I struggle to understand how flat org structures work... In my experience, a hierarchy of power is essential. I've seen problems at organizations which lacked clear title differences between engineers with different experience. This meant junior engineers felt just as authoritative as senior engineers, despite those junior engineers often being very wrong.
The end result was unhappiness, and contention between coworkers. The senior engineers felt unappreciated and unrecognized, and the junior engineers felt the brunt of that resentment.
Based on that experience, I tend to believe that organizations should have clear power lines (titles), and respect those titles. Doesn't mean you need to have a dictatorship, but someone needs to be able to make a strong decision that sticks, when the time calls for it.
The case of the crash of United Flight 173[1] is quite an extreme but still a relevant one on why seniority (in terms of title or work experience) shouldn't be the sole driving factor of decision making. Yes, junior engineers can be wrong but shutting them out by defining a hierarchy leads to multiple issues - a) they don't learn and b) senior engineers don't benefit from useful and creative ideas. A hierarchical top-down org usually forces the people at the bottom to just follow the instructions. The better option is not hierarchy but leadership. There should be somebody in charge of the project and they should be able to take the final call when there is a contention. Yes, some wrong decisions would be made but that's what learning is all about.
While I believe clear power lines, and titles, are important for business function, they should not come at the cost of respect, or a democratic environment which promotes conversation and compromise. You can definitely have both; Not all rigid org structures are authoritarian.
"Yes, some wrong decisions would be made but that's what learning is all about."
The problem I've seen is that unless an engineer sees his peer as having more experience (visa vi the title), then they often won't even give them the time of day. Even if their peer is 100% right, the junior engineer often believes themself right and is unwilling to budge. While the reverse can definitely happen, its generally less common.
Explicit hierarchy is useful to break ties. Not all questions have a universally compelling answer. There are often two or more competing "explanations" that are all sensible. Having nobody with the authority to make the final call often leads to uncertainty and endless bikeshedding.
And I expect to have an experienced person in authority make the decision based on their "intuition", which just means the part of their accumulated experience that is difficult to formulate into an externally compelling argument.
This is actually a pretty good example of the phenomenon - if you and I were on a team and trying to figure out how to make decisions for our team, we would have this strong disagreement about whether it's better to break ties through intuition of randomness. My intuition is that intuition is better, and your intuition is that randomness is better. It's unlikely I can convince you that I'm right, or vice versa, so how should we break that tie?
One of the problem is when the difference between technical leadership and management is not recognized. While titles can help, without a clear technical leader on top of that they are clearly not enough. And, most importantly, the titles must be in phase with the actual capabilities of people. Otherwise it is far worse than no title. And obviously, a good technical hierarchy can be quite hard to bootstrap in an organization where the culture was officially flat.
Part of the problem is the way you stated it - a hierarchy of 'power'.
If you focus on a hierarchy of 'ownership' instead, it's much better for everyone.
There's a fantastic book (Extreme Ownership) that talks about how this is used within the US Navy Seals, and how it empowers the people doing the job, rather than dictating what they should do.
Decisions do need to be taken with regards to direction - they shouldn't necessarily enforce 'how' that direction should be achieved.
The end result was unhappiness, and contention between coworkers. The senior engineers felt unappreciated and unrecognized, and the junior engineers felt the brunt of that resentment.
Based on that experience, I tend to believe that organizations should have clear power lines (titles), and respect those titles. Doesn't mean you need to have a dictatorship, but someone needs to be able to make a strong decision that sticks, when the time calls for it.