About pyramids and networks

With the comprehension of agriculture about 15,000 years ago, human societies radically reorganized. Before agriculture, groups of nomadic gatherers roamed the territories following animals to hunt, looking for trees that had fruits, plants that had roots. The fate was dictated by circumstances: the cycles of the plants, the path of the animals, the course of the waters.

With agriculture, this has changed: it was possible to collect and save to consume later. This required a new management model that, although primitive, already contains the principles we use today: investment for the future, segregation of duties by working groups, need to central command.

This improved model took the form of a pyramid. The monarchies, which ran from antiquity until the eighteenth century, are clearly built like this: a boss commands two, this two command four, four command eight. And the roles are clearly distinct: the church is a power, the monarch is the other, the feudal landlords, another. In corporations, the pyramid appears in the form of "M structure" or multidivisional structure: a General Manager is head of five Submanagers, who are heads of ten Supervisors, and each Supervisor heads thirty employees. The names are different: departmentalization, chain of command, span of control, but what we see is the original pyramid adapted in new ways.

With advances in technology and civilization, there is now a new organizational structure: the network. Very common in collaborative processes of software, it depends crucially on communication and collaboration. It is an open structure, where power and authority walk together because, usually, those whom collaborate the most, have more power - they are called "network nodes". Thus, the hierarchy is not defined vertically as in the pyramids, but in a horizontal way - where the people most involved, which solve most problems are the most influential, the most powerful.

There may be a novelty here: in the nets, the best server is the boss, reversing an earlier classical condition that the worker was necessarily more manual labor than in a higher point in the chain of command: to the extent that the work became more abstract, rank and salary grew. In networks, this is not so: those hierarchically above does not move away from production, they are, instead, called to solve more complexes problems. The planning issues are still scattered throughout the network and not concentrated at the top of the pyramid - a situation that can be called "strategy of accommodation".

i like administration a lot