The previous article examined mission command as a structural doctrine for distributing decision-making authority in organizations operating under uncertainty. Mission command addresses the question of how to delegate execution authority while maintaining alignment with the leader’s intent. It does not address a prior question. Who should hold authority in the first place, and on what basis should that authority be assigned?

This article proposes a governance model called telemeritocracy. The term is a portmanteau of telocracy and meritocracy. A telocracy is an organization governed by its purpose. A meritocracy is an organization governed by demonstrated ability. Telemeritocracy combines these two principles. Authority is assigned to those who have demonstrated the ability to advance the organization’s purpose.

The model is not new in practice. Scientific laboratories, engineering teams, and open source communities have long operated on something resembling this principle. What is new is the explicit synthesis and the argument that this synthesis deserves its own name because it differs in important ways from either telocracy or meritocracy alone.

Software Versions

# Date (UTC)
$ date -u "+%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S +0000"
2026-02-18 15:58:18 +0000

# OS and Version
$ uname -vm
Darwin Kernel Version 23.6.0: Mon Jul 29 21:14:30 PDT 2024; root:xnu-10063.141.2~1/RELEASE_ARM64_T6000 arm64

$ sw_vers
ProductName:		macOS
ProductVersion:		14.6.1
BuildVersion:		23G93

# Hardware Information
$ system_profiler SPHardwareDataType | sed -n '8,10p'
      Chip: Apple M1 Max
      Total Number of Cores: 10 (8 performance and 2 efficiency)
      Memory: 32 GB

Telocracy

A telocracy is a system of governance organized around a substantive purpose. The term derives from the Greek telos, meaning end, purpose, or goal, combined with -cracy, meaning rule. A teleocratic organization exists to achieve something specific. Its structure, roles, and rules are instruments in service of that end.

The philosopher Michael Oakeshott developed the most influential treatment of this concept in On Human Conduct in 1975. Oakeshott distinguishes two ideal types of human association.

An enterprise association, which Oakeshott calls universitas, is teleocratic. Its members are united by shared substantive purposes. They function as role-players in a coordinated endeavor where individual aspirations remain secondary to the enterprise’s defining end. A business, a research laboratory, a military unit, and a political campaign are all enterprise associations. A person enters and exits such an association voluntarily.

A civil association, which Oakeshott calls societas, is nomocratic. Its members share procedural agreements and rules of conduct rather than common goals. The laws of a civil association set out a structure for human interaction but do not advance or inhibit the particular causes of individuals or groups. A constitutional republic is the paradigmatic example of civil association.

Friedrich Hayek developed a parallel distinction in Law, Legislation and Liberty in 1973. Hayek describes a state as teleocratic “if the same hierarchy of ends is binding on all its members” and nomocratic “if its general welfare consists solely in the preservation of an abstract and end-independent order.”

Both Oakeshott and Hayek warn that teleocratic governance becomes dangerous when applied to the state. If a government defines a substantive purpose and organizes all of society to achieve it, citizens who do not share that purpose have no meaningful exit. Constitutional stability erodes when substantive outcomes take priority over procedural rules.

This warning is important but it applies specifically to coercive institutions. Oakeshott explicitly notes that enterprise association is the natural and appropriate model for voluntary organizations. A business, a research team, or an engineering department is properly teleocratic. Members join voluntarily to pursue a shared purpose. The organization’s structure should serve that purpose. The danger arises only when teleocratic governance is imposed on people who cannot leave.

Meritocracy

The word meritocracy was coined by the British sociologist Michael Young in his 1958 satirical novel The Rise of the Meritocracy. The book describes a dystopian future United Kingdom in which merit, defined as intelligence plus effort, has become the central organizing principle of society. The narrative ends in 2034 with a popular revolt against the meritocratic elite.

Young intended the term as a warning. He represented meritocracy satirically as the cold scientization of ability, the bureaucratization of talent, and the creation of a new ruling class that could justify its privilege through the claim of deserving it. In June 2001, six months before his death, Young published an essay in The Guardian titled “Down with Meritocracy,” protesting that Tony Blair’s Labour Party had adopted his satirical coinage as a term of praise.

Despite Young’s intent, the term was widely adopted as a positive ideal. Meritocracy in organizational contexts means that authority, advancement, and influence are assigned based on demonstrated ability and measurable contribution rather than seniority, social class, or political connection.

The technology industry and open source communities have been prominent sites of meritocratic ideology. The Apache Software Foundation formally describes its governance model as meritocratic. Contributors earn decision-making rights through sustained, high-quality contributions. The progression from user to contributor to committer to Project Management Committee member is determined by demonstrated merit as assessed by existing members.

Meritocracy has well-documented failure modes.

The first failure mode is measurement. Merit is ill-defined, and its measurement reflects the biases of those who define it. When organizations claim to evaluate people on merit, they often evaluate people on a narrow set of visible outputs that may not capture the full range of valuable contributions.

The second failure mode is privilege replication. The ability to contribute often depends on access to resources that are unequally distributed. Free time to contribute to open source projects, for example, is itself a mark of privilege. A meritocratic system that does not account for this may reproduce existing inequalities while claiming to transcend them.

The third failure mode is self-serving bias. The people who define merit are typically those who have already succeeded under the existing definition. The ruling class becomes the gatekeeper of an ill-defined concept that conveniently validates its own position.

These critiques are serious but they apply primarily to meritocracy as a complete governance philosophy. When meritocracy is used as one component of a more carefully specified system, and when the definition of merit is explicitly tied to a defined purpose, several of these failure modes can be mitigated.

Telemeritocracy

Telemeritocracy synthesizes telocracy and meritocracy into a single governance principle. The organization defines its purpose. Authority is assigned to those who have demonstrated the ability to advance that purpose.

The synthesis addresses weaknesses in each component.

Pure telocracy defines the purpose but does not specify how to assign decision-making authority. A teleocratic organization knows what it is trying to achieve but has no principled basis for deciding who should make which decisions. It risks concentrating authority in whoever claims to speak for the purpose, regardless of competence.

Pure meritocracy defines a basis for assigning authority but does not anchor that basis to a purpose. A meritocratic organization rewards demonstrated ability but “demonstrated ability at what?” is left underspecified. Without a telos to constrain the definition of merit, the system drifts toward rewarding whatever the current power structure values, which may or may not align with what the organization needs.

Telemeritocracy constrains both. The telos defines what the organization is trying to achieve. Merit is defined relative to that telos. The people who hold decision-making authority are those who have demonstrated the ability to advance the organization’s stated purpose. When the purpose changes, the distribution of authority should change with it, because the relevant expertise may differ.

This is not a novel practice. It is a novel name for a compound governance principle that already operates in many technical organizations. What the name provides is a vocabulary for discussing, evaluating, and deliberately designing governance structures that combine purpose alignment with competence-based authority.

Precedents

Several organizational models exhibit telemeritocratic characteristics even when they do not use the term.

Apache Software Foundation

The Apache Software Foundation governs over 350 open source projects using a formally meritocratic model. Contributors earn decision-making rights through sustained, high-quality contributions to a project’s stated mission. The progression from user to committer to Project Management Committee member is governed by lazy consensus. A few positive votes with no negative vote is sufficient to proceed. A negative vote requires an explanation and an alternative proposal.

The model is explicitly teleocratic. Each project has a defined charter. Merit is assessed relative to that charter. A contributor who writes excellent code for a different project’s goals does not thereby earn authority over the current project. Purpose and merit are coupled.

The IETF

The Internet Engineering Task Force operates on the principle articulated by Dave Clark of MIT in 1992. “We reject kings, presidents, and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code.”

RFC 7282 defines rough consensus as being achieved “when all issues are addressed, but not necessarily accommodated.” The critical distinction is examining unresolved technical objections rather than tallying supporters. Running code serves as a merit signal. A proposal backed by a working implementation carries more weight than a proposal backed only by argument. The IETF’s purpose is to produce practical, interoperable internet standards. Authority flows to those who advance that purpose through technical contribution.

Academic Shared Governance

University departments operate under a model of shared governance defined by the American Association of University Professors as “the joint responsibility of faculty, administrations, and governing boards to govern colleges and universities.” Faculty have primary responsibility over curriculum because their training and knowledge make them “distinctly qualified to exercise decision-making authority in their areas of expertise.”

This is telemeritocratic in structure. The purpose is education and scholarship. Authority over academic matters is assigned to those with demonstrated expertise in the relevant domain. Administrative authority over budgets and operations is assigned separately.

Valve Corporation

Valve Corporation published its Handbook for New Employees in 2012, describing a company without formal management. All desks have wheels. Employees form ad hoc teams by physically moving to projects they find compelling.

Valve is an instructive failure case. Former employees have described a “pseudo-flat structure” with an informal, unacknowledged layer of management. Without formal authority structures, power consolidated around personal relationships and social capital rather than demonstrated merit. Employees compared the environment to Lord of the Flies. The flat structure was blamed for lack of diversity and perverse incentives around performance reviews.

Jo Freeman anticipated this outcome in 1972. Her essay “The Tyranny of Structurelessness” argues that truly structureless groups are impossible. “Any group of people of whatever nature that comes together for any length of time for any purpose will inevitably structure itself in some fashion.” When organizations reject formal structures, they do not eliminate hierarchy. They hide it behind informal arrangements that become harder to challenge.

The lesson for telemeritocracy is that the governance structure must be explicit. If authority is to be assigned based on merit relative to a defined purpose, the mechanisms for assessing merit, assigning authority, and resolving disputes must be formalized and transparent. An informal telemeritocracy degenerates into an informal oligarchy.

Mission Command

The previous article on mission command describes a military doctrine that is structurally telemeritocratic. The commander sets the intent, which defines the organizational purpose. Authority to execute is delegated to subordinate leaders based on their competence and proximity to the problem. The six principles of mission command as codified in Army Doctrine Publication 6-0 include building cohesive teams through mutual trust, creating shared understanding, providing clear commander’s intent, exercising disciplined initiative, using mission orders, and accepting prudent risk.

Mission command is telemeritocratic because authority flows to those who can best advance the mission and because the mission itself is explicitly defined and communicated.

Why Telemeritocracy Fits Engineering Teams

Engineering and scientific organizations are natural candidates for telemeritocratic governance because their operating conditions align with the model’s prerequisites.

The first prerequisite is a definable purpose. Engineering organizations typically have clear missions. Build a product. Solve a research problem. Maintain a system. Ship a standard. The telos is usually concrete enough to serve as an anchor for defining merit.

The second prerequisite is distributed expertise. In engineering organizations the people closest to the problem typically have more relevant information than their managers. Telemeritocracy acknowledges this asymmetry and builds authority structures around it. The person who best understands the database replication topology should hold decision-making authority over database replication changes, regardless of where they sit in the organizational hierarchy.

The third prerequisite is that contribution quality is assessable. Code can be reviewed. Designs can be evaluated. Systems can be tested. Research results can be replicated. While the assessment of merit is never perfect, engineering disciplines provide more objective signals of contribution quality than most organizational contexts.

The fourth prerequisite is voluntary membership. Engineers join companies and teams voluntarily. They can leave if the purpose changes or if they disagree with the governance structure. This satisfies Oakeshott’s condition for legitimate teleocratic governance. The organization may properly be organized around a shared purpose because its members chose to be there.

The benefits follow from these prerequisites. Decision-making scales because authority is distributed to those with the most relevant expertise. Innovation improves because the people closest to novel problems have the authority to explore solutions. Purpose alignment is maintained because the definition of merit is anchored to the organizational telos. Accountability is clearer because authority comes with explicit expectations of contribution.

Risks and Failure Modes

Telemeritocracy has failure modes that deserve explicit attention.

Goodhart’s Law. “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” Any metric used to assess merit will be gamed once it becomes the basis for advancement. Lines of code, number of commits, number of papers published, and patent counts are all metrics that have been optimized at the expense of the underlying purpose they were meant to serve. A telemeritocratic organization must continuously revisit whether its merit signals still correlate with purpose advancement.

The Peter Principle. Laurence Peter observed in 1969 that in a hierarchy, employees are promoted based on success in previous jobs until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent. Telemeritocracy is not immune. A brilliant individual contributor who is elevated to an architectural role may lack the communication and coordination skills that the new role requires. Merit in one domain does not automatically transfer to another.

Mission drift. The telos itself can change gradually without anyone noticing. Social enterprises and purpose-driven organizations face the risk of slowly deviating from their stated purpose as external pressures shift incentives. A telemeritocratic organization must periodically re-examine its purpose and verify that its authority structures still align with that purpose.

Authoritarianism risk. Bryan Cheang argued in the Journal of Institutional Economics in 2024 that mission-directed governance “could require the use of authoritarian and disciplinary mechanisms to sustain mission focus in an environment of uncertainty.” When purpose alignment becomes mandatory rather than voluntary, teleocratic governance slides toward coercion. This risk is mitigated in voluntary organizations where members can exit, but it remains a concern in organizations where exit costs are high.

Informal hierarchy. As the Valve case illustrates, removing formal hierarchy does not eliminate hierarchy. It makes hierarchy informal, opaque, and harder to challenge. A telemeritocratic organization must formalize its authority structures even though formalization introduces bureaucratic overhead. The alternative is worse.

Narrow definitions of merit. If the organization defines merit too narrowly, it will systematically undervalue contributions that fall outside the definition. Community building, mentorship, documentation, and operational maintenance are all forms of merit that are often invisible in systems that reward only technical novelty.

When Not to Use Telemeritocracy

Telemeritocracy is not appropriate in every organizational context.

In organizations where the purpose is contested or where members did not voluntarily agree to the purpose, teleocratic governance is illegitimate. A government cannot properly be telemeritocratic because citizens did not choose its purpose and cannot easily exit.

In organizations where expertise is concentrated at the top of the hierarchy rather than distributed throughout the organization, a more traditional hierarchical model may be more efficient. Telemeritocracy is designed for organizations where the people closest to the problem have better information than the people giving orders. When that condition does not hold, the model loses its advantage.

In regulated environments where compliance with specific procedures is legally required, distributing authority based on expertise may conflict with regulatory requirements for defined chains of accountability. A nuclear power plant requires a clear command hierarchy regardless of how expertise is distributed.

In organizations without the maturity to support transparent merit assessment, attempting telemeritocracy will produce the informal oligarchies that Freeman warned about. The prerequisites of trust, transparent evaluation, and genuine commitment to purpose must be in place before the model can function.

Summary

Telemeritocracy is a governance model that assigns decision-making authority based on demonstrated ability to advance a defined organizational purpose. It combines two established concepts. Telocracy provides the purpose. Meritocracy provides the basis for assigning authority. The synthesis constrains both. Purpose prevents meritocracy from rewarding ability disconnected from organizational needs. Merit prevents telocracy from concentrating authority in whoever claims to speak for the purpose.

The model has precedents in open source governance, academic shared governance, internet standards bodies, and military mission command. It is well suited to engineering and scientific organizations where the purpose is definable, expertise is distributed, contribution quality is assessable, and membership is voluntary.

Telemeritocracy is not a universal solution. It fails when merit measurement is corrupted, when purpose drifts unexamined, when authority structures remain informal, or when the organization lacks the maturity to support transparent evaluation. It is inappropriate for coercive institutions, regulated environments requiring strict chains of accountability, and organizations where expertise is centralized rather than distributed.

For engineering and scientific teams that operate under uncertainty, value distributed expertise, and align around a shared purpose, telemeritocracy provides a principled framework for deciding who should hold authority and why.

Future Reading

Michael Oakeshott’s On Human Conduct provides the foundational distinction between teleocratic and nomocratic governance. Michael Young’s The Rise of the Meritocracy is the original satirical treatment of meritocracy as a social system. Jo Freeman’s “The Tyranny of Structurelessness” is essential reading on the dangers of informal hierarchy in organizations that reject formal authority structures. The Apache Software Foundation’s governance documentation provides a working example of formalized meritocratic governance for open source projects. RFC 7282 describes the IETF’s consensus model in detail. The companion article on mission command examines a military doctrine that is structurally telemeritocratic.

References