Why even a flat company becomes a cage

A team assembles without bosses. No hierarchy, no titles that mean anything, everything decided together. Six months in it has quiet leaders, unwritten rules, and one person whose opinion somehow weighs more than everyone else’s. Nobody appointed them to that role. That is simply how power settled inside a group that swore there would be no power in it.

This is the experiment working rather than failing. It is what happens to any organisation, including the most deliberately anti-hierarchical one, and the psychic prison metaphor explains why escape from it is impossible in principle.

Joining a group costs part of your freedom

To enter an organisation is to hand over part of your freedom and part of your individuality in exchange for what the group gives back. This is a condition of entry rather than a side effect of poor management. Without a partial surrender of “I do what I want”, joint action does not begin at all. From that follows a conflict between the individual and the group which is never settled once and for all. It runs for as long as the organisation exists.

The most interesting case here is the fate of anarchy as an idea. A group that consciously builds itself without hierarchy acquires, fairly quickly, its own ideology, its own symbols and its own rituals, and ends up with a control system as rigid as anybody else’s, only less visible from outside. The absence of a formal boss does not mean the absence of power. Power simply flows to wherever there is less light.

The theory underneath this level is autopoiesis and self-organisation: living systems produce and maintain their own structure in response to their environment, rather than following an external blueprint. The conclusion is uncomfortable for a lot of executives. The mechanistic metaphor does not work here. You cannot run an organisation like a machine in which one lever pulls one action. At best you are sustaining the principles by which the system already organises itself, rather than building it from nothing by your own will.

How this metaphor produced the coaching profession

If a manager cannot build an organisation the way an engineer builds a mechanism, what do they become? The administrator who allocates resources and hands out tasks turns into a mediator and a facilitator. Command of the subject matter, knowing how the product or the process works, stops being the main capital. The capital now is command of a framework for organisational development: how a company grows, where it gets stuck, which forces hold it in its present shape.

The same logic produced a separate profession, executive coaching. A specialist of that kind sits outside any functional unit and formally does not even belong to the organisation. They take no decisions for the manager and stay out of the details of a particular deal. What they influence is the organisational design, the management system and the way decisions get made, and they do it while remaining outside, holding the frame of the game in view: whether it is zero-sum or not, who is behaving like a hawk and who like a dove, where the paradox of altruism is operating, meaning where something unprofitable for one person turns out to be profitable for the whole. They can know nothing about the deal the team is fighting over and still see exactly what is wrong with the frame that deal is happening inside. Their function is mediation and facilitation rather than management in the usual sense.

What changes when head office is abroad and the team is in Russia

Everything above is universal. What is specific to a foreign company selling into Russia is distance, and distance makes invisible power a practical operating problem rather than a topic for management literature.

A company selling here normally holds one of three arrangements: a small local team, a distributor, or an agency running the marketing. In all three, the organisation on the Russian side is a self-organising system that head office observes through reports. Reports are produced by people. People produce the version of reality that keeps the arrangement stable. What arrives abroad is a company that has been prepared for viewing.

The vocabulary of the flat team travelled to Russia from American and European technology firms, and in most offices it arrived as vocabulary. The words get used in meetings, while the rituals underneath them stay local. A Western management culture treats the explicit process as the source of truth: the documented decision, the written charter, the meeting minutes. Russian working practice runs a large share of real coordination through informal channels, and Telegram in particular functions as the actual instrument of work rather than as a side chat. If head office reads only the formal channel, it is reading a translation, and a flattering one.

The practical consequence is blunt. The org chart approved abroad describes reporting lines. It does not describe power. The person who decides whether next week’s campaign goes live, whose quiet objection kills a proposal before it reaches the agenda, or whose approval everyone seeks before announcing a decision, may hold no interesting title on that chart at all.

Hiring an agency changes the shape of the problem without removing it. You then control a contract and a scope of work, while the frame of the game is set inside an organisation you do not see. The agency has its own ideology, its own idea of what a good client is and its own internal politics deciding which accounts get the strong people. None of that appears in the proposal.

How to read invisible power in a team without bosses

If you run a team that takes pride in its informality and its lack of bureaucracy, look more closely. An ideology is already present there. It has simply never been written into a document, and lives instead in habits: who takes the floor first in a meeting, whose ideas get discussed longest, who is invited into the informal chat and who is not. Denying this does not remove power. It makes power invisible and therefore uncontrollable, including by you.

At distance the signals are thinner, so they are worth naming explicitly. Watch whose name keeps appearing in messages that get forwarded to you. Watch which decisions arrive already agreed, with the disagreement stripped out. Watch who answers at odd hours, because availability is a status marker inside most Russian teams and it is visible even from another time zone. Watch what happens after a call in English ends: if the working conversation restarts in Russian in another window, that window is where the organisation lives.

What to do if you sell into Russia from another country

The practical conclusion is simple to state. Stop trying to construct the organisation as though assembling a mechanism from parts on a drawing. Ask the question differently. Which conditions in the environment are shaping the way these people self-organise right now, and what happens if I change those conditions slightly, by changing the frame rather than by issuing an order?

Want less toxic hierarchy inside a flat team? Do not abolish leadership. Make it visible and discussable. Want more initiative? Do not demand initiative in a directive. Change what recognition is actually given for inside the group. If the Russian team is measured on volume this quarter, no memo about brand quality will move behaviour, because the memo speaks to the chart and the measurement speaks to the cage.

Three things are worth doing before the next planning cycle. Write down who really decides what, as a separate document from the org chart, and expect the two to disagree. Name the local ideology out loud rather than assuming the global one applies by default, because an unnamed ideology cannot be negotiated with. And when you bring in an outsider, buy the frame rather than the domain knowledge: a consultant who knows your product better than you do is rare and mostly useless, while one who can see the game your operation is playing is the reason to bring in anybody at all. That is the work behind Russian market entry and behind the strategy sessions that usually precede it.

And if you find yourself in the position of the outside consultant to somebody else’s team, hold on to the same distinction. Your value is not that you know the details of their business better than its owner. Your value is that you see the frame of the game from outside and can hand it back to the team in a more workable form, without solving a single one of their tasks for them.

Who holds the key to a cage nobody built

A prison without walls is still a prison, as long as the inmates share a language, share rituals and share an understanding of who is entitled to what. Take down the bars, dismiss the guards, call the result self-management, and six months later you will find the same roles in place, with no signs on the doors.

The question is not how to destroy the cage. It reassembles itself inside any group of people doing something together, in Moscow and in Munich alike. The question is who holds the key, and whether that person can see that they are holding it.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Russian version of this article on belokrylovo.ru: Почему даже свободная компания превращается в клетку