The flattening
We had a real problem with hierarchy. We fixed the process. But making the process fair isn't the same as making the outcome good.
Here’s something I keep noticing. A room full of smart people. A decision to make. Someone with twenty years of experience has a strong read on the problem. It gets the same weight as everyone else’s input. Same sticky note. Same dot vote. The process is clean and fair. The outcome is worse than it needed to be.
This happens constantly now.
The backstory makes sense. The old model was broken. Hierarchy suppressed information. Power determined whose input counted, not knowledge or proximity to the problem. So we corrected. Made the process uniform. Same airtime for everyone. Same weight on every input. Every step in the correction was reasonable. And we ended up somewhere wrong.
When you flatten every input to the same weight, you don’t eliminate power dynamics. You mask them. The senior person still shapes the outcome through softer channels: framing the question, choosing what gets workshopped, setting the defaults. But the process has stripped away the one legitimate reason to weight someone’s input more: they’ve been here before and they know what breaks.
There’s a concept in forecasting called calibration: how well your confidence tracks reality. Calibration improves with feedback loops. You predict, you see the outcome, you update. Twenty years of that produces something different from two years of it. Not better judgment, necessarily. More finely tuned uncertainty. The experienced person often isn’t more sure. They’re more precisely unsure.
The flattening treats this as irrelevant. Acknowledging it would feel like hierarchy. But that’s a category error.
The cost is visible. Consensus becomes the goal, not correctness. When every input carries equal weight, the path of least resistance is the option that offends no one. Fine for picking a lunch spot. Bad for architectural decisions.
Experienced people can be wrong, though, and their confidence makes it harder to challenge them. Deference to seniority really did suppress good ideas for decades. The old model earned its replacement.
So the question is what we’re actually optimizing for. Fair process is simple but lossy. Fair outcomes are harder. They require judgment about whose input matters more on which questions, and that judgment can be abused.
We don’t have good language for this yet. We have language for treating everyone the same. We have language for hierarchy. We don’t have much language for “your experience matters more on this specific question, and that’s not a power claim.”
Until we do, rooms full of smart people will keep making decisions that anyone with ten years of context could have steered away from.