From Hierarchy to Intelligence: What Block's Org Reset Means for SMBs

The org chart was never the goal

In a recent essay, Jack Dorsey and Roelof Botha walked through where the modern org chart actually comes from. The short version: it's a 2,000-year-old bandwidth workaround.

The Romans figured out you can only directly manage three to eight people before information starts dropping. So they stacked managers in layers. Prussia later added a “general staff,” specialists whose only job was to move information sideways across the hierarchy. American railroads in the 1840s borrowed the idea. Frederick Taylor optimized it further. The Manhattan Project tested cross-functional teams under one DRI and it worked, but only as a wartime exception. Post-war, the matrix org tried to fix it. Spotify, Holacracy, and Valve all tried to fix it again.

None of them solved the fundamental tradeoff: narrow span of control means more layers, but more layers mean slower information.

Every org chart you've ever worked inside was a compromise on that one equation.

What Block is actually proposing

Block's argument isn't “use AI to make our managers faster.” It's that hierarchy itself exists to solve an information-routing problem, and modern AI can solve that problem differently.

They lay out two foundations:

1. A company world model.Because they work remote-first, every decision, doc, commit, and progress note already exists as a machine-readable artifact. AI can hold a continuous picture of what's actually happening in the business. That picture used to be a manager's job to assemble in their head.
2. A customer world model.Cash App and Square give them years of transaction data. AI can hold a continuous picture of the customer that compounds over time. That picture used to be a product manager's job to assemble in their head.

On top of those two models they propose four building blocks (capabilities, world models, an intelligence layer, and delivery interfaces) and three roles that replace the conventional manager:

• Individual Contributors. Deep specialists operating one part of the system, pulling context from the world model instead of from standups.
• DRIs (Directly Responsible Individuals). Cross-cutting problem owners with real authority to allocate resources for 90 days.
• Player-Coaches. Builders who also grow people, instead of managers who exist to route information.

The pitch is a “company built as an intelligence” rather than a hierarchy.

Why this matters more for SMBs, not less

Read that and it's tempting to think: cool, a 10,000-person fintech can afford to rebuild itself around AI. What does that have to do with a 50-person homecare agency, or a marine staffing firm, or a condo-HOA accounting practice?

Here's the part most people miss. Most ops-heavy SMBs already operate without a hierarchy that works.There's no general staff. No DRIs. There's one person, usually an operations lead or a long-tenured admin, whose head holds the entire “company world model.” When they're at lunch, the company is offline. When they retire, the company forgets how it works.

The 50-person business doesn't have too much hierarchy. It has none. And it's strained the one person who's been holding the org together.

Which means Block's argument lands harder at our scale, not softer.

• The company world model already lives in someone's brain. We just have to externalize it.
• The customer world model already exists, scattered across email threads, Drive folders, Excel sheets, and CRM notes. We just have to make it queryable.
• There's no manager layer to displace. Just one drowning person to give a brain to.

What an SMB “intelligence” actually looks like

This is what we build at Hawkify, and it doesn't look like a Block-scale reorg. It looks like four specific things:

1. One bottleneck role identified. The person whose mental model the business depends on.
2. Their knowledge externalized. Every doc, policy, vendor email, client history, regulatory rule, and one-off decision they carry around.
3. An intelligence layer in front of it. An agent that answers the questions that role gets asked all day, in seconds, with citations, available to every employee.
4. A delivery interface that fits the workflow. Slack, a tab in the tool they already use, or a Claude plus Excel handoff. Not a new dashboard nobody opens.

That's the SMB version of “from hierarchy to intelligence.” For a homecare agency it's an internal knowledge agent every caregiver can query. For a commercial builder it's a document-search agent across years of project files. For a marine staffing firm it's a credential-matching agent. For a condo-HOA accounting firm it's Claude operating Excel.

Same underlying move as Block. Four orders of magnitude smaller. Faster payback.

The org chart is not the asset

Block's bet, and ours, is the same: the asset isn't the org chart. The asset is what the business actually knows. Hierarchy was always just plumbing to move that knowledge around when humans were the only thing that could carry it.

The plumbing is being replaced. The knowledge stays.

If you're running an ops-heavy business and you've been quietly wondering why everything keeps routing back to one person, that's not a leadership problem to solve with more org chart. It's a knowledge problem to solve with a brain.

We build the brain.