Level Best

Last issue, I wrote that on a call everyone providing care is responsible, but the lead is the one held to it. This one is about what happens to that idea when a company takes out the layers that used to hold it.

In September, Brandon Sammut published how Mind Robotics aims to run as a flat organization. He built it around four questions a company can ask itself: who has the information, how context travels across teams, who decides, and who gets credit. Where the answers fall short, he asks people to say so.

My first reaction was that the whole idea of flattening an org is a bad one, and I pushed back in his comments:

I wrote that as one of those project managers. On my team at my day job, a PM's week goes to hundreds of small projects and dozens of multimillion-dollar ones.

Like a lot of large enterprises, we keep our project information in about eight different platforms, and there's no simple, accurate way to connect them. I've been having fun trying through Copilot and Microsoft's newer connectors, which aren't as bad as they used to be. But everyone has their own workaround, so nobody owns the fix. If I got it working, I'd still have to put a business case together and snag some of the innovation budget. That's cool and all, but a newer company like Mind gets to set up its structure "correctly" from the start, and that's a privilege.

In the same comment I asked how a company makes decisions that affect 100 employees who all share ownership and authority, or 1,000, or whether you just lump them into "teams" instead of calling them departments. I also pointed out that his accountability section says nothing about owning failure.

Then I had to ask myself what his argument actually was against mine. Mind keeps more governance than the word suggests. Every body of work gets one named decision-maker, defined up front, because without one, in Brandon's words, "the loudest voice in the room wins." The first of Mind's AI principles, which I quoted in Show Your Work, is "You are responsible for anything you put your name on." And he says plainly that flat isn't a case against structure:

My opening line argued against a version of flat he never proposed. My caution is for the companies copying him, so they understand what they're taking on and what's failed before. Named owners and personal accountability are structure, and they're the part most worth copying. The word "flat" tends to travel without them.

Named owners still collide. The first time two of them want the same engineer or the same budget, someone above them has to break the tie, and as a company grows, those collisions stop being rare.

When a company removes that layer, those decisions tend to go to the top. Google removed its engineering managers in 2002 and reversed course within a few months, once too many people were bringing expense reports and interpersonal conflicts straight to Larry Page. Julie Wulf's study of more than 300 large U.S. firms found the same direction: flattening at the top went along with more CEO involvement with direct reports.

AI is why this is coming up now. It can take over a lot of the routing and status work a manager used to handle, and it helps with quick, simple decisions. But it's the big ones that slow things down. You can foster a culture of ownership and still find, when people make decisions worth millions, a lot of indecision and people not wanting to own the call at all.

AI can add a layer of its own, too. The way I read Mind's AI principles, people think their work through with AI before they bring it to the team, and the company plans to "convert individuals' best ways of working into team-level standards." I do the first part myself, and it helps. But that step can potentially become red tape of its own, and the whole point of flattening is reducing red tape. It works if the AI is connected to what everyone else is writing and considering.

If your company has a couple hundred employees, you're not really bottlenecked on red tape. It's the large enterprises that struggle with that, which is why they revitalize and change so often. Fast-growing companies, early startups and large incumbents trying to revitalize all run into similar problems with governance, and at some point an early-stage company needs more of it than it started with.

Brandon's four questions are a good test of whether a company is truly flat. If you're borrowing his playbook, add a fifth before you take a level out: when two owners collide, or a big call fails, whose name goes on it? The companies that skipped that question ended up answering it at the top.

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This is my eighth newsletter. Send in a reply, I’d love to hear your experiences with interteam or departmental conflict(s).

With love,

Jim Sullivan