As software absorbs the predictable parts of knowledge work, a quiet mismatch is opening up inside the org chart. The tasks that survive automation are the ambiguous, novel, boundary-crossing ones. Yet most large companies are still built as pyramids designed for the opposite job: reliable repetition. Firms spent a century perfecting a structure for doing the same thing well, and the market is now asking them to do things they have never done before.
The pyramid earns its keep on known work
The honest case against hierarchy depends on the honest case for it. In their synthesis of the management literature, Lee and Edmondson (2017) conclude that managerial hierarchy works well for the reliable execution of known tasks in stable environments. A chain of command routes a decision upward, standardizes it, and sends it back down with predictable results. That is a feature, not an accident. When Ricardo Semler inherited Semco, the firm ran on precisely this logic, a paternalistic command structure that could turn out pumps and mixers on schedule (Semler, 1989). For a factory making the same product to the same specification, the pyramid is not a pathology. It is a well-fitted instrument, and pretending otherwise is how flat-org enthusiasm loses its credibility.
The trouble starts when the work stops repeating.
Where the chain of command jams
Lee and Edmondson (2017) are equally clear about the other side of the ledger. Hierarchy inhibits the solving of complex, non-routine problems that cross functional boundaries, tends toward rigidity, and hardens status differences that stifle how people grow. Each of those failures follows directly from the thing that makes hierarchy good at routine. Vertical reporting lines move a known decision up and down efficiently, and they move a strange problem sideways, from engineering to sales to service and back, far too slowly to matter. The pyramid was built for depth of control, not for lateral speed.
W. L. Gore, the maker of Gore-Tex, was built to route around that jam. Grønning (2016) documents a company organized as a lattice rather than a ladder, with self-managed teams as the basic unit and direct person-to-person communication in place of a vertical chain of command. Associates form and dissolve teams around projects, and the structure is credited with sustaining a long run of innovation across fabrics, guitar strings, and medical devices. The evidence here is a documented case, not a controlled trial, so the claim has to stay narrow: a firm can operate at scale without a conventional command line, and at least one has done so for decades while staying inventive.
The rigidity Lee and Edmondson (2017) describe is not a matter of bad managers. It is structural. A pyramid gives every problem a predetermined route, up to the nearest common boss and back down, and that route is efficient only when the problem is shaped like the ones the structure was designed for. A novel problem is by definition the wrong shape. It needs people from three functions in a room deciding together, and the chain of command is built to keep exactly those people reporting to different bosses who will not meet until the issue has already escalated. The delay is not a failure of the system. It is the system working as designed on the wrong kind of input.
Automation raises the stakes
This is where a decades-old design debate becomes a current operating problem. If machines now handle a growing share of the routine, the human residue skews toward exactly the non-routine, boundary-crossing work that Lee and Edmondson (2017) identify as hierarchy's weak spot. An organization tuned for reliable repetition is being handed a workload made mostly of exceptions.
None of this argues for abolishing structure. Foss and Klein (2022) caution that flat and bossless firms, whatever their appeal, often struggle with innovation, scale, and longevity in dynamic, time-sensitive conditions, which is a warning against treating the mere absence of a boss as the cure. Their point sharpens the diagnosis rather than reversing it. The failure is not that hierarchy exists. The failure is that a single vertical structure is asked to do two incompatible jobs at once.
The practical read
The useful move is to stop running both kinds of work through the same channel. Keep a clear line of authority where the task is known and the environment is stable, which is most of what a company does on any ordinary day. Build lateral, team-based paths, closer to Gore's lattice, for the novel problems that ignore the boxes on the chart. Semco's own transformation followed this instinct, replacing blanket command with participation and open information so that decisions could form where the knowledge actually sat (Semler, 1989).
The question a leader should ask of any given decision is not who is senior enough to make it, but whether this problem has been solved before. When the answer is yes, the pyramid is fine and probably faster. When the answer is no, the pyramid is often the thing standing in the way, and the job is to open a sideways path before the exception becomes a crisis.
Sources
- Lee, M. Y. & Edmondson, A. C. (2017). Self-managing organizations: Exploring the limits of less-hierarchical organizing. Peer-reviewed synthesis finding that hierarchy suits reliable execution of known tasks but inhibits complex non-routine, cross-functional problem-solving; the spine of the argument. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191308517300059
- Semler, R. (1989). Managing Without Managers. First-person account of Semco's shift from paternalistic command to participation and open information, used as the classic case of moving work off the vertical line. https://hbr.org/1989/09/managing-without-managers
- Grønning, T. (2016). Working Without a Boss: Lattice Organization at W. L. Gore & Associates. Documented case of a lattice firm sustaining innovation through direct person-to-person communication instead of a chain of command. 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. Argues flat firms struggle with innovation, scale, and longevity in dynamic conditions, sharpening the case that the problem is one structure doing two jobs. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41469-022-00132-8