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Episode Transcript
Lisa: So Tom, you are back into founder land at the moment with your new company Maptio. Could you tell us a bit about what Maptio is and how it came about?
Tom: Yeah sure. So the problem that we’re trying to solve with Maptio really starts with companies and other organizations when they hit this growing pain anywhere between about 6 or 12 people. They suddenly realize that the very informal way of organizing that served them well when they were very, very small suddenly starts to creak at the seams. It’s difficult to get everybody in the same room together, it’s difficult for people to keep track of who’s responsible for what, and the organization starts to become to feel a little bit more complex.
Unless people know otherwise, that’s the point where it’s really easy for an organization to sleepwalk into becoming a management bureaucracy because someone will say, “Well, clearly we need managers and we need some departments and we need to create some silos.” That can certainly help to create more control inside the organization, but I’m sure listeners of this podcast will be very well aware of some of the downsides of management hierarchy.
So the question is, if you’re not going to do the traditional management hierarchy thing, what’s the alternative? People often look at some of the inspiring examples out there like some of the examples in Frederic Laloux’s book “Reinventing Organizations.” They might look at Spotify or Netflix or WL Gore and try and copy some of their ideas, but they find that in reality it’s not that easy to copy what somebody else has been doing for many, many years and make it work for yourself.
Into that mix you’ve got these new organizational operating systems like Holacracy, which provide a really good alternative to management hierarchies, but then what we’re starting to see more and more is people just find them overbearing with too many rules. It’s complicated in a different way and they get a bit stuck.
So the idea behind Maptio is to focus not so much on the organization but focus on what’s the creative idea that all of this organization stuff is trying to realize. Starting off by drawing a circle and saying this represents the overall vision of the initiative, and then within that there are some smaller circles that represent some smaller ideas that contribute to the big vision, and building up what we call an initiative map to just get clear on how the big vision breaks down to its smaller parts and who’s responsible for what along the way. It has a few more features which we can talk about in a bit, but that’s the core idea – to help people find a way of organizing without traditional management hierarchy but without the overbearing rules of something like Holacracy by focusing on mapping the creative initiative that’s underneath it.
Lisa: I know you’ve worked a lot with self-managing organizations in your consultancy work and previously as a founder of your own company as well. What were some of the frustrations and some of the pitfalls that you experienced or witnessed that inspired Maptio?
Tom: One of them is a phenomenon that I call creative entropy, and this is something that you see all the time if you look at very self-managed, very autonomous companies where there’s lots of freedom for people to start new initiatives and do new things. What often happens is that these companies very naturally attract creative, self-starting people. It’s a good environment for people like that to be in, and it’s very easy for those people to start new projects and initiatives inside the company.
What you start to see over time is that the company gets more and more bloated as more people start more initiatives. But at the same time, it’s a lot harder to shut down an initiative. Just because it maybe pushes the boundary of the organization a little bit wider, it’s harder to say to someone to stop doing something than it is to get support to start something. So it means that over a period of time things start to get really diluted and watered down, and that’s this entropy effect. They start doing more and more different things, and then there can be a fallout from that.
The organization can become very unclear, very unfocused. People don’t really know what the whole represents anymore, and it can cause frustration to whoever it was who started this thing in the first place when they see that the purpose isn’t actually being realized. And when you have a problem at that kind of level, everyone feels its effects. You feel the energy starting to drain out of it. So that’s kind of one key problem.
Lisa: Now that you’re a founder yourself, are you sort of eating your own dog food with Maptio? How are you making decisions about how you work and how you interact with people such that you kind of avoid things like creative entropy and so on?
Tom: It’s a very humbling thing to go back into founder mode from being a consultant. It’s so nice and easy being a consultant because you just wander into other people’s initiatives and give them your thoughts on it, but you haven’t really got anything at stake ultimately. You can give your advice and then they take it or leave it. Whereas when you’re a founder, you’re in a much more vulnerable position because you’ve started something because you’ve got some kind of unmet need and an idea that you desperately want to bring into the world. And like you say, you have to eat your own dog food, and that’s a lot harder.
So it’s definitely a humbling experience and I’m by no means perfect, but one of the things that I’m really trying to do now I’m back into founder mode is to really delicately play this role of the person who’s responsible for the overall vision. That doesn’t mean that I am this old-fashioned command and control dictator where I just believe that I have all the best ideas and everyone should wait for the commandments to come down from my enlightened brain up on high, because that’s just not how things work. But likewise, I don’t want to descend into “Well, what does everybody think?” and death by consensus and watering our vision to the lowest common denominator so that everyone is kind of okay with it but maybe it loses some of the edginess to it.
Making sure that I take responsibility for the vision but also the number one job that I have to do is listening. This is what I always tell founders that I advise – that your job is to really take responsibility but listen, listen, listen, listen, because there’s information coming to you from all kinds of different sources, especially from your colleagues. And to create a space where people can share their ideas, contribute towards things so that the vision gets better, but making sure that you still take responsibility as an individual for holding the space for that to happen. So that’s one key part of the role.
And then another key part is really giving people the space and the autonomy to step up and take responsibility for parts of the vision that they feel they’ve got a vision for. So my co-founder of Maptio, Sofia, is the technical partner in it, and she is 100% holding a vision for everything technical. She’s making the calls about which technologies we’re using, how the software development process works, and that is a hundred percent hers. So within that bit of it, I’m best off just leaving her to it, making sure that she stays connected to the overall vision of Maptio, but within her part, she’s the creative source for that and allowing her to find the best way and to hold a space for the technology to be developed.
And then I think finally just trying to just live the basic human values of being respectful and dignified, of listening to one another and caring about one another such that we can create a level of trust within the team so we can have difficult conversations and conflict when that needs to happen, and that no one’s hiding and people’s voices can be heard. But yeah, it’s so much easier to talk about this stuff than to live it in practice sometimes. So yeah, I’m doing my best.
Lisa: I know that you’ve mentioned the word “source,” and I know this is something that you’ve blogged about a lot. I think it’s something that people – you know, fans of Frederic Laloux’s “Reinventing Organizations” and fans of teal – seem to have an allergy sometimes to this idea that someone is the source for something, that someone has a vision and that other people are kind of in service of helping that person realize their vision. How do you see that kind of paradox? And what would you say to people who kind of get a bit scared about that idea and think, “Well, hang on a minute, that sounds an awful lot like hierarchy and the things that we’re trying to move away from”?
Tom: Yeah, exactly, and maybe the starting point is that word “hierarchy” because that’s a very evocative word to people these days. Almost every week I see someone sharing an article that says we have to destroy hierarchies and break down the hierarchies – hierarchies are bad and evil and they must end. But what people need to understand is that a hierarchy is just a pattern, it’s just a naturally occurring pattern that you see in nature. You look at a tree and that’s a hierarchical pattern of a trunk and then branches and twigs and leaves. There’s nothing to be afraid of inherently about hierarchies.
People are naturally wary of them because we’ve seen hierarchies really being abused. We see very toxic management hierarchies of bosses behaving in ways that really dehumanize people. But the important thing is not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The problem is not the hierarchy, the problem is the behavior that’s going on.
So I find the most useful way to use the hierarchical pattern is to think of, as we’re doing in Maptio, to think of the hierarchy of a big overall idea breaking down into ever smaller ideas. That’s still a hierarchical pattern, but the important thing is that at every point in that hierarchy, starting right from the root node of it, there is an individual – there’s one person who has a connection to that part of the vision that’s unlike anybody else.
I know that lots of people will recoil from that idea, probably because it still reminds them of this old-fashioned command-and-control, but it’s really important to make the distinction that this is not about power over people, this is a creative form of authority. So it’s authority as in authorship – it’s a creative role.
In a dialogue with Fred Laloux that I had, he said that he sees it – I think you mentioned the word – he sees it as an allergy almost that some people have about thinking that anybody has a special role. And actually there is a great power and a leveling up almost to be okay with that idea again. It’s okay to accept that somebody is the author of a particular vision or a part of a vision, and for whoever that author is to really step into that role and take responsibility for their vision, and for other people to try and connect to it in a loving and empathic way and understand what is it you’re trying to create and what’s the need that you have that’s driving you. And when people can do that, you can work with hierarchy quite comfortably.
We actually managed to get a little footnote in the second edition of “Reinventing Organizations” about this, about the role of the CEO or the founder in self-managing companies – that their role is certainly about facilitating a process of coming up with the vision, but it is more than that. It’s accepting responsibility for the whole, and that involves a lot of listening, but it does involve authority, and that’s not a thing to be afraid of.
Lisa: It seems like there are tools like Maptio that help bring clarity to who is doing what and what the vision is for each initiative and the organization as a whole, but you’ve also mentioned a lot of words like the importance of listening as a founder or CEO, and words like caring, empathetic, loving even. So it seems like there’s something about soft skills as well and something about your way of being that makes it so that you avoid the toxic hierarchies and create something instead that’s much more healthy. What would you say are key aspects of that? How do leaders need to be in a different way in order to create healthy hierarchies or healthy organizations?
Tom: Well, the almost awkward thing about this is that in any initiative that you encounter – from a company to a very postmodern, very decentralized organization – you will always find if you examine it really carefully that there is one person who has a different relationship to everybody else: the first person who took the first step to start realizing whatever the idea is.
What you find is that person’s personality and their values – and by values I mean their real values, the things that they actually express through their words and actions, not their stated values on their websites – they become endemic in the initiative. And if that person has quite toxic values and behaviors, you’ll see that everywhere.
So there’s nobody in a company or initiative where it’s more important for them to go on a journey of personal development and of understanding themselves, of dealing with their shadows and their bad habits and whatever else it is that might get in the way of them being truly creative or being a good person that other creative people will want to be drawn to. They need to uncover themselves and work through whatever happens to be because you’re going to get it whether you like it or not.
And the most powerful place to start, I’ve found, is looking at identities. So who is it that I want to be and who is it that I’m afraid to be? And you often find that people carry stories often from their past, and it usually comes from childhood. You know, Philip Larkin was right.
So uncovering what is the story that I tell about myself, who do I want to be, and who am I afraid to be, and exploring those stories and coming to terms with who you really are – that’s the most powerful place to start.
Lisa: And for you, what have been some of the practices or personal development courses or sources of inspiration that have moved you forward in your journey of personal development and discovering what kind of person and leader you want to be?
Tom: I could give you three actually, and I would also heavily caveat this with I’m a work in progress. I don’t sit here saying I’m the finished article, it’s all worked out. And if I did believe I was, then that would probably be proof that I really wasn’t.
But three things that are helping me on my journey: Number one, and I see this as almost the foundation to everything, is mindfulness. Mindfulness is becoming very popular and buzzy right now, and I’ve been lucky enough to work with some really great teachers in recent years. But learning to be in the present moment, learning about your attention, learning about judgment, thinking really deeply about just the interconnected nature of reality is so powerful and for me absolutely foundational to becoming a better person. I think I’m probably 2% along in my journey in that, but that 2% already has been quite transformative for me. So I’d recommend people just get started with mindfulness, and it’s easy to get into. Most people have heard of the Headspace app for a phone, and that’s a really popular way of starting, and that will get you into it. That’s the most foundational thing, I think.
And then I’d say number two is learning about empathy and how empathy really works. Most people have a general idea of what empathy is – they know it’s something to do with understanding how other people feel or standing in their shoes. But the big breakthrough for me came when I learned about Non-Violent Communication, which is a specific way of thinking about empathy and this idea that empathy is not just about your feelings or somebody else’s feelings and connecting to that, but it’s also connecting to your needs. So what’s underneath that feeling?
So if somebody is feeling angry, actually what’s underneath that might be an unmet need for safety or an unmet need for respect. So working with needs, I think, again is incredibly powerful and incredibly important. And it’s a question I love to ask all the time – just say, “What do you need? Let’s talk about our needs.” And that helps us to connect to one another. I also really recommend Brené Brown’s work on this. She did that very popular TED talk – I think one of the most popular of all time TED Talks – hopefully lots of people have already watched it, about the power of vulnerability. That’s incredibly powerful as well.
And then the third piece is learning about identity, which we touched on earlier, and specifically looking at the relationship between identity and money, because often this is where problems in our life show up. Because how many people listening have ever felt guilty, frustrated, jealous, or even sick when money has somehow entered into the picture? I would guess everybody. But money in itself doesn’t have the power to do those things to us – it’s the story that we project onto money that has that power.
And actually, the stories we project onto money – that money is security, for example – if you see someone who says money is security, what you’ll find is someone who wants to be secure and is maybe afraid to be insecure. And that’s the thing that they need to work on to be able to feel secure as they are with and without money, and to be okay with being insecure as well. So learning about identity using money as a fun and interesting way into it is transformative also.
So yeah, those three things have given me a good grounding, and the plan is to deepen those like I say as a work in progress.
Lisa: I think one of the things I really like about Maptio and about your work and your approach to things that I’ve been following – and you and I have been talking about for a few years now – is there’s something about your approach that makes work more human again. And I think one of the things that challenges me about Holacracy is that Brian Robertson has even said, you know, you take the people out of the work and you’re just – in meetings sometimes you might start referring to each other by your role names instead of your actual names. And that, for me, I had a real response to that where I felt work needs to be more human, not less human.
So I like the fact that with Maptio, initiative mapping is about using people’s names and you talk about starting to tell the story of that idea and where it came from and what that person’s need is and what help they need and things like that. There’s something very adult-adult and evolved – without sounding a bit pretentious – about having those kind of transparent conversations.
Tom: I really agree. Gosh, I didn’t realize how Holacracy was quite that bad. I mean, I know I’m not its biggest fan, although I do have a lot of respect for the people using it. But yeah, I think what happens is people get very caught up in thinking about organizations – like the organization is the important thing. And people talk about “What is the purpose of the organization?” And they take it to the extreme of saying that the organization is like its own entity in and of itself. It’s got its own soul and a purpose and a destiny of its own, and the job of the people is to steward this thing to go in whatever direction it wants to go.
But what often happens in reality is that really people just project their own needs, their own ideas onto the organization. So someone saying “I really think that where this organization wants to go is over here,” whereas what they’re really saying is “What I’m personally really energized to do is go over here.”
And I think it’s much more useful for people to not get lost in thinking about organizations but instead start by looking inwardly and saying, “What do I really need?” and to be as truthful and honest about that and as best they can to try and unpick what’s a true present creative need for them or what’s some story from their past that they’re still serving. I talk to founders all the time where they’re not really in the present thinking about what they want to create – they’re actually serving a story about being accepted by their parents that goes all the way back to their childhood.
But first of all, looking inwardly, getting clear on what they need, but then it’s about connection – so connecting to what other people need as well. And this is where empathy obviously plays a really key part – to understand other people’s needs and that desire and that pull to help other people meet their needs and serving your own needs as well.
So it’s neither individualistic work as we used to know it, nor is it group sense either – it’s about individuals and it’s about connections between individuals. And when you do that, I think actually work becomes a lot more straightforward. You don’t get into so much confusing talk about the organization or it being about roles and formal processes. You can just get back down to the basic conversations about saying, “What do you need and how can I help? How can I help you with that?” It’s actually much simpler, much more human, and much more natural. So I try to bring that philosophy into my own work as much as I can, and that’s what’s at the heart of the Maptio product as well.
Lisa: I think you mentioned simplicity, and I think that’s another really key – maybe that’s a key value for you or something because it comes up a lot in your work, I think. And there’s something about that… Yes, to quote someone, I think it was “When you make it really simple and you give everyone all the information they need, it’s easy to take responsibility.”
Tom: That’s really true, and responsibility is another really key word. I had a real aha moment when a colleague said to me once, “Responsibility is only something that can be taken; it’s not something that can be given.” And there’s a really big difference between the two.
If you think someone’s responsible for something because you think you’ve given them responsibility for it, there’s a good chance they won’t be responsible and that thing might not actually happen. But it’s very different when somebody says, “No, I’ve got this. It meets a need for me to do this. I’ve got an idea of how I’m going to do it, and I’m up for it.” That’s taking responsibility, and then you find that that thing does actually happen.
And when people connect in that way – so they make sure that people are only working on things that meet a need for them, and they make sure that if they’re helping somebody else to do something that they know what that person’s need is – you find that the need for formal organization is greatly reduced.
And my suspicion is that perhaps part of the reason why many people find things like Holacracy very overbearing and that there are just way too many rules is it’s almost working against this very natural way of working and just asking people what they need, because it’s almost lost up in the clouds thinking about the organization – “How best do I serve the organization?” – when you think, what even are we talking about when we talk about the organization?
So I tend to just prefer a mental model where I just think about the organization just as a story – it’s not a thing that really exists. But actually the thing to keep coming back to is individuals and their needs, but then connecting individuals to other individuals as well, and then just providing help where it’s needed and asking for help where you need help. It just flows a lot more simply like that, I think.
Lisa: To come back to that responsibility point, because it’s something that comes up a lot when I’m speaking to people in organizations who are experimenting with self-management and other ways of organizing – it’s a common frustration, particularly with founders, where they say to me, “I’ve tried to create a flat organization and everything, but I’m really struggling with people taking responsibility. Some people just don’t seem to want to take responsibility.”
You know, “We tell everyone to do things they’re interested in,” and then there always ends up being this sort of pile of tasks that aren’t as appealing and attractive, and no one seems to want to do them. And founders often tell me that at a certain point, you know, particularly if the shit hits the fan, then they tend to sort of swoop in and default back to kind of command and control.
You also have that really great analogy that I share often with people about when you say, “Oh, it’s everyone’s responsibility to take the bins out,” and lo and behold, you find that no one takes the bins out. So what do you do? In your experience, how do you create a culture or what do you do as a leader in particular to create that sense of responsibility? Because as you said, you can’t give responsibility – it has to be taken. But how do you do that?
Tom: I’ll give you one useful little tip, and that is that you can, as a very crude way of categorizing people inside organizations like companies, say there are two types of people. Some people within a company will be on their own creative journey in life, so they’ve got some sense of what they’re trying to create, what their life is really about, some kind of direction that they’re going in. And those people see that working for the company could be a good environment for them to be really creative because they could see the organization has got resources, it’s got colleagues, it’s a great place for them to be.
With people like that, those are the people that do tend to really step up well to take responsibility for things. They’ll say, “I can see I can connect to the overall vision here, and I’ll take responsibility for part of that. I’ve got an idea for an initiative that I will run here.”
And then the second category of people are more like what you could just call “employees.” And employees – and there’s no judgment at all against the skill or intelligence of these people – but they’re people who aren’t particularly on their own creative journey in life. And when you talk to them about why they work where they work, they will often say, “I really enjoy the work, I love the people that I work with, and the monthly salary is really useful to me.” And that’s completely valid, and those people can do great work. But often those people aren’t the ones to hold a creative vision within the organization – they’re the ones that could feel a bit overwhelmed and lost with that.
And the trick is to not treat one group of people like the other, because if you say to somebody who is on their own creative journey in life, “Tell me about your personal sense of purpose in life,” they’ll happily have a conversation with you for an hour about all of their thoughts and ideas around that. But you say to someone who’s more like an employee, “What’s your purpose in life?” and they’ll probably just feel a bit overwhelmed and embarrassed that they don’t know what the answer is.
And it’s a trap that lots of very creative, purposeful founders fall into, because they’re very much on a creative journey. They assume that everyone is, and you’ll often see them do things like putting the whole company through a “discover your purpose” process. And then what you find is that there’s a large group of people who just don’t really know, and that should be okay and they shouldn’t be pressured.
But people who fall more into that employee category, what usually works best for them is just really good delegation. So just being clear about the results that are required from them, but give them the autonomy to find their way of actually achieving that objective. But don’t expect them to be the one to set the overall creative direction.
So not treating one group like the other, and likewise, if you treat a really creative person like an employee and just try and delegate things to them by objectives, they’ll get bored and they’ll leave and they’ll start their own thing or go somewhere else. So that broad categorization can partly resolve that tension.
But also a big part of it is just often in very self-managing organizations, it’s just unclear who’s responsible for what. And that’s one of the real needs we’re trying to meet with Maptio, that you have a map of all of these concentric circles that show the smaller ideas that contribute to the bigger ideas, and then you look for the natural author of each of those.
And what we’ve been finding through companies that are using this is just by having that clarity and seeing people’s names against everything, people already start to take more responsibility just because it’s in the map. So through no formal accountability or organizational mechanism, but just by having the clarity, people take more responsibility.
Or what happens is people see that they’re responsible for something and realize that they don’t actually want it anymore. And then that tells you that that initiative should probably be closed or it should be handed over to someone who does want to do it.
And maybe what you’ve observed in some of these organizations that you spoke about is that maybe they’ve got a whole bunch of ghost ships running inside the organization where it’s not connected to someone’s real need – they’re kind of ideas that sounded okay but not things that people have really wanted to commit to and take responsibility for. And so probably a lot of those initiatives just need to be killed to free up the time and resources for more worthwhile things.
Lisa: It strikes me as almost like a coaching mindset. Like in the beginning of a coaching conversation, it’s always really important to establish what the goal of the conversation is. And that’s a bit like what you’re talking about – by establishing what people need and if it meets the need for them to be working on a particular initiative or in a particular organization. So it’s really like a much more adult-adult, taking responsibility for your situation kind of way of thinking about work in a way.
Tom: Exactly, and there’s another really simple exercise you can do. I used to enjoy doing this with colleagues in my last company where you just get them to make a list of everything that they’re working on, everything that they’re doing, and put it into two columns: stuff that is energizing them and stuff that’s de-energizing, stuff that feels like they’re paddling upstream or stuff that feels like they’re paddling downstream.
That’s a very easy exercise for people to perform – they know immediately which things fit into which column. And then when you look at the stuff that’s de-energizing to people, you’ve then got a list of all of the things where they’ll be underperforming, they’ll be behind schedule, things aren’t happening, or where you start to feel there’s more of a need for kind of formal accountability practices to just get them to deliver on that thing.
Whereas you’ll find the things that are in the energizing column will just naturally be happening of their own accord because they’re energized by it. But the mistake so many companies make is they just think, “We need more systems and processes to make people more accountable for things that they don’t really want to do.” And actually they’re approaching it from the wrong end, whereas if they get people doing things that are more energizing to them and things that fit into that de-energizing column get passed off to someone else – or you just accept that it’s not happening anyway, so why don’t we just remove it from your list and absolve you of the guilt that you’re feeling every day about not doing it properly, and then free your head space up for something else – that’s a much more productive way to work, I think.
Lisa: And I think it’s a myth in self-organizing companies as well sometimes that because you’re self-managing or self-organizing it means that everyone has to do everything, particularly if you’re like a small team or small startup. And I’ve heard lots of stories of people who’ve discovered that, oh, actually that person is a developer and they’re really not interested in governance and the vision and strategy of the company – they just, they love coding and they want to just do that.
Assuming that everyone has to do everything is kind of like the polarities, right? So command-and-control, you’re told exactly what you have to do and you just have to do it – like it or lump it – or everyone does everything. But actually there’s so many different alternatives in the middle as well.
And I think it starts with having an honest conversation about what are you energized by. And if there’s things that need to be done in the organization that someone or no one’s energized by, then you have a conversation about that and you decide what to do. But you do it in a transparent way.
Tom: I 100% agree with all of that, and there are so many great people working inside organizations where they keep getting pushed when they don’t need to be pushed. They’re doing absolutely fantastic work, their colleagues really love working with them, but there’s somehow this pressure to say, “No, you have to be more purposeful in your work and you have to link your work to your own personal sense of vision.” And they don’t really need that – just leave them alone.
If they’re a brilliant developer, they just want to develop great software every day. It doesn’t even matter if they don’t get up every day feeling motivated by whatever the high-level purpose of the company or the founders is. Providing they feel energized about the work to help realize the vision, with people like that, the best thing to do is just give them a really clear brief to work from and then say, “Put all of your talents and skills and energy to help realize that brief.” And if they feel energized to do that, then they’ll do a great job and just kind of leave them alone.
Lisa: Well, I don’t have any more questions, but I’m aware that you’re such a fountain of knowledge and kind of thoughtful insights on these things. Is there anything else that you think that you’d really like to share with people? Maybe a kind of trap that you see a lot of people fall into when they’re experimenting with new ways of working, or a tip or an insight that you think could really make the difference for people?
Tom: I mean, just to sum up everything that we’ve spoken about, I’d really sort of channel my colleague Charlie Davis around this – is to start with needs. It’s the needs conversation. So don’t start by thinking about the organization. Start by looking inwardly and saying, “What do I really need?” Start by asking people around you, “What is it that they really need?” and be and try and get down to the real authentic truth of that.
And if that’s the thing that you’re working from – is meeting your own needs and collaborating with other people to help them meet their needs and finding the common ground – and that’s the starting point for everything else. So that would probably be my parting shot.
