July 13, 2005
are we hardwired to hierarchy?
One of the main arguments we use to rationalize moronic and soul-destroying hierarchies in our workplace is that we’re biologically programmed that way i.e. it is in our genetic makeup to create moronic, soul-destroying “tree structure” hierarchies, and to organize things accordingly.
“It is scientificly determined that I be moronic and souless” etc.
As a card-carrying member of the Madison Avenue “Fuck You” school of marketing, I can certainly relate. And I imagine, so can lots of people reading this.
Sig begs to differ:
tree-structures, are we hardwired?
If I say “Book” and “42”, what comes to your mind? Some “Hitchhiking” perhaps?
What with “Umbrella” and “Film”? Any film titles coming to mind?
Add “Nanny”, “Flying”… would that be “Mary Poppins”?
See? Your brain is quick and naturally wired to intercept iffy tags!
Nevertheless, I often hear that tree-structures are necessary and that we are hard-wired for tree-structure organising: Hierarchies, folders…
That I would argue, humbly of course, is bogus.
Would “Film > British location > Female lead > Disney > Family > etc.” trigger “Mary Poppins!” as promptly?
Nah, didn’t think so…
We’re naturally inclined to tag imprecisely and freely — and locate any object or subject intercepting those tags. Fast, efficient and without training. And without any quest for standards.
In other words, we need no classic tree structured data sorting. We would be better off without.
[DISCLOSURE:] Sig and I are working together on a mostly secret project. Even if what we’re doing is proved wrong, well, at least we had fun trying. And if we prove to be even partially right, then… Holy Fuck. Holy Fucking Fuck. Holy Fucking Fucked Fuck.
Indeed.
"Hugh's Daily Cartoon" Newsletter.
A new cartoon sent out every weekday morning to your inbox [RSS version here.].
A wee chuckle to start your day off right etc.
I’m not saying that you’re wrong, because I honestly don’t know. I’ll be eager to track the progress of you and Sig’s experiment.
What I do take issue with, and perhaps it’s the real problem with hierarchies in the first place, is that your example hierarchy was too granular. The hierarchy of many organizations is also too granular. You could have said Film > Disney > Live Action > Nanny, and you arrive at the same spot using the same number of facts.
Also, your fuzzy clues work fine for the remarkable (“film” and “neo”), but not as well for the anonymous — find a 4 piece (or even 10 part) clue that would quickly lead most people to think of the movie “Sorority Boys”.
Trying to read between the lines of Thingamy, and wondering…
…to what extent the management of flow through the riverbed will focus on the narrow portions — the constraining bottlenecks — which limit what can pass throught the whole system, and at the same time are the source of turbulence (rapids?) that can upset the flow.
…how much of your thinking about the relationship of traditional hierarchical structures result in silos, which result in conflicting objectives and metrics that end up sub-optimizing the performance of the larger system/organization.
…how your left/right brain perspective allows for the necessity of both (duh!). The left brain logic is necessary to analyze and define processes while the right brain makes you care about them. Nothing can get done without the left brain implementation while without the right brain buy-in, nothing will get done.
Just a quick thought …
Tree structures are important, there is a linearity about it which is convienient, but a lateral take could be taken into account. It is also possible that thought (or structures) can be rhizomic — that is, like a rhizome, the roots that spread connect into each other, as opposed to to spreading and branching out independantly. A wikipedia entry for you:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhizome
Rob: There’s been quite a bit of discussion on this tags v hierarchies topic; some here on gapingvoid, and some on the originating site (start here
http://thingamy.typepad.com/sigs_blog/2005/06/tree_structures.html
and work your way up the posts and comments until you get to the one Hugh links to here). The point you make that “You could have said Film > Disney > Live Action > Nanny, and you arrive at the same spot using the same number of facts” is in fact one of the benefits of the tagging — multiple routes to the same information make it easier to find by different people.
It is not an OR problem… hierarchy OR something else — like network
It is an AND situation… hierarchy AND network — prescribed AND emergent…
We traverse/surf whatever paths get us to the solution, sometimes hierarchy, sometimes horizontal/diagonal associations[network], and sometimes both, jumping back and forth from one to the other until we get there.
“jumping back and forth from one to the other until we get there…“
That’s not how it worked at ANY of the companies I worked for, back in my Madison Ave days
Hierarchies can be directly translated into linear lists — start with the first large branch, then the first smaller branch, and keep going like this until you’ve exhausted all the sub-branches of any one larger branch. This will always be useful for anal-retentives like myself who want to make sure we haven’t missed anything.
A free-floating web of association, on the other hand — like the human brain — might have “dark areas” that we never get around to. Is it safe to assume that if we don’t happen to find these, they weren’t important enough in the first place?
I couldn’t agree more with Valdis… free form tags are useful, but so are hierarchies.
Both Sig or you talk about tagging in such an OR oriented way. Which is very provocative, which is why you’re doing it I suppose.
This not a binary problem with a binary solution, it is not black and white, it is not cut and dried. Each has their place.
Why can’t Hierarchy AND Tagging they live side by side? What makes you think one is so useful it can ‘completely’ replace the other?
You use toothfloss, but surely that doesn’t mean you should stop brushing your teeth?
I’ve also been working on ways to find, filter and organize information over the last year, including playing around with the tags idea a bit.
There are many areas in which tags and tag-like organization offer huge potential, in my opinion largely because it gets a little closer to the way our brains seem to work. And there are other twists on the concept that haven’t been explored much publicly, but when I get to public beta…
I don’t know if, in the realm of digital information, there would ever be a complete move away from hierarchical organization. I rather imagine nonhierarchical (tags etc) forms taking over an ever larger part of our digital lives where strict organization isn’t a true requirement.
For example, on sites like Slashdot there are periodic lively debates about Google’s approach, particularly with Gmail: “don’t file, search.” That can be amazingly powerful, but only where 100% accuracy isn’t an absolute imperative. You might want your e-mail working that way, but I don’t think you want your banking system working that way.
Of course there’s also the data-mining angle, where any new way to find connections is very welcome, and is going to generally be overlaid on a defined structure (set of structures) anyway.
I think we’ve realized by now (or should have) that with the flood of digital documents, information, etc., the/old/file/structure/concept isn’t going to cut it. At least not from the user’s point of view.
And yes, soul-crushing hierarchies in business are stupid, but that has more to do with the egos and insecurities of people “in charge of” other people than with any serious attempt at efficient organization.
I highly recommend Oliver Sacks to anyone interested in this topic.
http://www.oliversacks.com/
Unfortunately, this article has gone to “pay mode” but it’s great:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16882
http://www.thingamy.com/
the best kept public secret. some one is creating oxy thingany…uhm…I mean doxy moron (as di for digital).
thingamy could be the next ginger!
see: the “i was there” factor
http://www.gapingvoid.com/Moveable_Type/archives/001716.html
You probably know what I think … philosophically.
I like Frank Patrick’s points, and I agree strongly with Valdis’ points .. theoretically.
Practically, it IS “both/and” in my opinion, but only when there are those higher up in the hierarchy who think like that, are predisposed in terms of personality, or are in front of problems where hierarchy is creating more problems than it is solving (although there are many examples where that is the situation but the hierarchs wouldn’t ever think of tryiong other ways.
IMO, the issue is that there are not any other *models* that have widespread awareness or conditioned trust … organizations have almost all of their management processes derived from heirarchical structural assumptions, and there are many cycles of reinforcement going on … job evaluation, compensation schemes, strategy development, objective-setting, accountability and performance management processes come to mind
It WILL become “both/and” over time (See Stan davis work in Chapter 2 and 3 of Future Perfect, from 1987, for a seminal discussion on this specific point), because the compexity and pace of change is too rapid now .. networks are necessary for effective response, and some forms of effectively functioning hierarchy are necessary for decision-making.
It makes necessary people and skills such as “social” and “organizational” architects, rather than big organizational / HR consulting houses selling hierarchical control methods for the knowledge-and-network based work of people in today’s organizations.
i guess I should probably get more active blogging on these issues, and participate more in the conversation, given that I’ve been thinking about and working with them for a while now.
Btw, the “hierarchy to wireacrhy” t-shirt design got rave reviews at Gnomedex.
“That’s not how it worked at ANY of the companies I worked for, back in my Madison Ave days
“
And that was why you got the fuck out of there!
BTW, hierarchies are a special type of network know as a “tree” — so it is ALL networks, patterns of connections.
Your Brain At Work
Quick: umbrella, flying, nanny As Jeff Hawkins points out in On Intelligence, your brain just sits in the wet, warm, darkness of your skull and tries to make sense out of patterns of nerve impulses. Via gaping void (Not
Better than me: the hierarchies that bind
My mother once said to me, “If you are on a date with a guy who is nice to you, but rude to the waiter, he is not a nice guy.” My mom is smart. I’ve taken that lesson with me throughout whichever status I’ve been.
If a tree structure appeared in the mesh and there was no taxonomist to see it, would it still exist?
Part of the problem with hierarchies is the world seems to be mesh structured rather than tree structured. There’s always just enough cross links to screw up the nice neat tree we’re trying for.
Which is probably why every so often big companies experiment with matrix management. Just before closing down the whole division.
Time for another article; “Outliners considered harmful”; or to ponder the difference between traditional XML and RDF.
Not sure if you’d find this relevant, but I’ve written about and made some diagrams showing how tags reinforce hierarchies.
Tags stuck on trees (with pictures!)
http://icite.net/blog/200506/tags_trees.html
Tags remove a middle level of hierarchy, but they don’t replace hierarchy – tags depend on trees.
With tags, we get less access to hierarchy. This is a tradeoff – we get hierarchy out of our face and don’t have to deal with its awkwardness, but we also forgo the ability to shape hierarchies on which we are being dependent.
Julian, meshes can contain trees but not vice versa.
The answer to your question is “it depends”. We can find trees in the mesh, but as soon as we find cycles/loops in the trees, they stop being trees. Kind of like life in an atomic collider…
I agree with the “let’s not get all pissy” observation made in a couple of posts that BOTH hierarchy and tagging/association are useful, in their place… but I ALSO think that tagging is ALMOST always better.
Granting that this is partly a personality test thing, and many people will like hierarchy more than I do. Some may possibly like it less (hard to imagine).
But I think a fair test of this is to compare the utility of X1 (www.x1.com) vs. MS Explorer. I started using X1 as a desktop search tool about a year ago, and I now use Explorer about 10% of the time to go to stuff.
For non-X1ers, it essentially provides an interface where you type in keywords, and as you type, it instantly retrieves matches based just on indexing of ALL contents of ALL files, along with a “preview pane” showing the contents of any file you select. The list of matching files updates instantly with each keystroke, so no need to submit, look at results, go back and try again, etc. It’s instant feedback — just keep adjusting the search terms till you get what you need.
This has the useful side-effect of helping you find related useful things you hadn’t thought of or remembered… but even without that, it’s just a better, faster way to find almost anything EXCEPT images or music or other non-text content. Occasionally it’s faster just to go to a folder that has everything for a specific project.. but 90% of the time, in my experience, X1 is better.
A second confirmation of the same thing is how well Gmail finds stuff I need, again with no folders, just with keyword search. I never miss folders for my mail — it’s all in one big bucket, and I always find what I need right away.
Of course, I’ve never understood people that have millions of Outlook folders with hierarchy — I prefer even Outlook’s anemic search to the overhead of categorizing and then traversing the categories, not to mention the problem of needing multiple pathways and changing pathways to the same content.
In my view, hierarchy is RARELY right, but our systems and processes use it MOST of the time. This should be flipped on it’s head, and it’s important to recognize this, not just to say “well, both are valuable”. We’ll never catch terrorists by tracking info on them in single, static hierarchies.
Peter writes ” We’ll never catch terrorists by tracking info on them in single, static hierarchies.” Yup.
Yet, that is what we keep doing — repeating old behavior and expecting different results. I riffed on this in a brief white paper — hierarchy vs network in the war on terror.
http://www.orgnet.com/orgchart.html