The one thing I truly value of dialogue-based podcasts is that no matter the topics, the conversation often wanders into unexpected and insightful places. This is how this post came to be, specifically when listening to the Signals and Threads episode Why Testing is Hard and How to Fix it with Will Wilson.

In these times of international turmoil, financial crunch and decreasing numbers of students, there are important discussions about restructuring our University’s governance and processes, with the aim to make its decision processes faster and operations cheaper and more efficient. So it should not be too surprising that while listening to the episode my attention kept picking up all remarks about workplace culture. Maybe it is confirmation bias, but they kept coming back to highlight how collaboration, honesty, and shared learning together create a working environment that is both constructive and rapidly adaptable.

At some point it also reminded me of similar ideas in an older episode of the same podcast, Solving Puzzles in Production with Liora Friedberg. Which I also needed to re-listen before writing and turned out to be rather interesting in the context of this post.

But let me get to the point. Two things kept surfacing: flat, trust-based structures, and the tone around failure. And both felt uncomfortably relevant to what is happening at our university.

# Flatter organization structures

Jane Street is a large quantitative trading firm, well known in the OCaml world for the role it plays in shaping and supporting the ecosystem. What interested me most was the way it is organised. The company describes itself as having a low-hierarchy culture, where people work together across roles and where seniority matters less than one might expect. It stresses intellectual humility, fewer layers of bureaucracy, and easy access to colleagues across departments.

I honestly did not know any of this before preparing this post. What comes through from these two episodes is a structure that strongly incentivizes intellectual humility and knowledge sharing over the cult of personalities.

But what struck a nerve that led to this post was the remark that they have no hierarchy for its own sake. I thought of these big financial corporations as huge power pyramids, so this was truly unexpected. From what I could infer, so take it with a grain of salt, seniority of course exists but internally the organization is quite flat, with no official titles and a culture that allows anyone to participate in decisions, ask questions, or challenge assumptions. If the default expectation is that status does not matter and ideas can come from anywhere, then people will spend less time protecting status and more time learning from each other and improving the work in front of them.

Jane Street publicly emphasises shared goals and collaboration, describing staff as partners working together, with the firm being only as strong as its people. The few personal anecdotes I know confirmed that they have a great office culture. But they also seem to put their money where their mouth is: the incentive structure, according to what they say, builds around bonuses following the company’s success more than the individual contributions.

For a university, this makes for an uncomfortable comparison. We often say we value collaboration, but the rewards we hand out lean heavily toward individual publication counts, individual grants, and individual reputation. That arrangement inevitably pushes people toward defensive behaviour and promotes self-entitlement and big personalities over team players. This seems to me reflected both in the academic and the services side of the organization. And while I am overgeneralizing, I think it plays an important role in the issues we are facing.

It is easy to assume that a low-hierarchy culture would slow things down. That is also the message we seem to be getting from the many reports on how the governance of our university would benefit from a big merger of faculties: fewer people on the decision table will mean fast decisions and agility. This may be fast due to the lack of plurality of views, but the downside of it, in my mind, is an increasingly small and isolated decision oligarchy, increasingly distanced from the needs and issues on the workfloor.

Then I listen to the podcast and hear that Jane Street makes speed possible by combining openness and shared ownership of their infrastructure. I think that could be a useful lesson for universities, still entrenched in bureaucratic structures from the 70s, even though the details are different. Our sort-of equivalent of Jane Street’s technical infrastructure would be the set of practices and structures through which research and teaching actually happen. When those are obscure, disconnected or held together by a few overworked people, it does not seem strange that the institution moves slowly. When they are properly “documented”, shared, and maintained with care, people can act with more confidence.

Universities describe themselves as places of knowledge, yet they routinely allow essential knowledge to live in people’s heads or in informal networks that disappear when someone leaves. Ok and sometimes in old email threads. Jane Street seems to treat documentation and internal teaching as a crucial part of the work itself. With such an attitude people can join, learn quickly, and contribute without having to wait years to absorb the unwritten rules. It brings in a kind of safety that makes good work possible and an onboarding free of (or with reduced) anxiety.

# The role of failure

Which leads me to a second important point, especially for universities: the tone around mistakes. This was in the product engineering episode and I had somehow forgotten about it: Jane Street actively promotes a culture where people are not blamed for making mistakes. That sounds like a cliche, until you look at what it means in practice at Jane Street. When something breaks, people are expected to raise their hand, explain what happened, and get help working through the problem. The emphasis falls on understanding the failure and improving the system. The response when someone does raise their hand is supportive and leads to collaborative problem solving, which means that the incentive again falls on the sharing and the collaboration. That is a hard culture to build, because it has to be real before anyone will believe it, but it sounds like they were able to make it the working norm. So it is achievable after all.

Now, academic life depends on the same kind of safety, even if we have only recently started to put it that way. Students need to admit when they do not understand and ask about it. Early-career researchers need to ask questions before ideas are fully formed and need honest feedback to develop. More senior members of staff need to be able to say or hear that their approach (technical or as leaders) is not working. None of that happens well in an atmosphere of fear or embarrassment, and the overemphasized successes and the all-round excellence required for career promotions do not help. The result is a culture of silence where many people are afraid to speak up, ask for help, or admit failure. That is bad for personal wellbeing and for the workplace itself.

Of course there are ongoing steps in the right direction, look at DORA or Recognition and Rewards (Erkennen en Waarderen) here in the Netherlands. But they are, so far (and in most cases), more used as HR slogans than anything else.

# What can we do?

So can we do something? Do we really need a broccoli tree of management layers, where small boards disconnected from the workplace make sure to take isolated decisions in a bubble? Or can we do something different?

I should note upfront that some things in how a university is organized and its bureaucracy cannot be changed, they are actually written in the national law or in European laws. But I am pretty sure that there is quite some room for work.

What I would push for is a flatter structure, with management much closer to the rest of staff, and many dynamic collaborative units of people closest to the work with delegated real responsibility, in a true collaboration between academic and support staff. This sort of structure feels a lot more agile than layers of centralized power. Open and transparent feedback loops (loops = two-way dialogue!) can contribute to reducing the distance between the problems, the people who face them and the ones able to act on them, helping collaboration and making truly informed decisions.

Of course, this needs to go hand in hand with a promotion of openness, collaboration and a de-shaming of failure. The latter will be crucial to help us all to question our ideas and learn from them instead of hiding problems.

We saw the stigma around failure during our Young Academy Groningen project, when we very unsuccessfully tried to make a collective CV of Failures. We also saw the opportunity though: once problems were discussed in the open, they became easier to recognise, easier to avoid, and much less intimidating for the people coming after us. That matters especially for younger academics, who often enter an environment in which senior colleagues (and sometimes also peers) are seen through idealized and unrealistic lenses. This is a huge benefit of such a change: when failure can be discussed without embarrassment, people speak more openly with one another. The atmosphere becomes less guarded, more cooperative, and in a small but real way lighter. People stop treating mistakes as social danger, they just become useful information.

This shift on failure could also be useful in the classroom. We could have some seminars to make space for confusion, for presenters to share open problems, false starts, and things they do not yet understand, rather than treating every seminar as a stage for polished results. Research is mostly the messy middle, and almost none of our sharing formats make room for it.

It should go without saying that this logic should apply also to policies, procedures, and services. They should be assessed honestly, not protected out of habit or pride. If something is not meeting the goals it was meant to meet, we should have the humility to revise it or drop it, sometimes substantially, rather than preserving it because it was produced by some committee, or is an influential someone’s pet project. This kind of review, made structural, would make practical improvements easier to introduce without first looking for someone to blame.

We could also make knowledge transfer count in annual reviews, not as a token acknowledgement but as a genuine criterion. Who has written things down in a way that helps others? Who has made their working methods legible? Who is a supportive and active mentor? These activities currently carry almost no career weight, which is precisely why almost no one does them. We should structure mentorship as an explicit responsibility with real expectations, rather than leaving it as an informal arrangement that works well when a supervisor happens to be naturally good at it and collapses otherwise. Of course we have training, and it is improving, but it is again mostly an HR-related checkbox at the moment.

In the end, we should drop the slogans (at least internally) and make changes that show people that they are trusted, that it is safe to speak, and that we value what they do and are eager to learn from it, rewarding explicitly these behaviours.

# Is it all just a utopia?

I don’t think so, but who am I to claim this? Turns out that many experts have been working on making these changes possible also in large, formerly bureaucratic industries, with important successes. There are many research-backed examples of this working, with some explicit recipes for what works and how.

Recently I hear a lot change management being mentioned around me. Its popularity seems to have arisen from the failure of large top-down plan-driven approaches and the need to involve the whole organization more constructively (and humanely). I did not have time to look much into it, but it seems a possible starting point (and feels quite different from what the process we have gone through so far). Moreover, it seems to align with another resource that fired up my hope. This is already a rather long post, so I’ll just drop the link: Humanocracy. To quote the book’s description:

From Gary Hamel, Wall Street Journal’s #1 business thinker, and noted consultant Michele Zanini, a revolutionary manifesto and practical manual for building organizations that are more daring, resilient, creative, and inspiring places to work.

Let me stress two words: practical manual. The style of writing is perhaps not my favourite, but the book is good and feels actionable. It just needs the good will to try something different and stop with the current bureaucratic bullshit, whose only purpose is to control and cementify the organization.