Chapter 8
Organizations

Our objective in this chapter is to set the scene for coexistence, that is, the production framework. To do so, let us first clarify that production takes place in enterprises. Let us then define what we mean by an enterprise: a certain number of people associated to fulfill a mission of collective utility, formulated in the organization's purpose. As we will see later, our concept of an enterprise can include what is currently called a commercial enterprise, as well as what is called an administration or association. By the end of this book, we will understand that this concept of an organization can even replace our notions of government and assemblies. Therefore, in the following, we have chosen to abandon the word 'enterprise,' too close to the current notion of a 'commercial enterprise,' in favor of the word 'organization.'

The presentation of the structure of organizations will be completed in chapter 12, concerning the concepts of horizontal or vertical integration, and therefore subcontracting.

Presentation of Organizations

We aim to architect production in the form of village-organizations, that is, large enough so that no one is indispensable to its smooth functioning, but small enough that everyone knows each other and can take into account the particularities of each individual.
In terms of workforce size, a study recommends the number 150, known as Dunbar's number (1). For now, let us simply adopt the goal of around one hundred until it can be refined by practical experience. The main idea to retain is that any number significantly larger or smaller must be justified.

The objective of the village-organization is, in large part, to contain the key element of human nature, which is social ambition, whose effects were described in chapter 2 concerning Parkinson's law. Ideally, we would have an organization with only two levels. In practice, there is no absolute rule at this level, but we will see in the following how the new formalism aims to limit the 'postbox effect,' that is, to limit the number of people who, when receiving a request, simply forward it and supervise the process, rather than dealing with the issue themselves. In practice, this involves, on the one hand, favoring short circuits at the process level, and on the other hand, limiting auxiliary functions whose multiplication is criticized in the article by Meyer and Rowan.
Another important social effect of village-organizations is that they make it easy to integrate people with physical or mental impairments. Indeed, in a village-organization, on the one hand, everyone knows each other, which makes it easy to take into account the specificities of each individual, and on the other hand, the funding system, which we will address in chapter 17, allows for adjusting the expected productivity accordingly.

We now finally come to the concrete presentation of the new formalism imposed on organizations. An organization must maintain three official documents: its accounting, its problem journal, and its strategic reflection journal.
For the accounting, nothing has changed compared to what is done today, so we will not go into detail.
The functioning of the problem journal will be described in chapter 9. In short, it records all minor unforeseen events that on a daily basis hinder the optimal functioning of the organization, as well as their analysis, the planned improvements and their implementation. An example of an entry in this journal could be: 'This morning, there was no ink in the printer when trying to print invoices'.
Finally, the journal of strategic reflections will be described in chapter 10. It records the in-depth reflections carried out by the organization regarding its positioning, its way of functioning, and the follow-up to the implementation of the conclusions. It is the most direct manifestation of the decision made in chapter 7 to frame the decision-making process to make it rational, that is, to eliminate the hegemony of action over reflection.

In terms of hierarchy, an organization has only three specific roles that constitute the board.
The president, first of all, is responsible for the allocation of strategic reflection resources. But be careful, this is not the ultimate decision-maker as found in associations or at the head of the Fifth Republic. Indeed, he or she cannot arbitrate decisions or intervene in the implementation. He or she is simply responsible for the quality of strategic reflection.
The director is next, responsible for the implementation of the conclusions of the strategic reflection, as well as the problem journal. All that is required of him or her is to organize problem-solving, not to act as a fly in the ointment by wanting to control everything, including what is working well. Thus, one can accuse him or her of abuse of power if he or she decides on the organization for reasons other than responding to a specific problem reported in the problem journal, or to advance the implementation of the conclusions of a strategic reflection. In other words, the director is responsible for everyday operational efficiency, particularly the management of unexpected events, but not for organizational choices that are long-term and fall under strategic reflection.
Finally, the treasurer manages the accounting, financing from banks, and the allocation of resources (salaries, strategic reflection, etc.). He or she is therefore responsible for the proper use of resources.
There is no other formalized hierarchical function than these three, which allows organizations to ideally function with a single level of management. In this sense, organizations resemble 1901 associations, except that the president's role is purely strategic, and the day-to-day operations are exclusively managed by the equivalent of a secretary, who is thus closer to the notion of a general secretary.

The board is elected among the eligible and candidate members of the organization. This is a vote where each person rates all the candidates. The scores given by each voter are weighted by a function of the elector's strategic rating. Then, the score obtained by each candidate is the average of their weighted scores after removing the lowest third and the highest third (2). The elected candidate is the one who received the best score.
The election of the board is the only use of voting foreseen in the social organization proposed in this book. The reason for such rare use of the concept of election is the distrust in this mode of assigning functions, as explained in the paragraph 'The Illusion of Election' in chapter 7. However, the proposed voting methods take into account mathematical studies aiming to optimize the electoral process, unlike traditional voting systems, which operate on archaic methods. In particular, the most fundamental bias of current voting is that it asks the voter to choose, rather than ask him or her to rate each candidate. In doing so, the voter says nothing about all the candidates except one, which multiplies the number of configurations in which the elected candidate strongly displeases a significant portion of the electorate, thus exacerbating future social conflicts.
The fact of using an election to form the board also aims to not totally ignore the fact that, currently, one of the two pillars of the decision-making system is to make the decision by an individual who has the support of the most powerful social group. This is to not forget the limitations of the decision-making system we have developed in chapter 7, namely, that for certain decisions, current knowledge does not allow a choice to be made on a fully rational and objective basis. Therefore, the concept of an election aims to secure these difficult cases.
For the other current pillar of the decision-making process, which is the statutory competence of the person making the decision, we have preferred simply to weight the weight of each vote by a function related to the elector's strategic rating. We have not formulated the details of this function, because as long as we have not lived the strategic rating system, we do not have the capacity to go to this level of detail. However, the fact of specifying from now on a weighting means that we choose to translate the objective ability of an individual to conduct a study methodically, reflected by his or her strategic rating, into an ability to choose discerningly the people to whom to entrust leadership. This seemed more relevant to us than the simple resort to status, diploma or mandate, widely used today as the sole justification.

It seems useful to us at this point to reiterate that the mission of the board members is not to lead, that is, to make the decisions that will determine the future of the organization. Each function of the board simply consists of satisfying one of the three methodological constraints imposed on it.
In particular, in the general case, the president does not carry out the strategic analyses himself or herself, therefore does not make the structuring decisions that result from them. The president merely ensures that the process of studying strategic issues is correctly conducted. In this sense, a change of president does not represent for an organization such as we envision it, a change as important as for a company or an association today. Similarly, it is not the president's task to be visionary.
The director may have a more directive role on occasion since dealing with current problems can lead him or her to make quick decisions. But precisely, this can only be exceptional. If an issue becomes recurring, then it must be studied within the framework of a strategic reflection, and the director will no longer be responsible for implementing the results of the study.
In the end, being elected as a board member does not give power, but only the responsibility for the smooth functioning of one of the three basic functions of the organization. We understand better that the model of organization retained actually meets the objective expressed at the beginning of this chapter of limiting social ambition. Today, what is seen as socially advanced is often collective decision-making by voting. However, if voting allows to avoid the tyranny of the boss, it does not effectively reduce the game of alliances, that is, the tendency to generalized nepotism, and the resulting stress.
Thus, the approach we have retained of a formalism to ensure the rationality of decisions is a major advance compared to the one of the election which simply ensures the support of the decision by the most powerful social group. This advance becomes even greater as technological progress makes the organization of production more complex, and therefore strategic decisions more complex to adequately measure all consequences, for example ecological ones. In this sense, the organization proposed here is a direct response to the in-depth analysis of the decision-making process that we just carried out in chapter 4.

Finally, if we draw a parallel with Dumezil's tripartition, we notice that we have retained the three functions, but instead of distributing the staff in the traditional form of a small number for the sacerdotal function, a small number for the martial function, and the majority for the production function, we have opted for exactly one person for each function, and all others undifferentiated. This is consistent with the fact that the three people of the board, representing respectively the three functions, are no longer charged with the exercise of the function, but simply guarantee that the function is carried out satisfactorily in the organization. It is through this shift that we can hope to move away from the function as a source, and therefore a stake, of power. Moving away from the function as a source of power is linked to the barrier that is placed against making inane reasoning, discussed in chapter 4, one of whose justifications is status. However, from the moment the function is no longer a convenient source of power to use, it ceases to become a power stake.
In other words, with this definition of the board, we have sought to propose something that is not too foreign to our culture, while bringing an important change, namely to guarantee rather than exercise the function, to take into account the difficulties related to human nature that we identified in chapters 2 and 3.

Search for the optimal size of organizations

The recommended size for organizations is a compromise between different conflicting constraints.

The smaller the organizations, the more the production of a good or a service will tend to involve many enterprises. However, it is much more difficult to optimize a process involving several enterprises than to optimize a process involving only one. In other words, the smaller the organizations, the more the problems at the interfaces between the various actors are exacerbated.

Moreover, the smaller an organization is, the fewer resources it can allocate to strategic reflection, and therefore the less it is able to rationally address complex issues.

Conversely, the larger organizations become, the more difficult it becomes to limit the multiplication of hierarchical levels, that is, to fight against the effect of Parkinson's law mentioned in chapter 2, namely the proliferation of non-productive functions.
For the same reasons, it becomes more difficult to contain social ambition, and therefore the struggle for power.
As a border effect, it becomes more difficult to prevent strategic analyses from being biased in favor of particular interests.

Moreover, the larger an organization becomes, the greater its influence over the territory becomes, so that it becomes locally unavoidable, therefore uncontrollable, which increases the risk that it no longer works in the service of all.

This explains our starting position of around one hundred people as the maximum we can reach without the formation of multiple hierarchical levels becoming an inevitability, due to the fact that people no longer all know each other. However, this position remains vague, since it is likely that at about a hundred people, different teams already inevitably form, resulting in a level of team leader. However, reducing the recommended size for organizations to the natural size of a team, which is probably more in the order of ten people, seemed to us too constraining in terms of the resources available for strategic analysis. This will become clearer after reading chapter 11 concerning operational control. In other words, rather than trying at all costs to avoid the eventual emergence of a hierarchical level of team leader, we have preferred to adopt a binding formalism at the level of strategic studies to guarantee their methodological quality, which we will detail in the following chapters, and for which a hundred people seemed intuitively more realistic. Moreover, in the context of an organization of about ten people, it would probably be quite difficult to ensure that the functions of president and director are not carried out by the same person who would then become a statutory chief, which would undermine all the efforts we are making to promote an explicit and rigorous reasoning at the level of strategic studies leading to decisions. This recommended number, initially set at around one hundred, will therefore be refined following practical implementation feedback.

At this stage, it seems interesting to us to briefly revisit the issue of Marx mentioned in chapter 1 regarding the service of the greatest number of technological progress.
Technological progress requires the increase in the size of organizations, to take into account the increase in complexity. However, this increase is not without consequences, and therefore must be limited. This is a path that Marx did not seem to have explored in Capital at the level of his proposals for the regulation of capitalism by law.

(1)
Researchers apparently have established among primates a correlation between the size of the neocortex and that of the social group in which they evolve. The number 150 was then derived from the size of the human neocortex.
See Theory of mind and the evolution of language, by Robin Dunbar.

(2)
A more sophisticated alternative is to sort the weighted scores, spread them over the segment [0,1], then weight them a second time with the function sin²(πx). This is equivalent to adding a zero weighting to the extreme scores, a weighting of one to the median score, and also to continuously vary the weighting for intermediate scores instead of abruptly going from zero to one at the level of 1/3 of the workforce, then returning abruptly to zero at the level of 2/3.