Hierarchy

In several systems, a hierarchical structure can be observed, i.e. rather than everyone being equal, such positions as ‘team leader’ or similar may arise. Going back to Edwin Hutchin’s example of navigating a ship into a port, it is obvious that the social structure of the crew plays an essential role. The navigator needs to be higher ranked than the sailors. That way he can give them the necessary orders for the efficient gathering of the essential information about the ship’s location. On the other hand, many other systems perform better if all individuals have equal levels of authority. Thinking back to our bacterial system, do we need a ‘master strain’, with higher control/power?

We asked the teams whether they felt that they had a team leader, and whether they felt they needed one.

• We found that in most teams, there was no hierarchical organisation; everyone in the team had equal authority and equal say in decision making processes. In most cases, the teams were quite happy with such organisation.
  We have a horizontal organisation, with no team leader. Anyone can bring a topic up, and everyone will chip in with the decision making, so that no single person can make the decision. We are happy with it that way.
• Some correlation between the team size and need for leadership/hierarchy could be observed. The teams that were larger and more dispersed were the ones to say that leadership would have helped with the team organisation and with keeping everyone on track.
  For a team as large as ours, a leader is absolutely necessary.
• For those who said they had or wanted to have a team leader, we asked to clarify what they thought the role would involve and what the benefits would be.
  I think the team needs a coordinator who would keep the bigger picture in mind and integrate all parts, and keep on track which parts need more attention.
  A team leader could help us decide if and when we needed to drop some part of the project, and motivate us to finish things well on time.
• However, it was also indicated that it would be difficult to decide who the leader should be:
  The team leader should be someone that is competent enough that the team can rely on their decisions.
  An authoritative leader would not be good, as that would feel forced.
• Interestingly, the question of leadership was the one for which the opinions varied quite a lot, even just within our own teams. Indeed, in our team, some people thought we had a leader, whereas others didn't see it that way. Also among other teams, when asked if a leader would be beneficial, people gave very varied answers.
• Hence, no certain conclusions can be drawn on the topic of hierarchy; it seems that the question of whether or not a leader/authority is beneficial depends on too many factors. It is influenced by such aspects as team size, the amount of communication in the team, the type of organisation of work used, personalities of individuals and various other factors.

Relevance for bacterial system design

This picks up on the idea by Wittebolle and colleagues (2009) that there is a need for an even distribution of functionally redundant members. They found that if the community depends too much on a dominant strain the population is more susceptible to fluctuations. Taken together with our findings from the iGEM interviews we are inclined to believe that it might be better to have no hierarchy in our system and ensure equal contribution of all components. This is in accordance with the horizontal structure of hierarchy we wanted to achieve with population control.