Chapter 8
Organizations

Our objective in this chapter is to set the scene for living together, that is to say the production framework. To do this, let's start by specifying that production takes place in companies. Let us then define what we mean by company: a certain number of people associated with the aim of fulfilling a mission of collective utility formulated in the reason for being of this company. As we will see later, our notion of business can cover what we currently call commercial enterprise, what we call administration, or what we call association. At the end of this book, we will have understood that this notion of organization can even replace our notions of government and assemblies. Therefore, in the following, we have chosen to abandon the word 'company' which is too close to the current 'commercial enterprise' in favor of the word 'organization'.

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

Presentation of the organizations

We seek to structure production in the form of village organizations, that is to say, large enough so that no one is essential for proper functioning, and small enough so that everyone knows each other and can take into account the particularities. of each individual.
In terms of numbers, a study recommends the number of 150, called Dunbar's number (1). Let us simply retain the objective of a hundred here, until it can be refined through feedback. The idea to remember right now is that any number that is significantly larger or significantly smaller will need to be motivated.

The aim of the village organization is largely to contain the key element of human nature which is social ambition, the effects of which were described in Chapter 2 regarding Parkinson's Law. Ideally, we would have an organization with only two floors. In practice, there is no absolute rule at this level, but we will see below how the new formalism aims to limit the 'letterbox' effect, that is to say limit the number of people who, when they receive a request, simply pass it on, supervising the process, instead of dealing with the subject themselves. In practice, this implies on the one hand favoring short circuits at the process level, and on the other hand limiting the ancillary functions whose multiplication is denounced 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 deficiencies. 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 financing system, which we will discuss in chapter 17, allows the expected productivity to be adjusted accordingly.

We now arrive, finally, at the concrete presentation of the new formalism imposed on organizations. An organization must maintain three official documents, which are its accounts, its problems log, and its strategic reflections log.
For accounting, nothing has changed compared to what is done today, so we will not go into details.
How the problem log works will be described in Chapter 9. In a few words, it lists all the small unforeseen events that hinder the optimal functioning of the organization on a day-to-day basis, as well as their analysis, planned improvements and their implementation. An example entry in this log could be 'This morning the printer ran out of ink when it was time to print the invoices'.Finally, the strategic reflections journal will be described in Chapter 10. It lists the substantive reflections carried out by the organization concerning its positioning, its way of operating, and the monitoring of the implementation of the conclusions. This 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 remove the hegemony of action over reflection.

At the hierarchy level, an organization has only three particular roles that constitute the office.
The president, first of all, is responsible for allocating resources for strategic thinking. But be careful, he is not the ultimate decision-maker as we find at the level of associations or at the head of the Fifth Republic. Indeed, he cannot arbitrate decisions nor intervene at the implementation level. It is simply responsible for the quality of strategic thinking.
The director, then, is responsible for implementing the conclusions of the strategic thinking, as well as the problem log. All we ask of him is to organize the handling of problems, not to play the role of fly-by-night by wanting to control everything, including what works well. Thus, we can accuse him of abuse of power if he decides on the organization for something other than responding to a specific problem reported in the problem log, or to advance the implementation of the conclusions of a strategic reflection . In other words, the director is responsible for day-to-day operational efficiency, in particular for the management of unforeseen events, but not for organizational choices which are long-term and which involve strategic thinking.
The treasurer, finally, manages accounting, financing from banks, and the allocation of resources (salaries, strategic thinking, etc.). He is therefore responsible for the proper use of resources.
There is no formalized hierarchical function other than these three, which allows organizations to ideally operate with a single level of management. In this sense, the organizations are similar to the 1901 law associations, except that the role of the president is purely strategic, and that daily life is exclusively managed by the equivalent of the secretary who is therefore closer to the notion of general secretary.

The office is elected from among the people of the organization who are still eligible and candidates. This is a vote where each person rates all the candidates. The scores assigned by each voter are weighted by a function of the voter'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 office is the only recourse to the ballot provided for in the social organization proposed in this book. The reason for such rare use of the notion of election is the distrust in this method of attribution of functions, explained in the paragraph 'The illusion of election' of chapter 7. On the other hand, the modalities proposed for the ballots take into account mathematical studies aimed at optimizing elective functioning, while traditional ballots operate on archaic methods. In particular, the most fundamental bias of current ballots is to ask the voter to choose, instead of asking them to rate each candidate. In doing so, the voter says nothing about all the candidates except one, which ultimately multiplies the number of configurations in which the elected candidate strongly displeases a significant part of the electorate, and therefore exacerbates future social conflicts.
The fact of resorting to an election to constitute the office also aims not to completely ignore the fact that, currently, one of the two pillars of the decision-making system is to have the decision taken by an individual with the support of the most social group. powerful. This is about not forgetting the limits of the decision system that we developed in Chapter 7, namely that, for certain decisions, current knowledge does not allow a choice to be established on a completely rational and objective basis. In fact, a notion of 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 preferred to simply weight the weight of each vote by a function linked to the strategic rating of the voter. We have not formulated the details of this function, because until we bring the strategic rating system to life, we do not have the capacity to go down to this level of detail. On the other hand, the fact of specifying a weighting now means that we are choosing to translate the objective capacity of an individual to methodically conduct a study, reflected by its strategic rating, into an ability to choose with discernment the people to whom to entrust supervision. This seemed more relevant to us than the simple use of status, diploma or mandate, currently used very widely as the sole justification.

It seems useful to us to reiterate at this stage that the mission of the members of the office is not to lead, that is to say, to make the decisions which will determine the future of the organization. Each function of the office consists simply 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 analyzes himself, and therefore does not make the resulting structuring decisions. The president simply ensures that the process of studying strategic issues is properly carried out. In this sense, the change of president does not represent as important a change for an organization as we envisage it as for a current company or association. Likewise, it is not the president’s responsibility to be visionary.
The director can occasionally have a more directive role since dealing with current problems can lead him to make rapid decisions. But this can only be exceptional. If a problem becomes recurrent, then it must be studied as part of strategic thinking, and the director will then only be responsible for implementing the conclusions of the study.
In the end, being elected member of the office does not give power, but just responsibility for the proper functioning of one of the three basic functions of the organization. We understand better that the operating model of organizations adopted effectively meets the objective expressed at the beginning of this chapter of limiting social ambition. Today, what is seen as socially advanced is often the making of collective decisions, through voting. However, if voting makes it possible to avoid the tyranny of the leader, it does not effectively reduce the game of alliances, that is to say the tendency towards generalized nepotism, and the stress which results from it.
Thus, the approach that we have adopted of a formalism to ensure the rationality of decisions is a major advance compared to that of the election which simply ensures the support of the decision by the most powerful social group. This progress becomes all the greater as technological progress makes the organization of production more complex, and therefore strategic decisions more complex to properly measure all the consequences, for example ecological. In this sense, the organization proposed here is a direct response to the in-depth analysis of the decision-making process that we have just carried out in Chapter 4.

If finally, we establish a parallel with the tripartition of Dumézil, we see that we have taken up the three functions, but instead of distributing the numbers in the traditional form of a small number for the priestly function, a small number for the priestly function. martial function, and the majority for the production function, we opted for exactly one person for each function, and all the others undifferentiated. This is consistent with the fact that the three people in the office, who respectively represent the three functions, are no longer responsible for carrying out 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 escape from the function seen as a source, and therefore issue, of power. Leaving the function as a source of power is linked to the barrier that is placed against inept reasoning seen in chapter 4, one of the two justifications of which is status. However, from the moment the function is no longer a source of power that is convenient to use, it ceases to become an issue of power.
In other words, with this definition of the office, we sought to propose something which is not too foreign to our culture, while making an important modification, namely being a guarantor instead of exercising the function, to take into account the difficulties linked 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 contradictory constraints.

The smaller the organizations, the more the production of a good or service will tend to involve many companies. However, it is much more difficult to optimize an operation involving several companies than to optimize an operation involving only one. In other words, the more we reduce the size of organizations, the more we exacerbate the problems of interfaces between the different actors.

Furthermore, the smaller an organization is, the more modest the resources it can allocate to strategic thinking, and therefore the less capable it is of rationally dealing with complex issues.

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

Furthermore, the larger an organization becomes, the greater its influence over the territory becomes, so that it becomes locally essential, and therefore uncontrollable, which increases the risk that it no longer works to serve everyone.

This explains our starting position of around a hundred people as the perceived maximum that we can reach without the creation of multiple hierarchical levels becoming inevitable, due to the fact that people no longer all know each other. However, this position remains vague, since it is probable that at around hundreds of people, different teams are already inevitably formed, resulting in a hierarchical level of team leader. However, reducing the size recommended for organizations to the natural size of a team which is probably more than around ten people seemed too restrictive in terms of the resources available for strategic analysis. This will become clearer when reading Chapter 11 regarding operational control. In other words, rather than seeking to avoid at all costs the possible appearance of a hierarchical level of team leader, we have favored a restrictive 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 to us. Furthermore, in the context of an organization of around ten people, it would probably be quite difficult to ensure that the functions of president and director are not exercised by a single person who would then become a statutory head, which would tend to undermine all the efforts we make to bring out explicit and rigorous reasoning at the level of strategic studies leading to decisions. This recommended number, initially set at around a hundred, will therefore be refined following feedback from practical implementation.

At this point, it seems interesting to return for a moment to Marx's problem mentioned in chapter 1 of putting technological progress at the service of the greatest number of people.
Technological progress requires an increase in the size of organizations, to take into account the increase in complexity. However, this increase is not without consequences, and must therefore be limited. This is an avenue that Marx apparently did not explore in Capital at the level of its proposals for the regulation of capitalism by law.

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

(2)
A more sophisticated alternative consists of sorting the weighted scores, distributing them over the segment [0,1], then weighting them a second time using the function sin²(πx). This amounts, as before, to adding a zero weighting to the extreme scores, a weighting one to the median score, but also to continuously varying the weighting for the intermediate scores instead of suddenly going from zero to one at the level of 1/3 of the score. effective, then suddenly return to zero at the level of 2/3.