Commanding Presence

God damn, I had forgotten about flowchart templates. I did have one of those at one time, lost somewhere along the way.

Clifton Royston

Claire used the Dom voice

Egos

I went with pseudo code as soon as I could. I still have my old flowchart template from school.

Marshall Gates

You also can't spell "flowchart" without "OW". The only time I ever made flowcharts was when they were absolutely required work in college. They always gave me a migraine.

awgiedawgie

Booo!

Stephen Wells

GDI, Andrew. Enjoy your like! lol

Miyaa

Claire is using Googirl Flow (tm) to get this documented.

Andrew

Problem with organizations with too much fluidity is that there can be a lack of accountability. Cubetown has very clearly indicated that there is a lack of "common sense" such as respect for boundaries, accountability, precaution, etc. This is an indication that some form of direct oversight is needed, even if it's more progressive than the traditional model.

Bill Silvia

As someone who - for now, at least - runs a nonprofit organization that essentially operates on this kind of model, I can tell you that it *only* works given a very select group of people, with sufficient technological & communications skills, and reasonable amounts of personal organization/follow-through. It's highly dependent on regular communication in informal channels, in-flux working groups, and the ability to make good use of task management software/slack/teams for file sharing, communication, etc. Unfortunately, my current situation is predominantly analog and/or e-mail communication, and it's a battle to even get people to use Google sheets or GDrive or similar due to age & volunteers vs. full-time employees. It drives my autistic Claire-brain absolutely nuts, and also results in tremendous overwork of our actual staff, both professional and administrative. The informality sounds good in theory, but it only works in a certain kind of setting in practice. That setting may become more common given the tech skills and routine real-time text communication of Millenials/Gen Z. But it isn't there yet in many orgs.

Sean Morgan

So this is the kind of org chart which requires a Mobius strip, or even a Klein bottle?

ValdVin

Flowch art, surely

Stephen Wells

I think the solution here is going to be more about consolidating responsibilities and areas of control. Who does requisitions? Hiring? Firing? Who sets up the lunch room, who schedules special events, who sends out daily lists of "S is out sick, A has control of the west conference room all day, and there's a sonic experiment at 3 PM, everyone needs ear protection from 2:45-3:15"? And who authorizes each of those aspects of Cubetown? Organization is the key to a functional organization.

Viktor

@Some Ed • Possibly Claire gets into a similar situation with Marigold where she doesn’t know what to do with her income? Does Hannerlore becomes the QC CPA?

Miyaa

Small tech companies that are actually functional tend to work this way in practice, regardless of what the org chart says. When I was at VeriFone decades ago, back when it was still a small startup, we ended up calling this the "Blueberry pancake theory of management" after an intentionally vague whiteboard diagram our CEO Bill Melton drew of an "interconnected network of small groups." He also made a great distinction between authority derived from power - the traditional feudal or totalitarian model of management - and authority derived from knowledge and responsibility - we do what Brian says is needed for the email server because he knows how that system works, and so on for those who understand the finances, software development, etc. (This only works as long as you're not hiring a lot of arrogant Dunning-Kruger type people.)

Clifton Royston

The point being I think that you shouldn't try. Org charts are required either for management chains (who is doing performance reviews on whom) or for giving orders (who gets to tell whom what to do). But in academic collaborations, the latter happens only loosely for certain relationships (mostly advisor->student) and the managment chain often has little to do with organization of work. It's herding cats, all the way down. The way to manage it is to just try to capture crudely who is working in which groups, knowing that everyone wears more than one hat.

Nathaniel Tagg

It may not look like it, but this is salary negotiations. Sure, as a consequence of that effort, there is a work product being produced. But it's one they wouldn't be able to properly use without her, so it's fine. To be clear, if they were less of a disorganized mess, it could be possible for them to get some benefit from the work Claire's doing here without Claire's guidance. But they aren't. I'm not certain exactly what ballpark Claire is thinking for the salary, or how much that will change when she has a better handle on the full scope of the mess. But I suspect she'd be able to swing a seven or eight figure salary if she has the confidence to push for it.

Some Ed

It's kind of hard to properly draw one of those on a whiteboard.

Some Ed

Flowchart art…fart.

Chris Crowther

No work w/o pay

And 'team mom' for the entire town, which I'm sure will be super chill

Bagge

Yup, this stopped being an interview some time ago

Bagge

A fundamental problem is the urge to apply traditional org charts to highly fluid communities run by beings who are physically more suited to ad hoc mesh communication. Human industrial management is based on the idea that the Monarch has nobles each ruling over a fiefdom so on top to bottom. The paradigm is ownership of land and the serfs who work it. This does not adequately capture the work and resource flow of a highly interconnected network of small groups with varying degrees of integration with others. A more profitable approach might be the literally organic modes employed by mixed forests or slime molds. Dynamic graph databases with heat maps, not aristocratic 18th century hierarchy. In the end, a new form of enterprise management might be Cubetown's most revolutionary innovation

Todd Ellner

Claire is the Chief Detanglement Officer.

Mad Marie

Didn't take long for Claire to go from "Head of Information Science" to "Effectively CEO for an absent owner".

David Durant

She has already started the job.

So the entire organisation is "we have this weird jellyfish that's super smart and occasionally buds off slimegirls, talk to them" Good lord, they REALLY need Claire

Bagge

That’s what a bidet is for.

Mad Marie

Claire about to unleash some shit she don't want Marten to see

George Bias

"... and by the time we left she had the robots eating out of her hand. Literally. It was a weird scene."

Stephen Wells

I hope Claire plans to bill them for her time here later on, because it seems like we've moved on from "showing her around" to "actually starting the job"

enchantedsleeper