The Future of Work: Embracing Autonomy in Decentralized Organizational Structures

Autonomy in the Workplace

What might a workplace of the future look like? What is needed for decentralized organizations to actually make it?

Decentralized Organizations

💪 Are you willing to work hard? Go work for a startup organization.

🦥 Are you hardly willing to work? Go work for an established organization.

🥥 Are you a crazy coconut? Go work for a decentralized organization.

Decentralized organizations offer lots of autonomy, but they lag behind traditional organizations when it comes to actually getting work done effectively and efficiently. As we move from traditional organizations towards decentralized organizations, which benefits should be kept, and which problems should be avoided?

Benefits of Traditional Organizations 👍

• Traditional organizations (at least some of them) have proven to be highly efficient. They have existing systems and standards in place that ensure that things are running smoothly.
• Hierarchical decision-making helps move things forward faster, even when several people lower in the organization’s hierarchy disagree with the decisions.
• Traditional organizations can hire top talent, and fire lack of talent. This is mostly done through traditional legal contracts.

Disadvantages of Traditional Organizations 👎

• Lack of autonomy. Yes, some organizations actually give workers freedom and autonomy to make their own decisions and changes, but that’s not the situation in most traditional organizations. They are rather the exception.
• Unfair compensation. It is not uncommon to have managers and middle managers barely do any work at all, and still get paid more than people working closer to the actual value creation.
• Lack of transparency. People unwilling to work can get away with it if there is no transparency for other members of the organization.

Enter Decentralized Organizations 😎

In a decentralized organization, people have autonomy. They can launch new projects without asking a boss for permission. They can work full-time, or they can work part-time, or not at all. The choice is theirs.

And since there is no longer a CEO figure on top of a hierarchy guiding everyone on the same direction, decentralized organizations can quickly get chaotic and slow. One of the largest challenges of a decentralized organization is achieving autonomy and having all the autonomous groups moving in the same direction:

To achieve this, all the groups need to agree on the organization’s vision as a cultural whole. Yes, each group can operate autonomously, but they must all be part of a cultural whole.

Cultural Whole 🧫

“A local economy that’s as self-sufficient as possible while still being part of a cultural whole—a holon—thus creating a resilient civilization that has no central points of failure. And which through its very structure promotes democracy.”

If incumbents try to take out a decentralized organization by disabling one of its groups, the decentralized organization could continue to exist if its groups are designed to be self-sufficient and to operate autonomously.

This translates to an organizational structure where the infrastructure provided by the top-level organization is minimal, and more cultural than tangible. This means that the cultural whole is not a centralized group of people, and it’s not something physical or digital that can be broken. Instead, it’s something more like a mindset. A shared dream, or a shared culture.

Lost Potential 🤯

A workplace would lose out on a lot of great things if its people possess talent that is not allowed to flourish. A hierarchical leadership structure tends to stifle innovation by not allowing employees to try new things without approval from their boss. Some companies understand that this is a problem, and implement measures to prevent it from happening. Amazon is one example of this, where the boss/employee relationship is turned upside-down:

whenever a new idea is suggested the default answer must be “yes” — biasing the company towards pursuing new ideas. If a manager wants to say “no” to a new idea, they are required to write a thesis, post it internally and rigorously defend their position.

A decentralized organization with autonomous groups (and individual autonomy within each group) adopts this “yes” by default principle, which is great for giving people the freedom and autonomy needed to carry out their ideas.

Autonomy + Cultural Whole 🫠

How can an organization give its groups and people full autonomy, while at the same time achieving collective productivity?

We can imagine an AI system that keeps track of each autonomous group. Instead of a human on top directing each group, a decentralized AI system could be the entity that ensures that the groups move in a direction that aligns with the cultural whole.

The AI would regularly communicate with the groups to check which direction they are moving in and at which speed. If the AI detects that some of the groups are starting to veer off course (relative to the cultural whole), the AI will nudge them in the right direction. The autonomous groups could also be incentivized to move in the direction of the cultural whole by providing financial rewards only to those that move in the correct direction, and by providing additional rewards to those that move at a higher speed.

For this to work, the organization’s culture needs to be defined in a way that enables an AI system to determine whether or not an autonomous group is in alignment with the cultural whole, as well as measuring how fast they are progressing. This is an area that will require more research and development as we continue to explore workplaces of the future.