Reinventing Startups — the making of

How we wrote a book without ever having met….

Last July, Travis Marsh ignited a dream which saw our collective work presented at SXSW. Our collective work not in the sense of anything we’d particularly produced, but the work that energizes our souls, and keeps us up at night. The work that has names like Teal, and Self Management, and Self Organising and Bossless Organisations and non-hierarchy in the workplace. Because we are immersed in it every day, and practice, coach, write or read about it daily, our confirmation bias is that everyone else is! But as Aaron Dignan of The Ready reminds us in his talk at the 2016 Responsive Org conference ‘no, they’re not!’

We scoured the last few years of the SX programme and couldn’t find any sessions discussing these ideas.

Between the four of us, myself, Brent Lowe, Julia Marczi and Travis had some calls just jamming and brainstorming on what could be possible. Quite quickly we landed on the idea that we wanted to put forward two proposals — one for a speakers session, and the other for a workshop on self-management.

Considering the audience of SX, we played with using Zappos front and centre in the pitch, as we imagined most attendees (or at least more than might have read Reinventing Organisations) would have at least heard of Tony Hsieh and Zappos! We even considered pitching him to speak.

We talked ourself out of that quickly — the change we want to see in the world will need CEO’s of really large organisations to consider this transformation, but we really wanted to pull out leaders who were at the front lines, in it with the people, in organisations that weren’t mandating a change, but deciding together that this was the road they wanted to journey together. With that, we gained clarity that the best individuals to share their stories would be front-line practitioners, with battle scars and tenure. We were incredibly privileged that they said yes!

Samantha Slade has been leading Percolab, a consulting company based in Montreal (and with a presence in France) for nearly 10 years. Her blogs and stories of the practical ways this team had collectively embraced self management are exemplars of open-source learning. Percolab are currently transitioning from an incorporated company (with owners) to a worker owned co-operative.

Fitzii is a free hiring platform for small and medium sized businesses. The platform provides easy access to expert recruiting tools and advice. The team at Fitzii is self-managed.” Edwin Jansen has documented the journey of this organisation over the past years, and isn’t shy about sharing the hard stuff as well as the wonderful surprises.

The process wasn’t easy — because we’d started even before the applications were able to be loaded, we made lots of assumptions. We also decided to make some videos, mainly to highlight our enthusiasm and geographic diversity. Travis, who lives in San Francisco, attended an event entitled (something like) ‘How to get your session chosen for SXSW’ on the eve of our submission. At the end of the session they gave away a free pass to the SXSW, and he won it! I think that was a good omen.

We were so grateful for the support with the panel-picker process, and overwhelmed that our session ‘Growing a company without bosses’ was selected.

We found out quite quickly and were put on the wait list for the workshop, which wasn’t successful :-(

We were all so high from the excitement of figuring out the secret sauce to working together remotely that we decided to write something. We’d all come together through, and were part of the Teal for Startups project. This project was born from the impulse that startups needed some sort of guide to give them the opportunity and choice away from the traditional incubator/accelerator options when considering the human aspects of creating a company.

We undertook a lot of reflection, and gained insight into the positive and negative aspects of that undertaking — it was a great model of co-creation and self-organising. After the first wave of work, many in the group had followed their energy and turned back to a sensing process. Our energy was different, and we turned it towards honouring our collective sense, which was to produce a toolkit which could be a starting point for founders and leaders.

Because I’ve worked most of my life in IT, and have been utilising Agile and Scrum practices for over a decade, I knew that many tech companies were already engaged in some of the practices we sensed for the guide: collective purpose, transparency, checkins/stand ups, etc. It’s also true that a fair proportion of startups, and especially those traditionally attending SXSW are in the tech sector, and so likely would have had exposure to agile practices. That became our market framing.

We began in earnest in October.

Three things set the course: 1) A regular, weekly meeting 2) An editor as part of the core team, a full participant from the outset and 3) The deadline for SXSW.

We brainstormed synchronously, and each added to a google doc in between. We used Trello extensively as our project timeline artefact.

Initially, we tried different approaches — each writing our ‘take’ on a topic or chapter, each choosing chapters based on our energy and following the impulse of the energy. Although we were not bad at making weekly meetings, we began to slip on our commitments. I was travelling extensively during this time and my fantasy availability and my actual ability to write/review were at odds with one another. I felt bad, but we were all slipping.

We sputtered. We didn’t meet our commitments. We began to lose energy.

In early December Travis that called it out and named it, and we realised we had to follow our own medicine and revisit our commitment to one another; our accountabilities and how we wanted to be held to account. We all really wanted this to happen, and the level of trust we’d built over the months allowed us to be really honest with one another. It wasn’t easy after that, but we made much more progress more quickly.

This pause also allowed us to gain clarity on the ‘how’. My strength is stream-of-consciousness spewing of content. Travis’ strength is in the ideation of practical examples, tips, and ‘try this’. Brent is the master of crispness — his editing prowess somehow managed to allow our truly disparate voices to sound cohesive. Nicole, our editor, was our sense-maker; our objective, professional, indispensable compass.

We made (more or less) our end of January content deadline, and we are so grateful to Helen Sanderson, Sean O’Connor, Edwin Jansen, Colin Basterfield and Ilana Grossfor their conscientious and sometimes merciless clarifying questions and proof reading. I haven’t actually held the book in my hand yet, but Travis recorded his opening of the box, and it was quite something to experience, even second hand.

The SXSW session was on Monday, 13th March, and we achieved our goal of having books available for the attendees!

Reinventing Startups was created as a resource for the commons. Very soon, the ebook will be avaliable to download for free via our website, Reinventing Startups — if you’d like to be notified, enter your details via the ebook page on the site. We are very excited to be utilising a platform called open.collective for the pay-what-you-feel process, and can’t wait to see what it makes possible as a community tool and a lived experiment in transparent participation.

I’ve been asked what made this possible, what was it about this specific group of people? Collective purpose, intentionality, respect, trust all ring equal for me. And time: prioritising and committing.

We wrote a book without ever having met in person — now that’s pretty cool.

Visit the Reinventing Startups webpage, join our Facebook Group, and help make Beta 2.0 the iteration the world needs. It’s starting.

Panda Pounce

The Golden Pandas — Part 2

As Kate mentioned in Introducing the Golden Pandas, our Panda Pounce in January was the first time we were all physically together as a Golden Panda Posse.

We’d had to work hard to create a rhythm and cadence for virtual meetings and checkins that worked for everyone in the build up to our physical time, and we became super proficient in Zoom and Slack (we #checkin and #checkout daily). But, despite our proficiency at remote working, we needed time to breathe together, to sync our live selves, recognising that the in the moment and residual benefits from committing this time was essential.

We had almost five full days together, in a beautiful part of Auckland called Titirangi, in the Waitakere ranges; replete with flora and fauna, dense and wild, but with all the comforts of a wonderful home lent to us by friends.

Following a spacious check-in, we gently eased into an agenda building process that included space for strategic and tactical conversations, specific product planning, and work sessions. We loosely organised each day to include each of these elements, respecting that each of us had a few general commitments that we needed to honour during the week.

Each session was facilitated by the panda whose energy was drawn towards the topic, and another panda scribed where necessary.

We also experimented with different techniques and ideas that inform our outward-facing facilitation practice, for example, product poker and Joshua’s great process for life-planning. And very importantly, we had wonderful meals….

Although bamboo is the most favourite food of Pandas (luckily we are all ‘mostly’ vegetarian), we do enjoy experimenting, and lucky for us, Kate is a joyful cook. Enspiral retreating is punctuated by wonderful food, prepared with so much love that it changes the energetic quality (I think so anyway!) and nourishes our work, energy, and ability to sustain a good pace. Turns out Pandas love berries, and high summer in New Zealand means a proliferation of strawberries, blueberries and raspberries — a highlight of our time together was a mid-afternoon snack of berries with coconut yogurt and a few crunchy nuts on top.

In preparation for pouncing (and all year long) Pandas like to keep fit, and enjoy exercise, so it’s important that we build some time in for a run or a hike or some press ups. We organise some of our spacious conversations as walking sessions. We also try to build in alone time each day, which is necessary when we are densely packed.

Technology is our friend, and design thinking is a big part of the panda process. We love Realtime Board, and we love post-it notes. We’ve shared screen shots of some of our creations, but I could imagine much mirth if anyone had been looking through the window as the Pandas sat in our circle, laptops open, moving virtual post it notes around the virtual board! It might have looked funny, but it was super effective — and without a facilitator standing and directing action at the whiteboard, it meant all of us were participating fully.

Morning check-ins and evening check-outs are as important to us; and as natural as brushing our teeth. At the January pounce I requested consent for an identity of Panda Provocateur — an experiment in more regular reflexive noticings as we went (thanks François for the tip!), a couple of times a day after a big block of work. I found these really useful as a way to track energy and more instinctive feedback.

Our retrospective at the end of the week provided lots to celebrate and lots to consider. We will have two week long Pounces per year, and 2 mini-pounces, our next one is scheduled for 11–14 March.

We hope you are enjoying Golden Panda time — please share with anyone who might be interested in learning with us as we go! Until next week...may your tummies be rubbed and your bamboo be plentiful.

Keynote at Reinventing Europe - October 2016

Masks and puppies

The idea of being one's self, one's whole self ‘at work’ is an idea that most people find really appealing. I think its because most people recognize that they do hide facets of who they are, or wear masks at work.  

This practice began for me, and probably for most people, at school – being laughed at by your classmates as well as your teacher for asking a question or making a statement that they thought was silly or dumb. 

This is the one that sticks with me:

Back in the day, sex education films were shown in the auditorium to all the year 5 classes together, on, wait for it, FILM reels... 

Earlier that week, I’d witnessed the miracle of birth as one of the neighbourhood dogs had a litter of puppies. It never occurred to me that they would come out encased in the placenta. After showing the film the teacher asked for questions my hand shot up (something that hasn't changed) and my question went something like “Do babies come out in the same kind of little bags that puppies do?” Cue uproarious laughter, as if that was the most idiotic thing anyone had ever said. 

Up until then, I’d felt really free to be curious. After that humiliation, a little less.

Isn’t it funny how clearly I remember that incident – I can still smell the air in the room. Walking out of the auditorium that afternoon, I picked up my first mask.

In high school I was a bit of an enigma – always in the top classes, but also a cheerleader, and then a rocker. I spent many years changing clothes in the car – I had literally different uniforms. At school I would dress one way, then change for work in the car into my office uniform, and then change after work into my denim and leather for another night on the Sunset Strip. 

This pattern lasted for four or five years, and my approach to it was that there were ‘different Susan’s’ – 4 or 5 personas that I could be and that were differentiated by my uniforms. 

After university and (my first) marriage, slowly but surely the Susans came back together, into two focuses – work and home. As my personal focus on career (what does that mean anyway?) accelerated, those masks came to the fore. 

Even when I was doing work that brought me joy, there would be some enforced ‘coping’ masks that I’d put on just to get me through the day. 

The ones that comes back for me so strongly are ‘the mask for firing people’ or ‘the mask I put on in the plane because it’s the only time I’m alone and if the guy next to me starts chatting I might very well explode because this is the only down time I’ve had in 17 days’. 

This memory makes me smile a little, because it reflects the absolute nonsense of the idea of work-life balance. When I was not bringing my whole self to work, there was never a chance for any kind of balance – hence the futility of the concept. 

It’s all life….

These are just tiny little snippets of all my experiences, my influences, my ideas, my fears and phobias (utensils with round handles). 

At some point, many of us suddenly see that our reactions in the moment don’t always (or even usually) serve us. We might consider why we react to certain things, and might start to recognize that certain ideas or words or phrases repeatedly trigger this reaction. This is one facet of personal sense making. 

I’m not a psychologist, or a Buddhist, but as a human, I know that I suffer less when I don’t react, and when I don’t react the chance that I’ll hurt another human with my reflexive reaction is mitigated.  

But not always. (see 'the paradox of silence').

If we are doing work that matters to us, with the people we choose, in an environment of high trust, is it not in everyone’s interest that we support each other to notice and work with and enable us to work through our personal sh*t to enable growth and development? What better environment than the place where you are spending most of your time, with people who have a good sense of you, and shared context for triggers that manifest when you are together. To feel safe to remove and perhaps destroy the masks?

I return to my basic hypothesis of wholeness, and that it is a remedy for the scourge of scarcity. If I can be all of who I am in the work context, not just the rational/masculine, bringing only that perspective; if I can bring even just 3 or 4 different facets of my being, and you bring 3 or 4 and so on, suddenly we have 12 or 20 different perspectives in the room. And that is magic.

•  

Vulnerability and consent

This isn’t about what you might have thought when you read the headline, and I promise I didn’t choose those words as clickbait.

I’ve never been really afraid to share what I’m thinking. As you can imagine, that’s got me into trouble over and over and over again. Once I even had a boss that wasn’t afraid to name it ‘Susan, you’ll never rise above middle management because you say what you really think’.

I have been told more than once, within a few weeks or months of joining a firm that I was like a ‘breath of fresh air’ because I call it as I see it, unafraid to name the unnamed. On reflection, some of that is about my tendency to ‘think out loud’ and also probably because I’ve never had a lot of patience for learning let alone practicing the unwritten rules of organisational politics.

My expressiveness is not always delightful. I am forever grateful to those who have pulled me up on things I’ve said and asked me to think about the impact of my words. I have done a lot of work on that, and although I say and believe about myself that would never intentionally hurt someone personally with my words, of course sometimes I do.

There is a significant level of vulnerability that comes from honesty and especially when it’s coming from a place that’s not strictly rational. Brining all of ourselves, our whole selves to work means having the vulnerability to share our feelings, our fears, our impressions, and what we notice. All from our perspective and our experience.

I stand in an organisation of a couple hundred humans. I work really closely with about 20 all up, in different configurations. In two of these tight configurations, it’s understood and expected that we can ‘work our stuff out’ through our work. What that might mean is a topic for a different day, but what that means for me is that I can, virtually unfiltered, talk about not only what I’m noticing about the issue or opportunities at play, but how they are affecting me and my development; what are they bringing up for me. Am I being triggered by a word? Is it encouraging me back into old unproductive hierarchical patterns?

The ability to be able to continue to develop is an absolute gift to me, and the gratitude I feel for my colleagues to hold me in that is unbounded. The even greater joy for me is to hold them as they do what the need and want to do to exercise their muscles and sinew and sometimes tear ducts in the process of letting go and letting come.

Does that sound scary, or does it sound awesome?

I’m the first to admit that I’m probably not always hard to hold. Because what comes out is opinion mixed with fear and sometimes anxiety but very often joy at having connected some dots that bring understanding and clarity.

And that brings us to consent.

This week I was in an expanded circle in another group in which I participate. I was triggered by something and challenged it and started processing out loud. It wasn’t appropriate, and it wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair because there were at least two people in that gathering from whom I did not have explicit consent to ‘go there’.

If I’m honest, I knew almost instantly that what I said (what I processed aloud) hurt someone. Because I didn’t intend it to be hurtful, and assumed everyone assumes that of me, I didn’t over-explain myself. And it’s all because I didn’t have the consent of the broad group to do that — to work my sh*t out aloud.

There was at least one other individual that I know was made uncomfortable. Sometimes that’s OK, for example if I’m thoughtfully trying to provoke or challenge, but in this instance it wasn’t — because neither had they given consent.

I’ve apologized subsequently, and I know that over time the trust will or will not manifest, and consent will or will not be granted to me by this individual to do the work I want to do (MY work) out loud, in a group, with them.

Much of what I’m ‘processing’ is the old memes and attitudes and assumptions of 25 years of institutionalization in multi-nationals. Next week I’ll take on the paradox of masks and shadows — and the challenge of re-acquainting ones self with some long ignored facets — let alone the challenge of welcoming them into the workplace.

Webinar - Participatory Working

Power

Throwing your power into the laps of others and running away is equivalent to throwing a grenade.

Leadership and power — there aren’t two more loaded words in the language, and especially in the vernacular of organisations explicitly trying to be different. Over the last 20 or 30 years, the dogma of business and growth has focused on the shift from management to leadership.

What’s the next wave of business psychology/methodology that promises the (slightly sickening cliche) ‘next paradigm’?

An allergy to the sensate nature of the idea of power can paralyze. 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. What happens next? What happens in an organisation where we suppress our need to speak, to act, and to steward from this place of inverse fear? Is this the only way we know to give space to the heretofore un-powerful and those not given the opportunity to express their leader-ly qualities?

Is this some sort of Tyranny of Structurelessness for the twenty-teens?

Or is it a midwifing process of letting go and letting come. Is it only redolent and recognized in those who have done the work and notice what happens when the space is made — or is it this weird passive-aggressive movement of the head and eyes and slight wave of the hand as invocation to others to step into the space?

How scary!

Come hither into the space of leaders; I trust you, but not enough to help you — I want you to join me, but not enough to stand by your side.

I’ve read the book — I know I need to step aside and allow the voice of the people to enter the space and have not only a voice, but to enact the will of the organisation (because the organisation has its own will).

No one has told us how to do it — but I am a leader, I meditate and listen to podcasts. I know I need to let go, because this is unsustainable and I don’t have all the answers (but wait, I kind of do — this is why I’m trying this!)

There is a patent difference between letting go and making space, and actively participating in the space.

Just because you are making room doesn’t mean you are stepping out. You only need to be ready to learn and grow within a new environment — a new space that includes everyone who is interested in participating; if you step into this fertile land you will change. The land itself will change with the presence of all that inhabit there, and one day you will be able to take very long holidays. But not quite yet…

We’ve all experienced the many forms of leadership and power. It’s too simple and too passive to imagine that it’s just the way of the world — because authority is what we’ve known from the beginning. Of course when we are children it’s important — those older than us patently DO know more, are more experienced, and protect us from that which can harm. Authority and power are different. One protects, the other controls. Authority in business is sometimes a necessity — delegated authority as a signatory on contracts, or at the bank. Neither is it wrong or inappropriate to delegate authority for decisions, or for actions. But that doesn’t make that person a leader, nor does (should) it make them more powerful. On the contrary, it does make them in service of or to.

When leaders decide or realize that they are in service, everything changes.

But this is not a decision that is made on behalf of. For your board to say ‘OK John, starting Monday, we ask you to be at work not as a leader but as a servant’ is as strange as for you to turn up on Monday morning as a ‘servant’ and tell the people they now have all the power and need to be equal leaders. By ‘telling’ you are still exerting the power and control. It’s still parent-child. It’s only in adult-to-adult conversation that the power shifts and becomes distributed.

Sometimes when leaders ‘discover’ that it is possible, that there are case studies and years of practice in organisation who are self-managing, the feeling of relief, of a burden being lifted and ‘seeing the light’ that the impulse is to stop everything in service to the transition. Sometimes it can be a quick process, but sometimes it’s incremental. And sometimes it’s painful, and destructive. But for those who feel it in their being, in their body, it’s the only thing that can happen, for when the emancipation of potential emerges, everything shifts.

Into the Frying Pan......

How I joined one of the world’s leading participatory business networks

Only a year ago, I thought Enspiral was simply a group of freelancers and startups working out of a funky space in Wellington.  I was about a year into my journey as a freelancer focused on bringing the ideas of agile and responsive and teal to organisations, and feeling both lonely and isolated from the smart people who were always around when I had a real job.  

I was working on the Co-opathon project with Ben Roberts, and we were using Loomio. I didn’t realize that Loomio was an Enspiral Venture, and that piqued my curiosity.  I googled around and found some of the great talks from Alanna Krause and Joshua Vial and Rich Bartlett.  Then I had a chat with the wonderful Doug Kirkpatrick, and he told me that a little posse of Enspiral people had recently come to visit the Self Management Institute.  

All the threads started coming together, and I made the first move.  I met heaps of people, started hanging around, and by the end of Summerfest in January I had made my decision to invest in and work with these amazing humans.

See what I did there?  Quite different from a normal engagement – I chose participation.  

One of the memes that it took me a while to understand about Enspiral is that it’s easy to join and hard to stay.  Staying takes a mindset of total self-management, which is antithetical to the way we’ve been taught or how most of us experience work.  You find your own way.  Enspiral does not have jobs.  You create your own.  And find a way to make a livelihood.  

I totally get that I am not the traditional persona of an Enspiralite – I’ve had a career - in humongous multinationals, start ups, and global bungy jumping empires.  Since I was 17, I’ve always had to provide a CV, interview, and depending on the whim (or wisdom!) of the HR team or the hiring manager I’d get offered a contract and some money to do some stuff or sell some stuff.  Not only did that not happen at Enspiral for me – (not to say it couldn’t for you if you choose to do work for an Enspiral venture), but it also took me a really long time to get my head around it – the ‘how we do things here’ piece.  We are starting to understand how hard that is, and how important it is – not only to new adventurers poking around, but those of us hanging around  in the gooey center.  

Over the years, Enspiral ventures have built and developed some of the tools we use to make decisions – this is Loomio (now used by 10’s of thousands of people).  

What do you do when there is no CFO to do spreadsheets for what gets funded next year?  What do you so when you recognise the need to be responsive and realize that there is no way we can predict what we’d like or need to spend money on month to month – you build Cobudget.  And how does money get in there in the first place?  How does the Enspiral Foundation run?  It has no employees.  But there is the support and scaffolding of 40 members and 250 contributors to hold.  You think lean and practical and have a MVB – Minimum Viable Board to cover the legal obligations and  the risk, and you share out the work of the C-Suite (haha a c-suite that does actual work!) amongst those with the energy and interest, let them decide how to organize and beCatalysts in the true sense of the word.

It’s taken Enspiral the better part of a decade to both understand what it needed and what experiments to try.  We’ll never be done – it will always be changing.  And how do you care for a culture that is at once unique and emergent?  Notice.  Listen. Play.  Our latest ‘agreement’ invokes the opportunity of intentional Stewardship.

It’s not easy.  Sometimes it’s really hard.  We’ve heard voices and questions and ‘hands raised’ all around the world, and with a tentative gaze outward, understand we have a responsibility to share, with whoever wants to listen, this great experiment. We’ve started a new venture called Enspiral Labs to make that intentional – the sharing of ideas and tools and experiment – to provide some source of confidence that it’s possible – it feels good, and it changes lives.  

We are touring Europe in September and October, and we are so looking forward to sharing our lived experience.  Grab your tickets for Berlin, Stockholm, Copenhagen, London, Amsterdam, Brussels, and Budapest here.  

Hope to see you soon!

The 4 Reasons your people aren't engaged

Or “why I subverted my promise to myself never to write an essay with this title.”

About a million years ago, or 1997, I worked for a startup in the very first dot.com boom. Dotcomboom! It was the best — smart, motivated crew in Tony Blair’s Britain, where anything was possible — until it wasn’t. We had lots of the perks now associated with Sili (silly) money: an on-site massage room, hired a 707 to take the company away to Malta or Spain every year.

I am such a geek that the thing that made me happiest was having a full-time organizational psychologist. That was the coolest.

His name was Howard, and he was every bit as influential to me as the high school history teachers who changed my life — ex-Black Panther Mr. Lee who unlocked my personal opinions about politics, and Mr. Giacomazza who taught International Relations and unlocked the world for me.

Howard shared insight into how I as a leader could promote engagement and participation.

I refuse to quote the xxx% of employees are not engaged figure, we all know that it’s bad-bad. But here’s my offer — consider these 4 ways to check — and I’m going to use active first person here — because it’s not up to you as a leader, it’s up to the individual:

1) Are you involved in decisions that impact your work?

2) Is there a tangible outlet for your creative/innovative ideas?

3) Do you feel like you are better/have grown in your work in the past 6 months?

4) Do you feel like your colleagues are both good at what they do, and support you to do your best work?

Is this the first time you’ve seen these offers? Perhaps not phrased in exactly that way, but I’d be surprised if you hadn’t.

Theory has it that if you ‘get these right’ then the level of engagement is at least in the potential range of ‘happy’. I’ve iterated these (beyond recognition of the unknown primary source) over the past 20 years. I quote them or consider them very frequently — and I can’t remember anyone ever disagreeing!

In my years at the pointy end, I would consider these elements to be in the realm of my influence — behaviours or actions as a manager/leader I had the potential to effect. Looking at them today, with the shift of my personal lens of understanding to self-management, all of these elements seem obviously in line with and OPO (open participatory organisation) a DDO (deliberately developmental organisation) or a self-managing organisation.

1) Are you involved in decisions that affect your work?

Are you in an environment where your work is dictated to you, or prescribed? Do you have the chance to co-create your role or at least the tasks that you do day to day and week to week? Do you have enough insight or visibility into the bigger/broader picture so that you can make decisions or recommendations about the work that you do?

2) Is there a tangible outlet for your creativity/innovative ideas?

Can you create or invite this?

It goes way beyond the old ‘suggestion box’ to an invitation to sit with or build a cross-functional cohort that creates and provides the space for experiments. Even before the experiments, the chance to share what you’ve seen, what you sense, what you think, and what might be the basis for these making something from these thoughts or ideas, either independently or with your peers.

3) Do you feel like you are better/have grown in your work in the past 6 months?

Never mind the pejorative definition of better — have you grown? Doesn’t need to necessarily be in the skill competence realm of one’s particular technical capacity, it could be across any domain. I posit that choosing a growth mindset makes this inevitable.

4) Do you feel like your colleagues are both good at what they do, and support you to do your best work?

This to me is about relationships and high trust. This is about collegiality and interdependence — and perhaps the most difficult aspect, one might think, because the locus of control is different. But I’m not sure that it is — if we hold as important and non-negotiable our interdependence then this concept of safe psychological space can manifest and from that can emerge a certainty and sanctity. It cuts both ways — and it requires honesty and rigor.

I am so eager for feedback on this hypothesis — what’s missing? Please share your thoughts and especially any experience or experiments.  This is Applied Research for Enspiral Labs.

Mango Season - Self Management in India

I’d noted a post in the Reinventing Organizations Discourse in early April, an inquiry as to the existence of Teal Organisations in India. As I had recently been invited to speak at a conference in Bangalore in June, I pinged him for a chat.

Yash Papers, located just east of Lucknow, in Faizabad, Uttar Pradesh, was founded in 1981 by KK Jhunjhunwala. By all accounts, KK was a remarkable individual with a huge, but unfortunately weak heart — he passed in 2005 at 54. His wife, Manjula, equally remarkable, in 1998 founded an alternative school (think Montessori and Steiner) that serves over 3000 students in Faizabad. There was no pressure, then, on Ved, their first son, to live up to the contributions of his parents!

Mangalam Farm is in a mango orchard just south of Faizabad. The legend goes that KK was so attached to this place, which had been in the family for years, that he fought his brothers for it.

Ved and his wife, Kim McArthur, live here with their almost one-year-old Zara, and her older sisters (didis) Sargam and Vidia. In the morning, peacocks crow, and sometimes the blue cows appear in herds and romp through the orchard. It’s mango season, and I’m enchanted and a little overwhelmed by the many varieties. Breakfast ends in a competition for the biggest pile of mango skins on the plate.

We leave for the factory after breakfast, and a prompt arrival for 9AM assembly. Assembly is a company wide stand up that happens each morning, and starts with a small prayer. Around 100 members (as the staff are called) gather to hear yesterdays results — from the production numbers of each paper machine (there are three) to the water usage (of their onsite water treatment plant) to the power output and consumption of the bagasse (sugar cane waste) fuelling the onsite 2.5 MW Power Plant — which services the entire requirement of the plant.

Everything is transparent — the white boards that ring the assembly area show the daily results against targets — and as they are read out from the dais, there is gentle applause to each measurement area that has performed. For those on the shop floor or elsewhere on-site, the morning assembly is relayed via loudspeakers.

There is an air of relaxed seriousness, which I came to understand as shared purpose and commitment. Approximately 30% of everyone’s salary is based on the collective commitment to achieve. There is no difference between a machine operator or a sales person — everyone is held equally. Because all of the metrics of profitability are transparent, each member knows how their role impacts, and what they can do in their teams, and what they can do to support other teams whose areas might be behind. And while salaries are not transparent (as yet) there is intention for this in the short term.

In 1999, Faizabad was beset by some of the worst inter-communal violenceIndia has seen in recent times. A virtual martial law and curfew was imposed. This meant that many members couldn’t make it to the factory, and those who did needed to figure it out for themselves. A classic case of needs must — they had to self-organise, and it worked. One of the legends of this time, who still serves at Yash Papers, is Mahavir Shekhavat, who heads Production also known as ‘The Mountain Mover” or Hanuman.

In India, myths and folklore are both ancient and contemporary. Yash Papers never forgot that time, and have persisted in the understanding that when individuals are given agency and autonomy, magic can happen.

It’s not always been easy — and it’s still not. The cultural norms of India, especially when it comes to hierarchy, are not easily changed, let alone bent. In Uttar Pradesh, it’s not easy to attract and retain individuals who are willing to stay and commit to live in a ‘backwater’ when the opportunities of Mumbai or Bangalore beckon. But what Yash Papers does have is a common purpose — and a set of values that differentiate it from probably 99% of other organisations in India.

When Ved read Reinventing Organizations, it spoke to him clearly –

‘Going through RO was an intense spiritual experience. I could feel constant vibration of my energy field each time I picked the book. So much so that I had to put the book down at times. It felt as if so many areas where we had tried and failed were being reinforced and we were being invited to go try again as there were people who had appeared to guide. I truly wish we can build a place where people are able to recognise their purpose and built towards it along with many others’

Yash Papers is currently more green than orange, with flashes of teal. But the intention and direction is clear. More autonomy, distributed decision-making, self-organising pods responsible to one another as peers from a commitment perspective, and completely free to make their own decisions about the way they work.

With this distributed autonomy, the advice process comes alive. Although not yet to the stage where all central services are distributed, teams like HR embed one of their own into each work group — go to team meetings, and serve. They are establishing new and heretofore non-existent policies around harassment (a self-selected group of 2 women and 2 men who are not ‘managers’ but member representatives) and conflict resolution processes. They see their work as the holders of a safe psychological space — the necessary ingredient for real trust and collective development.

Recently, pods have formed for each paper machine; the members that work on each are autonomously responsible for the way they organise and their production. Quality circles, with representatives from across the organisation meet weekly to work on self-selected projects.

Yash Papers use SAP, and I witnessed the project lead practically beg Ved to be involved— to be the decision maker. Ved stoically and kindly pushed back — saying that the project had his support, but that there was no reason for him to be involved, and furthermore that he trusted the project lead implicitly, to make decisions based on advice.

Wholeness also plays a big part at Yash Papers. Again, in a culture where norms are respected, it’s not always easy or expected to bring all of yourself to work. But it is truly a desire — and it’s modelled in remarkable ways. The large majority of Yash Papers members are Hindu, but there is a real value placed on inclusivity — my visit coincided with Ramadan, and I was invited to a celebration for the breaking of the fast, Iftar. The mess was arranged with a large blanket in the middle, and we sat in a circle and broke fast with dates and mangoes and gram and other delicacies. In that circle were Muslims, but also Hindus, Sikhs, Christians and non-believers — sharing a connection, joyfully and respectfully.

This is an embodiment of the Yash Papers Value ‘Joy at Work’: Freedom of thoughts & decision…

Deepali, a bright and earnest female member asked me about wholeness. “Madam”, she said, “how do I bring all of myself to work?” I replied “you choose to, you model it, and you practice holding a safe space for others to do the same”.

Orange organisations call a change of strategy a ‘pivot’. In teal, it’s merely evolution of purpose. At Yash Papers, this is common practice — an environment that values experimentation. This can be unsettling for some — another change, just when we were getting used to the previous one. But they are truly iterations — and fearlessness. And the more practiced they become, the more natural it feels — to learn to feel the organism as that, to allow emergence, to sense and respond. Ved deftly and patiently holds that space.

I have been at once quietly stunned, and not at all surprised by what I have witnessed in Faizabad. Not surprised because we know that we share a common longing for connectedness, a sense of purpose, and a way of being with our work that does not diminish but enhances, does not extract but sustains. What did surprise and humble me is that this can be true in India, where neither life nor business is ‘easy’ by the Western definition. The impulse persists, and the pulse itself beats so strongly in those who perhaps daren’t believe that it’s possible for them — until they try. Until they collectively build and infuse their own environment with a sense of possibility and wholeness.

Perhaps it takes a visionary like Semler or deBlok or Rufer — if so, Ved Krishna stands beside these vanguards. If not, the members of Yash Papers have themselves created a uniquely expressed opportunity for Teal emergence in India.