Beyond Code

Chapter 10

Why Hierarchy Fails (and Why You Need It Anyway)

Every organization that grows beyond a single team faces a decision that has no correct answer. The work exceeds what any individual can hold in context, so it must be distributed. Distribution requires delegation, and delegation is an act of information compression: the delegator transmits a reduced description of the problem to the delegate, who works on the reduction rather than the original. The compression is necessary because the delegate cannot hold the full problem. It is also destructive, because the aspects of the problem that do not survive compression are often the ones that determine whether the parts compose into a working whole: the subtle dependencies across components, ...