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on Gopher (inofficial)
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COMMENT PAGE FOR:
URI Teams Grow Organically
fudged71 wrote 1 hour 31 min ago:
Isn't this effectively a core operating principle of DAOs? Members
self-organize and declare their roles and accountabilities. Tooling has
been built specifically around structuring, visualizing, governing, and
incentivizing this emergent organic structure. Traditional orgs could
learn a lot from what's been happening there.
FuriouslyAdrift wrote 2 hours 57 min ago:
Anyone who has worked in disaster recover and business continuity
planning knows how to map an organizations processes and people.
There is always 2 different orgs: the organization that is formally
stated for legal/insurance reasons, and the REAL organization that is
messy and ad-hoq.
You have to account for both.
random3 wrote 5 hours 16 min ago:
I grew several grassroots software projects in a 5-digit size company.
The last had least 10-15 direct contributors and tens of others
involved. It grew so large the CTO organized a summit to get the main
IT organization along with everyone else involved on the same page and
it came out as the "winner".
I did all this as an individual contributor. We called them "internal
open development" and had developed an entire model around it. You can
basically create "parallel" hierarchies within organizations. It's not
that different from the "build something people want" idea, but it
actually makes those people part of it.
There were several other projects like this.
m0llusk wrote 5 hours 22 min ago:
The office advocacy seems out of place. Extroverts work this weak
network methodology well with face time. Introverts are more likely to
get similar results from sharing planning and status documents and
lists highlighting relevant problem reports. While it may be easier to
do this kind of thing by putting extroverts in an office it might be
more valuable to let introverts focus on shared documents and reports
because of the records that get generated along the way.
pavel_lishin wrote 1 hour 26 min ago:
> * Introverts are more likely to get similar results from sharing
planning and status documents and lists highlighting relevant problem
reports.*
As an remote introvert, I do this sort of thing over Slack, instead
of at the watercooler, not via docs.
OhMeadhbh wrote 5 hours 46 min ago:
This would be a better article if the term "organic" was defined.
fudged71 wrote 1 hour 45 min ago:
I don't think it's hard to infer from the context and example.
An organic team is a group of individuals that forms spontaneously
within an organization based on informal communication networks and
interpersonal relationships rather than formal directives or
predefined structures. Such teams typically emerge in response to a
specific need or opportunity and are composed of members from various
departments who collaborate based on shared goals and complementary
skills. Unlike traditional teams, their existence is not documented
in official organizational charts, and their composition can be
fluid.
random3 wrote 5 hours 34 min ago:
organic, as in organic growth, is the default, natural growth as
contrasted with the synthetic one that is explicitly planned. For
example, that means how people prefer to work with there people they
like rather than those in their teams.
munificent wrote 6 hours 19 min ago:
> The challenge is that these communication networks are informal,
fluid, and nearly impossible to map.
I bet most large tech companies could have a fairly accurate map of the
network in less than a week if they really wanted it. Simply look at
every email and chat reply between two people and build a graph whose
nodes are people and with edges whose strength is the number of those
interactions. Done.
Of course, there are a lot of scary privacy implications and I'm sure
there are a few execs who wouldn't want anyone to discover that, wow
dude_in_power_x sure does sent a lot of chats to
cute_indirect_subordinate_they_have_no_reason_to_interact_with.
But if and organization really did want a better sociological
understanding of their workforce, they could build it.
clickety_clack wrote 3 hours 43 min ago:
I was in a non-tech org of about 100 people and they had this. The
data is so accessible to admins that itâs almost hard not to do it.
Noumenon72 wrote 2 hours 23 min ago:
What was the data used for?
devin wrote 4 hours 20 min ago:
I know someone who was building a product like this that they
intended to sell for the purposes of improving M&A efficiency. You
feed it slack, zoom, etc. info and then get a sense for "who needs to
be in the room" at various levels, see where duplicated management
effort is, and so on. Not sure where it went, but this was around 10
years ago.
sroussey wrote 5 hours 7 min ago:
Organizational Network Analysis (ONA) Tools. Google that and you will
find many out of the box tools that tap into email, calendars, Slack,
Teams, Google Workspace, et al.
deepsun wrote 5 hours 20 min ago:
I would gladly just tell my bosses who I'm talking to, how often, and
about what areas. If that helps me I see no problem, just send me a
survey to fill.
simianwords wrote 6 hours 20 min ago:
I find the automate csv shuffling example interesting. I have never
worked in a place that was this organic.
You canât just find some idea and do things. There are road maps and
promises made to manager and product.
What incentivises your manager to just agree to let you work on your
own projects?
pavel_lishin wrote 1 hour 28 min ago:
> What incentivises your manager to just agree to let you work on
your own projects?
What incentivizes you to ask permission?
ericdykstra wrote 5 hours 45 min ago:
I've seen it work in a few ways; these are not mutually exclusive:
* You have someone whose job or as part of their job is to it is to
discover these kinds of internal organizational efficiencies and
automate them. Something that organically comes up like this gets
assigned to that person.
* Managers are not incentivized to stick to a rigid schedule or
metrics based on an inflexible roadmap.
* Flexibility and autonomy is built into developers' schedules so
they can work on things outside of just their rank-ordered task list.
simianwords wrote 5 hours 40 min ago:
These sound like good ideas. I guess I just donât work in such
companies and I think this is the norm unfortunately.
There are strict timelines that span months if not years, often
optimised to a large extent. There is little room for spontaneity
and organic projects to come up.
pavel_lishin wrote 1 hour 27 min ago:
I've worked at companies where this sort of thing is encouraged,
and others where I'd be afraid to even ask about the possibility
of doing such a thing. Naturally it's a spectrum.
(Although, there is also the company that claims to encourage it,
and then buries you in bureaucracy...)
foobarian wrote 6 hours 36 min ago:
I liked what flashed on the front page a week or so ago, about
encouraging people to rant. With Slack specifically, it basically
amounted to having a "" channel for every user.
Now that I read the current post, maybe that should be a Slack feature
out of the box!
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