Using co-creation to craft a positive new joiner experience

One of the elements that permeate the ideas of Lead Together is ‘making the implicit explicit’.  When considered from the perspective of the organisation, with a little practice, it’s quite safe, and can be achieved with minimum levels of vulnerability.  It’s much less so when making explicit our implicit fears - including but not limited to deciding to join a new organization.  

We reflect in Lead Together on the many elements of the workplace that take us right back to our school days  - being a new joiner is right up there. If you are anything like me, every time you start at a new organization there is that little pang that takes you right back to the first day of school: What will the kids be like? What will my teacher be like?  Am I cool enough?  Am I too weird?  Am I going to have to eat lunch alone?

Regardless of what led up to that first day of work, now you are here. The cliché ‘there is only one chance to make a good impression is a cliché because it’s true.  

I recently worked with a division within a 60,000 person US-based services organization. While this is not my typical client, the leader within her division is.  As she is working out how to bring Lead Together practices into her part of the organization, she identified onboarding as an area within which her team could make a real difference and have a significant impact on the experience of new joiners.  We proposed a 4-week sprint (less than one day elapsed time) to arrive at a minimum viable product.

She invited two recent joiners to join 3 old hands to take the opportunity to do some deliberate development by coming together with these people they’d not worked with before to co-create something that is certainly not within the traditional remit of their roles.  

The first few things they did was to sink into what makes a bad onboarding process using the Liberating Structure TRIZ, and then identifying the positive deviance of great onboarding, using Discovery-Action-Dialogue.  At the end of the first session, they were able to both identify all of the things the organization was doing to perpetuate a negative experience as well as a clear view of what was consistently working well.

In the next session, they began to design the new process through another Liberating Structure called Purpose-to-Practice, which is super useful at the beginning of a process to ensure you are looking at all of the elements that will contribute to a ‘resilient and enduring initiative’.  Some of the ideas around the ‘why’  of the project were quite obvious, e.g. ‘less frustration’, ‘a happier team’, ‘feel valued and part of the team from day one’.  Some surprised me, coming from what on paper are not responsible for strategic outcomes, things like: ‘saves the company time and money’ and ‘setting people up for success leads to retention’.  

Over the next few weeks, the pop-up team created an onboarding checklist, calendar, buddy system and many artifacts.  They then ‘demoed’ their proposal to the head of the division and will be prototyping it with the next new hires.  They are hoping that other parts of the organization will be curious enough to copy or create their own version.

This co-created process might not be perfect, and it’s certainly not the finished product, but it gave this team the opportunity to practice leading together even from within a very traditional, hierarchical organization.  So whether you are a founder or a team member or a leader in a traditional company, there are many places to start, to act, to experience.

Curating an experience for a new team member to make her first few months evidence of the good decision to join you, where she knows how to contribute and bring her gifts from the very first day, is one of the best and perhaps easiest things you can do to bring the intention of leading together to life.

Liberating Meetings

Just today, Seth Godin’s daily missive read:  

“The perfect avocado… Sometimes they’re too hard, and often, they’re rotten.

But every once in a while, you’ll nurture an avocado until it’s at the peak state of flavour and texture.

You certainly aren’t going to waste it.

You’re not going to sacrifice it to some sort of smoothie, or even hide it in a sandwich. That’s for the other kind, the less precious ones.

And yet…

This Zoom call we’re on, the precious one, where all the right people are on the call, at the same time, ready to see and be seen–you’re really going to spend the first ten minutes having us go around the room and say our names? Really?

This gathering we all came to, back when we could, or when we can again–we’re really going to sit at tables for 10, shouting at each other, while we tolerate loud music and eat lousy food?

This interaction we’re having with the busy professional, the one that we’ve waited for, you’re going to spend it reciting things that we already wrote down on a form?

Face-to-face is like a perfect avocado. The cost of in-sync time, real-time interaction time, that’s time that we don’t get again.”

Today, as many a day, I found myself nodding and ‘amen-ing’ Seth out loud.  

And, as bizarre it is to say this, it’s been a full year now that most of us have been having most of our meetings on Zoom.  What have we learned?

At the beginning of the pandemic, me and my colleagues from Greaterthan helped HR Software company CultureAmp help their customers learn the 201 of remote facilitation.  This training introduced elements like breakout rooms, Percolab’s Wise Agenda, tools like Mural and Easy Retro. The stated objective of the course was to give people more confidence in navigating this (then) brave new meeting space.

The subtext, however, was encouraging these facilitators to take this opportunity to re-think what meetings are, and what they are for.  For years, large organizations have used the webinar format to share information synchronously - and these operations normally follow the same death-by-powerpoint download as the in-person version.  

Is it any wonder that many people don't turn their cameras?  Let’s face it, it’s much, much easier to disengage when the screen is covered with a slide anyway.  

Meetings can be a deliberately developmental space -  and help us think about our Lead Together culture.  The way we engage with content distribution inputs is a great frame to think about the ‘how’ of our meetings.

We need to hone our awareness of which practices work for the outcomes we seek. This quadrant diagram from Liberating Structures is a useful tool to help us ask these questions:

So, what makes Liberating Structures so different from other facilitation practices?

The Presentation puts maximum control of content in the hands of one person and has no structure to include/engage others.

The Status Report is essentially like a series of presentations, putting the control of content into the hands of one person at a time and with no structure to include/engage others.

The Managed Discussion puts into the hands of one person the control for including/engaging a small number of participants.

The Brainstorm provides a structure to include/engage a few people in expressing their ideas without constraints.

The Open Discussion has no control of content and no structure to include everybody. 

Liberating Structures make it possible to include everybody regardless of group size and distribute the control of content among all participants.

And another benefit of Liberating Structures is that many of them translate very well to our new virtual world.  

Probably the most well known and easiest Liberating Structure to practice straight away is 1-2-4-all.  Use breakout rooms to create the pairs and the 4’s.  It works like this:

Start alone, then in pairs, then foursomes, and finally as a whole group:

1- Silent self-reflection

by individuals on a shared challenge, framed as a question (e.g., What opportunities do YOU see for making progress on this challenge? How would you handle this situation? What ideas or actions do you recommend?) 1 min.

2 - Generate ideas

in pairs, building on ideas from self-reflection. 2 min.

4 -  Share and develop ideas

from your pair in foursomes (notice similarities and differences). 4 min.

All - Ask, “What is one idea that stood out in your conversation?” Each group shares one important idea with all (repeat cycle as needed). 5 min.

You can find out all about Liberating Structures on their website, download the handy app, or join a Liberating Structures training.  

Planning a meeting is a great opportunity to think about what serves our objectives, our people, and create more opportunities to lead together!

Radical Responsibility - A Team Sport

This is a truly unique time in history to be talking about radical responsibility. In traditional organizations or traditional hierarchies, one of the reasons for having structures or justifying structures like that is that the person that sits on top of that pyramid is held responsible and accountable for everything that happens in the organization. Today, we see an individual who has for the last 4 years sat on top of one of the most intricate, complex, largest pyramids on planet refusing to take responsibility for anything that does not make him look good.  The outgoing president has also created a reality where a person doesn't even need to tell the truth let alone take responsibility for their actions. It feels a bit ironic that the example that we see is likely the most visible on the planet. I worked for almost a quarter of a century in traditional organization's and I can't think of a time during that period where the leader refused to take accountability and responsibility - let alone at the scale that we see it today. It's impossible to talk about the Radical responsibility chapter in Lead Together without presencing this phenomenon.

Now that we've done this (!) let's talk about radical responsibility in teams and organizations that are striving for less hierarchy. One of the most commonly articulated pitfalls of self- management or self-organizing is that when everybody is responsible no one's responsible - and that couldn't be further from the truth. What leading together asks of us is not easy and it's not trivial. It asks us to use our agency not only to make commitments, but to keep commitments and further to that enter into an agreement or a social contract with our colleagues that Invites them to hold us to account. I know that the sounds easy, but it takes practice. What I've heard and seen and learnt from the many organization's that we researched and worked with is that the most difficult element of radical responsibility is actually holding your colleagues to account.

We are all very familiar with and used to a system where a boss tells us what to do and how to do it, and even to make very clear the criteria of success and exactly what it is that we need to deliver. The contract that we enter into when we are working in these types of organizations is clear but it doesn't require of us necessarily to make and keep commitments - all it requires of us is to do what we are told or get fired.  Without going too far down the rabbit hole, the common system of a boss telling the worker what to do also often leads to a state of learnt helplessness where me as the worker just waits to be told what to do because that is the only thing in the process of the organization that has clarity.

There something uniquely transformational about being able to say “I'm Susan I'm accountable for writing this blog post -  I want to be held to account by being reminded that I need to write this blog post and I want that to be done by email and by a text message. If continue not to meet my commitment, the expectation is that this is brought to the entire team and collectively we decide the way forward”. My commitment then becomes a partnership where I am working with my team to practice radical responsibility.

As with many of the ideas in Lead Together it starts with being clear and being committed to being on this journey of radical responsibility together for it is truly a team sport.

The Evolutionary Nature of Purpose

I wasn’t able to articulate my purpose until I was almost 50.  I could have made something up. There were certainly occasions when participating in a workshop or as part of an executive team working with ridiculously highly paid consultants who we’d hired to help us with the work of re-branding, or re-alignment, or simply working up the new slogans for coffee mugs or t-shirts where I’d felt dumb or inadequate because I truly had no idea.

I knew what kind of work energized me and what didn’t, where I felt my integrity being challenged or bumping against some questionable tactics in aid of sales.  So when, in the last decade everything seems to have become about purpose – as in the one sure route to employee and customer satisfaction (insert exhausted/cynical groan here) one can understand my trepidation. The new cure-all for what ails companies.

I’m not trying to be contrary when I say I didn’t know my purpose until advanced years – and maybe one could say that’s because I was working in traditional corporations that didn’t think about this stuff.  But they pretend to!  What I was able to articulate for example when I was Head of Sales for a large telco was something akin to making meaning from the sales vocation - which was this inner feeling that if I was helping people solve problems or create opportunities in their organizations that was work that was both worthwhile and could be celebrated.  I can see how an organization could get from there to a purpose statement like ‘our purpose is to make our customers lives better’. Fine. But really, what does that mean to me or for me?  Is it meant to make me feel better or somehow tap into an intrinsic motivator?  I just don’t get the how and why of aligning personal purpose to the organizational purpose as the key.

And don’t get me started on ‘purpose driven organizations’ – most especially large NGO’s – where in my experience many employees have horrible experiences with the organisation because ALL of the energy goes to the purpose (clearing the ocean of plastics, for example) to the extent that the people are either ground down and burn out, or at its worst treated horribly as instruments of change instead of human beings.  I call this ‘Purpose Washing’.

What I do believe, however, is that every time a group of people come together to do something, there should be a clear purpose.  Even if that purpose is to learn what we can do together, or to wait to see what emerges.  Every human in every constellation of work or relationship brings work that is meaningful and significant to them.  It’s in the coming together, in creating what only this group of people can create that we can find an aligned purpose.  But not at the expense of the humans, never at the expense of the people in the system. 

When we lead together, it becomes easier to notice the purpose that’s guiding us, because we start to pay attention to it.  Understanding that it’s not something you do once and forget about until you get tired of the company colors or your website starts to look out of fashion. Organizational purpose is evolutionary – it changes as we change, as our products and services mature and pivot, as our clients grow and drift.  Like any strategic intention, it’s dynamic and adaptive.

Cultural architect Caterina Bulgarella challenges us to distinguish between purpose as a means to an end (financial growth) and as the catalyst for transformation; not to use purpose for linear growth (i.e., evocative forward pull), instead of tapping its transformative qualities (i.e., evolutionary or upward growth).

Even if you are not quite willing to think of the organization as a living entity, it is a self-fulfilling one – we know that energy goes where our intention is set, and we can practice trying to see our organizations needs and possibilities through ‘its eyes’ - something larger than ourselves as individual participants in the system.  Whether this is an empty chair in a meeting or the literal acknowledgement of personhood of the entity (like the Whanganui River in New Zealand as we share in Lead Together) it can be incredibly enlightening and enlivening to practice.

Expressions of Power

What makes us powerful?  Is it innate or is it only real in reflection?  In other words, are we only powerful when others give us power?  Typing this I realize how naive that is. Some humans tacitly hold power by default - by gender, or age, or youth, or height or…..

Power can be as subtle as a hand grenade or soft as a warm embrace.

Talking about power is probably the most important thing leaders can do - because power (along with money and systems) is the water we swim in.  We’ve been trained to look at power as hierarchy, and that's how we tend to orient around it - when we see it on an org chart, positional power is obvious.  But within the possibility of a less hierarchical or traditional structure, If we are to learn how to lead together, we need to name and interrogate all of the ways in which power impacts work, leadership, relationships and development.  

“In any system with humans in it, power relations exist, whether you formalize them or not... If you refuse to define power structures, informal ones will emerge almost instantly. Not expressing these can be extremely harmful to your organization.” — Francesca Pick

If you are a leader with positional power, it’s not simply a case of walking in on Monday morning and saying: ‘I’m going to decentralize my power”.  That can be the equivalent of tossing a hand grenade into the room!  Although the impulse might be coming from a benevolent place, if it’s articulated as a pronouncement, that act itself can further the very positional power you seek to distribute.  It might even be coercion.

It’s not that simple, because if you are the leader of the organization, your ‘mandate’ to embark on a journey to lead together is essential. But don’t underestimate the care required to make that invitation from a place of seeking ‘power with’ or ‘power among’” 

When we work collaboratively to make decisions and negotiate resources, we are exhibiting power with. Power over, power for and power with exist within a transactional paradigm. One person acts over another, one person acts for another or one person acts with another. In all three, a finite amount of power is divided between two or more people. 

Power among is much more expansive. Fully self-organizing systems operate with power flowing among and through system participants. One person can use their power to advance the interests of the organization without anyone else feeling powerless.

The level of explicit-ness about what you are inviting is so important.  More than a few times, I’ve seen very well intentioned leaders step back too far, too quickly,  For men particularly, sometimes this revelation of the power of your voice creates a scary paradox -   I’ve been in rooms of evolved, self-aware men who have become so fearful of the power of their voices that they sit and say nothing — turning the atmosphere into some sort of passive-aggressive vortex. Leading together doesn’t mean relinquishing power, it means acknowledging and transforming it.

Even after we start down the journey, we’ll notice that we tend to inhabit many contours of power. I’ve done a lot of work with leadership teams, and it’s really interesting to notice the different types of power that we identify with. I imagined that most leaders (or more explicitly managers) self-identify with the power of decision making, protection and rank/title. I’ve learnt over the years that there are a multitude of power cards that we hold and cling to.  I encourage leaders to ask themselves these questions to help sense into their power preferences:  

• Am I attempting to influence the outcome?

• Am I advocating for my preferred solution?

• Am I wielding the fact that I hold the most context?

• Am I leveraging my authority?

• Am I trying to reinforce my status?

• Am I making decisions on my own?

Like many of the elements of inquiry we delve into in Lead Together, our hypothesis is that a big part of leading together is first looking inward, at ourselves.  We are all practiced at traditional forms of feedback and projection about the type of leader others perceive us as.  But if we depend on that feedback as the be all and end all of what’s really going on for us not only will we get lazy, but so many opportunities for deliberate development may be missed.  ‘Tell me what you think I’m bad at and I can fix it’ is not Leading Together.  

Get curious!  Spend a meeting challenging one another to note down all the power cards that turn up - and make sure you notice your own - who knows what you might find!  And it might be fun - this work needn’t be so darned earnest and intense all the time. 

Send us your list of power cards - we’d love to see what you come up with, as well as any experiments to see you might choose to lean into or transform them.  

Some you can’t change. For example, I am the oldest member of the Greaterthan team. To pretend there is not power in that, the unchangeable reality that I have more years of experience, is a missed opportunity.  As a team, we acknowledge our individual power contours - lean into it when it’s helpful, and mitigate it when it hinders.  You will discover power cards that do not serve, and together with your team of leaders you can help one another notice, acknowledge and shift.

P’s in a pod: Purpose, Proximity & Product — the journey of the Golden Pandas

Summary

The four of us (Susan, Damian, Kate and Joshua) started working on the idea of Golden Pandas in August 2016. The spark we gathered around was to form a small team that developed products for our collective, Enspiral, and the broader network. We are inspired by the idea of developing open-sourced business models that can provide us with the means to create an abundant livelihood, and help others do the same.

In April 2018 we refactored our business…

Where we came from

Assumptions & Intentions

1. The Golden Pandas was a Livelihood Pod* with an intention of building a multiplicity of products for the commons
2. We believed that there was the right amount of complementarity and overlap in our work to make this possible
3. We convinced ourselves that even when some of us were remote we could manage to stay tightly connected and focused through weekly synchronous and asynchronous check-ins, and quarterly meetings
4. We’d all be contributing to the pot and feel good about the money flows

*Livelihood Pod — a lightweight definition

Livelihood Pods are essentially micro-cooperatives — their exact form is still emerging but our working definition is:

Cooperative ownership: Livelihood Pods are cooperatives and follow the 7 cooperative principles

Limited size: A Livelihood Pod has an upper limit — we don’t know what this should be but somewhere in the 6–12 people range.

Interdependent: They are deeply interdependent with other Livelihood Pods and are collectively responsible for the health of the wider ecosystem.

There are two models we’ve seen pods experimenting with: Mutual Support and Income Pooling

Golden Pandas was an Income Pooling Pod — we put 100% of our earned revenue into the middle and engaged in collective decision making on how much each person is paid, as well as how much to spend on team expenses. People can be paid different amounts but everyone in the team consents to those amounts, and/or to the process for determining them.

In a Mutual Support Pod the members of the cooperative run agreed commercial activities through the company but keep control over the majority of the revenue they generate. A small portion, 20% for example, would go into the pods core coffers and the team engages in collective decision making about how to spend those funds.

The key idea behind Livelihood Pods is that they can act as “Economic Home Groups” which offer support and opportunities for individuals in the wider network. There are a growing number of pods active in Enspiral currently (EXP, Root Systems, Optimi, Greater Than and Golden Pandas) and it is an area of active experimentation.

What we did

Timeline

Outcomes

Panda Planning resulted in a number of successful collaborative projects and a created a couple of ventures:

• open.enspiral workshops — Europe / Australia / North & South America ~20 events and over 400 participants
• T4NT (Tech for Non-Tech) licensed to Code for Australia
• Practical Self-Management Intensive online course via Leadwise — 4 cohorts to date with participants from Australia, Japan, South Korea, The Philippines, Singapore, India, Brazil, Ecuador, USA, Canada, Denmark, Germany, France, Slovakia, the Netherlands, Spain and the UK
• Cobudget finding a home in Greaterthan
• Bamboo being developed with Root Systems
• Community Retreat in Hungary in conjunction with Social Fokus
• Convened and co-hosted Art of Hosting Aotearoa
• Launched the Peer Garden
• Developed some good processes for prioritising business opportunities
• Collaborating with other pods and teams

What we learned

Cohesion

Things are easier when teams are:

A) co-located and

B) deriving livelihood from the same activities.

Things can still work if you have A or B but if you have neither then there isn’t enough ‘gravity’ to keep the livelihood pod together.

We had a wide variety of skills which put us in good stead for developing products, but when it came to generating income we were all working on quite different projects. This alone would have been OK except we were quite often in different time zones — that combination created a significant barrier to collaborating.

Learning: make sure your livelihood pod is at a minimum a) co-located or b) working on the same stuff. Both is best.

Flexibility has a price

There’s a difference between being remote, being in different time zones or changing time zones often. When you’re remote, it’s easy enough to set standing meeting times but If you’re changing time zones often, the cost of coordinating those meetings and the awkward hours can be a real killer.

One of the biggest pain points we identified as a pod was the admin associated with scheduling meeting times. All of us went through long phases of jumping between time zones which meant there was a high cost to scheduling meetings which lead to us spending less time together and working on the things that generated revenue.

Learning: if you have remote members, maintain a consistent meeting time that isn’t up for negotiation. If someone really needs to be skipping around time zones, organise travel so it doesn’t interrupt the meeting rhythm or, take a leave of absence from the pod while travelling.

Critical Mass

There needs to be a critical mass of energy going into the pod for things to work well. Our Golden Pandas experiment started well but we lost a lot of energy when Joshua had to jump in to help Dev Academy through a rough patch by working for several months unpaid. This took his energy off our product development and earning power away from our short term cash flow.

We took another hit when Kate dived so deep into co-budget that it made more sense for her to be based in the GreaterThan pod (who took responsibility for the project) than to stay with the Golden Pandas.

Learning: Ensure you have a critical mass of people, energy and money to keep the pod healthy. If the critical mass changes then take action (recruitment or pod disbandment / readjustment) quickly.

Company Admin

One of the hypotheses of why many livelihood pods are more interesting than one large collective is the idea that lots of small simple companies are cheaper to run than one large complex one. Additionally, the skills that pod members acquire by running simple companies are valuable for running larger ventures.

While the pod affairs were quite simple there was still a lot of financial admin reconciling expenses, dealing with banks, managing Saas accounts and keeping the whole operation compliant. We often spent valuable sync time on administration and operation tasks, which wasn’t the best use of our time.

Learning: Make one person responsible for accounting, admin and operations and either rotate the role around the pod or better yet, hire Optimi to do it for you ;)

We loved our rhythms

One of the highlights of being in a pod together was the time we spent together on our bi-weekly syncs and Panda Pounces. See our previous blogs Introducing the Golden Pandas and Panda Pounce for details on our processes and patterns.

The pod was most alive when we were all together reflecting on the past cycle and planning for the next one. It was these moments which gave us the clearest picture of what pod life could be and why we are still experimenting with pods as an organisational form.

Learning: Spend time together and make it fun. It is a privilege to work closely with your friends so make the most of it.

Where we’re going

The three of us — Damian, Susan, and Joshua are committed to continue our experiment in Pod Life and are changing the way we work, together.

The new formation of Golden Pandas puts the focus on:

1. supporting one another on our entrepreneurial journeys
2. helping activate other people in the network to build livelihoods

We synchronise weekly for 3 weeks out of 4, every Monday for one hour via zoom (or in person if possible)

On the 4th week, we work together for the day, have a luxurious check-in, build an agenda on the fly, triage our needs, get through the agenda and spend the rest of the day co-working.

We are no longer running our individual invoicing through Golden Pandas, rather we have decided to value each other as partners and coaches by ‘paying’ a minimum of $500 per month into the Golden Panda’s kitty.

The idea is that we can then collectively decide how to invest that abundance — through gifts, loans or investments into other ventures and projects we believe in.

Our new hypothesis is that our configuration works because we are all in Wellington and can come together physically once a month, and don’t have persistent time zone issues that complicate our rhythms. We are all entrepreneurs and founders of (at least one!) business. We trust and love each other. Our collective support matters to each of us. We are in this for the long-haul.

We are also open to new people joining the pod and have set these boundary constraints for this iteration of the Golden Pandas. If you:

• are based in Wellington,
• can commit to an hour a week and a day a month,
• are a founder, entrepreneur and business owner
• want to help activate others in the Enspiral network to create a meaningful livelihood
• value peer support enough to pay $500/month,
• and are interested in participating in this experiment, let us know.

What we are hoping to learn

• How to support each other meaningfully
• What really good peer coaching looks like
• What patterns and processes help activate others to leverage opportunities to create and cultivate meaningful livelihoods

The experiment continues. Hurrah!

This article is a Golden Panda production, co-created by Joshua Vial , Damian Sligo-Green and Susan Basterfield

The Peer Garden

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

I see some things, and hold a few opinions that appear to be backed up by others, in the form or quotes, anecdotes, clichés, or random musings.

One is that we are differentiated, and that our lives have meaning only through what we think; specifically what we think that is different from what others think. This idea feels funny to me because of the sheer obviousness and the sense of ego it invokes. For me, the sense of ego in my writing is stronger than in anything else I do.

It took me a very long time to publish anything as an adult. The paradox: one of the first ‘awards’ or recognition I remember as a very young child (perhaps 8) was winning a local Lions Club (or was it Rotary?) essay award. My memory also has me reading the essay to said club in exchange for a trophy. (I also received trophies for tap dancing, but I recognised even at that age that I was far more likely to receive future accolades for my intellect than my dancing.)

One of the benefits of being in one’s 6th decade is this amazing sense of pattern recognition in a way that was never possible prior, simply because of the (more) limited number of patterns of life experience available to me. Patterns in my own experience, and patterns I perceive (or project) that I see in others.

The pattern related to writing is this: I’m afraid to say what I think. (also known as ‘The Resistance’, popularised by Steven Pressfield in books like ‘The War of Art’.)

I resist that metaphor because he talks and writes about it as a battle, where perhaps I see it more as a surrender, but not the good kind of surrender — a surrender to fear. The ego, the fear, the ‘I’m not good enough’ or the ‘why would I kid myself that anyone would care about what I think or have to say’? down to ‘it feels shitty to be embarassed’ or event the super dramatic version ‘I will be rejected by my species’.

But ideas come from somewhere. They are filtered down through the sediment of our existence, that unique existence that we have in ones. The literal impossibility of objectivity — no one has your exact experience, and even if we had the same parents and all the same teachers and read all the same books, we wouldn’t be the same. We have different friends; and our eyes see different things.

I want to hear what you see.

I want to choose whether it’s something I want; I don’t want you to choose for me whether you publish or not. I am selfish — and I don’t want you choosing for me.

I’m putting it out there that at least half of what you have ever read or listened to or looked at was made by someone who felt like they weren’t good enough, or that no one would want to read listen or look at what they made. Biography is littered with these stories! The sense of humility is an accompanying paradox — is it more humble not to say anything, or put something out there with it not needing to be seen by anyone, but that the act itself is sacrifice. Don’t worry, no esoteric religious metaphor on sacrifice here.

You arrived here to publish — that’s what the invitation that you responded to said — you pay by publishing. We’ve created super loose parameters. I have mixed thoughts about collective purpose in that we are not a community yet, and my opinion is that a particular value set (overlapping, not identical) brought us together. Would it be OK if I said my view is that our collective purpose is to see what happens? What grows?

Join us in The Peer Garden

Before the Monsoon: Self-management in India Part 2

Almost a year ago, I was invited by Ved Krishna to Faizabad, Uttar Pradesh, to experience a remarkable company, connected by values and love, with a vision of bringing a non-hierarchical way of being to the most hierarchical country on earth. Mango Season was reportage of that experience.

I returned in October last year, to facilitate an offsite for the leadership team. This was a time of transition for the organisation, as Ved moved out of the day-to-day operations of Yash Papersto focus on Chuk — creating compostable tableware with the audacious goal of ridding India of styrofoam.

I am very clear for myself in my facilitation practice — although I scaffold the process and choose the tools, the only objective in mind is to surface what needs to come, and design for action. Sometimes the action or movement is internal, and happens solely through the process. Other times it is operational and shifts a practical application. I was curious and a little nervous about how this fully participatory approach would work, considering the cultural context, the new and old leaders, and the language barrier.

The post-it light bulb over Mr. Rana’s head — an accident????

Utilising Liberating Structures and Open Space and Kabaddi, those days both bonded and shifted the sense of possibility in the team. It was also proof of the magic of free participation, safety, trust and ownership of one’s intentions and needs. These practices are not bound by experience or culture — they are universal, intuitively understood, and fundamentally human.

The obvious happened: the ‘consultant’ (me) left, and although the shift had begun, its momentum was muted. By December, Ved and I were trying to sense a way into a more deliberate intention, and imagined a coach and facilitator on the ground, as part of the team, for an extended period. One day I was having lunch with some powerful women, and another, whom I’d not previously met, joined unexpectedly. I simply asked if anyone had any idea of who might resonate with the project, and Lucia Die Gil, (the unexpected guest) said without a flicker of hesitation ‘I do’. And so it was, within 3 months Lucia joined the Yash Papers team.

When I arrived at Mangalam Farm last week, the mangoes were not quite ready. Monsoon had not yet arrived. The pressure and the heat were difficult for me, so I was grateful for a few days of relaxed time to tune in. Lucia had scaffolded a plan and invitations for work with a few teams — the plan changed.

On Sunday morning, Ved cooked breakfast –probably the best omelette I’d ever tasted! Relaxing in the afterglow of delicious food, he shared another vision — one even more bold and audacious than self-management. He said:

‘Let’s create the best fricken workplace in India’

I’ve been around a long time, have known and worked with many great leaders. There are few for whom that statement would be anything more than a throwaway sound byte. And perhaps I am super naïve, but I believe it’s possible.

So we shifted our plans. A new invitation was made:

Transformation occurs through choice, not mandate. Invitation is the call to create an alternative future. What is the invitation we can make to support people to participate and own the relationships, tasks, and process that lead to success? — Peter Block

Having never worked with Lucia as a partner, it became clear in a matter of minutes that we would flourish together, with no stress, complete trust, and in an emergent energy.

Upon arrival in the hotel conference room, we arranged the chairs in a circle. As soon as the group arrived, Manoj said ‘let’s sit on the floor’ and so we did, for the next two days, in circle. These cultural tools of equality — the circle, the check-in, the presencing are relaxed, not judged. If anything, it’s maybe more so in India — willingness and a practice of letting go, suspending disbelief, and being open to whatever happens.

We began the work with dreaming — in partners — one closes eyes for 5 minutes, and speaks their dream — the best workplace in India whilst the other transcribes — no reaction, no questions. One asked ‘by what measure’? The reply: ‘your measure’. We shared back, and transferred each idea onto a post-it, which were then grouped into themes. In addition to themes, it became clear that there were 3 distinct categories: Tools, Processes and Outcomes.

The next invitation was for each person to choose 4 cards that they were most energetically attracted to, then, again in pairs, to propose a minimum of 5 action points around each. In the end, from over 200 ideas, we landed with 48 potential ‘projects’.

At Enspiral, we’ve been experimenting with Working Groups for a while. Enspiral is a collective (a relationship, not a job), and as such we don’t have any paid roles to do the work we need to do on the organisation. The model has worked for us and you can read about our form in the Enspiral Handbook.

Although the inspiration for Working Groups came from our specific need, recently I’ve noticed that the need also exists within conventional organisations, especially those who are intentionally participatory.

Another of the organisations I work with, Avivo in Perth, Western Australia, is 800-person home health care provider on a journey to self-managed local teams. I am documenting that journey in audio format — and they too have commenced 3 prototype working groups.

This was a natural progression — when organisations choose to move from a standard consultation process on transformation to a deliberately participatory one, a key difference is in how the transformation work is done. Like Enspiral, where we are not paid to do this work, in Avivo, and as you will see, at Yash Papers, the work is not a separate job, but a willing act of generosity and service.

My experience is that it is disingenuous to create a participatory process to determine the work, and then hand that work off to a traditional business improvement or project management process. When the individuals identify, scope, and commit to the work, they should also be given the opportunity to do the work.

After scaffolding 48 opportunities (out of almost 200 identified) as essential ingredients to creating #BFWPIN, we sat in circle and talked about the prospect of working groups. The concept of holding Guardianship of an idea. Who in the group felt called to be the Guardian of a Working Group? Slowly the 48 ideas circulated, and one by one, individuals put their name next to one, as they felt drawn. Not everyone did. This is not compulsory or mandated. This is about commitment and guardianship of the dream.

At assembly, the group shared what transpired, and made the invitation — a call for 6–7 volunteers to serve in a group with a clear mandate to define outcomes, work in a sprint rhythm, report consistently, and see what happens. Be prepared to be surprised — even if that means failing.

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The next day, we spent the afternoon with the HR team, with a slightly different slant — rather than the general dreaming question of creating #BFWPIN it was more specific: What can the HR team do to support the creation of the #BFWPIN?

‘No Hierarchy’ is phrase that is in the Yash Papers culture. Not so much in practice consistently, yet. This shifted significantly with the process of role writing. Instead of a job title, e.g. Compliance Manager, what could it be if members of the team were freely choosing their roles?

We utilised a version of the Percolab role process, and within about 60 minutes the team had identified 58 roles and their accountabilities. Then we laid the cards out on the floor, and the invitation was made to select the roles you felt most attracted to. In another 30 minutes, every member of the team had their role cards, and was invited to make a commitment to the team for the accountabilities therein. Yes, there were some roles left in the middle — but they were mostly ad-hoc or seasonal tasks. There were also some that were in the pipeline but hadn’t started yet. It’s important to emphasise that when selecting roles, you are also assessing your own capacity, and the implication of your commitment to the team.

This is self-management in practical, tangible terms.

Yash Papers has stopped dreaming about self-management and started doing it, with a non-hierarchical HR team, and self-initiated Working Groups — but not without the vision of an even bigger dream, the #BFWPIN dream.

I reflected to Ved that I personally had shifted from a 5-year commitment to a 20-year commitment to #BFWPIN.

There are many more elements to the plan — doubling the size of the on-site residential colony — re-imagining the working buildings as tools to facilitate collaboration, becoming 100% closed loop regenerative system, creating a learning community for all generations on campus. Do you have skills in any of these areas?

This work cannot be scaled from a framework. This work is intimate and relational and emergent and instinctive. This work can only be done by individuals who are deliberate in their own personal development practice.

If the long, often difficult work of commitment and intention, whether on this project or more generally, is what you recognise as your path, let’s amplify each other.

Three Days in Montreal

Travelling at night by train from Toronto to Montreal (a journey I imagine would be beautiful in daylight), I wrote about my enlightening time in Toronto. Today I sit at a little kitchen table in a ground floor flat in Le Plateau with my head spinning and my heart fizzing from three full days on this amazing island.

For more than a year, I have been scheming and collaborating virtually with our friends at Percolab. A series of opportunities presented for me to be here in Montreal to serve alongside Samantha and the team in the first of a series of events with the CRHA, Quebec’s professional society of HR practitioners.

The society invited me to hold a workshop in addition to the ‘main event’. So, on Wednesday morning around 40 wonderful humans welcomed me to share with them some practices of Deliberately Developmental Organisations. Whenever I work with unfamiliar groups, especially in different countries, there is always a level of trepidation. It’s important to me to reflect an appropriate level of cultural sensitivity, so I started the morning like this:

Mon nom est Susan et je vi ens de Nouvelle Zealand. C’est un plaisir de vous vour ce matin, je vous re mercie de me permettes de parler en anglais.

As always (with me) we sat in circle and had a check-in, with the question ‘what is bringing you energy this week’? After sharing, I gave a brief overview of the concepts of a DDO, including ‘nothing extra’. Using the liberating structure 1–2–4-all, we harvested topics, which were then convened using Wise Crowds to unleash the collective intelligence of the group, practice deep listening, as well as feedback. We had two micro-sharings of process noticing, and finished with a round of intention setting evoked from the question ‘how did this process change your thinking’?

It was great to receive the following feedback:

“it is a lot easier than I thought it would be”

“no bells and whistles necessary”

“it’s safe and doesn’t cost anything!”

My critical feedback for reflection is that the session was billed as a conference/talk, where it was actually a participatory experience. I wrestle with this question, because I wonder how many people would have been turned off by the latter, but were pleasantly surprised/challenged by something different?

Thursday was the ‘main event’ around the seemingly ever-present topic ‘Future of Work’. There were 4 sessions, of which I had the pleasure of co-holding two with Samantha, the first on the Impact of AI and the second on New Organising Structures.

I was disappointed to miss the simultaneous sessions held by Nicolas Langalier, Editor-in-Chief of Noveau Projet, Canada’s magazine of the year in 2015. Launched in 2012, the magazine has been a catalyst and rallying point of progressive forces in Quebec in the 2010s, and seeks to encourage and nurture public discussion.

In our first session, groups worked in small teams to identify the tasks at their workplace that are most likely to become automated. We used a useful tool called ‘the Periodic table of Work tasks’ to visualise. The last step was to reflect and consider how the tasks that cannot be replaced will be enhanced, and moreover what is enabled in the space left by those tasks that will no longer be manual.

Periodic Table of Work Tasks

The reaction in the room was a collective sigh of relief — the topic seems so huge and overwhelming, that having a process to start identifying the potential impact in our own professional realm is liberating, and hopeful.

The second session on new forms of organisational structure was a lot of fun for me, because I just got to sit in the fishbowl for an hour :) I recognise that Enspiral sits on the far end of the progressive continuum, but we know it doesn’t have to be an all or nothing. The mood in the room felt like a collective buoyancy and confidence to try.

The the afternoon ended back in the collective circle with a ‘musical shares’ courtesy of the piano and a gifted pianist in the room; a simple process, share reflections with one person during a 3 minute musical interlude, when the music stops, shift to someone else. Repeat 3 times — I highly recommend it!

Friday was an early session; I had been invited to be the first guest in a series of Matinee Numerique Montreal events hosted by Espace Temps. What a pleasure and surprise to see around 80 people turn out to an 8AM event. Hosted by Vincent Chapdelaine and Elodie Gagnon, I shared a bit of my story and an Enspiral 101, with a focus on how we use technology to organise, and how it supports our distributed network.

It was great to finish up my trip speaking to a group of activists, anarchists and entrepreneurs. There is something really unique, but quietly resonant of home — perhaps it’s that Montreal, like New Zealand is an island. Perhaps it’s that both communities (endeavour to) integrate cultures. I am flying away awash with possibility and gratitude, for snow, fromagerie to rival Paris, new friends, and my imminent return for Tranformer Montreal on 29th April. A bientôt!

One Day in Tronno (Toronto)

Those of you who know me or follow my journey understand the fact that I live on a small island in the South Pacific doesn’t preclude me from building virtual relationships that eventually turn into a heartful real-life embrace. Over the past year, I’ve met (and hugged) collaborators and co-conspirators in India, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, The Netherlands, UK, Belgium, France, Bulgaria, the US and Australia.

This week, I’m in Canada — Toronto and Montreal. I spent a delightful weekend with one of my Reinventing Startups co-authors, Brent Lowe, and his family. Today, we had the opportunity to meet with three very different organisations in Toronto who are on their own journey to Self-Management, Teal, and Agile beyond tech.

I’ve been following the Fitzii story for a few years, and was so delighted when their co-founder, Edwin Jansen, agreed to co-host our SXSW session ‘Growing a Company without Bosses’. Although Edwin had the nerve to be on holiday this week, we were hosted by the wonderful Luz (Looth) Iglesias. Fitzii is remarkable not only for their journey, but how they share and document it. Luz was so incredibly generous and prepared to discuss everything — from roles to retreats to self-set salaries to on boarding to one of their latest innovations called ‘share the love’.

The Fitzii ‘role advice process’ was especially useful — a specific instantiation of the advice process that is triggered either by an individual seeking advice for a proposed change, or as the result of a team mate’s feedback. The process is well documented and clear — and action oriented, incorporating self-reflection, advice, decision, presentation of results.

We’ll be sharing more of the Fitzii processes in beta 2.0 of Reinventing Startups, including their on boarding process, the role of sponsor, and their compensation advice process.

As part of a larger, traditional organisation, Fitzii’s practices and way of being bumps up against the institution, but they have found a way to co-exist and thrive.

Lunch was with The Moment, an Innovation and Design consulting agency. I first met Mark and Erika about a year ago, via the responsive.org slack group. Mark was seeking input in advance of a team retreat where the journey was about to begin. It’s been such a privilege to follow their Teal for Real story, read their updates and finally meet the team.

Of course, there is never enough time to dive into everything that’s possible with a group of like-minded humans, but we did our best. We all checked in with what was on top, and shared a bit of our respective stories. I shared a cursory overview of Enspiral, which diverted and tangent-ed and emerged as a very profound question:

if we can start to notice how we are developing, can we also start to notice how we are evolving? and if so, can we accelerate the process?

Obviously we didn’t have an answer to that, but I certainly checked out wanting more: more time to surface and explore with people I don’t work with regularly, but are asking the questions that keep me up at night. I hope that they appreciated my noticing of them as a group — that they are too smart and too nice, and that an edge for them might be purposefully developing a healthy practice of dissent!

We rounded off the afternoon with a visit to B-Corp and fast growing full-service web app provisioner myplanet. The challenge:

when we were 40 people it was easy to be agile beyond the boundary of software development, but with 70+, it’s not so easy.

I think a lot about tools and practices that help startups organise without hierarchy. I also think a lot about transitioning organisations, and how to help individuals practice. The case of scale is really interesting. It’s just like anything else, when you are in something that feels good, that’s going well, we rarely take the time to reflect and notice the conditions, e.g. why is this so great? Moreover, what can we do to either codify or start to create the scaffolds, and even practice with them now so we can be prepared for when we need them.

I stand by my hypothesis that companies already practicing agile methodologies understand much of what is possible with self-organising teams working collectively to a purpose where the team holds each other to account daily and transparently. We learn through practice and continuous iteration the optimal size of team, what roles and skills are required, how to get the best from our coach and our scrum master, how the product owner and the customer interface. The same is true in the organisation. But somehow, it’s harder.

Toronto has got a larger population (~6.5m) than the whole of Aotearoa New Zealand (~4.5m) and it was so invigorating to have the opportunity to have open, authentic conversations with three really different companies who are all trying to change the way they are with and at work. They are the future of work, and will help build the confidence for more organisations worldwide to start their own experiments, prototypes, and journeys.