It's important to realize as well that humans didn't invent hierarchy. It's a structure that occurs naturally when the costs of direct connection are too high in a system with many parts. This is why networks are federated and why vascular systems in biology are tree-like. The same dynamics are at play in human social systems, but they are not particular to them.
While you're correct that fully connected graphs are an extremely inefficient structure for communication or other resource flows, trees are also problematic and not as common in nature as you suggest. One clear problem with tree like structures is that they have zero redundancy. There is only one path between any two nodes. That implies that severing any edge will separate the tree into two unreachable sections. Sever the wrong single edge and you can render large regions completely disconnected from each other.
That's not a recipe for a resilient system, and we see the same problems in organizational hierarchies. In strictly top-down companies, you often hear "I can't do that right now because X is on vacation." There is no way to route around the absense (or poor performance) of a single member.
And, in fact, vascular systems are not entirely tree-like. Veins and arteries generally are, but where they meet at the capillaries, you see a more unstructured interconnected graph. Likewise, the leaves on a tree are not themselves tree-like. Their vasculature is graph-like and semi-redundant.
I think a better way to look at it is as a continuum. On one end, you have trees which have the minimum number of edges to reach all nodes. This minimizes the total cost of building the edges, but also minimizes redundancy and resilience. On the other end, you have a fully-connected (or even multiply-connected) graph where there are many paths between each pair of nodes. That graph is maximally resilient, but expensive to maintain. The particular needs for minimizing edge cost versus handling edge failure will lead you to pick different points on that continuum.
Also, when it comes to biological systems, the evolutionary need to actually build the thing shouldn't be understated. It is very likely that non-tree-like structures would be better but there isn't an easy evolutionary path to reach them. Phenotype essentially arises from "executing" the genotype, and trees are much simpler to procedurally generate than more complex graphs.
That's fair. I was just using trees as an example. Tree-like might be a better characterization. Point is: there's a reason why fully connected structures aren't very common, and why systems tend to form hubs.
In retrospect, I think my comment was more disagreeable than it should have been. We're both saying roughly the same thing: that pruning edges makes a graph more efficient.
There's a difference between responsibility and authority though. The top of the lungs doesn't tell it's subsequent blood vessels what to do, it's just that more blood goes through them so they have to be constructed a certain way. It's not like God made them "higher", they just have a different job.
I think we're being too abstract, and talking past each other a little maybe. Let's try a hypothetical.
You're VP of engineering. You do stuff like:
- Hire and manage middle managers
- Manage budgets
- Work with other VPs to determine the direction of the company
I'm an IC on an engineering team. I do stuff like:
- choose algorithms
- choose code structure
- make complexity/performance (and other) tradeoffs
It's entirely possible you don't know a programming language, in fact it's likely. It's entirely possible I have no idea how to manage a corporate budget, in fact it's also likely. It's also pretty likely we never encounter each other, unless our company is pretty small.
Are your decisions more consequential? Maybe. I definitely think your list is higher stakes than mine. But do my stuff hundreds of times a day, and my decisions build up in the aggregate. You can imagine tech debt piling up, or overengineering slowing down product features (threatening the company, maybe a client relationship).
Are there differences in accountability? Well, neither of us acts entirely unilaterally. You have to run your budgets by your manager (or be responsible for it at some point), I have my team and code review. While the stakes for your work are higher, there are probably stronger guard rails. For example, while it sort of seems like you could fire all of your managers, you probably can't in actuality. Over time your incompetence or malice could force them out, but similarly my incompetence or malice could threaten our product.
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To bring this back into your framework of "aggregation points for responsibility", are you responsible for my work? I think the only way you would be is if corporate culture or policy made you responsible for my work; I don't think ethically you're responsible for my actions. (I want to carve a space out for knowledge, like if you know I'm doing something bad and you fail to act, then of course you're responsible, but this is because you're a human being, not because you're a VP of my department).
Actually I'd go further and say that this idea creates a lot of problems. For example, if I goof password storage and expose our users' personal information, what were you supposed to do to prevent this? You're not a software engineer, much less a software security specialist. Were you supposed to set up a chain of accountability and review? That's what code review is for.
Furthermore, this doesn't work the other way. If you mismanage the budget, I'm certainly not responsible. This isn't because you're "higher" up in the org chart than I am, it's because it's not my job to make sure you do your job well, that's your manager's job. I wouldn't have the expertise to judge, and the same goes for you.
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My overarching argument here is that the idea of the hierarchy is very baked into our conception of work, at least in the US. We struggle to think of the workplace without it. But it's actually pretty weird, and doesn't make a whole lot of sense, especially in professional spaces.
> Actually I'd go further and say that this idea creates a lot of problems. For example, if I goof password storage and expose our users' personal information, what were you supposed to do to prevent this?
Hire better. Pithy response, but that's how responsibility aggregates.
This is maybe possible when you're hiring direct reports, or your company/department is < 50 people. But if you continue to hold VPs to this standard past that point, they'll respond (if they're smart, I guess) by creating a bonkers system that strangles hiring and productivity to minimize their risk. This makes sense in some sectors (aerospace), but not most of them.
