[michaelchisari]

| flat organizations

Flat and structureless are not necessarily synonymous. It's certainly possible to have a highly structured yet flat organization with clear roles and non-hierarchical decision-making.

[tsunamifury]

Really? Because Adam Curtis spent something like 3 films and 10 hours to argue otherwise and not without a lot of examples.

When there is no authority, predators become the authority.

[dredmorbius]

"Flat" != "no authority".

Flat structures may, or may not, have a head.

What they don't have is deep hierarchy.

Mind that this has its own set of benefits and disadvantages. Fewer deparmental turf battles, but very broad spans of control and/or highly autonomous roles.

An ant or bee colony is a flat structure with a strong central control, at least reproductively: the queen. This isn't an ideal comparison, of course, as the individual workers don't take orders from the queen (or anyone else), but instead respond largely based on instinctual behaviours and pheremone signalling (in the case of ants at least, I'm not certain of bees).

Flat structures may lack any leadership, or have various rotating or ad hoc leaderships. These are more akin to the structureless organisations Freeman writes of.

[n4r9]

It's well konwn that megalomaniac's thrive on vacuums of power or meaning, but that's not the most important aspect of Curtis' message imo. For me, Curtis explores how power applies highly abstracted narratives in order to disguise its mechanisms - Soviet or capitalist realism, for example. His frequent trope is how things suddenly "don't make sense" to the general public, and this is when change occurs.

But this doesn't feel too relevent to the discussion of whether an organisation can operate effectively with a flat structure.