Roles instead of positions

One person, several roles, possibly in several cells — this is the smallest of the structural changes and the one that runs deepest. It also creates the field's most honest unsolved problem: if there are no positions, what is a career?

What actually changes

A position is a box on a chart that a person occupies. It bundles tasks, authority, salary band and status into one unit, and it exists whether or not anyone is in it. A role is a set of responsibilities someone takes on — and a person can hold several at once.

Position

📦 A box you sit in

One person, one box, one job title.
Tasks, authority, pay and status bundled together.
Changing what you do means changing your box.
The box outlives the person; recruiting means refilling it.

Role

🎭 Something you take on

One person, several roles, possibly across several cells.
Responsibility is separate from pay and from status.
Roles can be handed over one at a time, without a reorganization.
Roles follow the work, so they change as the work changes.

What that looks like for one person

Customer contact · Enterprise cell Pricing · Enterprise cell Onboarding buddy · People cell On-call rota · Platform cell

Four roles, three cells, one person. In a position-based organization this would either be one impossibly broad job description or three jobs nobody has.

Why this matters more than it sounds

🔀

The organization can change without a reorganization

When work shifts, roles move between people. That is a conversation, not a restructuring project. In a position-based organization the same change requires new job descriptions, new reporting lines, and usually a committee.

🔍

Responsibility becomes visible

A job title tells you almost nothing about what someone is responsible for. A named role does. This is also the cheapest defence against the criticism that self-organization hides power: written roles are inspectable, informal influence is not.

🧠

It matches how knowledge work actually behaves

Capability sits with people, not with boxes. Someone who is the best person to make a particular judgement should be making it, regardless of where they sit on a chart. Roles let that be formal rather than a favour.

🤖

It happens to be the AI-ready format

An unexpected side effect noted by practitioners: organizations that describe work as explicit roles find it far easier to decide what to delegate to software or to an AI agent. A vague job description cannot be handed over; a named responsibility with a clear output can.

The open question: what is a career now?

This is where the model owes an honest answer and does not have a complete one. Remove positions, and you remove the ladder — which was carrying more weight than anyone admitted.

Advancement A promotion used to be a visible event: a new title, a new box, a public signal that you had progressed. Taking on a bigger role is real progression, but it is far less legible — to colleagues, to family, and to the next employer reading your CV.

Pay Salary bands are attached to positions. Without them, someone has to decide what a person earns, and "pay the person, not the position" is a principle rather than a method. The practical answers in the field — peer-set salaries, self-set pay with an advice process, compensation committees — all work somewhere and none is a general solution.

Status and the outside world Job titles are currency beyond the company: for mortgages, for visas, for recruiters. An organization can abolish positions internally; it cannot abolish the labour market's expectation of them.

Zappos is the cautionary case. When it moved to a role-based model and offered severance to anyone who preferred to leave, roughly 18 % went. Meeting overhead and rule bureaucracy were part of it — but so was the plain absence of an answer to "how do I get ahead here?"

Roles instead of positions solves who does what. It does not automatically solve who advances and what they earn. Any organization making this change should have an answer ready before the first person asks.

What the practical answers look like

Nobody has a general solution, but there are working partial ones worth knowing.

Morning Star replaces job descriptions with a peer agreement, renegotiated annually: each person writes what they will deliver, to whom, and by which measures, and signs it with the seven to twelve colleagues they actually work with. Advancement means taking on more consequential commitments. Pay is proposed by the individual and reviewed by elected compensation committees that advise rather than decide.

Sociocracy 3.0 adds a mechanism the others lack: roles are filled by an explicit selection process and held for a fixed term. That solves a problem hierarchies also have — the person who has quietly held the important role for eleven years and cannot be dislodged, because nobody ever agreed when the term ends.

Buurtzorg sidesteps the question partly by keeping the professional career intact: nurses remain nurses, with professional development rather than managerial ascent as the growth path. That works in a field with a strong professional identity, and transfers poorly to one without.

How BetaOS handles it

In the data model, a role belongs to a cell and a person is linked to roles with start and end dates — so a person's role portfolio across cells is visible, and so is its history. There is no position entity at all; the concept simply does not exist in the product.

What the product does not do is decide pay or model careers. That is deliberate: those are decisions an organization has to make for itself, and a tool that quietly encoded one answer would be pretending the question is settled. Making the role portfolio visible is a genuine help; claiming to solve advancement would not be.

Sources

Niels Pflaeging, Silke Hermann: Cell Structure Design. Betacodex Publishing, 2020.
Morning Star Self-Management Institute: on the Colleague Letter of Understanding and elected compensation committees.
Bernhard Bockelbrink, James Priest, Liliana David: Sociocracy 3.0 — A Practical Guide — role selection and fixed terms.
On the Zappos transition and the roughly 18 % who took the severance offer in 2015.
Frederic Laloux: Reinventing Organizations. 2014 — peer-set salaries and the advice process.
Corporate Rebels: on role clarity as the precondition for delegating work to AI.

More from the Beta Library: betaos.org/library