Humans are not fundamentally autonomous. Even expert humans do not individually know enough to go into depth about how complex systems work (they typically know one layer of abstraction in great detail). Humans are terrible at assessing reality. They are bad at prioritising. They are lousy learners.
Leaders are a short circuit around all that by just telling people what to do, no arguments. If your organisation is small enough that everyone can be brilliant and busy, great, good luck, might work. But even then technical people often appreciate some leadership to reduce the mental load and let them focus on how rather than what and why.
I doubt there are leaderless organisations. There are organisations that purposefully hide their leadership and those that do not. And yes, big management layers are bad. The managers have the same problems as everyone else - humans are limited. If there are lots of managers they can't all be above average and then the basic human problems they were meant to solve come back.
Humans tend to choose leaders because of their biological nature, not because it's more reasonable.
They would like to follow a human (a creature similar to them), not a law — an abstract thing with no face.
BTW, the idea of God in religions is basically a personification of laws that a community must obey.
A useful trick to make things work.
It's true that some people are smarter than others in certain tasks, so it's reasonable to give them more power in making decisions.
But it's not reasonable to give them ALL the power. Because no human is smarter than a collective mind of others.
According to your own assessment of reality, we should not take what you say seriously. Clearly you are either wrong about humans or not competent to make sweeping judgements about this complex system.
This is not a criticism of you personally, but rather of the internal consistency of your argument.
That's what I suspect as well. If you don't specify who the leaders are, some will emerge anyway. Perhaps there's some advantages there, but one obvious disadvantage is that the org structure is now undocumented.
> Humans are terrible at assessing reality. They are bad at prioritising. They are lousy learners.
I think this is missing the bigger picture. I wrote this a few days ago:
“I think what we’re seeing has more to do with unaccountable invisible architectures (law/governance systems, IP and money) that obscure production processes, than that it’s anything to do with human nature or social media, or us being ‘hairless monkeys’.”
Arthur Brock describes it better:
“The story I want to be able to tell my (as of yet non-existent) grandchildren in 25 years.
Once upon a time, our planet was dying. People had organized themselves into patterns with funny names like “limited liability corporations,” “federal governments,” “non-profit organizations,” and “institutions of higher education.” We were unwittingly eating the world and all of its resources to perpetuate the survival of and expand the growth of these social organisms."
[...]
“Since information sources and sharing protocols weren’t integrated, we couldn’t clearly see flow patterns on large scales. The fragmentation made it easy for people to only pay attention to what they wanted to hear, or remain ignorant and unseeing of things they didn’t search out. In fact, most information was received in the form of dramatic entertainment called “news” that was filtered and scripted by the organizations delivering it according to criteria which supported their own influence and growth.
Since currency was only thought of as money, and wealth as accumulation, when people organized themselves into collective patterns, those social organisms were preoccupied with their own growth and acquisition of artificially scarce money. They were structured as cancers — using their resources only for their own perpetuation and growth — killing the planet that is their host.
Do you remember hearing stories about “the Internet?” — the early network for computer communication that started to emerge in the late 1900s… It was a place of great experimentation and chaos. We hadn’t yet discovered how to make all protocols interact with each other, or have shared models of meaning and world-views to operate from. But information started flowing quickly around the world, accelerating change in surprising and exciting ways.“
[...]
"In the early 2000s, there was a breakthrough. A small group of people translated the organizational patterns by which living systems operate into the computing and communications. Soon they invented the field of current-see design to consciously design the DNA of social organisms in accord with the sacred patterns which nourish life. People began to organize themselves into a variety of patterns that look more like ways you see us working together today.
Fractal computing receptors and self-describing protocols enabled information to flow in new distributed patterns of coherence. We built an easy compository for sharing meaning and models for sense-making. Our collaboration tools started evolving much more rapidly with the ability to install new shared protocols in an instant. There was no longer centralized control of information in every group and organization. There was an explosion of new life and new patterns of collective intelligence
In many ways this explosion of social organisms and communication protocols was even more chaotic than the Internet it began replacing. Really amazing patterns started emerging which quickly outperformed the corporations of the past because they were better at having people feel fulfilled, trusted, known, heard and involved… better at sharing resources that were previously hoarded… better at creating outrageous productivity and creative results.
Once we learned how to organize ourselves in these ways, we were able to reverse the damage to the planet and our communities very quickly. Problems that had been accumulating for hundreds of years, we reversed in only a handful years because we could coordinate on a planetary scale in ways that nourished the bodies, spirits, and hearts of everyone involved. We learned the joy of dancing together for mutual benefit, built the tools for us to see the state of our collective dance, and grew to feel the vibrancy of those rhythms together.“
Leaders are a short circuit around all that by just telling people what to do, no arguments. If your organisation is small enough that everyone can be brilliant and busy, great, good luck, might work. But even then technical people often appreciate some leadership to reduce the mental load and let them focus on how rather than what and why.
I doubt there are leaderless organisations. There are organisations that purposefully hide their leadership and those that do not. And yes, big management layers are bad. The managers have the same problems as everyone else - humans are limited. If there are lots of managers they can't all be above average and then the basic human problems they were meant to solve come back.