--- title: "Build #116 – Hierarchy and power gradients in organisational design" url: https://www.simonwakeman.com/blog/2026/10/28/build-116-hierarchy-and-power-gradients-in-organisational-design/ description: "Hierarchy bundles two things: who gets heard and who decides. Why founder-led businesses need voice as flat as possible and the vote as clear as possible." published: 2026-10-28T07:00:00+00:00 modified: 2026-10-28T07:00:00+00:00 author: Simon Wakeman --- # Build #116 – Hierarchy and power gradients in organisational design ![A single microphone on a stand between two empty bar stools in a bare white room](https://www.simonwakeman.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/t8IfxT0cyE4.jpg) ## Build #116 – Hierarchy and power gradients in organisational design I was working with a founder on a reorg recently and in a side chat outside a workshop, we got onto the subject of hierarchy. The founder was pretty clear. Hierarchy was a bad thing and the new structure should have as little of it as possible. I pushed back. My view is that it’s a lot more subtle than that and depends heavily on the context. To be honest, a decade ago I’d probably have been nodding along. I was one of the people enthusiastically championing self-management back then. That early (some might say naive) enthusiasm hasn’t survived the intervening years. **What the founder was right about** Aviation has a useful idea for this: the power gradient. It describes the gap between the most and least powerful people in a team. When that gradient is steep, speaking up feels risky. So people don’t. In a growth business that means information stops travelling upwards. The founder’s picture of the business and what’s actually going on quietly drift apart. And you probably can’t see your own gradient from the top. In a [2006 study by Adam Galinsky and colleagues](https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01824.x), people who’d been made to feel powerful got noticeably worse at seeing things from anyone else’s point of view. **But flat has its own problems** What’s interesting though is that aviation didn’t conclude flat was the answer. The UK Civil Aviation Authority’s [human factors handbook for pilots](https://www.caa.co.uk/cap737) describes both failures. Tenerife in 1977 was the steep one. But it also points to a 1988 accident where flattening the cockpit had gone too far and nobody was really in charge at the moments that mattered. There’s a [2015 study of Himalayan expeditions](https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1408800112) covering more than 30,000 climbers. Teams from more hierarchical cultures got more people to the summit. They also had more people die along the way. Hierarchy helped them push on. It also seems to have made it harder for someone to say “I think we should turn back”. And getting rid of hierarchy rarely makes it go away. Jo Freeman made this point in the early 1970s in [_The Tyranny of Structurelessness_](https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm) – groups with no formal structure still have one, it just becomes informal and much harder to challenge. I’ve seen this in growth businesses more than once. The org chart is flat but the real power runs through the founder’s earliest hires. **Voice and vote** Here’s where I’ve ended up thinking about this. I think “hierarchy” bundles two quite different things together. The first is voice. That’s whether people feel able to raise a concern, share bad news or tell you you’re wrong. The second is vote. That’s who actually makes the call and is accountable for it. A first officer is trained to challenge the captain and to challenge again if they’re ignored. But nobody wants the landing decided by a show of hands. Flat voice, clear vote. That’s what I’d want in most founder-led businesses: voice as flat as you can make it and vote as clear as you can make it. It’s also where psychological safety fits because in reality that is almost entirely about voice. Amy Edmondson’s work pairs safety with high standards rather than with an absence of authority. People need to be able to tell the person making the decision they think it’s wrong. I’m still spending a lot of time in my fractional and consulting work arguing for pushing decisions as close to the work as possible. That’s about where the vote sits. Wherever it sits, it needs to be clear. One caveat is important though: if people’s input never visibly changes anything, they learn it’s pointless and stop offering it. A clear vote only works when voice actually shapes the outcome. **So what do you actually do about it?** A few things I’ve seen help founders in the real world: - **Say which one you’re asking for.** “I want your input but I’ll decide by Friday” is very different from “this one’s yours”. - **Speak last.** If you go first, everyone responds to you rather than to the problem. - **Ask for the case against, and ask twice.** A concern raised once and dismissed often isn’t raised again. - **Close the loop.** Tell people how their input changed the decision or why it didn’t. So as usual, here are a few of the reflection points I’ve been asking founder clients off the back of this: - When did someone junior last tell you something you didn’t want to hear and what happened afterwards? - If I asked your leadership team who decides what would they all give the same answer? - And if you flattened your structure tomorrow, where would the power actually go? This question of hierarchy comes up in almost every org design project I’m working on right now. Always happy to talk it through.