Decouple Decision Making and Project Management

[alice-i-cecile]

Outline

Problems:

• overloads leaders
• these skills are different, not always found together, and require investment to keep sharp
• domain experts are best equipped to make decisions
• trust and ownership is essential! Disempowered workers are ineffective and don't tell you about problems

Examples of success:

• open source repos
• parliamentary systems: committees and clerks and researchers and lobbyists and chairs
• anarchists and coops
• sociocracy
• parallel ladders at tech companies (not quite)
• CEOs (not sucked into the support work!)
• Agile (Done Right:tm:)
• pirates! Elected captain and quartermaster

Key elements:

• decision makers have tangible skills and day-to-day experience with the project
• decision makers respect, are respected by and represent those they work closely with
• project management does not make decisions
• everyone can and does ask project management for help with information
• project management builds consensus
• project management gathers, organizes and communicates information

Supporting links

Perhaps the greatest crime of the industrial system is the way in which it
systematically thwarts the inventive genius of the majority of its workers

• (Ward, 2008, pp. 54–55; see Kropotkin, 1985)

https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781315172606-10/decision-making-power-maarit-laihonen

Video on pirates: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0fAznO1wA8

[sixfold-origami]

Roman legion structure may also have ideas worth stealing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKBWAYZOXqA&vl=en

It was explicitly a hybrid of top-down and bottom-up leadership

[alice-i-cecile]

Director and producer is split in Hollywood (and game dev!).