The pop-up employer: Build a team, do the job, say goodbye

At first glance, the organization chart for the maker of True Story, a card game and mobile app in which players trade stories from their daily lives, resembled that of any company. There was a content division to churn out copy for game cards; graphic designers to devise the logo and the packaging; developers to build the mobile app and the website. There was even a play-testing division to catch potential hiccups.

Upon closer inspection, the producer of True Story was not really a firm: The workers were all freelancers who typically had never met and, perhaps more striking, the entire organization existed solely to create the game and then disbanded.

True Story was a case study in what two Stanford professors call “flash organizations” — ephemeral set-ups to execute a single, complex project in ways traditionally associated with corporations, nonprofit groups or governments.

The professors, Melissa Valentine and Michael Bernstein, contend that information technology has made the flash organization a suddenly viable form across a number of industries.

And, in fact, intermediaries are already springing up across industries like software and pharmaceuticals to assemble such organizations. They rely heavily on data and algorithms to determine which workers are best suited to one another, and also on decidedly lower-tech innovations, like middle management.

But to the extent that temporary organizations replace permanent ones, they have the potential to add to the economic uncertainty that workers must increasingly contend with.

Temporary organizations capable of taking on complicated projects have existed for decades, of course, perhaps nowhere more prominently than in Hollywood, where producers assemble teams of directors, writers, actors, costume and set designers and a variety of other craftsmen and technicians to execute projects with budgets in the tens if not hundreds of millions.

In principle, many companies would find it more cost-effective to increase staff members as needed than to maintain a permanent presence. The reason they do not, economists have long argued, is that the mechanics of hiring, training and monitoring workers separately for each project can be prohibitively expensive.

But Valentine, who studies management science, and Bernstein, a computer scientist, notes that technology is sharply lowering these costs.

“Computation, we think, has an opportunity to dramatically shift several costs in a way that traditional organizations haven’t realized,” Bernstein said. “It’s way easier to search for people, bargain and contract with them.”

Three lessons stand out across the flash-type models. First is that the platforms tend to be highly dependent on data and computing power. Roger Dickey, a co-founder of Gigster, says every member of each team assembled by the company reviews every other member, generating 20 to 30 data points per person per project. Artificial intelligence then looks for patterns and helps the company figure out how best to build future teams.

Second is the importance of well-established roles. Sociologists and organizational theorists have marvelled for decades at the way disaster response teams or emergency room trauma units pull off complex tasks, even if they have never met before, because the division of labour is understood.

The same goes for flash teams. Dave Summa, who worked on a team that the Business Talent Group assembled to advise a major agribusiness company on which markets to compete in, said it fell to him to define the questions that needed answering and the mode of analysis, while a colleague oversaw teams of workers who produced specific plans.

Then there is perhaps the least likely of innovations: middle management. The typical freelancer performs the workerbee tasks. Flashlike organizations have tended to combine both workers and managers.

The flash organization has obvious limits. It tends to work best for projects with well-defined life spans, not continuing engagements. Microsoft probably would not set up one to build Windows given that it releases a new version every few years.

Yet the flash model appears to have revolutionary potential. If nothing else, millions of middle-management jobs that fell by the wayside in recent decades might one day be reincarnated as freelance project-manager positions. “The bottleneck now is project managers,” Valentine said. “It’s a really tough position to fill.”