Organized Anarchy and Organizational Self-Demotion
When experienced managers trace the full chain of activities in their organizations, many discover something unsettling: nobody is actually in charge of the whole. The discovery often triggers voluntary career exit — a “self-demotion” into organizational change roles.
The HBR Study (2019)
The article “Can You Know Too Much About Your Organization?” (Harvard Business Review, December 2019) documented a study of 6 project teams, 52 people across 5 organizations (4 Fortune 500 companies). Participants were tasked with mapping and redesigning their organization’s end-to-end operations — a temporary assignment, with everyone expected to return to their regular jobs afterward.
Key finding: 23 of 48 participants — nearly half — chose to leave their established careers after the assignment. They abandoned “successful and satisfying work” to take on organizational change roles instead.
The Discovery That Triggers It
Managers experienced an “epiphany” or “turning point” when they realized their organizations “often lacked a purposeful, integrated design that was centrally monitored and managed.” Whatever original design existed had been “eroded, patched, and overgrown with alternative plans.”
What they had attributed to “the direction and control of centralized, bureaucratic forces” was actually “the aggregation of the distributed work and uncoordinated decisions of people dispersed throughout the organization.”
“Everyone was working on the part of the organization they were familiar with, assuming that another set of people were attending to the larger picture… Except no one was actually looking at how people’s work was connecting across the organization day-to-day.”
Organized Anarchy
The academic foundation for this phenomenon is organized anarchy, originating with Cohen, March, and Olsen (1972). In an organized anarchy:
- Preferences are problematic (unclear, inconsistent)
- Technology is unclear (members don’t understand processes)
- Participation is fluid (members come and go, vary in effort)
This maps directly to what the HBR study participants discovered: the organization as experienced is not the organization as designed.
Related Concepts
- institutionally-constrained-technology-adoption — rulers adopt inferior tech when superior tech threatens internal control; organizational chaos serves a similar function for those who benefit from ambiguity
- norms — organizations without centralized design still function through emergent norms; when those norms are revealed as unmanaged, the psychological contract breaks
- gonzo-futurism — Pickard’s framework for sense-making applies here: the self-demoters are the ones who looked too closely and couldn’t un-see
Open Questions
- Is “self-demotion” the right term? The article may use “stepping down,” “requesting reassignment,” or “voluntary de-escalation” — the staging source notes some uncertainty
- Related sources to pursue: MIT Sloan Review, Stanford Social Innovation Review, The Oz Principle, Richard Pascale’s Surfing the Edge of Chaos, Edgar Schein on organizational culture and learning
- How does this connect to post-normal-times? The discovery that “nobody is in charge” is a quintessential PNS experience — facts uncertain, stakes high, values in dispute