Theeo Thoughts № 023 | Nothing Flat Going On

Subscribe to Future Theeo Thoughts

Well folks, what goes around comes around. You will have heard plenty in the last few weeks about how the work world ought to function.

When we get big, we need to get small again. When we start up, we need to appear big. When we loosen the office rules, we need to tighten them back up. When new technology enters the scene, we need to put technology in the center. When we've bloated, we need to clear our throats and talk structure plays. When we fire, we need someone to blame.

🤨

What's old is new again, and the boys are out there saying all sorts of funny words. Words that suggest a straight line, a sense of authority, and a "known" way.

I know. It is hard.

Binaries, Again

No single way is the right way. Binaries like hierarchy or flat keep the insanity loop looping.

Stop looking to them as if they have the answers. Stop taking instruction from them on how to operate.

Daniela Amodei said in an interview this week that Anthropic is actually benefitting from the mistakes of the technology builds in the last 25 years. She named it directly. "No need to build technology that drives child users to eating disorders."

No need to keep thinking anyone who has lifted up one of these companies has much methodological sense about systems theory, leadership, change, and practice. Or ethics. The messes originate from an embedded illusion of competence. A competence no single person has.

We need to break from that delusion and fog. Nobody knows how to do this or where it goes from here. We are all better off waking up each day and thinking "I haven't a f'ing clue. Let's get to work."

Jockeying is done. Dangerous, too. Stop looking outward as if the Brians, Jacks, Sams, Jasons, and Steves have your answers.

Flat is Not a Thing

Coinbase

Brian Armstrong recently sent 700 people at Coinbase packing. He declared there would be only 5 layers maximum from the CEO down. Leaders would not have more than fifteen direct reports. What he referred to as "player-coaches" and one-person AI-native pods would now replace the pure play management structure.

Armstrong called it rebuilding Coinbase as an intelligence, with humans "around the edge" aligning the intelligence.

Block

Jack Dorsey sent 4,000 packing.

Hierarchy, he argued, "was never an organisational philosophy."

Was it not? Disagree. Slavery, industrialism, and a century of HBS whitewashing say otherwise.

Dorsey proclaimed hierarchy was always an information routing protocol. Managers aggregated context, relayed decisions, and maintained alignment. AI does that now, he said. Remove the layers. Let intelligence do what humans once coordinated.

🤔

Intelligence, synthetic and organic, does not work like this. Communication unicorns and information flow rainbows are not summoned by Dorsey decree or wishing upon an AI star.

Airbnb

Brian Chesky meanwhile warned that two types of people won't survive the AI era. People Managers and workers resisting change. "Brian, where have you been?"

It is 2026. Why in good god are there pure play people managers employed at Airbnb? What is wrong within? Why have you hired "workers who resist change?"

He went on about fewer meetings and building an ecosystem where people are at the center. Jesus. Go man!

Mixed Metaphors

Armstrong wants AI at the center and to get back to the good old days. Jack wants information routing protocols and a flat organisation. Brian wants fewer meetings and proof of humanity.

Ok. Let's take a closer look.

These arguments are not bad. Neither are the decisions they have needed to make. They are mixing metaphors and attributions that do not hold. Methodologically.

Hierarchies

What hierarchy as a design has always done badly is default to aggregation of power by personality rather than distribution of talent and prioritisation of outcomes. The pyramid structure defaults to hoarding, not moving, information. To a control play, not an information routing protocol. If anyone believed the hierarchy of management in effect moved information through a system, they have been smoking crack.

So, Jack. Really?

People Managers

People Managers with no actual work to deliver. That is bad hiring, lazy building, fearful leadership, and unchecked bloat. Call it hindsight. Not design.

Change Resistance

Resistant to change is programming. Entitlement. And fear.

The solve? Hire better. Build an operating system that has no slack in it. Say what you expect out loud and deny drama. Run the work strategically, not from playbooks built for systems that are rapidly dissolving.

Whyyyyyyyyyyyy are we talking like this still?

Pendulums

Armstrong cut fat. Dorsey cut fat. Chesky appears on a media tour, preparing to cut fat.

Pendulums swing and narratives need building.

Change Math

Five layers between outer rim and the CEO is not flat. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. And fifteen direct reports is substantial. Simple math.

Chesky cheekily said the Vatican runs with four layers so why is Airbnb running with nine? Yes! Such a good question. Who runs the place anyway?

More math.

4,200 people remaining at Coinbase is still a substantial human system. The 700 who went packing rid the company of some roles and bloat to give to the machine. What it did not do is rid the company of unaddressed issues in the substrate. AI accelerating intelligence and information flows is achievable. Every remaining node in the system comes under increased pressure.

Fear and swirl that ran through the system when it was 4,900 is still in the building. Unhiring spreads the fear and swirl. Those remaining carry more. Information bottlenecking hits new decibels. Nothing flat going on here. AI does not arrive by proclamation and removal. Fear does.

Centralised strategies enabling decentralised protocols may. Protocols that influence every aspect of a living system, not information routing alone. Communicating. Decisioning. Leading. Confronting. Operating. Proclamations will not.

The Myth

Flat is a myth. A flat organisation has never existed, and never will. Methodologically, behaviorally, humanly impossible.

Power architecture will always exist. The compelling question, harder than grabbing for the myth, is whether the power architecture is consciously built.

Cutting fat is a business decision. AI will reduce numbers. Bloat will return. As it always does. People managers with no actual work to deliver is just dumb. Player-coaches? Close to the same dumb.

These are business decisions, not unearthed theory on ridding systems of hierarchy for utopian flatness. Narrating simple words about complex human systems does not make change simple. Nor does it make them look smarter.

Simplification makes what is critical invisible.

Invisible power is not less powerful.

It is less accountable power.

Structure Plays

Any organisation believing their AI-motivated structure play is different this time is factually and methodologically mistaken.

What runs underneath is not an information routing problem solved by 2026 AI. The power architecture always finds another way in the invisible, until made visible. The human system determines what any structure produces. Its communication defaults. Its decision making. Its fear frequency. Not its protocols.

These gentlemen are thinking from an AI bolt-on architecture, not from a substrate and consciousness overhaul. One where they sit atop the organisation whether they call it flat or structure it like JP Morgan or any other global bureaucracy.

There is only power that moves openly, from authenticity, agency, and accountability, or power that aggregates control, manipulation, and dominance. AI will now compete for it too.

Those who get it right make the power architecture conscious. Name it. Design for it deliberately. Hold it horizontally, alongside AI rather than having it run beneath, unexamined.

Simple it is not. Strategic it is.

Which brings us, again, to fear.

Feeling Powerful in, Not Absent, Our Fear

Fear does not show up as us standing in a corner shaking and cowering. Fear looks like distraction, denial, and deflection.

It can be silence. Starving the nuisance.

It can be aggressions, micro and macro.

It can be avoidance. Giving your power away.

It can be attempting to "outrun the problem with your smarter idea."

It can be a litany of available addictions.

It can be a structure play. Narrated as vision.

Fear runs through every system. At every scale.

We are entering an era of relearning.

Fear does not go anywhere.

We feel fear, and stand in our power anyway.

We shake through the "No."

We leave without a plan.

We defy the pattern.

We speak up.

We stop waiting for rescue.

We admit to fucking up.

We allow room for not knowing.

We listen.

Becoming responsible for yourself is power. The substrate.

You stop blaming, denying, projecting.

You stop wanting someone else to change to make you feel comfortable.

You embody yourself, and all the benevolence and evil within, and own your power without needing to perform it.

Falling victim to each other is the old programming. Making enemies of each other is the architecture. Nobody is without fear. Everyone has power.

We are accountable to ourselves, and leave the others to their own reckoning. Their fear frequency. Their path.

Through the Looking Glass

The conditions for this conversation have arrived.

Not because of AI. Because the proclamations are surfacing the questions that matter. What runs underneath? What is the power architecture doing, named or unnamed? What does any human system need to carry this next timeline?

Substrate questions. Old ones. Unsolved. Urgent.

Theeo lives here. Human and AI systems designed from the substrate out. Power architecture made conscious. Systems change that is evolutionary, tangible, and real.

Strategic it is. Simplistic it is not. x

Kathryn
Strategy & Systems Change | Theeo