Bulldozer00's Blog

I’m currently in the process of reading Donella Meadows’s Thinking In Systems. Donella says that successful hierarchical systems grow from the bottom up, one layer at a time.

In the case of a human-made system of humans, as an assembled group of people becomes successful at what it does, it starts growing horizontally. The group finds a way to extract what it needs to sustain and grow itself (like money in exchange for products and services) from its surrounding environment.

In order to keep the group aligned and coordinated, the next higher level is formed from a small sub-group within the first level. Both levels feed each other in a mutually beneficial relationship and the organization keeps growing sideways. At a certain point, the second level becomes wide enough to require a third level to keep it synchronized with the group’s overall organizational goals. As growth continues, more and more layers are needed to keep the overall system from diverging from its true purpose.

At some unpredictable point in time, a strange and seemingly irrational inversion starts taking place as growth continues. The smaller, but higher layers in the hierarchy start consuming a more disproportionate share of the fruits of the organizational effort. The original, mutually beneficial, two way relationship transforms into an unbalanced one way relationship that is strangely accepted and taken for granted by everyone at all levels.

As a result of the imbalance, the bottom layers begin to atrophy from a lack of nourishment. As the one way upward flow of nourishment continues, the weight of the top layers increases and the strength of the  lower layers decreases. In the worst case, the organization loses its balance and comes crashing to earth in a disintegrated mess.

In the early stages of growth, everyone in the organization fully understands that each successive layer is put in place to take care of the layer below it, and vice versa. When this understanding gets lost, all is lost. It’s just a matter of time until disaster strikes. Can the process be reversed? Sure it can, by restoring the balance and never losing sight of why the upper layers were created in the first place.