Richard D. Bartlett and Natalia Lombardo from The Hum on going from a domination to a partnership society

Lisa: Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I’m really looking forward to our chat. I suspect it’s going to be interesting and a little bit nerdy, but lots of fun. So thank you.

Rich: Thank you for having us and really looking forward to having a bit of a yarn with you.

Lisa: In our email exchange, we landed on - well, you landed on quite a cool question that I thought would be fun to open up the conversation with. Do you want to say the question yourself? I was going to read it out, but it’s your question, so you want to throw it out there?

Rich: Awesome. The question is: what’s the shortest path from a domination society to a partnership society?

There’s a lot condensed into that. There’s a lot of concepts, and I thought maybe I can start unpacking some of those concepts, and probably well before I’m finished, we’ll have lots of stuff to talk about.

This frame of domination and partnership is coming from Riane Eisler, who’s this really awesome thinker who I respect a lot. The concept is that any human relationship, whether it’s a relationship between two people or a relationship between two countries and anything in between, can be more like domination or it can be more like partnership.

So at the extreme end, you might have Hitler and the Nazis, and at the other end, you might have something maybe that we’ve hardly even seen in history - a much more equitable, collaborative, non-hierarchical way of relating to each other. There’s a spectrum; it can be at one end or the other, more or less.

At least my way of seeing it is that all of these different scales, from the relationship between parents and children to the relationship between countries, all of these scales are interacting with each other. So Hitler, for instance - there must be something interesting about his relationship with his parents, and also there’s something about what was happening in Germany at that time. Both of those scales are affecting that historical outcome.

I would like to live in a society that has much less domination. At the moment, I think there’s a lot of domination everywhere, whether it’s men dominating women, rich countries dominating poor countries, humans dominating all of the other life on the planet. This is kind of the biggest problem that I know of - that’s how I frame it.

I’ve also had glimpses of something that looks more like partnership, where you’re still different. It’s not about everyone being the same and everyone being equalized and total uniformity. We still keep our unique differences, but these differences are treated as a resource, as an opportunity for collaboration, an opportunity for exchange.

I have a tendency towards epic thinking. Maybe it’s because of my religious upbringing that I think in apocalyptic or utopian terms. I am thinking about how do we change the entire world. What’s immediately obvious to me is that I don’t have an influence over the entire world. I’ve got an influence in my family and in my friendship networks and in the organizations that we work with. So that’s where our work is really focused: can we start unpicking these patterns of domination at those scales and trust that that’s making some kind of contribution towards a society that’s much more fair, much less domineering, much less coercive? But we haven’t found the shortest path yet.

Lisa: Yeah, thank you. The sort of two things that come up for me listening to you that I think would be interesting to explore together, the three of us, is: what have been some of the milestones on the path that you’ve discovered in your work, in your experience? I’d also love to hear at some point in our conversation some examples of when you mentioned having experiences of something that feels more like partnership, and that not being the same as everyone being equal. It’d be really interesting to hear some examples of what that looks and feels like.

Natalia: I think Rich will have lots of examples. He’s the one that remembers stories; I’m the one that remembers the abstracts and the condensed lessons of it.

I think a milestone for me in this question is about how do I show up. It’s more on the personal level. Because we’re talking about relationships, we’re talking about organizations, countries - and the self level is the first one in a way. How am I dominating or how am I participating in partnership? What are the conditionings that I have? If I grew up in an environment that is extremely dominating, as you were talking a little bit before, I’m gonna bring those conditionings with me. That’s not only what I’m gonna try to replicate, but it’s also what I’m gonna be looking for in an environment. I’m looking for the same space that will repeat the same models that I’m used to.

So what is the space there to shift that dynamic? How I show up and also how aware am I of how I show up? There’s a lot of unpacking there - what are the spaces where I can unlearn my conditioning to be in a partnership in a different way?

Rich: I think what you’re describing is a common metaphor, you know, that it’s like when the fish discovers what water is - that’s a milestone. When you recognize, “Oh, there’s all of this stuff happening that I was taking for granted.” You go from being a subject of that cultural conditioning to treating that cultural conditioning as an object. You can reflect on it, you can separate yourself from it and say, “Huh, where did that come from?”

Natalia: Self-awareness.

Rich: So that’s definitely one of the milestones. As far as experiences, what immediately comes to mind for me to illustrate how partnership can still involve significant difference is some of the best examples of parenting that I know. One of your best friends is a really excellent parent, my sister’s a really excellent parent, and seeing how - seeing the relationship between adult and child there. It’s so distinctive.

I mean, my upbringing was in a really traditionalist, orthodox kind of Christian church, and so that is a really authoritarian style of parenting that I was raised in. To see the contrast - in that case, it’s all about submission. One of my family members, when they got married, the scripture, the text that they had for their ceremony was about “wives submit to your husbands” - that’s the line. Which to me now, having changed my faith quite considerably, that’s quite shocking.

In contrast to these parents that I’ve got in mind, where it’s not about submission at all, it’s not about domination at all. It’s about when you’re a child, you don’t have your full faculties yet. The smaller you are, the less able you are to look after yourself. You’ll literally die if you’re left on your own when you’re really small, and you need to be completely interdependent with another person that’s going to keep you alive.

The parent can orient towards that in an act of generosity and service and respect and elevating your agency and giving you more and more space as you grow, or they can come at you from a perspective of control and dominance - “I’m the boss, my house, my rules, you do what you’re told, you obey,” that sort of thing.

So that’s a really clear case, and I would guess that a lot of people can recognize that in their life. There are people where you see they’ve got this kind of relationship that just seems to be coming from a different place, that it’s emanating from a different set of values and a different set of commitments. Does that answer the question?

Lisa: Yeah. I mean, with every new thing you each say, it opens up too many possibilities of things that I want to dig into, one of which is I love this description of a milestone that you shared - it’s starting with self and becoming aware of how you show up, and this kind of fish-water metaphor.

I’m curious - I think it’d be interesting for listeners to hear also: was there a moment for each of you when you noticed the water, became aware of the water? What could we learn from that in terms of how could we create that experience for others in a way that’s not kind of imposing but inviting perhaps?

Natalia: I started to remember stories. I think there’s something for me that is more at the beginning of understanding that there were different ways of living and of being in the world. I spent a bunch of my youth going through different intentional communities and learning about permaculture.

I remember the first time sitting in circles - the first time sitting in a circle in one of those villages. I was just a volunteer in that space, but they asked me what I thought about what they should do about their garden. I was like, “What do you mean? You’re asking me?” That feeling of being part of the circle and my voice being considered equally - that was a moment of “Okay, there are different ways of doing things, there are different ways of interacting.” I started to pay more attention to those things in that moment.

Of course, it took me much longer to actually start embodying that practice and also making that space for others in other circumstances. That was more of a process of “How will these people do it?” I had a few role models, a few people that for me embodied that way of being and that I could try to look up to. When I was presented in those different circumstances, I could choose in which way to respond depending on who I wanted to be in that space and what was more useful as well.

Rich: The first example that came to mind for me was also in the circle. Lots of different varieties of this experience of seeing how I’ve only got one fraction of the whole circular picture, that my perspective is always a limited piece.

One that I really remember - the flash of insight, I guess - the “flesh of the obvious,” as my friend Bob calls it: Natty and I met during the Occupy Movement. We were young, enthusiastic activists, and we were in the circle doing consensus practice, doing a general assembly, hearing from everyone, trying to build proposals that everyone could agree to.

There was a deliberation that we were having about this topic of safety. We’re living in a camp for weeks in the middle of the city - a completely spontaneous, ad hoc little village. Quite a remarkable challenge, and we were governing it together. There was no one in charge.

There was this deliberation about safety, and at one point, someone said, “I’d love to do a round where we hear from everyone - do you basically feel safe here or not?” Because that’s going to set the terms of whatever proposal is going to come next. We went around, we heard from every single person, and I remember thinking to myself - or maybe I even said it out loud, I’m not sure - “Oh, this is a good result because like 80% plus of people said I feel safe. The vast majority said this is fine.”

Then someone else shared, “This is a big problem because everyone who said they weren’t safe - they were either a woman or they were queer.” That was just like electrifying - “Oh, there’s a thing happening. It’s clearly happening. The data is in front of me, everything is right there in full view, but I can’t see it until I had someone else draw attention to it.” That was one of many of seeing that I’m just a little fraction of the whole.

It echoes back to that dominator-partnership thing as well. “Oh, 80% of us said yes, so that’s a good result.” A new edge of what I’m curious and learning about is the joys of discovering how our experience and our lens and worldview opens up when we - well, Meg Lightheart, who you introduced me to, Lisa - she has a beautiful way of putting this, which is thinking about centering experiences for the marginalized and how differently, what a different outcome you get if you do that.

So there’s an example where it would be easy in a traditional domination society - it would be pretty standard, I think, for people to be like, “Well, the majority feel safe, so I think we’re good.” But organizing for “Okay, well, let’s center the margin here - the 20% that don’t feel safe” and design for them. Of course, that ultimately is likely to benefit the majority as well, because they’re only going to feel more safe, you would think.

Natalia: I think there’s also the margin of who’s not in the room, which is an even bigger margin. Especially a majority of people in that example - they were not there. That can be a question that really opens up a completely different approach to a design challenge - to say who’s not here.

Rich: Yeah, or like decision making. If we report the outcome of this decision to the group of people who are not here, what would they say? If we put ourselves in their shoes, would the people who aren’t here think this is a good decision, for example? Those kinds of questions, I think, are quite cool.

Lisa: So what are some other things that you’ve discovered along this path, do you think? How - because I’m interested in this question too - at the moment, these ways of organizing, these ways of being together, I think, just as human beings, are definitely in the minority. They’re not mainstream. I’m really curious to explore: what are some things we can do to - yeah, like you said - shortcuts on that path to make, to kind of reduce unnecessary pain?

Because if we have each gone through various different experiences, often painful experiences, of getting to a certain point - it’s not to say that you can do it pain-free. I think everyone has to go through some kind of change necessarily that’s probably going to be at the very least uncomfortable. But what other things are you finding help in terms of your work with The Hum when you’re working with groups?

You’re quite good at this - one of the things I admire you for is articulating patterns, like useful patterns to help people kind of access some of these ideas.

Natalia: I think one of those things is about paying more attention to the care labor that happens in groups. Normally, as we’re talking a little bit about more systemic structures of domination, normally we’ll end up with care - either more physical care or more emotional care - ending up being in the hands of women in general, because we’ve been more conditioned to be doing that work. We are expected to be the ones doing that work.

Also, if we’re looking at more traditional organizations, thinking about care labor as tasks, as something that happens, is not really considered in general. So making those tasks visible, saying, “Hey, you know what? There’s a lot of labor that goes in here just to make sure that people are okay, just to make sure that the relationships are okay.” Just checking - someone bought that card for everyone to sign “Happy Birthday” to others. Someone watered the plants. Someone made sure that there was water in the meeting room.

Those are really little things, but they are happening constantly. Just by making them visible and start distributing them around - that’s a way to say we can all support each other on these too. This is also important. And the more emotional tasks of care - there are also things, like supporting each other when someone is feeling low, or supporting each other to change those behaviors that we’re discussing, like maybe we’re showing up in different ways.

So just from my perspective, doing those things develops more empathy, develops more relationships, and that’s shifting from “someone else will do it” or “it’s not my job” to “this is something that we all do together and we do it for each other.” So it creates a little bit more of that partnership level.

Rich: What you’re describing actually reminds me of another very precise “aha” moment that I had. I think it was when we were working in Loomio, which is a co-op that’s trying to be democratic and trying to be equal. We did a process which was just about what’s all of the work that happens in this co-op and how are we distributing it. We’re all writing Post-it notes - “I make the website” and “I email the users when they sign up.”

Then someone started putting up all these tasks that I’d never noticed were tasks before, like you say about the birthday card and looking after relationships and checking in with people when they’re not feeling well and all that sort of stuff. It was again, the light bulb came on - “Oh, that’s work. That’s happening.”

Once we had normalized like “this is just work, it’s just work like all the other kinds of work,” then it became much more accessible to me. Like you were saying about women have been conditioned - men have been conditioned too. Men have been conditioned not to see it. I didn’t see it, I didn’t know that was happening until someone showed it to me in a way that I could see it.

That points to a kind of an even more abstract answer maybe. We’ve done a lot of traveling around the world now, meeting with groups that are trying to organize in this more decentralized, self-organizing way. I think one of the main bottlenecks and obstacles is about a lack of role models. People are doing it out of their imagination - they’ve got a sense of values, there’s something that like seems to be something that’s almost inbuilt in people’s character and their values and their ethics. It says there’s got to be a different way, but most people haven’t seen it. They haven’t felt it.

We’re lucky to have books like “Reinventing Organizations” come out, and it’s like, “Hey, here’s at least a few little stories,” but they still barely scratch the surface. I don’t know if that book talked about care labor, for instance. I don’t know if it talked about the realities of interpersonal dynamics, what it’s like to be a founder and bring someone new in your team and then have to negotiate that power dynamic. Like, you want them to be fully empowered, and this is self-organizing, but also I’ve got so much more context and expertise than you do in this. How do we navigate that? Most people haven’t seen that done.

With the care labor thing, I just hadn’t really seen - I don’t think I had men in my life, not many, that were emotionally intelligent and responsive and taking responsibility for attending the relationships in a group. There was one actually who was the co-founder of Loomio, and that’s probably how I got the training. Not just the women in my life saying, “Hey, you’ve got to pick up your fair share,” but also having men in my life saying, “Hey, you’re one of us, and this is an appropriate way to be a man.”

I think that’s what people are looking for: how do I be, how are we supposed to be around here? That’s what we’ve got to do - the technical stuff of saying, “Oh, you should have a system for managing your care labor.” But there’s also a cultural thing that’s happening, which is this is a way to be a person.

Lisa: It’s subtle. It is again, it’s operating at that water level. People don’t necessarily notice that that’s what was happening. There’s a real key insight that’s come out of your answers just then about role models. It also reminds me of what you were saying, Natty, about how for you, what I was hearing you talk about was mentors, encountering people that were - seeing other people that you could be like, “Oh, that’s a way of being, and how can I learn how to be more like that or how can I spend more time with that person?”

I think that’s something that would be interesting to try and be more intentional about. I’m thinking about Samantha Slade and Percolab, and I know they have these open meetings that anyone can join. They can just sit in on a meeting, and she’s talked about how people come away from that experience like, “Wow, I never knew a meeting could be like that,” and “wow, you know, the way you were when that tension came up and how you were just able to be there with each other and be with it - that was amazing. You’ve never seen anything like that.”

That sort of role modeling piece - actually, when I think about my journeys, it’s the same for me as well. That’s something that perhaps we as a community, people who work in this field, could do more of, and perhaps is what people are longing for having read books like “Reinventing Organizations.” People are like, “Yeah, but how do you start? What happens when this? What does that look like?”

Natalia: Yeah, and I think that’s - we’re quite aware that that’s pretty much 80% of the work that we do with teams. It’s about showing up in a different way, especially the way that we relate to each other, the way that we relate with the people in the team, especially if we can have residentials or in-person spaces. A big percentage of this role modeling is more about small gestures and behaviors that are shown, not told. It’s not about the words, it’s not about what you say - it’s how you show up in that space.

We’re pretty aware of that, but this is one of our long-standing questions: how do we even sell that? How do you tell people, “You just need to be in a place where you can feel it, where you can observe others being in a certain way,” when people want to know a process for fast decision making or a system for distributing care labor? Those things are super important, but if they’re done without the embodiment, then it’s not really that useful.

Rich: Yeah, this is the dynamic actually between me and Natty as well - she does show and I do tell. It’s quite good to have the combination, I guess. One example of that is how do you respond to tension? Tension can be anything - tension can be uncertainty or an unexpected thing happening.

We were hosting a call recently, a group of 50 people, paying clients. I’m feeling the pressure - we’ve got to deliver, we’re going to do a great job - and my computer died. It just did that thing that computers do sometimes and went “zip, I’m off.” Immediately, what’s actually happening inside of me is complete panic, complete disarray. That’s the end of the world.

Natty is next to me, and this is why I say she’s the “show” one - she’s just like, “It’s fine. We’ve got another computer here, we’ll get that going,” and made that transition seamless and without any stress.

That’s a kind of harmless example, but that kind of response to tension - it’s not always just a computer crashing. It’s often like some big emotions came up, or someone said something and the other person got really offended, or we just found out that we haven’t got enough budget to pay all of the staff. That’s what tensions usually look like in a work context.

If you can hold - I think of it as a center of gravity, as a rootedness of “Okay, stuff has happened, we weren’t planning on it, now we’ve got to respond.” If you can keep that sovereign, upright posture and not get completely thrown around by it, the challenges of collaboration and working in the group are just so much easier to deal with when you’ve got that center of gravity.

But it’s hard - I mean, I can explain it and you might kind of get an idea of what I’m talking about, but it’s so much more effective just to feel it, just to be next to someone in a crisis who’s completely chill and holding the whole in the lane.

Lisa: The Swedes have a good phrase for that, which I’ll butcher, but it’s something like “Lagom,” which means being able to be within or sort of liking it how it is without being reactive, which is a great quality to sort of try and master, I think.

So much of what’s difficult about organizations is the amount of anxiety that people respond to unpredicted events with. Unexpected stuff happens, and there’s going to be a good number of people in the room that just suddenly bring a lot of anxiety because they’ve been maintaining a sense of safety by having clear predictions about what’s happening in the future. When those get disturbed, it’s “Whoa” - suddenly everyone’s really spicy and alert, and it’s really hard to make good decisions when you’ve got half the room on alert.

Natalia: And I’m finding - I don’t know if you experienced this working with your clients as well - but in a way, that is what we are dropping people in when we’re starting to challenge some of these domination patterns - “Well, now we’re going to make decisions in a different way” or “Now we’re going to have conversations in a different way.” It puts people in this real kind of growth zone of, “Oh my God, this is like, if I’m right-handed, this is like suddenly being told I have to write with my left hand.”

Creating the conditions, as you’ve been talking about - how do you create safety and a space where it’s okay, where it’s natural and almost expected that that’s part of the process, and being able to be with that, knowing that you can sort of come through that? But it’s a kind of long process, and it’s not cozy.

Rich: It’s uncomfortable - that’s what it is. My perspective is that we are not that used to sitting with things that are uncomfortable. We want to run away because it’s uncomfortable. So the space as well, as we’re supporting people through that, is being able to sit with that discomfort and say, “It’s okay. It’s uncomfortable and it’s going to be okay, and we’re gonna have to go through it if we want to get to the other side.” That’s, as you said, the growth zone - if you’re growing and you’re expanding, you need to go through that space in order to change.

I think there’s another piece here that I was thinking as we’re discussing all this. It’s about the difficult conversations that need to happen in teams. Part of the discomfort is we’re gonna have to talk about those things. We’re talking about changing power dynamics - we’re gonna have to sit together and have those difficult conversations, and a lot of people want to avoid those conversations again because they’re uncomfortable, because they don’t know how to, because maybe they never seen it happening in a way that it was useful and productive. It was more disruptive - “We’re gonna hurt each other, it’s gonna be - there’ll be feelings. How do we handle them?”

So a lot of the things that we do as well is basically just say, “Well, what are the conversations that you think you can’t have, and can we have those? Can you have those with us? Can we support you to have those conversations - the ones that you’re afraid of, the ones that you think are going to be really difficult? Let’s look at it together.”

Start to unpack in that way a little bit the fear of not being able to talk to each other about what is real, and also creating a space where if those conversations go well, you increase safety and trust by 50% minimum. So there’s that space of how can we lean more towards a space where we can just openly name what is not okay or what is difficult and work it out together to come to the other side? That’s already a bit deeper on this journey, I think.

Rich: There’s another side of it that I feel is kind of important to add as well. I read a really excellent blog post recently - I think it’s called “Tools for Uncertain Times.” Ella Saltmarshe was one of the authors; there was another author I forgot who it was. They introduced this concept of “discomfortability,” which is a word I’d kind of heard before. I think it was them who defined it as the skill of knowing the difference between the discomfort of “here’s an opportunity for growth, and if we just lean in and we sit with it, we’re going to learn something new, we’re going to have some kind of new insight” and there’s another kind of discomfort, which is “this is fundamentally unsafe, I shouldn’t be here, I shouldn’t say” - I think the job now is to leave.

Natalia: That’s the panic sound, right? There’s the growth zone and there’s the panic zone.

Rich: When you say “we need” - so much of the work is just sitting with these difficult conversations. Part of the work is for people to say, “I’m out. I’m not going to have this conversation anymore. I’ve done - I’ve held up my end of the bargain for long enough. It’s not actually safe for me. I have to get out of here.” That’s a really important - I’m just thinking of some of the groups that we’re working with lately where that’s what they need. They need to be able to - they’ve been doing their thing and they haven’t been heard. They’ve been ready to sit with the discomfort, and now the other parties are not showing up. At some point, you’ve got to have a boundary.

Natalia: Well, when I was saying this is already deeper into the journey, is because to even be able to have those conversations, you need to have the basic safety. If you’re feeling that someone is going to dominate you and you’re not going to be heard, then there’s no way.

Lisa: Yeah, you’re speaking my language. This is all stuff that I’m really interested in, and it’s interesting because you’re not just going against societal conditioning, as we talked about at the top of our conversation, but also just the way the brain is wired. The brain is wired for comfort and shortcuts and safety and all of this stuff. The brain is just screaming “No!” And so it’s - I think about a lot of this work as about trying to create containers and sort of guardrails to help train the brain in a way to keep it in the groove that you want it to be, because all the time it’s going to be pushing against that because it - usefully so, because that’s how we’ve survived.

But now in this sort of age of relationships, really, which I think we’re all realizing is increasingly important - the brain’s not really designed for that. So there’s a whole curriculum almost of learning how to be in a different way with each other, learning how to relate in a different way.

Natalia: It’s also very cultural, though. I think there’s some societies that are a lot more wired to actually have those difficult conversations. I’m from Argentina - speaking about what is not okay is common language. You do it - that’s how you start the conversation, is about complaining about what’s going on, and that’s how you bond with others, by talking about what is not okay.

But there are other societies - I don’t know, I used to live in New Zealand with Rich - where naming what is not okay is a total no-no. So it’s about what we are used to as well, culturally. There is a tendency, especially in the English-speaking world, and a lot of the organizations that we work with, they’re coming more from that Anglo-Saxon culture where certain conversations are extra uncomfortable, and naming things that are not good is just - it’s just not okay, and people freak out. So it depends where we’re sitting culturally.

Lisa: I want to talk about - because you, I know you tend to work often with activists and non-profits and NGOs and that kind of group. I think it’s really interesting to hear from you about what some of the common challenges you encounter are there, and how - what is the - what are people in that space longing for that decentralized, more self-organizing ways of working could deliver? And what are some of the big challenges that you are encountering?

Natalia: I think in general, a lot of the activist groups that we’ve been working with, in NGOs and so on, what they want is a form of organizing that is more aligned with their values. Their values will be inclusion, equity, diversity, fairness. They want spaces where people are heard, where people are included in the conversations, especially conversations that affect them. So a decentralized way of organizing promises a lot of that.

One of the big challenges, especially in that NGO space, is that their funding vehicles and their legal structures don’t really allow for a teal way of organizing. If we put it into the colors that probably some of your listeners are very familiar with, they’re very orange structures. So they are constrained - if they want to be more adaptive, more flexible, change course midway through, they can’t do it because they have this funding that they got for five years where they have to deliver certain things, even if it completely changed and even if midway through they want to do something different. So they have big structural constraints that are more systemic than anything else.

Rich: I think that’s a really good example. Like what I was trying to say at the start is these different scales, and they’re all interacting. So in that case, it’s the sector scale that is fundamentally limiting the progress of a lot of the NGOs, especially that we’re working with in Europe. We’ve got some amazing vision and readiness, and all the people are there and they’ve got the values, but that thing is blocking them.

But then there’s also - just I think anywhere that we’ve been, any culture that we’ve been - I mean, we’ve worked in Korea and Brazil, and we’ve gone to some different parts of the world - but still, I think there’s this thing about power dynamics, which I don’t want to quite say that it’s universal because that’s kind of maybe oversimplification about what’s happening, but I can see a common pattern at least from my perspective.

A lot of the people that we’re working with, they know that they don’t want to have a traditional command and control system. They don’t want to have a chain of command where you’ve got someone at the top and then a bunch of people at the bottom. The person at the top is much more important and they get much more of a say.

Just speaking for myself, when I went through that, it was - I was trained as an engineer, I worked in an engineering firm briefly, I lost that job, and then there was this period of disillusionment. No way am I gonna go - I call it “box life.” I’m not going to just compartmentalize and put so much of my life into this cubicle that I just feel has got no respect for me as a human. It doesn’t respect my dignity.

So I went on this big rejection - that’s how I got to Occupy. Occupy is all about the circle. It’s all about “we’re not a triangle, we’re not a pyramid, we don’t have a leader, we’re going to be inclusive, everyone’s going to be the same.” That’s kind of what it’s biasing towards, and any vague resemblance of hierarchy is - we’re incredibly suspicious of.

However, that can mean it’s actually really hard to show initiative and be creative because people are going to greet you with some suspicion of like, “Are you trying to take over here?” No, I’m not. I’ve just got this creative, spontaneous moment of enthusiasm, and I just want to throw it into the room. But it’s being greeted with suspicion.

It’s really happening, you know. I gave the example of parenting - there are times where it’s completely appropriate to have something that looks a bit like a hierarchy. You don’t want the small child driving the car with the parents in it. You want it the other way around, for a reason.

But if, like me, you’ve had really negative experiences of hierarchy and you say “I’m not going to do that,” it’s really easier to throw out the whole thing and just go basically be moving from a kind of allergy or a complete opposition and just say, “Ah, if it’s hierarchical, I don’t want anything to do with it.”

The fact is, I do want hierarchy when I go to get kidney surgery or something. I want the most qualified person to be calling the shots there. It’s really difficult - just from the groups that I’ve been in personally, it’s really difficult to integrate that knowledge. Most people would actually agree with you and I about the example about the surgeon, but to bring that concept into a group that’s committed to equality - it’s really difficult. That takes a lot of struggle, to find a relationship to power, a relationship to hierarchy that’s not the old-fashioned command and control thing, but it’s also a lot more fluid and responsive and not bound up in allergy and resentments and rejections, but it’s more fluid and creative.

Lisa: I think I recognize that journey for myself as well. Definitely went through a phase of “all hierarchy is evil - we must destroy it.” I’m lucky that I was challenged by a few people and have kind of landed in a different place. But I feel like that is maybe another milestone as well. We talked about this fish-water metaphor earlier, and it seems like - I wonder if it’s a necessary phase to go through. “Okay, let’s move away from command and control hierarchy,” and then the automatic tendency is to go towards “Okay, everyone’s equal now, and anything that resembles hierarchy is bad and we should suppress that.” Then there comes another kind of realization milestone of, “Okay, hierarchy is neither good nor bad - it depends how we use it and whether it’s conscious and whether it’s transparent and visible.”

You feel the pain of - if we don’t allow anyone’s leadership to flourish, then it’s not fun either. We get stuck in this sort of dead, not innovative place. What’s your sense of how can that realization happen? Do you have a moment where it happened for you? How have you seen it facilitated for others?

Rich: That’s a tricky one. For me, it was - with Loomio, which was my first real significant long-term attempt at making a decentralized organization, I think all of us were really committed to equality, inclusion, horizontality. We went - we made the full commitment - “We’re going to do this, we’re not going to have a hierarchy” - and we just experienced practically the limitations of it. “This doesn’t kind of work, you know.” Including everyone in everything doesn’t actually work. You don’t get things done. There’s actually this implicit system that’s running the show that’s not actually the formal governance system. We just keep pulling out of that - “There’s got to be a different way.” I feel like we gave it our best shot at it, and it just wasn’t compatible. We reached the limit of it. [pauses] I lost it - that’s fine. We’ll come back to it. I’ll be back again in my brain at some point.

Natalia: I was just thinking - this question about, you know, going back into the teal using that language - do we need to go through green to get to teal, or can we fast forward? In my sense - I say this without hypothesis - I’m supporting some people at the moment that they’re starting a new co-op to see if they can start from at least some processes that are more teal oriented so they can move faster through green. But I still feel that there is an important piece there.

For me, that aversion to hierarchy - it’s also part of the learning process. If I observe what I don’t want, I’m gonna go into that reactionary place, and then I can integrate it from a different perspective and be like, “Well, maybe it’s not black and white, maybe there are scales of gray, and maybe there are other ways.” I think it is necessary.

There’s a problem, though, I think, where some groups get really stuck in that space of green. I think that happens because there’s a sense of “us,” there’s a sense of who we are that is attached to certain values. As we were saying, there could be a perspective from a particular perspective - still could look orange, still could look like, “Oh, there’s people that are trying to dominate” or “they’re trying to be the leaders when we don’t have any.”

So moving out of it also means I need to let go of my identity. I need to let go of those values that I hold so dear. The fear there, if you’re doing it as an individual or as a group, is: if I have a different perspective, if I think different or if I feel differently about it, will I belong? Will I be kicked out of this? Will I lose my sense of self and identity? And who am I then? What’s going on with me?

A bunch of the conversations that we also have with teams is about just talking about the implicit power dynamics. Because we’re very used to, at least recently, to hear more about these domination and partnership, these kind of power dynamics, or systemic power dynamics of oppression and racism and things like that. But there are power dynamics inherent to any group of humans that are always at play.

As you were naming the founders: if I’m being the longest in this group, I have all the context, I understand what’s going on, I have majority of the connections - I will have more influence into what’s happening, into the conversation of the group, than someone that just arrived into the team. And that’s okay. That’s the “power with” conversation that Mary Parker Follett named eons ago that is very useful.

The problem is that force - if we’re not talking about that dynamic as a healthy dynamic, as eldership - if we’re not naming it and saying “this is what we have, this is what is playing out here, how do we distribute that power, how can we make space for everyone to earn that power with” - if it’s not visible, then anyone that shows a little bit of that or any glimpse at those dynamics is seen as the oppressive dynamic. It’s seen as someone is trying to take over. But they exist.

So for us: can we talk about it? Can we put it on the table and observe it and think together about what are the systems that we can put in place so everyone can have a go, everyone can have their place in the leadership? How can we distribute it?

Rich: When you’re describing there, for me there’s at least two components. One is about language. At the moment, we’re living through a time where suddenly there’s a lot of people paying attention to some of the systemic oppression. So people have a lens where they can see, “Ah, I don’t know if I have been, but probably Rich has spoken more than Natty on this call. That’s because of patriarchy!” I’ve got that lens ready to go - “This is the explanation that fits that pattern. There it is again.”

That’s a useful lens. I think patriarchy is a real thing. I think it really shapes our interactions. But it’s not the only explanation for what’s going on. There’s always a complexity of different dynamics happening at the same time. If we’ve only got one language, if we’ve only got one terminology, we’ll overfit it, and we won’t be able to distinguish.

Like you’re saying, “power with” - that’s really useful, to be able to distinguish “power with” and “power over.” That’s why I talk about domination. It’s like I’ve got a no-tolerance policy for domination. That’s something that we don’t have to live with. I’m convinced about that, and that’s really specific. It’s got a specific meaning to me. There’s one of the parts.

The other part, though, is: it’s all well and good to have the language, but does the group actually have the capacity for listening? Because when you genuinely have this conversation, you’re certainly going to hear some grievance. This is where you need that center of gravity. You need to be able to - “Okay, that sounds really painful. That was unjust, that was abusive.” Sometimes that was at least unfair and unkind, and that’s gonna - like you’re saying about challenging your identity - hearing that kind of stuff, I’ve been participating in this stuff, it’s really hard to hear that.

I’ve got these urgent drivers inside of me that just say, “I don’t want to listen to that reality. I don’t want to consider that I could be part of that, and I’m going to quickly put up my internal blockers and distract myself from it.” It’s not just me - I’m not a particularly horrible person. This is what people do. If you have a room where most of the people are doing that, the person who’s trying to share their experience knows they’re not being heard.

That’s what I was saying before about wanting to have this difficult conversation. There needs to be that receptiveness. There needs to be the availability to say, “Yeah, we’re going to listen, and we’re going to feel it, and it’s going to suck. It’s going to really suck.” But trusting that there’s an insight and a closeness out the other side if we actually just allow ourselves to hear what’s going on.

Lisa: I like that, and it’s making me think also of - we’ve talked a lot in this conversation, I think, about the danger of coming from wanting to move away from something, or even being like allergic or resistant to something. What we resist persists, I tend to find. I really like what Peter Koenig says about integrating all of those parts of ourselves, and I guess that’s also what teal and all of that kind of integral theory is trying to get at as well. It’s not about a hierarchy or reaching a higher plane necessarily, but integrating and recognizing we have all of those levels.

So if we’re thinking about how can we move from a domination society to a partnership society, part of that, I think, is recognizing that we are all dominators. We all have the capacity to be dominating and are. That’s much healthier than trying to pretend that “I’m not” or “I’m a good person” or “No, I will never dominate again,” which I think shuts down a lot of potential for learning and growth in conversation.

Also just, if you’re - it’s just another version of censoring yourself. If we’re moving away from “you can only bring the parts of yourself to work that are professional, more decisive or assertive or whatever,” then we’re just repeating that, aren’t we, if we’re saying, “No, you can only bring your partner-y qualities. No, you must shun all dominating, hierarchical ways of being.”

That’s the space where actually trust and stronger relationships help, because that’s in the space where I can be authentic, where I can be all of my - where I can bring all of my parts and be accepted and not rejected for having them. That’s the space that we want to have more of. But again, it could be really hard for people to even know what that looks like if you never experienced it.

Natalia: I think a lot of people have only experienced that quality of relationship with very intimate relationships, with their love partner or with very close friends, and they don’t know how to bring that same quality into a different environment.

Rich: What you both just touched on points to this thing which I didn’t mention at the start. I said the different scales and said, you know, relationship between two people or between two countries - the same thing applies internally. I think the metaphor holds really, really well, that you have different characteristics, different parts like you said, different personalities.

There’s a practice you can do just inside of yourself about how do I stop trying to dominate and coerce myself? How do I loosen up and allow the different parts to just be there? Allow that some of my parts have got a lot of doubts about all these things that we’re saying today. Other parts are really - like, incomplete, not finished in development.

There’s such a strong urge in me to hide all those parts away and just say, “You’re private - no, don’t show anyone that.” Which kind of works as far as creating this sense of professionalism, but it completely stymies our ability to learn if we have to hide the parts that are not complete yet.

Lisa: I like that practice. I guess on that note, in trying to sort of wrap up a conversation that I think we could easily have for another two hours - what are some things for people listening who are thinking, “How can I, in terms of my path - what are some of the - if we think about practices or milestones, what are some things that people can start to do or be differently in their organization or in their group to start to edge towards some of these ideas of working in more human, more decentralized ways?”

Natalia: We love collecting these practices. There’s a lot of them. There’s actually a bunch in the microsolidarity.cc website. We run practices on microsolidarity, and that’s another topic, so we’re not going to leave it kind of there. But a big thesis about what are those practices at the different levels. What are the practices for the self? How can I be more aware of the conditioning that I have, of the parts that I’m trying to dominate of myself, of how do I show up in relationships?

The practices for the relational level: how do I listen to another person? Can I see it with that discomfort when they’re telling me something that I don’t want to hear or that brings a lot of emotions in me? Can I develop my emotional intelligence in a way to be able to hold it? Can I sit with conflict? How can we have better conversations when the topic is difficult?

Then the practices about care and support in small groups. How can you do that in your team as a full team, but also maybe you can have peer coaching? What are those different little micro-practices that you can have in a team of three or four or five people where you can support each other to be able to develop these self and relational skills even more, and to just pay more attention at those dynamics that show up?

Practice in a space where you can build a stronger relational field. Practice having those spaces that are more vulnerable. Practice having conversations that could be tense and difficult. So how can we do that in those different levels?

Rich: I wanted to name a couple of specific ones. You mentioned Samantha Slade from Percolab. I think it was her that we got the trigger log from, which has been like really personally and also in my work a transformative practice. This is the idea that you can do it, say, at a gathering, or you can do it in your team or whatever, but this invitation that when you feel triggered - you know, when you feel like you’re strongly moved - okay, you’ve got to practice your discomfortability here too. Sometimes there’s a reason to completely leave or to exert a strong boundary, but aside from those cases, when you get triggered, can you sit with it? Can you get out your pen and paper and actually write - “What I’m feeling is in my body, this is the sensation I’m experiencing, this is what’s at stake for me, these are my values, these are my needs”?

I really get into some depth to just unpack, to zoom in and slow down and understand that trigger. Are there any requests that I’ve got? That has been tremendous, to look inwards instead of outwards at the source of the trigger and say, “You have done something offensive, you’re in the wrong.” Maybe they are, maybe they are - but I don’t have any control over them. I’ve got much more influence over my own system. So that’s been really amazing.

You were saying about the social fabric. So there’s just so many, and I work with groups - basically, one of the main things we’re doing is just making the social fabric part of the job. Everyone’s got to be attending to the social fabric - small group support like you said, these trigger log things, communication skills.

But then the other half of the system, which we haven’t really talked about in this conversation - once you’ve got the social fabric of open communication, whether it’s just genuine - there’s actual data flowing between people through these relationships - then you add to that an iterative approach and an experimental “let’s try stuff and see what works.” The practice there we always focus on is retrospective - having a practice of regular reflection. What’s going well, what’s not going so well, what are we going to do differently in the next cycle?

If you put those two things together, you really get a superpower. You get a group that can solve any challenge and just evolve and adapt to the context without stress. It’s become spontaneous and fluid - if you have a very strong social fabric.

Natalia: Exactly. It’s like if you have traps, one doesn’t work without the other. If you haven’t got the social fabric, then your experimentation is going to be using the wrong data because people are going to be saying things that are not true. They’re going to be avoiding most of the information.

There’s one particular conversation that for me is one of my core conversations to have, that is, “How do we want to be together?” Having that conversation even just with another person, with my partner. What are the qualities? Not like, “We want to be inclusive and respectful.” No, tell me what it looks like. What does it actually mean to you for me to be respectful of you? What was the need to be true in that space?

Having those conversations to be able to see in which ways we are already living in that space, we’re already creating that space, and which ways we’re not, and what are the areas that we can improve together to change it.

Rich: I want more. I now have got my filing cabinet of practices and stuff ready to go. The human encyclopedia is in action. But one more is: I really believe that you need to be in community when you’re doing this. When you’re trying to push the forefront of what’s possible with human groups, you need to be supported by peers that you recognize, that care about you, that are not immediately implicated in your specific group dramas and conflicts - that they’re outside, they’re alongside you.

There’s a lot of - I think what we’re doing with our work too is just creating opportunities for people to meet each other and to create that kind of peer relationship. That’s why Enspiral has been such a huge impact on my life - I think on your life too - is having these people that are alongside, that are not in but they’re right there, shoulder to shoulder. I just - there’s no way that we would have done this on our own. I really don’t think that if it was just up to you and me trying to figure it out, we would have given up a long time ago.

Natalia: Yeah, having peers. Well, I guess that takes us back into role models. It’s also not just peers but role models. Do I have anyone that I can see that I would like to be more like? Or any group that we see that we want to try to emulate or get closer to their way of being? And can we be in conversation to learn from each other?

Lisa: Well, thank you for that little mini treasure trove of practices. I think listeners will really appreciate that. Is there anything else that you’d like to share that you’d be sad if you didn’t say before we close?

Rich: I feel like I should say something about the patriarchy.

Natalia: I know, but I was kind of defending my own position as being the talkative one.

Rich: Yeah, but I’m an introvert, so…

Natalia: So yeah, smash the patriarchy. Or maybe not smash - you know, maybe that’s the problem. Maybe what we need is tenderness.

Rich: And the inquisitive, vulnerable - yes. Come hang out with us. We’re always running events online. We’ve got the most awesome people that show up, so if you join us, then you’re going to be in really excellent company. Next program starts mid-March, but there’s lots of stuff coming down the road. So yeah, we love to meet you if you’re listening.

If you’re listening to Lisa’s podcast - honestly, this is not just trying to grease you up - your podcast is the absolute gold standard of conversations about organizations. This is absolutely my prime source of knowledge about what’s happening at the frontier, and I’m really grateful for the work that you do and for inviting us.

Lisa: Wow, gonna make me cry. That’s really lovely. Thank you. I’m so glad that you came on the podcast. It’s been sort of in the works for a while, and it’s happened at the right moment, and I’ve just loved our conversation. I just really appreciate being able to have this kind of conversation and sort of explore these topics together. I shake the way you - I mean, talking about the way people show up, I very much see you both as role models for that. So thank you for being who you are in the world.

Rich: Thank you.

Natalia: Thanks for having us.