how they will contribute to the CEOs, etc.

In practice this is almost never done at scale because having them sequentially ordered means that they must be done pretty quickly and there are too many political turf battles to let them be done quicklty.