Recently I've been thinking a lot about the role of responsibility within systems of organization. We've already spoken at reasonable length about the importance of clear modules and interfaces within the technical design of a system. But my question has been this - shouldn't the same apply to human systems?
Imagine first that we have some kind of organization with enough complexity and work that no single person is going to be able to handle all of it. Indeed there's so much going on that many employees/individuals are needed to keep things running smoothly. Because of this multiplicity, people are going to have filter the organization around them. Which tasks do they take, which do they leave on the table? What information do they pay attention to, what do they ignore?
If there are no rules for this filtering, chaos will quickly ensue. People will end up picking up the same tasks and stepping on each other's toes. Important information will end up ignored for there is no completeness guarantee when people are filtering in an ad hoc fashion. And beyond all of this, the ignored parts of the organization may end up being critical to the value of the bits that are actually worked. Obviously there needs to be clear rules for this filtering that ensures coverage and completeness.
One of way of doing this would be to have a system which more or less randomly assigns work to individuals. Because that system could be aware of what all the work is, completeness and coverage could be guaranteed, but now a new problem arises. Within any kind of organization part of the "work" is figuring out what the new work will be. Doing that well requires vision and vision requires synthesis of information around a particular topic or component. So if folks are just getting hit with random tasks there's no opportunity for them to create this synthesis of vision. Therefore you'll end up with a queue of meaningless work and won't truly be taking full advantage of the creative element of your organization's individual brains. The obvious way to fix this of course is to ensure that the tasking and information flowing to any employee is more tightly coupled to particular subcomponents of your system.
Alright so at this point people are working on particular subsystems, and enough people are in the organization to cover those subsystems. There's still one piece missing from all of this though. While our current setup could lead to vision it doesn't have to lead there. Just because people work on something day in and day out doesn't mean they'll take ownership for it. This could happen for lots of reasons - insecurities, lack of clarity around how ownership is attained, just simply being unaware of the need for ownership, etc. So the last piece to our puzzle is to make that ownership clear. In order for people to consistently step up and ensure the growth of a particular subsystem (or in order to note that someone is just not up to task) ownership has to be made official.
Okay, let's review. In order to not have chaos we've created clear divisions within the work and put particular people in particular spots. In order to allow for the shaping of vision (and therefore growth) we've designed these spots to be points of synthesized information and purpose. These two things together indicate that we've identified clear, divisible subcomponents of our system that have similarly clear interface points. Finally we've made it clear and official who is responsible for what within that system in order to empower people and also hold them accountable. In other words we've arrived at a point where the technical organization of our system and the human one are in parallel with one critical difference - whereas the technical system is defined using capabilities the human system is defined using responsibilities. This is because, on the human side, we want to clearly indicate the intention for growth. Besides this one difference, the technical vision and the organizational structure are parallel.
Now before closing this out let's talk about one last thing - hierarchy. As we've discussed in notes of technical design, beyond the subcomponents there also needs to be coordinating components - a series of lego blocks lying around doesn't constitute a build. In a similar fashion our organization needs to have the responsibility of coordinating the individual owners assigned to a specific owner itself. Then, as the system grows (thanks to the vision and leadership of our owners) those subcomponents themselves are going to outgrow the capabilities of their original owners which will mean that the leaves in our tree of ownership are going to become branches and the original owner is going to take on the mantle of coordination amongst the subcomponents they've raised into being. In other words, hierarchy is the natural way to deal with organizational complexity. "Flat" organizations simply lead to uncoordinated subcomponents and thus eventual chaos and waste. In order to guarantee coverage and completeness a clear and official hierarchy has to be in place.
As a final note, we've spoken thus far as if the need for completeness and coverage is a given. But when you have lots of people working on different things, the only way to guarantee this is through clear accountability. Unless the bill falls to someone there's no guarantee that the bill gets paid at all. Each associated person can simply blame the group for letting something fall through the cracks. As a result singular accountability is incredibly important and yet another reason why official responsibility is a necessary component of organizational health.
In conclusion then, official responsibility and hierarchy that parallels the technical design of a system is a requirement to ensure completeness, coverage, coordination, and vision across the organization. It's also a requirement if you want folks in the organization to be both empowered and held accountable. So, the first step in creating a clear, healthy organization is the official assignment of responsibility and designation of a corresponding hierarchy.
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