When I began my journey in the world of organizational change, I was 23 years old, bright-eyed and just out of graduate school. I remember it clearly. In a town in the southeastern Sri Lanka, victim to brutal sectarian violence two years before. A tenuous peace still holding. I sat there with hundreds of faces, watching them process inter-religious violence, trauma, and the non-linear path to the rebuilding of relationship.

And I remember thinking — this just isn’t my work. Not here, not on the front lines. I wanted to be more behind the scenes, helping others be out front and center, making change. And so I met with someone who seemed to be a wise elder at the time, asking for advice. I told him I was more interested in helping organizations be the best they could be, rather than the one on the front lines doing the change work. And he said very clearly: no. Only people with 20 or 30 years’ experience should be doing that kind of work.

Fast forward 20 years. I followed my passion and did the work anyway. Was I right? Was he right? I still contend with the fragile line between knowing and unknowing, experience and inexperience, insecurity and confidence, and humility and hubris. Internal voices arise in different contexts, each representing facets of me.

I have accrued my own set of varied experience.

Other people have more real-life experience than me.

Others are smarter than me.

I put more thought into situations than others do.

I am smarter than others.

I feel more comfortable thinking before I speak.

I have strong and immediate gut reactions.

Our final week of the Practical Self-Management Intensive focused on working out loud. Perhaps more concretely: on generosity, give and take, and being brave in public about both the giving and the taking.

A common exercise in my organizational change work is using a case study framework for teams. Many of us have used variations of this. It allows the person in the ‘hot seat’ to present some sort of block or challenge and to go through a process of inquiry, receiving of advice, and then integration of that advice (similar to the generative decision making processes, but with a different purpose).

When I facilitate these sessions, one thing I like to convey is that while it seems to be about the person in the hot seat, there are inevitably surprises that emerge about the ‘blocks’ that prove relevant for each person giving advice. Because we are mirrors to each other. We can be, in the best of worlds. And when we let someone else’s challenge in, we miraculously find within ourselves an amazing ability to pattern that vulnerability and grow as well.

The idea of giving is traditionally considered unilateral — one person helping another person. But in so many instances of giving, that energy is mutually reinforcing, enlightening, lightening, lightning. I give not because it feels good, but because it is one of the most human gifts to be able to do so. Because it reminds us how inextricably connected we are to one another.

I think about this in the context of who I am as a consultant. I see consultants around me filled with hubris and knowing. What is best for the client. What they should do. What all organizations should do. And I have moments where I stumble into that, particularly as I get older. And yet, the practice of acts of generosity, of asking for help, of working out loud — almost feels to me like a requisite ritual for every consultant. Because that unknowing, that vulnerability, makes me better. It reminds me that I am really just a mirror. That I do not really know what that person or team is going through. And while I can hold the vessel for their journey, the moment I forget that I too am in design, in vulnerable unfolding, is the moment that I no longer can serve as that mirror.

So I ask myself, as a practice:

How much am I asking out loud?

How much am I thinking before speaking?

How much am I practicing I don’t know?

How much am I wondering before advising?

How much am I purposely creating moments of vulnerability?

How much am I creating space for my unknowing?

This is not about discounting knowledge, experience, and perhaps even wisdom accrued over time. Often clients want answers, so this is not a directive for being in relationship with a client with a blank canvas. This is also not about insecurity masked as humility. Rather, it is about the palette I offer. I believe that the more I intentionally practice the values I center in my work — inquiry, brave communication, experimentation, learning (and unlearning), transparency — the more I will be able to be the kind of consultant (and person) I hope to be. A person who can hold complexity and contradiction. Knowing and unknowing. A mirror that reveals an infinite number of reflections.

Part 5 of a series of reflections during my participation in the Practical Self-Management Intensive.

A Consultant’s Mirror was originally published in Greaterthan on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I’ve danced all my life. One of the few recommendations that has remained consistent over the years is the idea of the ‘good’ vs. ‘bad’ stretch. We all know the good kind of stretch. We are able to distinguish that stretching tingle from ‘pain,’ though it is on a continuum. It is very clear when that stretch moves into ‘bad’ territory, on the verge of injury.

This week was prototyping week in the Practical Self-Management Intensive, and I’ve been thinking about starting small. Frederic Laloux in his video series shared a few great examples of companies starting small in the self-management realm:

· Small Pebbles Committee: the Belgian Ministry of Transport’s committee dedicated to addressing small, fixable organizational issues within one week

· Open meetings: anyone can join any meeting

· Hiring: staff decide on their future manager (rather than the ‘boss’ making the decision)

These examples are low(er) risk ways to stretch an organization, to prepare the ground for deeper self-management transformation. By embodying fundamental self-management principles (e.g., transparency, autonomy, etc.), they build confidence and unleash energy blocked by traditional organizational structures and processes.

These ‘prototypes’ struck a chord, as I have been wondering recently about the tipping point when self-management practices are introduced too early — when organizations, like bodies rejecting an organ transplant, cannot absorb and perhaps even actively reject the practice. Are there certain practices which naturally ‘fit’ into a later stage of the self-management journey? Are there certain practices which require more mature communication, deeper self-awareness, more robust trust, or even more complex understanding of the very idea of self-management?

I have been grappling with this idea in the context of a current client, a mission-driven organization with whom I have been consulting for the past year. While the organization has a fairly traditional hierarchy, team members are naturally collaborative. Each individual is highly capable and feels valued for their unique skill sets and expertise. The organization tends towards autonomy in its discrete work areas and collaborative decision-making around macro-organizational issues, but has not yet been exposed to self-management thinking or practice. Recently an opportunity arose for the leader of the organization to go through a performance evaluation, and sought advice for what this might look like, tending towards wanting some type of 360 degree appraisal (this team is far from the point where it would do away with performance appraisals all together).

In reflecting on the leader’s request, three things come to mind:

1. Shared ownership: Is this an opportunity for the team to co-design how they would like their performance assessed? If so, to what degree would the team even have energy for curating an appraisal process like this?

2. Knowledge: How much ‘knowledge’ would be beneficial for the team to have on alternatives to traditional performance appraisals? If the team is not steeped in alternative ways of working, what is my responsibility as a consultant to share that knowledge with them? Where does that outside ‘knowledge’ detract from the natural creativity of the team?

3. Building the muscle of feedback: To what degree should the team already have robust feedback practices before it seeks to revamp its performance appraisal system? Performance appraisals in self-managed systems have at their heart a healthy ongoing feedback process. If staff are not practiced or comfortable with offering peer feedback (and not just manager-to-subordinate, bilateral feedback), then an annual review with the colours and textures of self-management (e.g., transparency, group feedback, etc.) might be rejected and fray the trust that already exists within the organization.

There are indeed practices that are not safe-to-try at early stages of organizations’ self-management journeys. At best, the practices might just not ‘work’ (remember the too-many-to-count failed corporate innovation efforts?). At worst, a rash intervention can do real harm to both individual mental health and organizational viability.

While my client is likely not ready for a complete transformation of performance appraisals typical in self-managed systems, there might be low risk experiments that it could embark on to stretch the organizational system. Some ideas:

· Modeling: The leader could decide to share the results of their appraisal process/results with the rest of the staff, thus embodying authenticity, transparency, and openness to growth and learning.

· Learning: The team could embark on shared learning of alternative ways of holding each other accountable/supporting each other’s growth.

· Building the feedback muscle: The team could opt to try out a peer model of quarterly feedback, where they each have a partner tasked with supporting their growth.

There is no stage-by-stage playbook for how to build self-management practices within an organization. And yet I do wonder about examples — and maybe the possibility of a taxonomy — of self-management experiments that went too far and extended an organization beyond its readiness. As organizations embark on self-management journeys, there seems to me an optimal stretch zone in the prototyping process. A fragile balance of stretch beyond a comfort zone, the unleashing of a new energy, but not so far that the stretch disrupts the elemental tissues that hold the organization together.

Part 4 of a series of reflections during my participation in the Practical Self-Management Intensive with Better Work Together.

The Good Kind of Stretch was originally published in Greaterthan on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

At the heart of self-managing organizations is the dynamic and fragile interrelationship between the individual and that human aggregate mapped onto an entity we call an organization.

In an interview about their book, An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization, authors Kegan, Lahey, and Fleming describe core ingredients of organizational innovation:

“Scanning the literature on innovation over the last 10 years or so, one thing stands out for us: The core dynamic that drives sustained creativity and innovation has to do with a high capacity to challenge existing assumptions. That’s what the most consistently innovative people and organizations know how to do regarding their customers and markets, as well as their internal operations. They rigorously surface, test, and transcend limiting assumptions.”

The interconnection of the individual and organization reveals itself in this work: there is a deep relationship between the individual’s capacity to sense, engage with, and transcend their own assumptions and their ability to do that for the organization. The lines between the individual and the organization are never clear, as the organization itself is simply a projection of the human imagination. And yet we know from these Deliberately Developmental Organizations that organizational innovation is predicated on individuals’ abilities to transcend limiting assumptions and the organizational infrastructure that can support that.

It seems to me that there are (at least) three levels of highly interrelated assumptions built into organizational DNA:

· Assumptions re: self: who I am in the world, how I act, relate to people

· Assumptions re: role: how I do this work, what I can do in my role, what the work is

· Assumptions re: organization: what the organization is able to do and accomplish within its environment

Each of these assumptions creates habits and draws invisible boundary lines for how we act in this world and relate to others. In looking at these deep interrelationships, I wonder: how might we build cultures of testing and transcending assumptions — individually and organizationally?

What if…

· Rituals were built into team meetings where individuals shared one assumption they were testing/trialing (this could be at any of the three levels)?

· Staff retreats did scenario planning/storytelling around visions of radically shifted assumptions?

· Organizations celebrated not only the sharing of ‘mistakes’ (see Bridgewater Associates’ Issue Log), but of mind shifts (“I changed my mind!”)?

· Organizations held year-end parties where ‘busted’ assumptions were burned (like Burning Man, but with more clothes)?

· Organizations held regular ‘earthquake talks’ — bringing in outsiders that intentionally offered perspectives that radically challenged core organizational assumptions?

· Feedback processes (whether in formal appraisal processes or informal ones) were grounded in the language of assumptions, e.g., ‘self-evaluations could ask about limiting assumptions, positive feedback could be offered when teams broke through limiting assumptions?

· Each person in an organization was paired with a colleague; the pairs would meet for monthly ‘breakthrough sessions’ where they would each workshop an assumption that might be limiting their creativity, innovation, or thrive capacity?

We humans often get stuck in entrenched conceptions of who we are — as individuals, in the roles we play, and in the collective structures we make. These fixed identities are barriers to growth. There are endless opportunities for organizations to build into their DNA both the questioning of seemingly fixed assumptions and the celebration of their transcendence. These are just a few.

Part 3 of a series of reflections during my participation in the Practical Self-Management Intensive with Better Work Together.

Breaking Through was originally published in Greaterthan on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Just a year ago, an introduction like this was not a mainstream practice in my circles. In the past months, I am finding it is more and more common for people to self-identify in group spaces.

Self-identification (not just as a greeting practice, but also a subject to be explored within groups) allows people to show up as their full-er selves. It shines a light on distinct context or perspective, elevates uniqueness and commonalities, and defines sources of power and privilege. It creates the ground for talking about what is unsaid or assumptive about who we are. Taken more seriously, grappling publicly with identity can be a first step towards unearthing and deconstructing unconscious biases and inequities that manifest in group structures and institutions.

As our learning this week focused on decision-making, I think about the practices we experimented with — advice process, consent-based, generative decision-making. Each built for different purposes, there is deep wisdom that lies at the heart of these practices. Clear frameworks to mitigate the potential for ambiguity, malintent, or misunderstanding. A design that mandates everyone in the decision-making room to voice an opinion, mitigating the festering of the unsaid or the harboured. The precise identification of each person’s roles within a particular decision.

In our first session, Susan Basterfield insightfully explained that many self-management practices are rooted in the idea of making the implicit explicit. How does implicit power show up in these decision-making practices? What can we do within these practices to name the different forms of power that lie in a room? This may be the power of authority. This may be the power of expertise. This may be power of pedigree. This may be the power of charisma. This may be identity-based power drawn from societal hierarchies. Some power — like the power of expertise — can be vital to certain decisions. Other power — like power emboldened by white supremacy culture — can be detrimental to decisions, and ultimately, the organization itself.

Extending this lesson more generally, I wonder where unspoken societal power and its manifestations show up in distributed or self-managed systems. This is a time when people are awakening to the importance of acknowledging identity, especially the identity that historically has been most unacknowledged in much of the West: whiteness and its manifestation of white supremacist culture. Given this backdrop, what is our responsibility to explore how identity and power manifest in self-managed organizations? What I do sense is that we cannot assume that its decision-making practices innately ‘right’ themselves or magically extract societal bias from their scaffolding.

Whiteness is an implicit identity that we need to make explicit in conversations about self-managing organizations. Many of the self-management ambassadors I have encountered are white. Why is this the case? What is built into the assumptions about self-managing organizations that are attracting whiteness? What implicit bias is there — in the design, in what it is discussed, in what it is not discussed — that this community might be missing? Where is white supremacy culture showing up across the design principles of self-managing systems? In the spirit of making the implicit explicit, I am eager to explore how asking these questions can guide us towards organizational practices that work — and are championed — across a broader range of identities.

Part 2 of a series of reflections during my participation in the Practical Self-Management Intensive with Better Work Together.

Naming the Power at the Decision-Making Table was originally published in Greaterthan on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

2020. I don’t think I am alone in this feeling of powerlessness. A fog so thick that some days it feels hard to move. Covid-19, relentless murders of black people, institutional systems steeped in inequity, climate crises, democracy slipping away. And conversations with people, siloed at best, toxic and vitriolic in our inability to call upon shared humanity. We feel helpless in our ability to make change, to cast a vote that ripples beyond our bubbles, to march on the streets to influence change. Even our formerly go-to tools of what we considered ‘truth’ and ‘facts’ have been stripped of all power.

As I study the practices of self-managing organizations with such a thirst, I wonder — is it more than just the inadequacies of green and orange organizations that resonate with me? I have growing clarity that my attraction to self-managing organizations is not just about addressing organizational deficiencies. It’s also about addressing the world around us, as we struggle to feel any sort of power amidst an overwhelm of tragic decisions, self-interested power grabbing, and the mass suffering that follows.

In unhealthy organizations, we see recurrent themes of dysfunction, power abuses, and helplessness. The person who destructively talks about someone else behind their back. The staff incredulous at leadership’s poor and uninformed decision-making. The individual who loses all fire for their work or is drowning in a position that does not maximize their skills. Flagrant power slinging that drowns out other voices in the room.

Self-managing organizations seek to overcome these dysfunctions by starting with the premise of the power of the individual in community. Many foundational self-managing practices call individuals to take active postures in their organizations, and to engage directly with their own patterns of interaction, communication, and power.

Example 1 — Social contract: an explicit agreement that outlines ground rules for how team members will and should interact with one another.

Social contracts give individuals the power to co-create a dream team — one that communicates, ideates, makes decisions, and relates with each other in ways that allow members to embody their best selves. Created by the team itself, each individual is an actor in social contract design, evolution, and holding each other to account.

Example 2 — Role design: in self-managing organizations, there are no fixed jobs. Instead, there are evolving roles, born out of the needs of the company. Team members opt to commit to these roles based on their skills and interests.

The role design process (see here for an example) asks each team member, in relationship with the broader team, against the backdrop of the organization’s needs — to be actors in the design and implementation of individual roles. Ultimately, it is up to the individual to figure out where and how they will best thrive and how they will make the most of their role/s. There is no one to blame when they do not perform (You can change roles! Redefine the role! Maybe move companies! It’s all in your hands!).

Example 3 — A map for communication: many self-managing organizations opt for extensive protocols that nurture, regularize, and formalize transparent communication and feedback habits.

Communication practices like this one at Fitzii seek to habitualize feedback, unearth tensions, celebrate growth that comes from feedback, and build transparency into the full process. They explicitly resist silos, chasms between individuals, gossip, and the toxicity of unexpressed frustrations.

If you take these three building blocks — only glimpses into the world of self-managing organizations — they offer a hint of an antidote to this societal powerlessness. We are both the clay and the molders of that clay. We are constantly evolving, trying to be and do our best, with the power to be architects of our futures. Perhaps this is Pollyannaish — but there is a draw to this construct, for me, in 2020, as we watch so much crumble around us. As I was writing this, a quote from U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez appeared in my Twitter feed, expressing these principles in a wider societal frame.

“No one politician is the answer. No one president is the answer. You are the answer. Mass movements are the answer. Millions of people are the answer. You are the answer. I need you to show up. We need you to show up.”

We are all trying to wake from this dream, out of this stupor of passivity. For me, self-managing practices provide a starting point: they call upon us to become actors in designing the organizations — and the world — in which we want to live.

Part 1 of a series of reflections during my participation in the Practical Self-Management Intensive with Better Work Together.

We Need You To Show Up was originally published in Greaterthan on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.