What Happened When We Ditched Our Flat Org Chart

In organizations where human and intellectual capital contributes much of the value being created, it is tempting to eliminate organizational structure in order to let the best ideas and people realize their potential via the distributed network opportunities that technology provides.

But as the following article explains, in any society, there are implicit if not explicit structures and sometimes it's best to openly acknowledge them. JL

Chris Savage comments in Read/Think:

Being really flat meant that certain decisions had to be centralized because no one knew who to turn to. The way we operated meant that some people, like myself, were involved in every. single. decision. And after we grew past 30 people, that process started to break. There’s always a structure whether or not you define it.

When we began Wistia, our organization was intentionally very flat — and it stayed that way for a long time.

We churned out our “flatness” as a core value. I’d tell people, “We’re flat as hell, and it’s awesome. No company is going to be better than us at doing this.”

But as we grew, our process began to fracture. Being really flat meant that certain decisions had to be centralized because no one knew who to turn to. That meant way too many decisions rolled up to me, and I became a bottleneck for growth.

Something needed to change.

You Can’t Fight Structure

At the start, we hadn’t defined our company’s structure, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t one.

There’s always a structure whether or not you define it.

Once I took a hard look at our structure, I realized our flat structure was inefficient. The way we operated meant that some people, like myself, were involved in every. single. decision. And after we grew past 30 people, that process started to break.

The thing is, I was scared to change. I didn’t want to become the “evil dictator” of Wistia — the guy who implemented rules, processes, and structure no one wanted to follow.

Turns out, I had it all wrong.

What Happened When We Changed Our Structure

I thought that everyone wanted to be at Wistia because it was flat, but our flatness actually created more problems than it solved.

People didn’t know what to work on. They didn’t know whom to work with. And this caused more debates and stress than we needed.

These conversations helped me realize that having a clear org structure isn’t inherently bad — it all depends on what you do with that structure.

If you’re really clear about who reports to whom — and what it actually means to have people reporting to you — your company is in a very different camp than those with stereotypical structures.

For us, having an org chart allowed us to better define a manager’s responsibility and distribute decision-making into the company. Now, we were holding managers accountable for defining the responsibilities and decisions of the people who report to them, acting as a mentor, and helping their team grow.

Once we started to do that, I started being in a hell of a lot less meetings. I also started to not know what was going on because everyone was doing great stuff.

It was terrifying … and then, very quickly we started doing stuff faster. And better.

One day, I looked at our company and realized, “That’s actually how this is supposed to work.”

Maybe flat works for some companies. But for us, adding some structure to our team helped us get focused on what really matters: building a company that’ll have an impact for decades to come.