Thanks for the reply, Michael!

I have worked in a chain restaurant. And that's one of the experiences that convinces me of the essential inhumanity of deep hierarchy. There was some coworker cameraderie, sure. But I don't think there was anything human-centered about the place. Workers were replaceable, disposable units. Much of the worker bonding was despite (or against) the company and the managers, not because of it. And restaurants in some ways have it easier, in that the purpose of the work is present and visible. For many organizations, that's much less true.

As to definition of hierarchy, the last half of the word literally means "rule" or "government", like monarchy or oligarchy, so I'm comfortable with my definition. I agree one can use it as a metaphor to understand natural systems, but it's only a metaphor. And as with the Great Chain of Being, I think it's a dangerously easy one to over-apply.

There are surely phenomena in emergent systems that relate and are worth studying, but conflating them with primate dominance structures obscures more for me than it reveals. To the extent that nature tells us things, though, it can't tell us what ought to exist. That's our job.

I totally agree that consent is vital for humane organizations. But I think that's in direct opposition to hierarchy, which is about top-down control. American democracy, for example, is basically non-hierarchical. I'm a participant in and subject to at least 9 quasi-independent governments (city, county, state, federal, regional transit district, school district, community college district, air quality management district, municipal utility district), plus various splits (executive, legislative, judicial). None of these controls any of the others. And none of them controls me, either, except in certain deeply constrained circumstances.

That stands in contrast to me to the essentially feudal structures of scaling American businesses. The main rule there is "my way or the highway" for all superiors. In theory, employees can always switch jobs to another company. But that's always much easier on the employer than the employee, so I think that does very little to act as a practical check. Employees and teams can try to carve out niches, but I've always seen that happen at the sufferance of (or with the neglect of) management, never because the teams had much real authority. And the more levels they have above them, the larger the set of people who can ruin things for them without consequence or even awareness.

The only exception I personally see much is at very mission-driven organizations. There the stated purpose really seems to have some teeth; people are willing to leave if they aren't doing good. In fact, right now, one team at Code for America has just demanded the resources to improve their code quality so that they can be more effective at serving their audience. And I just saw them excitedly share your 2002 paper. So I believe it's possible!

I guess what I'm arguing for here is to see what happens when we put human-centered systems first and scaling second. It may be that there are fundamental limits, in which case we'll face some hard choices between economy of scale and treating humans like humans. But I've never even seen a place try. It's always, "Oh, we're getting big, better hire an earl of mobile development and put him under the duke of engineering." Maybe the bankers overthrow the CEO boy-king, maybe they don't. But I've never seen anybody stop to question the dominant paradigm.