The checklist for setting up a horizontal structure

Most flat-organization checklists line up intentions: communicate transparently, build trust, give teams ownership. Nobody ticks those lines. Nobody can say six months later whether they happened either.

A useful checklist item says three things: what you do, how you know it is done, and what breaks when you skip it. The fifteen items below follow that shape. They run the sequence set out in how to transition to horizontal management, which explains why the order is what it is. Budget six months for a pilot team.

Before you touch the org chart (week 1)

1. Write down three baseline numbers. Date the last ten issues the team escalated, from the moment someone said this is broken to the moment something changed, and keep the median. Ask five people who signed off the last expense over 5,000 euros. Watch what piles up when a manager is away for three weeks. It is done when the three numbers are written and dated in a document the team will reopen in six months. Without them, the only assessment available at the end is how everyone feels, and feelings side with whoever argues best.

2. Write the list of what stays closed: payroll, legal obligations, safety, signed client commitments, and anything else you would rather keep at the top for now. It is done when the list fits on one page, carries the name of the person who owns it, and can be read by the whole team. A written boundary is what makes everything you open next credible. An implicit boundary gets discovered the day a decision shoots upward in a panic, and on that day the team concludes autonomy stops where things get serious.

3. Pick one volunteer team rather than the whole company. Richard Hackman wrote in Leading Teams (2002) that no work team should reach double digits in size, and that he preferred six. Bill Gore, quoted by Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point, capped his plants at 150 people because past that point "things get clumsy". It is done when the team has said yes in a meeting, one named person owns the experiment, and a review date sits in everyone's calendar. A simultaneous switch asks each person to learn a new system and keep producing on the same day, which is exactly the wall Zappos hit in 2015 and Medium in 2016.

Write the structure (weeks 2 to 6)

4. Start from the real work rather than the job titles. For two weeks, everyone logs what they actually do, without looking at their job description. The activities missing from the org chart are the interesting ones: the person who chases unpaid invoices, the one who welcomes newcomers, the one who arbitrates between two impatient clients. It is done when the list holds at least three activities nobody would have guessed from the org chart. Starting from existing positions rebuilds the same hierarchy in new words, and that failure is the hardest one to spot from inside, because everyone recognises their own place in it.

5. Group those activities into roles, using the same three fields for all of them. The Holacracy Constitution defines a role by its purpose, its domain, meaning what its holder controls alone, and its accountabilities, the ongoing activities others expect from it. It is done when, for every role, the question "who decides this without asking?" gets settled by pointing at a written line. A role with no domain is a title, and a title leaves decisions travelling exactly as before. See how to define roles and how a role differs from a job description.

6. Put a name against every role. One person holds several, and that is how it is meant to work. It is done when every role has a holder, or when the vacant ones carry a review date. A vacant role gets picked up in practice by whoever has the most spare time, who is rarely the right person, and the team finds out at the first incident.

7. Hunt the orphans and the duplicates. Take the last twenty decisions the team made and ask which role would have made each one. It is done when every decision on the list lands on a role, and when the cases where three roles raise their hand get settled in the same session. Work that nobody owns goes to whoever talks loudest, the mechanism Jo Freeman described back in 1972 in The Tyranny of Structurelessness and that the piece on the liberated company traces through French research.

Name who decides what (weeks 4 to 8)

8. Set one rule per kind of decision, in a table anyone can reread.

Kind of decision	Who settles it	What gets kept
Inside a role's domain	Its holder, alone	A line in the role's discussion
Across several roles	Consent of the roles concerned	The decision and the objections raised
Creating, amending or retiring a role	Governance meeting	The proposal and its outcome
Anything on the closed list from item 2	Leadership	The decision and its reasoning, announced

It is done when someone from outside the team sorts five real questions correctly with that table in front of them. With no named rule, every topic first replays the argument about who is allowed to decide, and the meeting runs twice as long for the same outcome. Consent asks for the absence of a reasoned objection, which is a lower bar than everyone's enthusiasm.

9. Put a figure on the spending a role commits alone. One number, written down and known by everyone, is enough. Above it the holder still decides, after seeking advice from the people affected and from those who know the subject. That mechanism comes from Dennis Bakke, who installed it at AES, the power company he co-founded in 1981, before Frédéric Laloux popularised it as the advice process. It is done when the team's last expense went through the new rule with nobody asking permission. Teams test the money first, and autonomy that stops at the first purchase order reads as a slogan.

10. Name the place where a disagreement gets raised between meetings. Holacracy calls tension the gap between what a role produces and what it could produce, and the guide on raising a tension describes the move. It is done when at least three tensions have been written down in the first month, by at least two different people. A disagreement with no door goes through the corridor instead, which favours the people with the most time and the best contacts.

Keep it running (months 2 to 6)

11. Open a monthly governance meeting, one to two hours. That is where roles get created, amended and retired. It is done when the first session produces at least one role change applied the same day. Without that slot, the org chart freezes within three months and the gap with real work widens while everyone notices and nobody has a moment to say so.

12. Keep governance and operations in separate meetings. The tactical meeting handles work in flight, governance handles the structure. It is done when, over the past month, no operational item changed a role. Mixing the two lets the structure drift during status updates, with no proposal and no record, and the org chart stops describing what happens.

13. Pick the place that counts as authoritative. The structure gets one source of truth, and that source keeps the record of every change. It is done when you can find in under a minute who created a given role, on what date, and off the back of which decision. After a year with no history, a newcomer cannot tell what was decided from what drifted, and nobody on the team can tell them either.

Look at what happened (month 6)

14. Redo the three measurements from item 1. Count as well, every month in the governance meeting, the decisions that got escalated for lack of a clear mandate. It is done when the median decision lag is compared, number against number, with the one from week 1. No movement is still useful information: either the structure is too young, or the bottleneck sits somewhere other than the hierarchy, and the second case is worth knowing before you extend.

15. Ask the former managers what they do now. It is done when each one can name the roles they hold and quote at least one decision they make alone. A manager whose position is removed with nothing offered in its place will defend the old model, which is rational, and they usually have the means to do it.

The six lines worth deleting

The culture audit costs a lot, takes two months and mostly confirms what the person who commissioned it already believed. The three measurements from item 1 take half a day and give you numbers you can compare a year later.

The values workshop has never moved a decision. Writing "trust" on a wall leaves the approval chain for an expense exactly where it was, whereas item 9 changes it in one sentence.

The company-wide switch date asks everyone to learn a new system and keep producing on the same day. Item 3 says what to do instead.

Renaming the teams, from "department" to "squad" or from "project manager" to "facilitator", without touching who signs what, produces cynicism, and cynicism takes longer to undo than a hierarchy.

Choosing the tool first makes you fill in roles you have not written yet, and you will fill them in by copying the existing org chart.

Shared leadership training pays off in month four, when participants bring real cases. In month zero it produces notes nobody rereads.

The objections we get

"With no hierarchy it always turns into corridor politics." That is what happens when the management line goes and nothing written replaces it. Valve is the most quoted example. Its 2012 internal handbook describes a company with no bosses, and several former employees, among them Jeri Ellsworth and Rich Geldreich, have publicly described an unofficial layer of management where influence is won by keeping the right sponsors happy. Items 5, 8 and 10 answer that. They ask for writing rather than for trust.

"We will spend our lives in meetings." The first year adds a monthly governance meeting of one to two hours. What disappears against it is the approval ping-pong, which appears in nobody's calendar and weighs more. Item 14 will tell you which of the two wins in your case, and nobody can predict that for you.

"The founder will keep deciding anyway." On the list from item 2, that is the job. The trouble starts when they decide on a topic they announced as open, and one case is enough for the team to stop believing the rest. That is why the closed list gets written up front rather than as you go.

"Our line of work does not allow it." Sometimes true. An operating theatre, a cockpit and an emergency response team need a chain of command at the moment of action. Those same organizations write roles and domains for everything else, and everything else takes up most of the hours.

What Rolebase ticks off this list

Rolebase covers items 5, 6, 8, 11, 12 and 13. Every role carries its purpose, domain, accountabilities, checklist and indicators, and the org chart reorganizes by drag and drop. A dedicated panel lists the vacant roles, which settles item 6 at a glance. Proposals are voted by consent, unanimity or majority, simple or absolute, with a deadline, and an accepted proposal applies the org chart changes it carried before recording a dated decision. Every edit lands in an activity log where you can see the diff and undo it.

Three governance modes set who may change what: open editing for everyone, editing reserved to each role's lead, or mandatory approval through a proposal. Meetings run on reusable templates, repeat on a schedule, and their "checklist" and "indicators" steps pull directly from the fields of the role concerned. Sync works with Google Calendar, Outlook and any iCal feed. Discussions and tasks attach to a role rather than to a person. The organization exports to XLSX or JSON, the org chart to PNG, and an existing structure imports straight from Holaspirit. The code is published under the MIT licence and can run on your own servers. The product is free up to five active members, then 5 € per user per month.

Items 1, 4 and 14 happen outside any tool, and team chat stays in Slack or Teams. The review of tools for horizontal teams places each category on its own ground.

The worker cooperative EVEA is item 13 in practice. Shared governance was already running, but going from 60 to 140 people across three sites between 2020 and 2023, the hand-maintained document had stopped keeping up.

Frequently asked questions

How long does this checklist take?

Budget six months for a pilot team of 5 to 40 people: one week of measurement and framing, four to five weeks to write the roles, four weeks to set the decision rules, then four months of running before the first numbers-based review. Items 11 to 13 carry on indefinitely, since the structure of a horizontal organization keeps moving.

Do you have to write every role in the company before starting?

Write the roles of one team. A complete map of the organization takes months, ages while you build it, and lands too late for anyone to remember the problem it was meant to solve. A team that runs for six months on fifteen written roles gives you numbers to compare and an internal story that convinces better than a leadership memo.

What do you do with a role nobody wants to hold?

Three causes are possible, worth checking in this order: the role mixes activities that have nothing to do with each other, it has no real domain and amounts to carrying out other people's decisions, or the work itself interests nobody. The third case calls for a straight decision on whether the role should exist. In the meantime, mark it vacant with a review date rather than handing it by default to the person least able to say no.

Can all of this live in a spreadsheet?

Yes, and that is the right way to start. A spreadsheet holds up as long as the structure changes less than once a month and one person maintains it. It falls behind when two versions circulate by email, when the change history amounts to cell colours, or when it takes five minutes to answer "who decides this?".

How do you know whether the horizontal structure has taken?

The most reliable sign is the number of decisions escalated for lack of a clear mandate, counted every month in the governance meeting. When that number falls and the median decision lag from item 1 falls with it, the structure describes the work. When it stays flat while everyone reports that things are going well, the roles exist on paper and the old approval chain is still running underneath.

Where to start tomorrow

Items 1, 2 and 3 fit in a single day. You come out with three numbers written down, one page saying what stays closed, and a team that said yes. None of the twelve items that follow works if those three are missing.

See what Rolebase does, or create your organization for free up to five active members.