Samantha Slade from Percolab on practicing self-management

Lisa: So Samantha, first of all, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Samantha: Maybe I’m gonna just thread with the past for a moment. When I was 20, I was studying at McGill University in Montreal, Canada in anthropology. After a couple of years of being in the books and thinking about different ways people could get organized, I realized that there was this great opportunity going on in the world. I took a year off and joined the revolution in Nicaragua. I was excited to live firsthand how a country could prototype itself and how it could be and function.

That really kind of sums me up – this keen interest to be thinking through different ways that we can organize ourselves as human beings, and I’ve been doing that ever since. So fast-forward 30 years later, and here I am in this wonderful international community of companies called Percolab, and I founded the one in Montreal and the entire network. We’ve been pioneering how companies can be, and within that sphere, I kind of hone in on developing interventions that support organizations in thinking of new ways they can be.

Lisa: Wow, and what is so important about finding these new ways of working?

Samantha: Well, I think that we’ve come from a mechanistic paradigm that was spurred on by the Industrial Revolution, and all of the different management practices and organizational practices that we’ve become actually accustomed to aren’t natural ways of being for human beings.

So what I’m interested in – and this is my background in anthropology – is our capacity to reconnect to ways of functioning that actually make sense for us individually and collectively. So they feel better and more nourishing and enriching, and they work better.

Lisa: And you’re currently writing a book about seven practices that help us get more horizontal in our organizations and rewire us, as you say, for self-governance or self-management. So is that kind of part of this interest in reconnecting to different ways of being together as humans?

Samantha: Yes, absolutely. I really think that in the whole self-management movement, you can come at it from different angles. You can make an official structural change of shifting to self-management, but at the end of the day, each and every human being functioning in self-management needs to reconnect with different ways of functioning in which they’re in their own agency.

After years of thinking this through and really looking at every kind of organization I’ve been in – I mean, it can be from my kids’ schools to the businesses I grow – it started to become clear that there may be just some easy places that you can start that are kind of naturally occurring within organizations where we can start practicing how to be more self-organizing. So it was about just naming those and starting to talk about what those are, helping us just be more conscious of the daily opportunities that are around us.

We don’t have to wait for upper management to announce a new organizational shift to self-management to start developing the practices within ourselves here and now. So the book is designed for anyone, wherever they are in an organization or a community even, to start.

Lisa: Yeah, absolutely. And the idea is – because when I was talking to different people who were trying to move forward in self-management, there are a lot of people who are reading the books and getting really kind of excited about it intellectually, but then getting stuck from an action base. Like, what do I do? How do I shape change? So it’s the gap between the theory and ideal of it and then how to make it operational. Just starting with some really kind of simple, basic places and using those little places or fragments or fractals of larger things that we can be doing, and in those smaller places, we can start embodying the different shifts of ways of being and doing. Could you give an example of one or a few of the practices and/or some of the actionable starting points that you’re starting to write in the book?

Samantha: Yeah, absolutely. So say, for example, practicing autonomy. Now that sounds very simple, right? In our daily lives, we get up every morning and figure out our breakfast, figure out how to get to work, we find a real mode of transportation, we set our own alarm clocks, etc. There’s nobody telling us what to do, nobody micromanaging that at all. You know, we’re autonomous for buying our houses, deciding whether to have children, all sorts of different things.

So bringing that consciousness into work and giving us frameworks to say, well, how autonomous are you in the things you work on, what you’re working on, how you’re working, and starting to think about that from a very micro level – how comfortable you are deciding for yourself and not waiting to be told to do different things.

That’s just one example. Another one would be collective decision-making. Thinking about that – collective decision-making is something that we do again in our personal lives all the time. Typically in our personal lives we’re really kind of coming in and listening to the different perspectives and figuring a way forward to come to a decision. When it gets to the workplace, it seems like we defer to positional authority, or we have these kind of laborious consensus processes when we try to do something collectively.

So what are other frameworks or containers that can help us hold decision-making processes together that are collective and helping us be action-focused, which is what we need in a workplace? It’s like building from helping people to see that you’re already doing this in your everyday life. Why is it when we get to the workplace, we all of a sudden shift and we stop doing things the way we’re doing really well in our natural lives? And looking at different organizations that have set up frameworks and protocols that are helping themselves to kind of reconnect better. So decision-making is one.

Samantha: Did you want to hear some more?

Lisa: Yeah!

Samantha: Another one is how we co-manage meetings. So really kind of digging in and questioning a lot of the assumptions we make about meetings – who gets to call a meeting, who gets to organize the meeting, who gets to determine who’s attending. I mean, in our personal lives, we self-determine when we turn up for meetings, or together we negotiate times and topics. Yet when we get to the workplace, we kind of end up letting that be one person.

So the idea of coming back to – would it be possible to rotate some of those roles? Who gets to document the meetings? So just again, it’s this kind of jumping between what we’re already doing so well in our personal lives and then how we lose that sometimes when we go into work, and so how we can just start reconnecting with that.

That doesn’t mean you need to start changing your big team meetings every month. You can just start with your work meetings that you have on different projects with people and already start thinking about that from a conscious place as a practitioner, being in your own kind of self-reflections on it and starting to think about power with that, and starting to think about your own personal leadership around that practice of co-managing meetings.

So what do you want to be stepping up to, and what do you want to be leaning back on and leaving space for others around? The more we just go into any of these things and start thinking about how am I acting right now – am I being passive and self-effacing or victim, or am I taking so much leadership that I’m crushing space for others to be stepping up into their own personal leadership? It doesn’t really matter the practice, we’re kind of looking at it from those same angles.

If I can think of another one – another would be transparency and openness, another one would be communication and dealing with conflict, one is checking in with purpose and intention. So you kind of get the idea of the different practices.

Lisa: It sounds like two things emerge for me. One is something about sort of the structures and the kind of tacit pieces and rules of the game of work that we’ve all made, that we take for granted and that we’ve inherited from, as you said before, kind of a mechanistic industrial era. It’s almost like making those visible in order to start to make choices about alternative ways of doing things.

Samantha: Absolutely.

Lisa: And then the second one seems to be something you started to touch on there – something about self-awareness and how am I choosing to be, how am I showing up in this meeting, for example, and almost like the softer personal side of things.

Samantha: Yeah, and it’s very deliberate to name them as practices because the idea is we also need to realize that we might have lost our practice in the workplace. So it’s not the first time you’re going to start doing things differently in this alternative way that you’re going to get it perfect. You have to do it over and over again. It’s just like learning to play piano or learning to do judo – these are practices, and we acknowledge those in those realms that it’s by doing them over and over and over that we get better.

So it’s also about bringing that into these and starting looking at most practices. It’s just by not just doing them over and over, but doing them over and over and being self-reflective about, hey, can you just do a little bit of sense-making about how that went and what could be tweaked in the future and changed and improved? So developing awareness and consciousness around how I’m showing up.

And the different frameworks and containers that we have help hold the practices. For example, when we play piano, we don’t just get better by playing piano randomly, right? We straightaway give ourselves a little framework. We say, “I’m gonna play piano on Tuesdays, 30 minutes. On Wednesdays I’ll play just 15 minutes. And on Saturday mornings, I’m gonna give it one hour. And I’m gonna play the same piece during the weekdays. Saturdays I’ll challenge myself with a new, more complicated piece.”

So you see, that’s just like working with how we do this absolutely naturally. We give ourselves frameworks to challenge us to be developing forward as learners and practitioners, and so it’s bringing that again into the workplace.

Lisa: I like that. It’s a little bit like coming at it from a habit point of view rather than some lofty organizational, you know, structural change, or something kind of ethereal called change. And kind of breaking it down into practices and the mindset around practices. I really like what you said about it being something that you are intentional about, and then you kind of break down into, you know, something – a process, an ongoing kind of learning process and practicing process.

Samantha: Absolutely. And so it yeah, it brings it hopefully to somewhere that self-management becomes accessible. It’s not far away, and it helps people hopefully to get unstuck when they’re trying to figure out where do I start, what can I do that’s on a concrete base tomorrow morning at my workplace. And you don’t even need to like name anything or frame it as self-management. You can just bring it in and start doing it just quietly on your own.

Lisa: That sounds awesome. I’m curious about – as an anthropologist and also as someone who works with people and organizations that are exploring these new ways of organizing and being together – what are some of the common pitfalls that you hear people sort of being challenged by?

Samantha: Well, people are always going to say – one of the projections people do is they think that when you develop a new system, the new system needs to be perfect up and running. Like, we don’t acknowledge that when you’re changing your ways of doing, that it is gonna have to iterate forward to fine-tune and improve and find its fully fleshed out, crystallized way of being. And the system that we’re in right now didn’t get created in a day; it’s got iterated forward.

So to give ourselves this kind of way of thinking of just iteratively working and practicing – once we can shift to that mindset, it really opens up space for just prototyping, trying things out, messing around, making mistakes, and learning. For me, that’s one of the key things we can do – we can just shift into being collective learners together.

There’s something very playful about it, and it seems that in our workplace we don’t give ourselves this opportunity. Everything has to be so serious. And I really think that we can – there are ways of doing really great work and having this experimentation kind of culture and way of being together that’s very enlivening in the end.

Lisa: I like that idea of being playful and it’s like being a bit forgiving of ourselves as well, like, you know, that it’s not gonna – we’re not gonna get 100% right first time, and there’s no like perfect template that we can overlay onto our team or organization that’s gonna nail it first time.

Samantha: Yeah, it’s like you’re figuring it out as you live it, and there is no recipe. People keep going, “Well, what do you have to do?” There’s no “have to do,” right? So yeah, that’s one of the challenges.

And I think the other thing is it’s like we’ve taken on inside ourselves so many different things about the current mechanistic way of thinking that we’re not necessarily even aware of. We’re not even in agreement with it intellectually. For example, we had a meeting yesterday with a guest at Percolab, and at the end of the meeting was “What am I going to be committing to?” And the guest was like, “What am I supposed to be committing to?”

Everybody in the Percolab team was just kind of quietly smiling and holding space for this person because we all know that you commit to what you want to be committing to and what makes sense for you, given all of your professionalism and knowledge and experience. That’s what you could be committing to and should be committing to. None of us can say that at all. And it was like this is really just a little micro moment where he’s having his shift, going, “Oh, I can own what I commit to. I don’t have to defer to another to tell me what I need to be committing to.”

Lisa: Yeah, it brings to mind – I was looking on the Percolab website earlier, and I love this tagline that you have of “walking the paradigm shift together.”

Samantha: Yeah, and in the end, he was like, “Okay, I get it,” and then he named this perfect commitment for him from where he is. There’s nothing we could have said that could have helped him in any way. It’s like, you know, be in your own knowing of yourself.

Lisa: And speaking of Percolab, I was reading about your journey, you know, internally at Percolab as well, and you as a co-founder, and how – and some of the milestones that you’ve had along your journey to becoming a self-managing organization. Could you share a little bit about that story and some of the things you learned and some of the challenges you encountered?

Samantha: Sure. So I co-founded Percolab ten years ago, and I mean, it had always been a vision that it would be a very kind of autonomous place where people could come and work on what they wanted, how they wanted, when they wanted, where they wanted. So this whole idea of freedom and autonomy was like at the core and center, and people could bring in and do what they wanted and bring in new work.

So for me, when I started, I had all of this going on, but that was inside my head, and it was my vision. So if people came into the company, they’re still stuck in the paradigms which were products of all of the organizations from school to places we worked, and they’re kind of entrenched and embedded within us. So our habits and things are still kind of like deferring to the boss, even if the boss isn’t acting as – you still have this voice of authority as the founder, right?

So I had this frustration in that, and I see it in other founders. They’re like, “Well, everybody has the freedom to do everything. Why aren’t they just taking initiative and being in their leadership?” And you can actually get kind of frustrated, until I figured it out that if you want to be shifting to this other system, you have to make it explicit and you have to formalize it, and you have to give it the containers that are different from the current containers we have.

You can’t just say, “Oh, all of the policies and principles and practices of conventional organizations don’t apply here,” then people are like, “Well, what does?” You can’t just take them away and leave nothing because people can’t step into nothingness. If you’re taking away one set of an organizational structure, then you need to bring in another organizational structure that’s an expression of this other paradigm.

And so that was what happened in my path – I really realized that it was me who was holding everybody back because we hadn’t made really explicit the new system. And as we started to make it explicit, well, then it revealed that there were things that we were doing as co-founders – my business partner and I – that we actually were horrified about. We had espoused values of transparency, and sure, we were transparent about so much, but at the end of the day, there were some things in the finances that we weren’t being transparent about.

And if we wanted people to be really doing business development with us, then we really needed to get fully, fully transparent. So it was a great awakening and a great shift that was in 2015. So we, what I call – we wanted to be it from the beginning, and then we formally became it in 2015. And the moment we got explicit about things and wrote stuff down and had structures in this wiki and everything, it just took off. It was as simple as that.

Lisa: You have this in your blog that I really liked – one of the lessons that you summarized, that self-management doesn’t just spontaneously happen. It needs to be named and structured.

Samantha: Absolutely. This is just it. It’s like if you – it can’t just go, “Oh, we’re now self-managing, everybody self-manage.” People can’t shift. You have to name and structure what that means because we don’t all have experiences in it, and we don’t know what it is, and it’s a little bit terrifying. “If I do this, am I gonna get in trouble?” And everybody has their own stories and experiences bringing with them from previous places of employment where people might have said, “Oh, you can do whatever,” and they did whatever, and they got disciplined for it, or things like that.

Lisa: You mentioned finances. I know that you’re really interested in financial models for future organizations, and you and I kind of – one of the ways that we connected was over a blog that we each had written about self-set salaries. What is your take on finances and how we can reimagine those in organizations?

Samantha: Well, I think when you’re going into self-management, at one point you’re going to end up looking at your financial models, and compensation becomes a key element in it because, at the end of the day, if people can actually get beyond the taboo of money and start looking at money as just something that’s another tool out there, and start practicing being okay about thinking about value – what’s the value of this and how money flows and the value of this versus the value of that – then you start getting into places where you start shifting about your own value.

What we’re noticing in organizations is that typically men are paid more than women. We know this throughout the world. And when you open the space of really putting money as something that we can learn about and have a practice about, things start evening out. So people are helping themselves own their value. When people perceive super value and somebody undervalues themselves, then collectively that gets held and supported. And when some people in an organization overvalue themselves, that can be named and supported through as well.

At Percolab, what we have is what we call a self-determined variable salary system. That’s one part of it. And the other part of our financial model is that we very deliberately take a whole bunch of the work that we do, and it’s non-transactional. So all the work that anybody in the organization does that’s for the functioning of the company and the growth and evolution of the company – none of that has any money associated to it. And it’s very deliberate and intentional so that we can reconnect with experiences of doing things from a community perspective.

That’s one part of our model that was almost a detail when we got to it, but the more that we live in it, it really helps us walk through so many of the assumptions we have about things being transactional and not transactional, and what just doing something for a community – how that can be super fulfilling and how it shifts how we do our work.

And then the other part about – okay, so here’s a project with a budget, and the team working on it will together, with full transparency, figure out who gets what part of the pie. And that pie is limited, so if I say I want more, then that means somebody else on the team will be getting less. So having that conversation together is absolutely amazing – to be able to think about money from a place of individual value and care and collective value and care.

So this is the financial model we have, and I know it’s a little bit – it’s a bit extreme, or I don’t know, very many organizations functioning like that. And I think there’s all different ways to have financial models and self-managing systems, just as long as – the more you go transparent in the compensation models, the more you’re supporting shift to self-management.

There’s an organization I know here in Canada, and what they did is they had a meeting which they called the “opening the kimono” meeting, in which they invited everybody on staff to reveal the salary that they were earning and a story behind that salary. And they went around in the circle. Can you imagine? Even once they had done the circle, they put in the center the budget that they had for the company for salaries for the upcoming year and had everybody think about their portion of that budget that they would like to have.

And they went around the circle once, and then they went around the circle twice because you could readjust once you’ve heard everybody else’s. And you tallied it up to see if it was above or below. And that company, what they’ve shared is that with this system, people are asking for less in salaries than they did when they used to just come to the manager and ask for a salary increase. It’s kind of like owning the company’s finance together brings people into this shared caring about the financial well-being.

Lisa: Wow, that’s really interesting. I really get fascinated by the paradigm shift of thinking about money in different ways and, as you said, thinking about it more in terms of kind of personal value and care and community care, and less about kind of transactional. And it’s so interesting, isn’t it, that when you open it up and when you start to have inspiring conversations about it and you have access to all the information that make sense of it, that people are less inclined to – you know, money’s value goes down somewhat when you kind of realize other things that have a value in the organization, in the community, if you like.

Samantha: Yeah, and what was also interesting is that we became aware of doing this practice that the value that we get passed on in society is the more money you make, the better professional you are. And we were like, no, maybe that’s not what we believe in. We believe that there’s other variables that make us a successful human being and worker, then just the amount of learning, so it’s how much I’m learning. So taking on some what I call learning work that might be less paid has so much value, and I’m growing as a human being, or giving myself a few months off this year to be writing a book – look at the value with that.

So being able to maybe give myself space where I’m not just reaping in huge amounts of money so I can have time to work on personal projects is something we look at – that as being the person who, from a holistic perspective, is flourishing.

Lisa: It also strikes me that it kind of changes the dynamic from kind of parent-child a little bit, where it’s like, “Well, you pay me money, and then I give you my time,” and more to like an adult-to-adult exchange where, you know, it’s like, “I give this to the organization in the community, and the community in the organization gives me this.” And that’s not just money, that’s also learning, that’s growing, and all sorts of other things that kind of changed that dynamic.

Samantha: Yeah, and I think this whole parent-child shifting to adult-adult dynamic in relationship is key and critical to all of the different practices of self-management. And of course, in money, it shows up huge because it’s actually – you’re almost doing a thing like, “I’m a teenager, and I’m doing my chores and then getting my money. And if I don’t do my chores well, then I get my money taken away from me, or I get disciplined by my parents,” or whatever. And that is the model that we take in organizations.

So deconstructing and even just exploding the model by being like, “Okay, here we are, here are the monies that we’ve got, where we’re bringing in, and here’s the monies going out,” and you can actually – each and every one of us can figure out what makes sense. And money’s the same way we can figure out what’s the best thing I should be doing right now, or what’s the best commitment I should be doing – figuring out what’s the best amount that I should be paid given all of the complexity of what’s going on in the organization. People can figure that out.

Lisa: I think there’s also something for me about the power of choice, and that it’s not this kind of passive “Well, I’m paid in such and such a way, and my assumption is that, you know, year on year I’d just like to get a pay rise and climb the ladder.” It’s like a very different way of looking at work, which is much more about, “I choose what my engagement is with the organization, and we choose together how that ecosystem works, and we care about each other as flourishing human beings.”

Samantha: Yeah, and that shifts everything. It really does. And you know, we’ve been told a story that in business world, you can’t do this. Business is about money, and we’re supposed to just make decisions based on what makes financial sense. And I think that our assumption is that we can be successful, thriving businesses from a financial perspective and caring and learning and flourishing individually and collectively as well. And I think that’s the hypothesis that we’re experimenting into. And thus far, successfully.

Lisa: Thank you so much, Samantha, for sharing your insights on self-management and the practices that can help organizations transform.