Interesting discussion today on autonomy within teams - there is a strong propensity to grant subteams autonomy, as long as they do exactly what the team leadership want.
Recognising that this is implausible, the leadership attempt to create an organizational structure strong enough to guide behavior in the desired direction. They also strive to make the team’s work legible enough that discrepancies can be caught.
Even among teams that Know Better there is a strong pull towards this authoritarian high modernist tendency, to use the language of Seeing Like A State. As with the larger scheme, it almost always fail to capture the illegible aspects of an organization that made it effective. It’s very hard to tell the difference between things the team was successful because of versus in spite of.