How to Identify an Immoral Maze

What’s better than having skin in the game? Having soul in the game. Caring deeply about the outcome for reasons other than money, or your own liability, or being potentially scapegoated. Caring for existential reasons, not commercial ones.

Soul in the game is incompatible with mazes. Mazes will eliminate anyone with soul in the game. Therefore, if the people you work for have soul in the game, you’re safe. If you have it too, you’ll be a lot happier, and likely doing something worthwhile. Things will be much better on most fronts. 

In general I worry that the advice you are giving is phrased too confidently. This quote about soul in particular stood out to me. I have a few friends who have worked for big hierarchical non-profits, and their experience seems to contradict it. Plenty of people who do seem pretty passionate about 'the cause' and yet lots of dysfunction, bureaucracy, office politics, metric-gaming, etc. Maybe these problems didn't rise to the level of a true moral maze, or maybe the people weren't actually passionate but really were just posturing. But maybe not, and at any rate how do you tell at a glance?

This is mostly a terminology quibble, but I guess it also means I've been mildly misreading previous posts: I wouldn't say you have middle management until you reach four levels. That is, my usage (and also Wikipedia's) of the term would be "people who manage managers, and are also managed" while you seem to just mean "people who manage, and are also managed".

At least one of the corporations in Moral Mazes had more than twenty ranks.

But per the comments on the previous post, that's not necessarily (and probably not) twenty levels of hierarchy, right? In that someone might be given a promotion to a new rank and pay grade, while continuing to manage exactly the same set of people who themselves have exactly the same set of responsibilities.

In which case it's not clear how relevant it is, and it seems misleading.

Do you have thoughts on "how to find/create acceptable modern corporate paths"? Or how to set some Schelling lines for those of us who want to avoid the worst, but do find value in working for large companies? Your list is good in terms of characterization (and thank you for it), but might benefit from some mechanisms/measurements.

My thoughts:

• Have 1:1s with your manager AND your skip-level manager (and in some cases, higher), which include both personal and team/org/company goal contributions.
• Encourage your reports to talk to your boss, and to hold you accountable for the direction you're giving.
• Have written goals for the company, division, group, team, sub-team, etc. Document and get agreement (in the same way you do for the goals) how the sub-goals aggregate to the total goals.
• Do a lot of writing, both in reports and metrics up and down the chain, and in longer-term narratives (annual or semi-) about why these are the right metrics for your shared goals. Demand this of your reports and managers as well.
• Be open with yourself and management chain (and at least some peers) about the cases where goals are contradictory or divergent, and the fact that you are picking weights between them.

These are difficult and uncomfortable, that part is normal. If they're impossible or harmful, you're probably in a maze and you should get out. I think a one-liner is "be wary of things that you believe but can't say to your boss, peers, or repots").

How does this work in the military? They have a very deep hierarchy: is life in the army above private and below commander-in-chief also a maze?

This was the post I was most personally looking forward to. I think it lays out of a number of gears that are easy to reason about, that seem useful regardless of whether the entire thesis hangs together. 

The issue with layers-of-management was my most important update from this sequence, and "what to do about that?" seems like one of the most important questions for groups of people trying to put a dent in the universe.

An open question in my mind is something like "how much better is it to found a new organization rather than open up a new department at an existing institution", in particular because it's not obviously better if you end up with an ecosystem that has less legible "management layers" in between organizations. (Zvi notes that investors may-or-may-not count as a management layer and it depends. "What does it depend on?" is my next question)

When counting levels of hierarchy, it's not necessarily clear where to stop. For DeepMind, would you stop counting at the CEO of DeepMind, or continue through to the CEO of Alphabet? Or to take my previous job, I'd say there were four plausible stopping points (the respective heads of Universal Pictures International, Universal Pictures, NBCUniversal, and Comcast; though I could be misremembering the structure such that either of the first two is not plausible).

My impression is that when a startup gets bought by a large company, the startup typically turns to hell; and this would point towards counting the levels in the parent. But I also suspect that would be too pessimistic on average (i.e. adding a level above the CEO counts for some amount, but less than a level below the CEO). This is super not confident.

Curated, after chatting a bit with Zvi about a better intro.

I noted previously [LW(p) · GW(p)] that this lay out gears that seemed clear and easy to reason about, which seemed quite useful. The concepts here seem quite important to consider for anyone building an organization, or organizational ecosystem. This seemed like a significant hack-away-at-the-edges [LW · GW] of the questions that originally prompted Inadequate Equilibria [? · GW]. 

I'm interested in followup work that checks into the "Moral Mazes are Common and Damaging" hypothesis a bit more empirically (how common? how damaging?)

More sanity-checking "20 layers of hierarchy"

If a each person at each layer of hierarchy reports up to one person and has two people that report to them, 20 levels of hierarchy means 2^20 -1 people, over a million. A quick Google suggests... Wal-Mart, McDonalds (including franchise employees), China National Petroleum, and some government actors as potential groups of that size. If we call "team lead" and "Shift manager" different levels of hierarchy, then we get a ratio of about 4:1 across the first middle manager (who is an hourly employee that doesn't make business decisions about who to hire). If we assume that ratio holds, Wal-Mart could have 11 levels of hierarchy with their employee total. To have 20 levels of heirarchy with each level having 4 direct reports would require 4^19+1 people in the organization, which would require a larger population. (while it isn't strictly necessary that every branch be fully populated, the termination of a branch represents people 'on the front lines', which affects how distant from the front lines their immediate superior is)

In US government hierarchies, the GS payscale has 15 grades, and each position within the GS structure reports to a higher paygrade individual, and not all of the grades are actually usable. If we add the Senior Executive Service employees, political appointees, and elected officials, there are almost 18 possible paygrades above the blue collar FWS payscale employees. Outside of the US government, it is of course possible for people on different hierarchical levels to have the same paygrade, so a paygrade count is not always an upper limit on the number of levels.

I'm worried that people will see "One of the organizations studied reached 20 levels of hierarchy without falling over under it's own middle management, therefore this organization that has merely seven is not particularly bad". Instead of counting layers, I would instead ask "What responsibilities does this layer actually have- what buck stops here?" In the retail sphere: A shift lead decides when everyone's breaks are; the shift manager decides whether to approve overtime; the store manager makes hiring decisions; the district manager decides which stores to close; the regional manager... might lack specific purveiw, but there are too many districts for each of them to report directly to the CEO, and there are a few tiers there. My alternative would be "If this position serves mostly to consolidate several lines of a spreadsheet into one line on a different sheet, they can and should be automated with a cell formula"... except that policy would result in every middle manager instantly finding something that they can do to justify their position, and start actively doing that thing, resulting in massive shock to an already stable system.

I don't like the specific description of levels of hierarchy for reasons I'm not quite certain about. This is at least partly just the phrasing, not the deeper point.

One piece of this is that, as is mentioned in some other comments, not every level of management has the same size. For example, if I regularly speak with my manager's manager and they have both explicit awareness of the object level work I do and share some responsibility for the outcome of that work, are they really two levels above me? What if I only talk to them once a month? Once a quarter? There may be some calculus that one can use to compute whether these count as 2 levels or 1.27 levels, but it seems like it has a strong interaction with the other criteria, such as how much slack I'm given, whether excellence is measurable, and who has skin in the game.

Maybe this is an optimistic take based on good luck with the team I currently work on, but my expectation is that usually there will be more levels of hierarchy than there are levels of non-interaction; that is, I expect most actual ranked titles to correspond to 1/2 or less of a level of hierarchy, which makes it a bit difficult to measure the depth of an organization.

Maybe this is just pessimistic of me though, and it's easy to find an up to date, readable org chart when joining an organization? That doesn't match my experience though.

Anyway I don't really feel satisfied that I've found my true objection but maybe this will help someone else or future me identify something.