Every few years, the pendulum swings. Organisations flatten the structure, strip out layers, push decision-making to the frontline. For a while, it works. Then governance gaps start to show. Decisions stall because nobody owns them. Accountability gets murky. So the layers get rebuilt and eventually someone declares that hierarchy itself was the problem all along, and the pendulum swings back the other way.
I’ve watched this cycle play out across sectors again and again, and the diagnosis is always the same: hierarchy isn’t the problem. The way most organisations adopt hierarchy is.
The pendulum keeps swinging because the real need never disappears
Governance. Oversight. Accountability. These aren’t bureaucratic nice-to-haves that a flatter structure allows you to skip: they’re structural necessities. Any organisation ends up rebuilding some version of these layers, whether it calls itself flat, holacratic, matrixed, or traditional. The pendulum swings because it’s easy to treat hierarchy as a binary choice: you have it, or you don’t. In reality, it’s a design problem.
The real work is never eliminating hierarchy. It’s navigating it well.
What navigating hierarchy well actually looks like
Equalise the room, not the org chart. You don’t need to erase reporting lines to make sure the most junior person in the room feels able to speak up. Structure can stay intact while the dynamics shift entirely inside a meeting, democratising whose voice gets heard, whose idea gets built on, who’s invited to weigh in before a call is made. Equalising the room is what actually changes how people experience working together.
Give autonomy within structure. Autonomy without boundaries isn’t empowering, it’s disorienting. People do their best work when they know exactly where their decision rights start and stop, and can move freely inside that space without checking in at every turn. That clarity has to be designed and communicated, not assumed. Without it, autonomy quietly becomes a euphemism for ambiguity, and ambiguity is where trust erodes fastest.
Design systems that reduce administrative burden, not amplify it. Every layer of oversight should be earning its keep. Too often, the processes built to create accountability end up creating duplication: the same approval sought twice, the same update reported to three different people in three different formats. If a system is producing more admin than clarity, it isn’t protecting the organisation. It’s taxing it.
Hold oversight without holding people back. There’s a meaningful difference between oversight that catches real risk and oversight that exists because trust hasn’t been extended to the layer below. There’s a balance to strike between sufficient oversight and empowering agency and effectiveness, and it’s a balance worth being deliberate about, rather than leaving to default.
Why this balance matters for collaboration
Get the balance right, and something shifts. Teams relate to one another differently. People find their voice, because the structure isn’t quietly telling them their input doesn’t matter. Decisions get made with more information, more ownership, and counterintuitively, more speed, because of the way the structure has been designed.
That’s not a soft outcome. It’s the difference between a team that collaborates because someone asked them to, and a team that collaborates because the system makes it the natural thing to do.
Because collaboration is a systems issue and systems need to be designed.
If structure and stated values are pointing in different directions, structure will win every time because structure shapes behaviour. The encouraging part: we can deliberately design for the outcomes we want.
Navigating hierarchy well isn’t about picking a side of the pendulum. It’s about being deliberate on both: equalising the room even where the chart stays the same, giving autonomy that’s bounded rather than vague, designing oversight that catches risk instead of just creating work, and building systems that make collaboration the default, not something people have to fight the structure to achieve.
If you’re rethinking how decision rights, oversight, and structure work inside your organisation, that’s exactly the work I do. Let’s talk about what it could look like for your team.
Because we’re better together but nobody taught us how.
