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From Stars to Spheres

In a pyramid, you report to a boss who will do their weekly reviews to see how you're doing. You will probably create documents together to agree on what needs to be achieved; this typically happens with your boss.

The current paradigm: The boss trusts you to do your job, you trust your boss to protect you and be fair to you.

This trust-based mechanism, at first sight, feels very nice but has many side effects. Read notes on reinventing organizations; this shows you issues with organization styles.

Above is typically known as 'red' or 'orange' organization style. Orange is the modern management style used in most large US or Europe-based companies.

In such an organization, there seems to be a lot of freedom on each level. For example, if a manager of a team wants to change the tools they use, it will still work because it's a pyramid. It goes top-down and back up.

Main issues:

  • Limited consensus on priorities
  • Very quickly becomes political (especially in orange organizations, too easy for people to abuse the system of feedback loops, ...)
  • Quickly leads to inefficiencies, with huge amounts of time lost because of admin/politics overhead
  • The people moving to the top are typically not the ones with the biggest added value
  • It's a survival of the fittest model
  • Values are very quickly forgotten

A pyramid-like system is a system that fits in the current 3D = fear based world.

The new paradigm: Circles group people & projects, and we work as a participatory organization to realize our joint goals.

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