It is easy to praise distributed power in the abstract and hard to picture it working on a Tuesday. Who assigns the work, who breaks the tie, who gets to say no. The suspicion that networks are just disguised chaos is fair, because plenty of them are. The way past the suspicion is not another manifesto. It is a company that has run this way for decades and can be described in operational detail.
The lattice as a working machine
W. L. Gore, best known for Gore-Tex, is that company. Grønning (2016) documents an organization built as a lattice rather than a ladder, with no formal layers of management and no assigned bosses. Self-managed teams are the basic building blocks. Associates form and dissolve teams around projects, and communication runs directly from person to person instead of up and down a chain of command. Even the top job is distributed: the CEO is selected through an internal process of peer recognition rather than appointed from above.
Notice what is present here, not just what is absent. There are teams with real membership, projects with real boundaries, and a recognition process that confers real authority. The lattice is not the removal of structure. It is a different structure, one in which authority attaches to a role and a contribution rather than to a permanent rung. The firm is credited with sustaining continuous innovation across fabrics, guitar strings, and medical devices, and with recurring highly in best-employer rankings. The evidence is a documented case rather than a controlled experiment, so the claim stays modest: this can be made to work, and it has been, for a long time.
Why the label without the mechanics fails
The cautionary contrast sits in the same literature. Foss and Klein (2022) point to Valve, another firm celebrated for flatness, where the flat structure produced what employees by 2013 called "The Wilderness," a creative inertia serious enough that the release of Half-Life: Alyx required management intervention. The same authors note that firms lacking dedicated functions, such as customer support or marketing, can pay for that absence in real capability gaps. Flatness copied as an aesthetic, without the connective mechanics, drifts.
The difference between Gore and the cautionary cases is instructive. Gore has explicit substitutes for the things a hierarchy normally provides: a team as a durable unit, a peer process that legitimizes leadership, and a communication norm strong enough to move information without a chain of command. Where those substitutes are missing, the network does not become free. It becomes a place where nobody can be sure who decides, which is the failure Lee and Edmondson (2017) predict when they warn that self-managing designs demand more structure and discipline, not less.
The Zappos experience is the clearest illustration of the cost of getting the mechanics wrong. Groth (2020) records that the company's push into holacracy was disruptive enough that Tony Hsieh issued an ultimatum in 2015, and eighteen percent of the workforce took a buyout rather than adopt the new system. Within a few years Zappos had dropped holacracy's bureaucratic meetings and brought managers back, keeping only a circular hierarchy as an artifact. The lesson is not that distributed power cannot work. It is that a distribution scheme imposed as a system, without the earned legitimacy Gore built over decades, meets resistance and reverts. Mechanics cannot be decreed on a Monday.
What to copy, and what not to
For a leader tempted by the lattice, the lesson is to import the mechanics, not the vocabulary. The temptation is to announce that titles are gone and expect self-organization to fill the vacuum. Gore's example says the opposite: distribute authority through explicit roles, invest in the lateral communication that replaces the chain of command, and build a legitimate way for leadership to be conferred and, importantly, withdrawn. Semco reached similar mechanics from a different direction, grounding distributed authority in open monthly books and worker votes so that decisions rested on shared information rather than on whoever spoke loudest (Semler, 1989).
There is one more mechanic Gore makes visible that the manifestos tend to skip: the role of information. A lattice only works if people can see enough to coordinate themselves, because there is no manager aggregating the picture and handing down conclusions. Semco built this explicitly, with monthly books open to everyone, so that a worker deciding something has the same facts a manager would (Semler, 1989). Strip the vertical chain out of a firm that still hoards information at the top and you get the worst of both: no one to decide and no basis to decide on. The connective tissue of a network is shared visibility, and it has to be engineered as deliberately as the roles.
The practical read is that a network needs more deliberate design than a pyramid, not less. A pyramid comes with default answers to who decides and who is accountable. A lattice has to build those answers on purpose, in the open, and keep maintaining them. The firms that treat distributed power as an engineering problem, with real roles and real recognition processes, get Gore. The firms that treat it as a slogan get The Wilderness.
Sources
- Grønning, T. (2016). Working Without a Boss: Lattice Organization at W. L. Gore & Associates. Detailed case of Gore's lattice, self-managed teams, direct person-to-person communication, and a peer-selected CEO, the working example at the center of the piece. https://sk.sagepub.com/cases/download/person-to-person-communication-at-wl-gore-associates-inc
- Foss, N. & Klein, P. (2022). Who's the boss? The persistence of entrepreneurial hierarchy in flat organizations. Supplies the Valve 'Wilderness' counter-case and the capability gaps of missing functions, showing what happens without the mechanics. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41469-022-00132-8
- Lee, M. Y. & Edmondson, A. C. (2017). Self-managing organizations. Argues less-hierarchical organizing demands more structure and discipline, supporting the claim that a lattice needs deliberate design. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191308517300059
- Semler, R. (1989). Managing Without Managers. Shows Semco grounding distributed authority in open books and votes, a parallel set of mechanics for shared decisions. https://hbr.org/1989/09/managing-without-managers
- Groth, A. (2020). Zappos has quietly backed away from holacracy. Documents the 2015 ultimatum, the eighteen percent buyout, and the reversion to managers, illustrating the cost of decreeing distributed power without earned legitimacy. https://qz.com/work/1776841/zappos-has-quietly-backed-away-from-holacracy