Resources
Episode Transcript
Lisa: So Susan, Enspiral seems to be gaining a strong reputation in the world of self-managing teams at the moment. What do you think it is about Enspiral that people are finding so inspiring and useful?
Susan: I think that it has something to do with the fact that we are a practical example of an organization and network that’s been going for about seven years now, and really maybe in the beginning not specifically intentionally sharing what we were doing, but the bits and pieces that got out into the world were so provocative and different that people started to pay attention. We as Enspiral have just started probably this time last year to take the first tentative outward-looking glances. I think for the first five years or so we were really inwardly focused, but it’s just quite amazing and incredible to see what happens when the intention shifts even slightly over our shoulders to see what our fellow humans and the rest of the world are doing, and how that I think changes the amplitude of the dialogue and the ability for us to share what we’re doing.
Lisa: What are you finding are your biggest challenges at the moment as you call yourselves a participatory network? What challenges are you facing?
Susan: Oh gosh, what challenges don’t we face? And I think that’s the thing, you know, I think it’s human nature as well that the stories that people read and hear about Enspiral are of the really amazing things that we’re doing in terms of participation, but it’s really difficult to describe in a blog post or in an article or even in a workshop how difficult this work is. And to be honest, we’re making it up as we go along as well.
When you’re trying to be significantly and profoundly different with the way that we approach our individual relationship to the work and then how we approach our relationship to the collective, it’s just fraught with everything that exists within normal organizations, assumptions, projections, and everything in between. So I think for me, you know, I can only speak personally from my lived experience, is that the biggest learning for me over the past year or so is that just because individuals love to work in the thing doesn’t mean that they get the joy and the energy from working on the thing.
And of course, you know, this is also one of the paradoxes of Enspiral. We talk about it as if it’s a thing, but in reality, it’s just either a container or a network of relationships, a community of relationships, but it still needs tending. The thing needs tending and scaffolding and looking after. And that’s, I think, the ongoing biggest challenge that we have is how do we keep on making the invitation for people to serve the community in a way that actually reflects their energy and what brings them joy.
So 18 months ago, when the refactor process, which was really an understanding that having operated so loosely for many years, that some agreements needed to be instantiated and yeah, basically put forward and agreed by the members and the contributors, we tried some things around a minimum viable board and a cohort of catalysts. And you know, as I said earlier, some of the assumptions that we made around what would be important for those roles and what the impact of that would be on the community has morphed and changed.
So even before we get to the question of growth and is growth something that Enspiral wants and needs to do, the big challenge and reflection that we’re on now is what does that mean from the perspective of mainly fiscal and financial governance? Because if we’re not a solid thing moving forward, then you know, smoke and mirrors are going to be cracked and reveal something that is not sustainable. And more than anything, I think that our mission is to create something that’s sustainable even in its dynamism.
Lisa: You mentioned about making assumptions about certain things and one of the tensions you mentioned there about assuming that everyone wants to both work in the network and on the thing or in the thing and on the thing. How have you processed those tensions? Have those conversations been difficult? Is there space for people to say those things that are difficult to say, especially when you’re working in a kind of startup or in a passion project like Enspiral? Has it been easy for people to have those difficult conversations?
Susan: It is easy, but again, this is also something that takes effort. So we are really privileged to have a really good culture of using Loomio and increasingly Slack and Zoom as tools that allow us to have those conversations virtually. But you know, as we know, being able to sit together and have spacious conversations around these difficult topics is really, really important.
So as you know, Enspiral goes on retreat twice a year and every time we go away together, that’s really the time to dig into the juiciness of these topics. Last year it was around stewardship. This year we’re just in the planning process for going away in July to talk specifically about the idea of growth and what it looks like in the network. And for me, the opportunity is to keep the invitation and the dialogue going so that we can together unearth the ways that people are going to feel comfortable in participating.
And what really shifted for us last year was this concept of working groups. So rather than having sort of fixed roles in the organization, which would be unsustainable anyway because these are all passion projects, all of the time that we give to the organization is voluntary or self-funded or pro bono or whatever you want to call that. But the idea that people could come together specifically for a project or to work on something that sat within, I guess, their realm of joy has really shifted the conversation.
So we’ve got working groups currently, we’ve got a finance working group and a communications working group and a brand working group and an ambassadoring working group. And we’ve gone to the extent that we’ve actually changed the posture and the nomenclature of the catalyst and the board role to be working groups so that we can focus on more specifically what we’re interested in.
So that has been a shift that has made, I think, the invitation a little less overwhelming and given people the opportunity to commit to maybe a shorter period of time or to a specific project. And that seems to have had a positive effect because if you count, I guess, everybody that’s participating in working groups, it’s probably, you know, 20 or 30 individuals, whereas up until, I guess, the end of last year, if you count the catalyst and the board cohort, there was only seven of us. So this seems to be a hypothesis or a prototype that has gone beyond prototype stage and really seems to be an essential ingredient that is working for many more people.
Lisa: In this catalyst working group that you mentioned, that’s the Enspiral equivalent of an executive leadership team, is that right?
Susan: Well, that’s the way it was originally imagined. The anti-pattern that was appearing in Enspiral after about five years was that in this exploration of bossless organizing, there were still people that were doing the work of the thing, and those tended to be the people that really enjoyed that kind of work, people that loved to look at the big picture and work on strategy and actually understand how all of the moving parts fit together.
But there’s privilege that comes with that, so individuals that have time to do that kind of work. And the paradox of then, especially if it’s not recognized and it’s not paid, the tendency for those individuals to do too much, I don’t want to say too much of the work, but to burn out, to hold high expectations of themselves, to be blind when things don’t go wrong. But then also recognizing that the contextual power that comes with spending time on the thing is something that’s real, and the social capital that goes along with that is something that’s real.
And we often talk about the tyranny of structurelessness. The seminal piece by Jo Freeman, I think written in the 1970s as a reflection on some of the organizing anti-patterns in the women’s movement, was that in a vacuum of named power, these toxic and unhelpful structures emerge.
So the idea that as an organization, trying to obviously learn and not throw out everything that’s come before, even though maybe that’s our natural tendency to try to reinvent from the ground up, the work of somebody that’s responsible for the operations, and somebody that is looking at the strategy, and individuals that really have a passion for that kind of overarching, big picture work.
In most organizations, those are the roles of the C-suite, so the CEO, and the CFO, and the COO, and the Chief Marketing Officer. So at the end of last year, we shifted into this kind of epiphany that really the work of the Catalysts is to facilitate working groups, and that’s what we’ve moved into, and it’s brought a real lightness and a, yeah, just a different quality to the work that we do as Catalysts.
One of the things that I appreciate most about the Catalysts’ work is the cadence that we keep, so recognizing that working in two-week sprints is something that works really well for us, and especially in a distributed network where I’m maybe in the same place with the other Catalysts two or three times a year, that technology allows us to really keep tight as a team, and a crew, and a trusted cohort to do the work that we need to do.
Lisa: It’s a really interesting point that you bring up that I know a lot of people struggle with in self-management, which is this paradox of it’s self-management, and yet there is a role for leadership of some kind to play, and also I know in Enspiral you have a very detailed handbook that’s open source and people can view online, and it’s very iterative and a kind of living document that captures kind of principles and kind of a rulebook, I guess. So I think a lot of people assume that self-management means no rules, no structures, no processes, and yet almost the opposite is true. What’s your experience been with walking that kind of paradox of self-management?
Susan: I think that if the basis for decisions and agreements is open and participatory, that it’s not antithetical to the concept of self-management. That said, there is still and will always be a significant anarchist element in Enspiral, but if we are using the tools and our opportunities for dialogue to express dissent in a way that’s encouraged, to always try to create opportunities for proposals to have space to breathe, to have everybody who’s interested to have the opportunity to comment and revise and craft things that eventually become agreements, then I don’t see that having, I guess, principles or social contracts or, yeah, agreements of how we want to be together to be antithetical to self-management because nothing is ever fixed, nothing is ever set in stone, and the invitation is there for anybody in the community to, again, participate, and I know that I tend to maybe overuse these words sometimes, but I think that for me and what I recognize is this is the beauty of what we’ve created because the expectation for participation is always there, and I can’t recall during my tenure or even the stories that I’ve heard about before I arrived, any ideas, any impulses being shut down.
I think that when we’re in a network that’s based principally on trust and love, and I know that those are provocative words that might kind of induce visceral or physical reactions in people that are listening to it, that the expectation of good and positive intent is what allows us to really check each other constantly on what is clear in terms of our key motivation, which is non-coercive work, basically.
Lisa: On the subject of self-management, I know that you’ve been involved with Ricardo Semmler’s LeadWise in designing this online program about self-management, a practical self-management intensive it’s called. Could you share with us some of the thinking that went behind designing this program?
Susan: About three or four months ago, I got a call from the LeadWise crew, just really an exploration. Is there something we can collaborate on? What are you guys doing? Within about 10 minutes of that conversation, it came to light that Mariana, who is one of the principals in the organization, was just about ready to start her Alt-MBA, and that this experience felt like a perfect opportunity to experiment with the LeadWise Academy format, which they’d already sort of ideated, but not populated with content yet.
It just was one of these beautiful moments of connection that made me realize that LeadWise was exactly what we had been waiting for, and it’s just been such a joy to work with the organization because we complement each other so well. I guess this is just another example of when strangers are working together towards a purpose, what can be manifest.
We have iterated on the Alt-MBA process. Alt-MBA is completely offline, well, not offline, so there is no actual live course material. We’ve iterated so that we’ve got three hours together live as a cohort every week where we talk about theory, we practice some cultural tools. We’re even practicing virtual liberating structures, which I know is something that you and I share in common. It was really fun yesterday. We did some appreciative interviews, and we do a lot of one-two-four-all, which is really easy to do with Zoom, a little plug for Zoom here with their breakout room technology.
That’s been, yes, a super amount of fun, and just really keen to see how we can encourage this next cohort of participants to feel the confidence to go out there and share their experiments. Because at the end of the day, for me, it’s not about converting, it’s not about colonizing, it’s merely giving anybody who’s interested the confidence to choose to be different with their work.
Lisa: I love the sound of that, and I love the idea that the individuals participating on the programme and getting a chance to try out some of these self-management tools and practices and experience them because I think one of the things that interests me about self-management is there’s a lot being written about processes and structures, you know, things like holacracy and so on, and I think less is written about and spoken about in terms of ways of being and I think there’s a really key piece there and I think that’s where a lot of people, myself included, are struggling and being challenged because I think there’s a lot of unlearning in a lot of ways that needs to be done from ways of being that we’ve picked up from school and sort of more conventional work environments. What do you think about the difference between sort of structures and processes and then ways of being in terms of self-management?
Susan: I mean, you know, I’ve got some pretty strong opinions about some of these things. I’m not sure frameworks ever really work. It’s really difficult for me to think of a scenario where somebody creates a framework that can then be plopped down onto an organisation and work exactly as it worked in, you know, in the organisation in which it was originated.
You know, the metaphor I like to use is that when you’re framing a house, you know, you’ve got the timber frame but once you start to slap the drywall on and the bricks and the mortar and the paint, the only way that you can change it is by actually knocking the whole thing down again. So, I prefer to think of the work or the opportunity as a series of scaffolds and what’s in the middle, like that lump of clay or whatever that’s in the middle of the scaffold, what is created from that is only a reflection of the people working on it at the time and the weather and the tools and how good the cups of tea are and what people are eating. And, you know, that’s the way that I like to approach and look at all of these, you know, tools and methodologies is as tools and methodologies rather than frameworks.
So, Holacracy, for example, I think that there are a lot of really, really good practices that I use all the time that have come out of Holacracy, even the fact that, you know, some of the tension around the language and using the word tension, you know, that kind of came out of the Holacracy framework. Tactical meeting format, integrated decision making, all of these roles instead of job titles, so much useful opportunities exist within a framework that I found to be transformational for organizations. But the idea of completely ceding one’s will or the organization’s will to a constitution that is all or nothing just seems, I don’t think it works, right?
So, that’s my view on, I guess, operating systems that are all or nothing. But I think that another sort of part of this that I’m finding super interesting and reflecting back on to your noticing that what the practical self-management intensive is, is it’s not about learning theory or even, you know, listening to conversations of practitioners. It’s the opportunity to actually learn through doing another sort of piece of work that’s been really influential to me over the last year or so, which is the Robert Keegan and Lisa Leahy curation and everyone culture that talks about deliberately developmental organizations.
And the idea that everything that we need, and I’ll qualify everything, well, I won’t qualify everything, but I’ll hold that word everything loosely, to do our personal and individual development is present in our work. And this, again, is like a hypothesis that I’m testing and seems to be really resonant for a lot of individuals that, I guess, a practical example, a personal example that I have from my own practice is, you know, sitting in circles, whether they’re physical or virtual and noticing what’s happening, noticing how a process is making me feel, noticing how a type of interaction or a type of work is giving me the opportunity to illuminate something that could be a development opportunity for me using conversation and using, I guess, challenges within the work to practice and reflect and experiment with our way of being as well.
I was sharing with somebody yesterday that, you know, I’d gone through most of my adult life thinking that my personal development and my career were two different things, or my work, not my career necessarily, were two different things. And the kind of reflection and understanding that, no, it’s actually all me. And the joy of, you know, understanding one’s passion, whether it’s our expression of that through our work or through reflection or being more curious about how we can develop as individuals is all one thing.
And I think that, you know, back to Enspiral, that’s something that is super attractive for people that come maybe at a summer festival for the first time and maybe sit in a circle for the first time and maybe do open space for the first time. It’s opportunities to, like, experience a different way of embodiment around work.
And I was talking to Joost de Blok last year about Buurtzorg and about the self-organizing teams and self-management in respect of a very large organization, you know, between nine and 13,000. I’m never really sure what the number is. And my challenge to Joost saying, well, surely there must be, I don’t know, a couple hundred individuals in Buurtzorg that just want to be told what to do. They’re not interested in self-management at all.
And he said, I don’t believe that. I believe that every one of us intrinsically in our bodies want to have a say about the work that we do and want to be able to participate in decisions that affect that work. And if there are any individuals in Buurtzorg not feeling able to do that, it’s because the teams and the circles and the groups haven’t quite created the conditions and the invitation for everybody to step into that opportunity that is really a fundamental part of who we are as humans.
Lisa: That brings me on to my next question beautifully, actually, which is, I know that you travel around the world a lot and you speak to a lot of really interesting people. What is your sense of this movement? Do you feel that there is a paradigm shift that we’re on the edge of something that’s shifting? Do you feel like there’s a movement kind of gaining momentum?
Susan: So that’s a great question, Lisa. On my more cynical days, I think that there’s maybe a couple of thousand of us in the world that are thinking about this stuff and that pretty soon we’ll all know each other. And I guess when I’m honest with myself and I’m thinking about the privilege that I have of meeting people literally all over the world that are at least keen to open the conversation, I recognize that being able to see organizations that have a lived experience of doing something differently just feels like such a relief and such an opportunity to try some stuff.
There is a huge spectrum, right? And Enspiral is at one end of a huge continuum. But that doesn’t mean that most organizations are not already currently expressing some form of self-management or self-organization. You know, if I close my eyes and I think about even my time at IBM or some of the other really ultra-large multinational matrix organizations, there were always still opportunities for me to self-select in the team to get some work done. There are always opportunities for, well not always, but often opportunities for on-the-fly innovation and conversations around how we break down the silos and conversations even if they were only once a year with my line manager around what I felt would be interesting for my personal and professional development the next year.
There are things happening in every organization that if we can start to amplify them are great starting points for big organizations to leverage what could be possible. So is the energy around the movement amplifying? I think that the more people that we talk to and the more people that are invited into the conversation, that will naturally start to happen. But again, another one of my old chestnuts is this is not the work in the next five to ten years. It’s the work in the next 50 to 100 years.
And you know what? It might not work. We don’t know, right? We don’t know. All we can do is come to the opportunity with an open heart of experimentation, expecting the best from each other, trying things, iterating all the time. But for those of us, and I know that you resonate with this as well, Lisa, that always felt like the restrictions and the limitations of organizations and organisms that treat people as cogs in a machine, merely to be made more efficient and imminently replaceable, did not reflect what we knew in our hearts and what we felt in terms of our individual potential and the potential for the organization that we work in.
And there are organizations doing it differently, that there is help available, I don’t want to say help, but the opportunity to do something like the Practical Self-Management Intensive or read your book that will start to illuminate places where people can start this journey and practically start these experiments. But it’s hard work.
Lisa: That’s a really hopeful message and I love that at the core of what you’re saying is really, there’s something really inclusive and compelling about an invitation for people to see work differently and see work as an opportunity and a rich source of development. I came across a quote the other day that I loved, which said that relationship work is one of our evolutionary assignments. And I think there’s no richer source of relationship work than work.
Susan: Yeah, absolutely, especially as we get older, right? And you know, you asked me earlier about Enspiral and what’s kind of the secret sauce there and it is literally as simple as relationships. It’s choosing to be in relation with other humans in a way that goes beyond the cursory work relationship and that lovely tension between vulnerability and challenge that’s only possible with trust and love.
