Organisations without hierarchy can create sustainable solutions

What makes people work for the common good without being directed to do so by some higher-ranking or external stakeholder?

Professors Dorthe Døjbak Håkonsson, Erik Reimer Larsen and Jacob Kjær Eskildsen decided to find out in 2018. The three professors are researchers at the Department of Management at Aarhus BSS, and the results of their research are now available in the article Effective Information Infrastructures for Collaborative Organizing: The Case of Maasai Mara, which has just been published in the prestigious journal Organization Science.

Organising good collaboration

The researchers chose a starting point in the theories behind organisational design, particularly research into how people learn to collaborate and create solutions in systems without hierarchical control. Because how can you work together and create sustainable solutions without having fixed structures in place?

"Good collaboration in a community-driven organisation begins with people coming together to find a solution to a particular challenge. This can be anything from minorl issues in the local community to global challenges such as climate change," says professor Dorthe Døjbak Håkonsson.

But even if you come together with the best intentions, conflicts and break downs in collaboration will often occur. So why does that happen, even when everyone is on the same page?

"Research has previously focused on the problem that collaboration within these kinds of organisations collapses because participants don’t have a shared set of values and, ultimately, lack the will to actually solve the problem," says Dorthe Døjbak Håkonsson.

"But that research overlooks the other important element of good collaboration: the ability of the participants to act in a coordinated manner and thereby reach their goals," says Dorthe Døjbak Håkonsson and continues:

"Action requires knowledge about what others are doing. If you know what others are doing, you’ll be able to predict how they’ll act in the future. You’ll believe that everyone is ready to invest in the cause, which will inspire you to take action yourself. And then the things will get rolling."

Field Study in Maasai Mara

How important is the shared experience of the situation for successful collaboration in a non-hierarchical organisation?

This was the question that the three researchers attempted to answer during a field study in Maasai Mara. Teams of Maasai livestock owners played a board game where they had to make a number of joint decisions about their cattle on the common grazing areas.

Maasai Mara, Kenya
We’ve all seen the pictures. The endless savannah. Thousands of wildebeests, zebras, antelopes, gazelles. And cattle. Lots of cattle owned by the local Maasai, who for thousands of years have grazed their animals on the savannah, which in its original state was owned by no one and everyone.

Without any interference from governments or other powers, the people of Mara found a way to manage their shared resource, making sure that there were never more cattle than there was grass, thereby ensuring that there would also be grass for the cattle next month: next year. Together, they prevented individual cattle owners from acting solely in their own self interest. They found a way to share the grazing so that everyone could survive, and they thereby created a sustainable system.

However, increasing privatisation and increasing population growth are just some of the reasons why it has been difficult in recent years to make these non-hierarchical collaboration structures work. The project from Aarhus University was interested in seeing whether it was possible to build on the Maasai’s own traditions for collaboration while simultaneously adjusting those structures so they could better account for current issues related to over-grazing.

The goal was to examine how collaboration developed across the groups depending on what participants knew about decisions made in the other groups. How does this information affect the participants' ability to find sustainable solutions to ensure that their shared area isn’t destroyed?

Data collection via cattle-grass board game
The researchers collected data in Maasai Mara in Kenya in 2018 and 2019. The data was collected via a board game that Erik Reimer Larsen and Dorthe Døjbak Håkonsson had developed specifically for the project. The game consists of three grazing areas (lots of grass/ grass and rocks/ rocks and only a little grass). The players were asked to place their small, plastic cows on their chosen grazing area, and after each round, they had to decide whether they wanted to buy or sell cattle. Their decisions were registered in a computer program that calculated the consequences of the decisions.

The researchers collected data in two rounds with a total of 258 participants. In the first round, the researchers played the game with eleven groups of cattle owners. After each round, players were told how the ecosystem had been impacted, for example there wasn’t much grass left in grazing area 1 and the calves had begun to die from starvation in grazing area 3. This helped participants learn about the situation as a whole but it didn’t provide them with any information on what the other groups had decided to do. So each group just played in their own little bubble with the result that the entire ecosystem collapsed.

In the second round, 12 new groups played the same game. Once again, participants were told about grazing levels, number of calves born and died, etc., so that they always knew how the ecosystem reacted to their decisions. However, this time they were also told how the other groups had decided to allocate their cattle, whether they had bought or sold cattle, etc.

Better common solutions

The experiment showed significantly different behaviour among the participants who received information about the actions taken in other groups. That information made them better able to coordinate their actions and make decisions that ensured sustainable use of their communal area, the savannah.

"Our experiments show that it’s important to make sure that members of non-hierarchical communities know what’s going on and who does what," concludes Dorthe Døjbak Håkonsson, who then provides an example of how the research results can be used:

"It's not enough that we agree that the climate needs to be saved, for example. We need to know that other people are actually doing something to reduce CO₂ emissions, for example by building wind turbines or using a bike rather than a car. Because then I’ll be able to figure out what I can do as a member of a global informal and non-hierarchical movement of citizens who are concerned about climate change."

That’s why it’s important to support the sharing of this kind of knowledge if you want communities to create sustainable solutions.