Hierarchy and synarchy are both valid systems, each addressing their own purpose.

2 years ago I still worked at a cryptocurrency exchange. One of the projects I was in charge of during that time, was creating protocols for crisis management, including incident response procedures. And since I worked in a security team, these protocols had to have very clear decision structures for general scenarios that simply couldn't be specified. Otherwise we would have blind spots in our operations.

And until that time, I had been a proponent for group dynamics that were in line with the idea of sociocratic synarchy. No leader, just equal roles where everyone had an equal voice, but roles were specialized to the individual.

I played along in hierarchical structures, simply because I had no other option. But when I started creating these protocols, there truly was no other way but to create a hierarchy. I was also reminded during the process, of my times working together with people in physical high pressure situations.

At those moments, you need to know who's in charge of decision making. And it should be the person who can make decisions quickly and with minimal collateral damage. It's risk mitigation, rather than risk prevention.

Yet, I still hated being in a hierarchical corporation as an employee. It got me pondering about a mixed system.

So in the end I realized that my ideal system would be one that becomes less hierarchical with complexity.

The more complex, the more synarchical the system should be. And the reasoning is simple: organizations with many moving parts shouldn't make quick decisions.

Imagine a cruise ship that would make rapid turns in the harbor: the waves would be humongous.

Meanwhile, if you have a canoe. It makes no sense at all to take the space a cruise ship takes for making a turn.

Scale should inform the group dynamic. And this is why, it makes no sense to me that the US has a president or catholicism has a pope.

Dictatorship creates issues on a large scale. And clarity on a small scale.

Plus, on a small scale it's evident what a single leader does. This isn't the case when you deal with millions of people. There's just no way that even a group of 100 people could fully comprehend that scale of complexity. Let alone one person.

Hence, I think that our society should be made up of a decentralized network of synarchies that inform local hierarchies.

What do you think?