In any large company there is the official HR hierarchy and then the informal collaboration graph of how work actually gets done.
The former is necessary to coordinate coarse-grained decision making, policy and vision that needs to be unified across thousands of people, most of whom will never meet each other, but who should ideally be rowing in the same direction.
The latter is necessary for the armies of individual contributors to get their respective jobs done. Trying to document and formalize this ad-hoc network holistically is impossible because it's too complex to be understood by any one person. Attempting to do so would require a non-trivial time commitment from all the workers, which would actually take away from them, you know, getting work done.
It's tempting to look at an org chart and assume this represents how things work on the ground, but Conway's Law is more ironclad than it may appear at first glance. Don't confuse legibility for operational capability. If lower level folks did not understand their goals and improvise, then large corporations would be even more rigid and brittle than they already are. They would be utterly incapable of responding to changes in the marketplace and smaller firms would dominate.
The official hierarchy still represents decision power. I'm not suggesting trying to document all work relationships but wondering whether a non-hierarchical model of decision power would be better than a classic hierarchy.
The official hierarchy does represent decision power, but it is not the only source of decisions in a company. The vast majority of decisions in a company are taken on lower levels and either not passed through any hierarchy at all or only presented through the classical technique of presenting a list of options, all but one of which are unpalatable. In practice specialists prepare most decisions in advance (cloaked in boss-pleasing terms like "advice" or "RFC"), so the non-hierarchical model you speculate about is already there.
Is your take then that the classic official hierarchy is purposeless? That it is simply an obstacle? Or that it cannot be improved upon because it is already optimal for its purpose (whatever that may be)?
I don't think I said any of those. The official hierarchy is a neat compact description of formal lines in an organization, not less but also not more. At most I think any formal org chart represents a vast oversimplification of the intricate graph of relationships that exist between people in any company. There are things about a company it can describe well (like who is in charge of performance reviews for who), and things it cannot describe well (like the nebulous role of individual popularity on company decision-making, or in distinguishing between productivity differences between individuals on the same "level"). It is also almost always limited to the company itself and excludes any factors outside it like competitors or suppliers, despite those factors sometimes being more important to company decisions than its internal organization.
In short, my take is that the "classic" hierarchy is a useful but limited tool. It is not sufficient in the slightest to describe how a company makes decisions, yet too many people treat it as if it is all you need to know.
You didn't, and you didn't leave the impression of having done so; it's just me poking to understand.
> like who is in charge of performance reviews for who
These are the kinds of things I'm trying to challenge: Are performance reviews useful? Would performance reviews actually be more useful in some other structure than a classic hierarchy?
In other words, I'm not convinced beyond all reasonable doubt that the classic hierarchy is the optimal structure for the limited, but useful purpose you describe it having. Obviously the standard thinking is that it is.
> It is not sufficient in the slightest to describe how a company makes decisions, yet too many people treat it as if it is all you need to know.
The former is necessary to coordinate coarse-grained decision making, policy and vision that needs to be unified across thousands of people, most of whom will never meet each other, but who should ideally be rowing in the same direction.
The latter is necessary for the armies of individual contributors to get their respective jobs done. Trying to document and formalize this ad-hoc network holistically is impossible because it's too complex to be understood by any one person. Attempting to do so would require a non-trivial time commitment from all the workers, which would actually take away from them, you know, getting work done.
It's tempting to look at an org chart and assume this represents how things work on the ground, but Conway's Law is more ironclad than it may appear at first glance. Don't confuse legibility for operational capability. If lower level folks did not understand their goals and improvise, then large corporations would be even more rigid and brittle than they already are. They would be utterly incapable of responding to changes in the marketplace and smaller firms would dominate.