adilallo
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title, description, author, date, related, thumbnail, background
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| How Chaos Concentrates Control | How to limit informal hierarchies inevitably emerging in horizontal groups | Author name | 2025-08-15 |
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Every failing collective tells itself the same story: we don't need formal structures because we trust each other. We're not like those hierarchical organizations. We make decisions organically, by consensus, through the natural flow of discussion. We don't have leaders.
This is a fantasy. Worse, it's a fantasy that actively produces the hierarchies it claims to prevent.
Here's what actually happens in structureless groups. Decisions get made, but no one can say exactly how or by whom. Some people's opinions carry more weight, but there's no acknowledged reason why. Information flows through informal networks, which means who you know determines what you know. Conflicts fester because there's no legitimate process for working through them. New members can't figure out how anything works because there's nothing to figure out, just vibes and unspoken norms.
The group congratulates itself on being non-hierarchical while a small clique makes all the real decisions over drinks after meetings. This isn't an accident or a failure of the group's principles. This is what structurelessness produces.
Jo Freeman named this decades ago: the tyranny of structurelessness. When you refuse to create explicit structures, you don't eliminate power. You make power invisible and therefore unaccountable. The hierarchies that emerge are based on personal relationships, charisma, free time, and existing social capital. In other words, they reproduce all the inequalities you were supposedly trying to escape.
The solution isn't to embrace traditional hierarchy. It's to build transparent structures that acknowledge what every group actually needs: ways to make decisions, coordinate action, resolve conflicts, and distribute responsibility. Structures aren't the enemy. Hidden structures are.
Explicit decision-making is the first step. Stop pretending decisions emerge organically. They don't. Someone proposes something, some people support it, and somehow it becomes what the group does. Make that process visible.
Decide how you make decisions. Consensus? Majority vote? Consensus with fallback to voting? Different methods for different types of decisions? It doesn't matter which you choose as long as everyone knows what it is.
Set time limits for discussion. This sounds bureaucratic but it's the opposite. Without limits, discussions go until the people with the most stamina or free time get their way. That's not democracy, that's a war of attrition.
Make decisions in meetings, not in back channels. If it affects the group, it gets discussed where the group can hear it. The post-meeting group chat can't be where real decisions happen.
Rotating responsibilities prevents the accumulation of informal power. Your group has functions that need doing: taking notes, managing money, communicating with outside groups, maintaining your tools or space, coordinating meetings. Pretending these aren't positions of influence is delusional.
Name the roles explicitly. Note-taker, treasurer, communications coordinator, whatever you need. Write down what each role does. This isn't about creating a bureaucracy, it's about making power visible so it can be shared.
When someone rotates out, they document what they did and train their replacement. Knowledge can't be hoarded. If only one person understands the finances or the website or the coalition relationships, they have structural power whether you acknowledge it or not.
Keep records. Meeting notes, decisions made, rationales discussed. This isn't paranoia, it's memory. Without records, the people who were there control the narrative.
Share context proactively. When discussing something that builds on previous decisions or ongoing situations, take a minute to recap for people who weren't there. Otherwise participation becomes impossible for anyone who can't attend everything.
Legitimate conflict resolution matters because conflicts will happen. In structureless groups, they get resolved through whoever has more social capital, who can mobilize their friends, who's willing to make things uncomfortable until they get their way. This is violence pretending to be harmony.
Create a process. When there's a conflict between members, what happens? Mediation by agreed-upon people? A structured conversation using specific guidelines? Bringing it to the full group? Figure it out before you need it.
Make it legitimate. Everyone agrees this is how conflicts get worked through, which means everyone agrees to accept the outcome even if they don't like it. Without legitimacy, people just route around the process until they get what they want.
The process should be separate from personal relationships. Your closest friend in the group shouldn't be mediating your conflicts. That's not neutrality, that's just a different kind of power play.
Accountability structures ensure that actions have consequences. If someone consistently doesn't do what they committed to, what happens? If someone treats others badly, what's the recourse? In structureless groups, the answer is usually nothing, or else someone gets quietly frozen out through social pressure.
Decide what accountability looks like. Checking in on commitments? Having conversations when things slip? Clear consequences for patterns of behavior that harm the group? This feels uncomfortable because we're taught that structure equals oppression. But without accountability, you just have unaccountable power.
Make it proportional and restorative when possible. The point isn't punishment, it's maintaining the group's capacity to function and keeping people safe. But sometimes people need to leave, and there should be a legitimate process for that too.
Why this matters comes down to power. The fantasy of structurelessness serves power in two ways. First, it allows informal elites to consolidate control while claiming there's no hierarchy. Second, it makes groups dysfunctional, which is convenient for anyone who benefits from the absence of organized opposition.
When your worker coop can't make decisions, when your mutual aid network splinters over unresolved conflicts, when your organizing committee burns out because a few people do everything, that's not a failure of the people involved. That's structurelessness working exactly as it's designed to.
The choice isn't between structure and freedom. It's between explicit structures that can be challenged and changed, and implicit structures that operate in the shadows. One enables democracy. The other prevents it.
Build structures. Make them visible. Change them when they don't work. That's not selling out, that's how you build something that lasts.
Name who can bring proposals and how they get on the agenda. Otherwise the people who are most comfortable speaking up or who talk to the right people beforehand set the agenda by default.
Rotate them. Six months, a year, whatever makes sense. This prevents anyone from accumulating informal power through being the only person who knows how things work. It also distributes skills across the group.
Information access is crucial because hidden information is hidden power. If discussions happen in private chats, if decisions get made in informal hangouts, if context lives in the heads of a few long-timers, you have an invisible hierarchy.
Make information accessible. Use shared documents, public channels, whatever works. The point is that anyone in the group can access what they need to participate fully.