It's hard for me to have much faith in the author's argument.
And does the company's views on organization extend to the agile training they provide? Agile isn't disorganized or even unorganized, it just recognizes that you can't know everything/enough when you start. If they can't organize themselves well enough to avoid bankruptcy, can they organize a software project?
I think what they've done is an interesting social project, but by his own description, it seems like they've proved it doesn't work.
However, I believe a kind of implicit vision has emerged which is simply to make sustainable such a place. Put another way, people who are attracked by this implicit vision (such as the author of the article) are still with them, and the others have probably left because this was not a vision they were inspired by.
If you don't have really excellent, self-motivated people, you are going to have a lot of trouble with self-organization simply because some people need to be told what to do. People also have to be 100% bought in to the concept and don't try to create themselves management and authority roles. It really does take the right people.
Trust is probably the biggest problem. It takes a lot of trust from the people who start the business to let it run itself. It is probably easier at the start of a business than when it's big. Everybody has to have a high level of trust of everyone else, and when that trust is broken the organization probably needs to be willing to fire the person who took advantage of the system.
For many people, the hardest part would be to maintain that kind of system with ruthlessness enough to fire people who don't work well in the system. Knowing that it's not going to be for everybody and practicing that is hard.
The company I work for is about 30 folks strong and there are, for all intents and purposes, only two levels of hierarchy. It could probably sustain being completely flat, but I'd fear that it'd fall apart relatively swiftly due to people being unwilling to both bring others to task and be brought to task themselves.
Plus, there's something to be said for decision by committee severely obfuscating progress if consensus can't be easily reached.
I'm now part of a project (it is a creative enterprise of sorts, i dont' want to make it so easily identifiable) that is trying to apply this sort of ideas in its working process. It's been growing lately, and we've had to start thinking about this sort of thing (people we don't necessarily know are interested to join us, and it's a bit of a problem in some cases to decide whether to abandon our current "flat" structure (where everyone has access to everything) and "enrollment process", or bite the bullet and take some risks with these people).
Oddly I think there is an intellectual justification behind this movement - if we assume code literacy is as important now as real literacy was post 1451, then it's a rare group of people who write for a living that do not have few or no managers (who is the manager of authors at a publishing house)
As an Agile/XP coach, what I find is that I need to be very careful that I distinguish between things that work and things that feel like they ought to work. If you're not a pragmatist, always trying new things but always looking at results with a cold eye, you're truly lost in this business.
Good article, but the jury is still out here. Right now this is more of a sales pitch than a story. In about three years, I'd love to come back to these guys and see how it's going.
One of the problems with any organization is that people like doing what they like to do, not necessarily the things that need to be done. There are things we are really good at -- programming, artwork, group encounters, whatever -- and we tend to gravitate towards situations that let us do these things. The immediate danger of an organization without a tight feedback loop is that people drift into doing their own things and other important stuff doesn't get done.
But that's just the theory. The important thing is how it works in this situation, for these guys. Hopefully there will be an update a few years down the road.
