One of my idols is Gary Hamel, and he declared this year that bureaucracy must die. I’m sure he’ll get a lot of support for that sentiment, since we have been hating bureaucracy since we invented the word (it has ALWAYS had a pejorative undertone), and we all have had negative experiences with the rigid and frustrating hierarchies that we call bureaucracies.

But another one of my idols is Bob Sutton, and in his book, Scaling Up Excellence, he makes it clear that while we don’t necessarily like that element of bureaucracy that we hate–hierarchies–we really need them. Hierarchies reduce cognitive load. They spell out ahead of time who gets to make decisions in what areas, and that actually frees up our mental focus to pay attention to other things. If you want to scale something, you need to free up that mental energy, otherwise you get bogged down. Hierarchy is a natural part of the human condition, and studies have shown that while people have a generally negative view of hierarchies, they also indicate that they are “happier, calmer, and more productive when power and status differences are present and well understood,” according to Sutton’s research.

So what do we do? We make hierarchies more fluid. Maddie and I are writing about this in our upcoming book. What makes hierarchies horrible is the way they are rigid and inflexible. We can’t abandon hierarchy all together, but we do need to solve the important problems Hamel brings up in his bureaucracy piece. Organizations are doing that–just look at the Holacracy movement. In our book, we present a case study of an interesting healthcare organization that built in some fluidity into their culture.

We need hierarchy in order to scale, but that doesn’t mean we’re forced to do it the way we always have.