Organizational Disorganization

In "Anarchy in the Office" I considered the rather bizarre concept of a project execution environment in which there were no formal leaders, merely ad-hoc coordinators that leveraged voluntary resources to complete tasks.   It seemed an interesting but likely impractical arrangement, and I've since read a book that proposes to do the same not only for a specific environment, but entire companies.

Peer Leadership proposes a networked (rather than hierarchical) organization structure, in which individual employees are like nodes of a computer network that are engaged as needed to accomplish organizational tasks - or which can, on occasion take on coordination of the efforts of others when they recognize the need for something to be done.

It remains an interesting concept, though it strikes me as being even more improbable on that level, given a number of potential issues - chiefly, that most of the day-to-day operations of a business are rather routine and non-dynamic and require the ongoing involvement of the same resources with few situations in which deviation from standard operating procedure is necessary.

Granted, the problems many companies face in a competitive environment is that standard operating procedure becomes bureaucratic and inflexible, as the author rightly suggests:  a front-line employee perceives a need for a change to be made, must communicate it up the chain of command to a high enough level for someone who is not familiar with the problem to authorize a change or deviation from established process, and then the change must be socialized within the organization before communicating back down to the front lines for implementation - a procedure which can take days or months.

But as in many things, I expect swinging the pendulum to the opposite extreme could do more harm than good ... or perhaps it's just that I've become institutionalized to the traditional approach of command-and-control hierarchies that I can't fully concretize the concept.  I don't really think that's the case, but I'll allow for the possibility.

My sense is that the determination of the amount of authority given to those on the front lines of an organization largely depend on the task in question.  For some tasks (day-to-day operations that are repeated) the procedure/control structure is likely the best approach whereas for others (which focus on changing the procedures that guide routine actions) a great deal more latitude is necessary to make progress.   To impose the organizational structure of one upon the other would be counterproductive.