Darrin Johnson's Weblog: Need for speed...

I recently came across the term "heterarchy." The contemporary definition is "a form of institutional organization based on distributed intelligence and collaborative decisions rather than hierarchical structures. A heterarchy is an organizational structure resembling a network rather than the top-down tree of a hierarchy (www.yourdictionary.com)." Within a heterarchy the decision-making (e.g. power and authority) is distributed horizontally rather than vertically in a hierarchal organization. Some would consider a heterarchy to be the opposite of hierarchy but generally a hierarchical organization is constructed of vertically connected heterarchical elements with each of the elements having bounded decision-making authority (wikipedia.org).

Can a pure heterarchy (e.g. lacking the hierarchical framework) exist in a corporate environment? Or more importantly what conditions need to exist to make it successful without the loss of efficiency? If it can be made to work, it would seem that there is a tremendous value in leveraging this type organizational structure as a means to adapt to the often often dynamic nature of some business environments. Having the ability to dynamically connect a network of experts, empowering them to make the decisions, delivering on the objective(s) and then dissolving the organization for reuse for the next objectives seems like a powerful tool. Do any of you have pointers or anecdotal information where heterachical structures have worked?