> If you seriously believe that all (or most) companies disallow anyone not in leadership to improve things, I'd consider getting out of your current situation and seeing things again with clear eyes.
I've been around a bunch, including the US Air Force, and I can confidently tell you that heavily hierarchical organizational culture is the norm, individuals contributors who want to have effects beyond their job scope do so at risk of offending other stakeholders. They may tolerate you and even give some limited help, but they're not going to shout your name from the rooftops just because you want to be a boy scout.
Not saying you can't buck the system and get away with it, one of my favorite books was about one of my heroes, John Boyd, but if you want to be a hero, you need to go into it with a clear-eyed assessment of what you're up against and so you can tailor your objectives appropriately.
The DoD (!) is hardly representative of the cultures being discussed in the linked article, which is about tech startups (with a bunch of examples from medicine too). Yes, there are worse examples, but those may be beyond help.
As an enterprise grows, you either retain centralized control and have hierarchy, or distribute control by treating parts of the org like independent, federated entities (think Berkshire Hathaway).
The military's size, scope, and mission are unique. You need top-down control, because otherwise most folks won't decide to run up a hill into a machine gun on their own. That mission focus (do stuff with force), cascades into the supporting services.
Tech start ups are a rather small part of the overall IT industry. I dont really have the numbers to back it up, so i am not going to speculate as far as the actual numbers, but any discussiona bout workplace IT that ignores everything that isnt a tech start up is virtually useless.
And the IT industry is a rather small part of the overall job market. So therefore any discussion about the workplace that ignores everything that isn't IT is virtually useless?
I fail to see how governmental organizations should fall outside the scope of the discussion.
And the Air Force is not the DoD. While, technically, the individual branches of the US military fall under the DoD, they all have very different organizational cultures, and the DoD has staff and culture of its own.
> I fail to see how governmental organizations should fall outside the scope of the discussion.
I won't tell you what falls within the scope of this discussion or not, but I can tell you why they don't add a lot of value to it either.
It's already quite hard to somewhat objectively discuss whether a business company is dysfunctional, in part, or not at all, and what are the reasons for that.
It's almost entirely useless to attempt to have that discussion about government. Because politics. Because people root for their home team. Because people are inclined to dismiss the other team's ideas even when they're real good. If I told you the US Government is dysfunctional, someone would counter that I'm not American and I should see my own government. If we move past that and we got into the details of why things are not working properly, invariably Americans will start quoting bits of the constitution, bill of rights and foundling fathers at each other (and from there on it just becomes religion to me).
Discussing whether the function of Military organisation is working properly is even more difficult. In addition to the above problems, there's also hazing and indoctrination, which are incredibly strong psychological forces (without those, like said, people won't run into their deaths without question). And it pretty much divides the crowd in two slices, those "outside" that have no idea how it really works, and those that have been "inside" who are unable to disconnect the indoctrination bits from forming an objective judgement about how well the organisation functions and how that comes to be.
Certainly, discussing businesses has similar problems, but this just amps up the personal emotion factor to eleven. Also one of the reasons why the businesses were kept anonymous in the featured article.
Not sure why you are getting so many replies disagreeing with you. Narrowly-defined roles are indeed the norm, even in the tech world. When I was an "individual contributor" I'd get frustrated with Worst Practices all the time, but was told that I was hired to write code not to change our infrastructure or suggest different product features or improve our testing practices--MANAGEMENT makes those decisions. But even when you get into management, there are always managers above you to limit what you can achieve.
There may be awesome companies out there where anyone is empowered to just go fix some practice that's not productive, no matter where they are in the org chart, but those companies are few and far between. I'd love to see one.
There may be awesome companies out there where anyone is empowered to just go fix some practice that's not productive, no matter where they are in the org chart, but those companies are few and far between. I'd love to see one.
One thing I would consider doing, if I ever start my own company or rise high enough up in someone else's company to implement this, is to give every single employee some sort of discretionary budget to spend on things that make the workplace better. The more experienced and trusted you are, the bigger of a budget you get. I think this would go a long way in fighting the learned helplessness dynamic.
This is a very interesting idea. Have you, or anyone else on HN, ever seen this in action? I would LOVE to hear stories about this, either successes or failures.
It's called 20% time and it works OK. I always used it when I was at Google, although most people didn't.
20% is not specifically for "improving the organisation" of course. It's most famous on the outside for the new products it led to, like Gmail. But actually most 20% projects were small internal things intended to smooth the rough edges off a particular tool or process, or to improve the company in some way. If the particular bee in your bonnet was a type of bug that cropped up frequently in other people's software, making a linter to spot it and driving adoption through the organisation would be a good 20% project, for instance.
Part of it is vinceguidry makes something of a false distinction. Either fight the system and solve X problem behavior or just accept it and don't think about. A third option is simply investigating classes of behavior of this sort and learning something from them.
That you chose to mention the UAF as an example suggests that your experiences are really on the far side of what is being suggested here. If there's any place where these kinds of things don't work, it's in government or the military.
I recall reading somewhere that while military organizations are very much synonymous with hierarchy, they have historically experienced a lot of pressure to flatten and decentralize, at least as far as field command goes. Napoleon's success was attributed to smaller units that responded to feedback more quickly. Unfortunately I can't find that article.
However, this is not to say that in regular administration there isn't still a lot of de facto trust in the hierarchy. I think unbounded hierarchy is generally one of those memes that people grow up taking for granted as something that just works with any layer count. In some ways, it's a self-reinforcing thing - if you climbed ranks for 10 years, you don't want to see the system change and your "sunk cost" go away.
The US Marines are often cited in management literature as an example of an organization where the leadership communicates high-level intent and purpose to achieve strategic alignment, and then totally decentralizes tactical decisionmaking to the people doing the actual work in the field. The stereotype that they are just all about top-down decisionmaking and following orders, is false. They recognize that individuals need to be able to make decisions on the fly in order to react to volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity.
But it will always remain an inherently misleading comparison, because they get to train people to an extent and in ways that would be unthinkable for a business in modern civilized society to get away with. The training and drilling is such an engrained component in that whole system. Without having that first it seems to me a bit like prematurely spot-optimizing the wrong loop.
That book made it into four different reading lists from various branches of the military (USMC, USAF, Army, and a chair of the House Armed Svcs Committee). That's encouraging in that at least they're aware that his ideas/approaches were productive.
I've been around a bunch, including the US Air Force, and I can confidently tell you that heavily hierarchical organizational culture is the norm, individuals contributors who want to have effects beyond their job scope do so at risk of offending other stakeholders. They may tolerate you and even give some limited help, but they're not going to shout your name from the rooftops just because you want to be a boy scout.
Not saying you can't buck the system and get away with it, one of my favorite books was about one of my heroes, John Boyd, but if you want to be a hero, you need to go into it with a clear-eyed assessment of what you're up against and so you can tailor your objectives appropriately.