Structurelessness

In the 1960s, as Peter McCullough was hiring weirdos in California to invent ethernet and Mel Conway was working at UNIVAC with the squares, Jo Freeman was working in the civil rights movement and the second wave feminist movement, and she noticed a similar argument happening, which she wrote about in “The Tyranny of Structurelessness.”

Freeman observes that movements often have problems and solutions that people are already bought in on. For second-wave feminism, the overly-structured society is one of these problems, and structurelessness –which the movement defined as groups without leaders or hierarchy– was the solution that made sense to people.

This doesn’t feel like a huge leap to me, especially coming from Conway’s diagrams. That world feels extremely regimented to me, even having spent my working life in hierarchical corporations. I think one of the reasons this resonates is that much of contemporary culture has a similar solution that seems obvious. Bureaucracy, red tape, hierarchy, process is all a waste. What do managers even do? All this structure is why the government is inefficient. If you just get smart people together and the right tech, you don’t need structure. Right?

Well, no. Freeman argues we don’t get to turn a dial from unstructured to structured. The real choice you have is between formal structures, which you design, or informal structures, which arise no matter what.

The main thing that happens in structureless groups is that an elite “in-group” is created. These are people with some power over the whole. And this power probably isn’t formal. It’s probably based on popularity, or who matches best with some previous image of who should be in charge, or based on some outside resources they have access to. And crucially, because it’s informal, this power over the group comes without responsibility to the group. She emphasizes that these elites are very rarely intentionally nefarious. They grow out of friendship groups, shared history, or other normal and inevitable parts of human relationships. 

So we don’t get to choose whether we have structure, just what kind of structure we want it to be. But, this begs the question: what’s wrong with informal structure? At least with that, we don’t have to bother defining anything.

Well, there are a few problems. For one, it’s not good at getting things done. Freeman emphasizes that she’s writing about this now because the structurelessness of feminist groups is preventing them from accomplishing their goals, which she also wants to accomplish. Unstructured groups, she says, have little control over how they develop and what they do. They sort of drift along, raising consciousness forever without having any impact on the world. This happens because formal structures have progressive histories, but informal structures don’t. You can’t progressively improve a work-around, at best it gets replaced with something else. 

Freeman argues that structure follows tasks, or rather, it should. Content dictates form. In practice, updating a structure to support new tasks is difficult. Perhaps unexpectedly, corporations aren’t any better at it than feminist groups, in my experience. And this means that most organizations are using a structure that accomplishes something other than what they say they want to do. 

Structurelessness also resists aggregation or  alliances. Unstructured groups can’t effectively roll up to something larger, because they don’t have representatives or ways to fairly delegate tasks. They’re not just ineffective at accomplishing their own tasks, they also can’t easily ally themselves with other groups with similar goals to get bigger things done.

Most insidiously, though, informal structures, because they’re following the grooves that society has carved into our collective psyches about what feels natural and normal, will reproduce the power structures that exist in society at large.  Any time you’re organizing a group to do something, a “natural” structure should be understood as a formal commitment to reproducing current conditions of power. A formal structure also can and often does reproduce existing power structures, but it at least can be analyzed, critiqued and evolved.

As options for how a group will handle something come up, everyone has to decide: Does this make sense? Is this the right thing to do? Without conscious energy and a well-defined structure, people don’t handle options based on sensible criteria. They won’t ask Is this true? Is it fair? Is it on topic? Or is the person who’s saying it just really important to the group?

For Freeman, it’s essential to democracy to operate based on criteria, not vibes. I’d argue one of the main things we do as IAs is create criteria to replace vibes. This doesn’t mean you can’t have feelings, but we don’t make structural decisions based on them. It’s bad for democracy. And architecture.

So according to Conway, the act of organizing humans creates a strong predisposition to particular solution structures. Your org chart gives you a hammer that makes everything look like a nail. According to Freeman, there’s no such thing as an unorganized group of humans, there’s only more or less formal organizations. Therefore, every group has a “natural” solution structure that will come out if not actively countered.

Ok, so everything has a structure, probably like the people who made it, but it’s a structure at least? Is it an okay one? Bad news, it is not.

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