A Thought Experiment on Business Structure

This is a thought experiment about a hypothetical company. What if every employee at that company had the opportunity to choose the project they work on? Every December 1st, every employee could leave their current project and work on another project. Or start their own project. Or they could choose to continue their current project. What if repeats weren’t allowed? What kind of culture would emerge? What patterns might we see? Could a business really operate like that?

I have a few thoughts about this hypothetical scenario. I think the “no repeats” rule is interesting because one of two things could happen. No one at the company really invests into a project and all quality suffers, or the fact that you won’t be working on the project in a year encourages everyone to document everything about the project. Quality improves. Perhaps there will be a mix of people, but ideally everyone wants the projects to succeed, right? After all, the amount of money each project makes is directly in the employees’ hands. I’m an optimistic person, so I see this type of scenario leading toward better quality projects. I also think people would feel encouraged to think about clean separations. Perhaps automation would develop to quickly onboard / offboard employees with the correct credentials and access to each project.

Another important question to answer: are there size limits to a project? What if 100 people want to work on a project that needs only ten people? Is that allowed? I think yes. If a project attracts 100 people, then clearly it is a promising project. All of the extra people will go towards growing the project even faster or with better quality. The idea of better quality projects is then reinforced because better quality projects will attract more people, making the project more likely to survive.

Aside from project quality, I think overall employee happiness would improve. Personally, I would enjoy a system like this because I have so many interests that I could try out for a year. I could grow my skills in an area that I like without fully committing to that one area for my entire career. I imagine that many newer employees would behave the same way, so they can find what they most like. More senior employees will probably already know what they like and choose projects in those areas. Of course, a senior employee can join a project they have no background in simply because they are interested in it. If you ask me, that sounds really great for employees because their destiny is purely in their own hands.

As I mentioned, I am an optimist though. I have to ask myself: would this really happen? Maybe with the right culture it could. How would management work? Are there no managers? What about pay? Raises? Performance reviews? Here are my thoughts: as with all employees, managers also choose a project each year. Naturally, their duties are cross-cutting (meaning they can interact across projects) though, so maybe this would provide interesting synergy (yes, actual synergy) between similar projects. I’m not really sure about pay though, because it is a tricky subject. Perhaps it would need to be a function of the project you work on for that year in order to naturally encourage successful projects to grow. It would also help balance the number of employees in high-value/low-interest projects and low-value/high-interest projects.

What do you think about this hypothetical company? Is it viable? Would you want to work there? What problems do you see arising, and are there ways to remediate those problems naturally?