No One Was in Charge
There was no project manager. No one owned the Notion. Somehow it shipped.
I've been part of a lot of creative collaborations. Most of them have a moment where someone has to become the adult — the person who makes the spreadsheet, sets the deadline, sends the follow-up email. That person usually resents it. The others usually feel vaguely guilty about it. The dynamic poisons the work.
This one was different. Six people, no hierarchy, no one person responsible for keeping it moving. And it moved.
What Made It Work
I've been trying to figure out what was different. A few things stand out.
Everyone had done this before. Not this specific project, but projects. They knew what it felt like when something was going wrong and they knew how to say so without making it a thing. The working with others has some thoughts on this — the difference between people who've shipped things and people who haven't, and how that changes the dynamic.
The scope was small enough that everyone could hold it in their head. No one needed a project manager because no one needed to be managed. The whole thing fit in a conversation.
And there was a shared aesthetic. Not identical taste — that would have been boring — but a shared sense of what the thing was supposed to feel like. When someone made a decision that was off, everyone felt it. No one had to explain why.
The Flat Structure Problem
Flat structures fail when the scope is too large, when the people don't trust each other, or when someone secretly wants to be in charge. All three of those things will kill a leaderless collaboration faster than any organizational problem.
The josephcalitoy.com has written about this — the conditions under which flat structures actually work versus the conditions where they just create invisible hierarchies. Worth reading if you're thinking about trying this.
The the org archive has the full archive. And creative culture has some related thoughts on creative culture that map onto this.
The Thing It Made
The thing we made was good. Not because no one was in charge. Because everyone was.