Two articles on company culture caught my eye last week, both about what it’s like to work in organizations with no formal structure and communication. First, from the always excellent Design Staff, Design at Valve: collaborating and innovating in a flat organization is an interview with one of the designers at Valve:

It’s everyon’s job at Valve to recruit peers to help ship an idea. If I’m unable to recruit an engineer to help me ship an idea, it probably means either the idea isn’t solving an important problem, or it’s just not timely given our current priorities and ongoing projects. As individual contributors, w’re each constantly asking ourselves “Where is my time best spent?” The answer changes as projects ship and as new opportunities emerge.

For these self-selecting project teams to work, it’s important that we keep up on the various efforts happening around the company. Ther’s no top-down communication, so this typically happens by chatting with one another over lunch, or checking in with people to learn what’s happening.

Second, Brandon Keepers wrote about what it’s like to work at GitHub, and it struck me as remarkably similar to Valve’s culture:

Anarchy works wonderfully in a small group of individuals with a high level of trust. Everyone at GitHub has full access and permission to do whatever they want. Do great things and you earn respect. Abuse that freedom and you violate everyon’s trust.

Each person at GitHub has the responsibility to sell their ideas to the rest of the company. I quickly learned that if I can’t get anyone else interested in the project that I want to work on, then either I poorly articulated my vision, or more likely, it does not benefit the company. You can still work on it, but you will likely be working alone.

Both posts are worth reading, because they also explore some of the challenges of working in such environments. The teams seem well aware of the downsides of the cultures they’ve created, and they’re working hard to address those because the upsides vastly overshadow the downsides for them. And I guess that’s the key phrase — for them. I don’t think this type of environment will work in every company, but it’s encouraging to see how systems based solely on trust and self-governance can create productive environments and (extremely) happy employees.

For both companies, the measure of success is the quality and value of the products they ship to customers. That is fantastic, and could be the beginnings of a new era of true user-centered organizations. We need more experimentation that does away with conventional hierarchies and corporate structures so that we can find new ways to create value for our users.