Allan Rhodes on organisational gardening and Konsileo

Lisa: So Allan, welcome to the Leadermorphosis podcast. Thank you for being here.

Allan: Well, thank you for the invite. A milestone for me in my journey of working on self management. Like being here, I’ve learned a lot with Leadermorphosis and now being here is quite an honor. Thank you for your invitation Lisa.

Lisa: You’re so welcome. I’ve been wanting to have this conversation for a few years so I’m happy that it’s finally happening. So lots of things that I want to dig into with you, but if we start with Konsileo, this organization that you’re working in currently, as head of organization design, but I know that your role has also evolved somewhat. So let’s explore a little bit. Could you tell listeners a bit about Konsileo, what it is and what your role is there?

Allan: So Konsileo with a K is a commercial insurance broking company in The UK. It’s based in The UK, which means our brokers work with businesses, small medium corporates to identify the risks that they might have depending on their businesses and then advising what insurance would be the most appropriate to protect them. There’s certain peculiarities to Konsileo compared to other brokerages companies in The UK. The first one is that it’s remote first meaning everybody works from home or a co-work space. Some of our brokers have decided to work in offices together so they might rent a space but mainly we are spread out throughout The UK. North Of Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England. So yeah all over The UK.

The second thing that characterises Konsileo is that from its outset the founders were very inspired by the three principles of evolutionary purpose, self-management and wholeness and they’ve built the culture, the employee value proposition around those principles. So from the outset there wasn’t any transformation that happened, it was from the initial business model.

Structurally as well everybody’s employed in Konsileo and our brokers, we’re presently 135 brokers in the community and a very small lean central team with some support functions. That also has adopted, inspired by our product team because we’re also an insured tech company meaning we develop our own technology to facilitate the work of our brokers. Normally in this part let’s say of the insurance world there are some off the shelf software. Konsileo decided to build its own software because it’s part also of its proposition or business model. Humans at the center, relationship based but technology enhanced. We adopted from the product team their Agile ways of working so other teams within the central team work with the Agile methodology. So we’ve got catch ups, retrospectives and so on. So yeah, I think in a nutshell, that’s what Konsileo is.

Lisa: Yeah, thanks for sharing that. I think it’s, to my knowledge, it’s the only kind of teal insurance company that I’ve come across. I don’t know about you, but I haven’t come across another one. So it’s kind of unique.

Allan: No, I think in the insurance world, not only in The UK but worldwide, it is probably the only example I know. Probably in finance, in the broader finance sector, it’s not the only one. But for sure in insurance and for sure in The UK Konsileo is the only one.

And my role within it has evolved. My running job title is Head of Learning and Organizational Development. And it has evolved because I came here with bringing my experience of being part of also Teal inspired Holacracy, Sociocracy initiatives, non profits, my own companies. My last company in Mexico is a digital facilitation company. So with that experience, knowledge, sharing with other companies I was invited to come over and share that experience. So I come from Mexico although I’m English Mexican but I moved with my family three years ago almost now to The UK to be head of organizational development but a lot of the work has also been working on the learning and development function.

We’ll share a little bit more afterwards probably about our process of induction and how it has evolved. I’m very involved in learning initiatives including last year we launched our internal Konsileo Academy. So we develop content, we get content for external providers about the insurance, about compliance, about business development, about also personal effectiveness. So all that is in our academy and our client directors and central team members are able to use it. So yeah, the title has evolved also to learning and not only to organisational development.

Lisa: Yeah, maybe that’s a good moment to explore a little bit about induction, as you said, because I’ve seen, I’ve met some of the client directors in Konsileo, and also I’ve seen, you know, you have some wonderful videos of some of the people who work in Konsileo sharing how different it is for them compared to previous organization they’ve worked in. So I know that for many organizations that are organized in this way, in a more kind of self managed way, it’s quite a challenge to A) kind of find people who are going to thrive in that environment and B) kind of onboard them and induct them into a very different way of working. So can you say something about how you’ve been approaching that in Konsileo and what you’ve been learning?

Allan: Well the induction has always been a key process of Konsileo from the outset and it has evolved. It was pre Covid then Covid arrived it was converted from a three day in person induction very similar to what you could experience in another brokerage companies and then Covid came and that turned virtual obviously and not only did it turn virtual but it also one of the learnings of the team that led induction back then was that it required more time.

The transition as you say from coming from other companies and again if we use those colors of the reinventing organizations book very orange type companies in office now to the virtual world and proposing a different way of working required more time for the transition. Induction from 2020 till 2023 it was cohorts of eight, ten, even up to 12 people coming in every three months because that’s the growth model of the company bringing new brokers in with their expertise into the company and having that induction of one month. And then introduced to the different what we call like learning spaces and relationships.

So within Konsileo what we mean by that is that because we’re remote first we encourage what we call community hubs and people geographically close to each other get together once a month to share how they’re doing on their well-being, motivation but also business development and any other challenges that they want to share. We also have our coaching system which basically is peers so other client directors with more experience or more time within Konsileo, supporting new client directors into Konsileo and having that also link between me being at home or in a co-work space alone but connecting at least once a month with a person from the company but more on a peer to peer relationship.

Induction was that but still even though it was a month and still having those learning spaces and relationships many times client directors had the feeling of falling off a cliff. We were very hand hold in that process and then left to their own devices. Obviously they’ve got other things like our broken platform, our software to do their work. They collaborate between themselves using our self management system or mechanism called virtual team contracting. So you’re not alone but when you’re starting it does feel lonely.

So in 2024 and I think that was a big milestone for induction being out of Covid four years already so that definitely was a thing of the past we went to a hybrid version of induction and we actually extended it from one month into a six month process. So we wanted it to be a longer transition period and we combined what can be called induction which is the basics that we would like you to understand of the company but then also onboarding, constant onboarding. And that process we’ve called mobilization in the sense that you’re mobilizing yourself to be up and running within the company. So induction turned from four weeks virtual to two weeks hybrid.

Week one is a lot about culture. Our CEO John Warburton participates actively in that first week. Many times we hear the example of Patagonia for example and the founder being part of induction. Konsileo also has that idea that it’s really important to connect to the founding ideas, the inspiration, why Konsileo was formed and have that connection. For many brokers it’s quite a surprise to interact so much with the CEO. It’s something that they haven’t experienced before so that truly starts the process of this is a different culture within Konsileo.

In that first week we also have what we called our in person building my book workshop which is a bit of a process of planning. What worked for you to make you a successful broker beforehand? What are you bringing over, what are the basic things that you have to understand about Konsileo to adapt and bring over what will work for you and let go and leave behind what’s not going to work here. So thinking that you’re going to shout to people or that you’re going to give orders around the place that’s not going to work here so that you have to leave. You have to understand also that as a client director we called our brokers client directors you are the director of all the support services that you give to your clients so that’s more functions than normally you might have been used in the past you might have had departments of claims or finance in the company, you’re in charge of all those aspects and those relationships with your client. And you’ve got the freedom to choose the clients who want to work. You’ve got the freedom to choose the insurers you’re going to work with. You’ve got the freedom to choose even their finance houses that you’re to propose to your clients. So this is coming from, we call it freedom from to freedom to. So that transition is important.

And week two it’s all about at the end we’re a highly regulated industry, insurance and finance overall. So week two is about learning our software, how to use it. For a lot of people it’s obviously the first time they encounter it they’ve been used to other softwares they come here they have to learn it and compliance is embedded by design in our software so if you follow the prompts of the software its features you’ll be compliant by design we say. So all that happens in week two, like understanding that yes you have the freedom but there’s a playing field that you have to respect. At the end of the day there are boundaries of what is okay and what’s not okay thinking about the client in the center of.

And from week one and two you are paired up with what we call group coaches. So instead of doing one to one coaching once a month, now at the beginning the first three months you’ve got weekly catch ups with your team. A cohort of 12 can be divided in three teams of four and each team will have a group coach and they follow a process of group coaching, a structure. I was inspired by Case Clinic of Theory U so we adapted that structure and their BMB, which is their plan, is a centerpiece of the conversation. And each person brings every week how they’re doing under the like the case giver or the case presenter. And that really strengthens one the relationship within that team. There’s more touch points or follow-up then that sensation of a cliff disappears and then throughout the three months there’s a bit more of onboarding sessions live online on demand in our academy you start meeting other people within the company other specialists that you can have opportunities for cross selling. So we really build up those relationships within the company. And at the end of the six months, you’re now mobilized in Konsileo. Quite an evolution from what it was pre COVID to what is now what we call mobilization and part of our talent acquisition strategy.

Lisa: Yeah. And am I right in thinking then that as a client director I won’t do any kind of sales or deals until my kind of onboarding finishes six months into my time at Konsileo, is that right?

Allan: Well that was the case more in the induction of four weeks, and this time it’s more on your first two weeks of induction. You’re expected to concentrate on the training side of things, but by week three you’re free to go. Because you’ve got other support mechanisms for you to be compliant on one side, know how to use the system. So we’ve got mentors for the system and so forth. The idea is that you actually start getting business in. So that’s why we use the word mobilized. It’s not mobilized only on the system and within Konsileo, but it’s also that you start bringing new business in.

Lisa: I’m curious to hear a bit more about the role that coaching plays in Konsileo and I guess in general, like, you know, that my interest is always like the kind of human side, the kind of soft skills side, because again, like coming from, you mentioned a bit in the kind of initial two week induction phase, you know, some of the things that what people have been used to in their previous organisations or roles will not sort of serve you here. So how do you continually support people even kind of beyond those first six months with the kind of challenges that they’re facing or maybe the kind of personal professional development that’s needed on an ongoing basis?

Allan: So yeah, there’s different support mechanisms I’m gonna say within Konsileo. So coaching is one of them and coaching has several purposes to it. One is development, personal development, personal professional development supported by a peer that can bring you another’s perspective, challenge you on certain things based on the data that is available on the system, so it’s quite transparent in that way. Accountability happens as well, so it’s an accountability mechanism within that. It’s also mostly a mentor relationship. It’s a mentoring relationship. There’s a person with more experience within Konsileo. It might not be within insurance because you could be a person that has been in insurance twenty-thirty years and you’re coached not that long but they’ve been longer in the Konsileo system or culture so that support mechanism is important.

They also signpost to other support mechanisms that you might require. So for example we’ve got a group of trained mental health first aiders, so if that’s the case and you need it you’ve got that possibility to connect with those trained colleagues that are members of central team but also client directors. You might be referred to maybe the type of business that you’re doing requires the support of other people, so maybe connecting what we call practice groups which could be referenced more as community of practices around certain type of business, so you can be connected to that. Encouraged to share some of your challenges with your community hub as well. So they’re there to help you realize the potential of getting more support and connection within the company that you thought you had. Even though we see most of this in induction, it’s one thing to tell somebody that you have all these options and then remind them in the appropriate moment when to reach out to those support mechanisms.

So coaching is about helping you work better and more efficiently and more smartly even in the Konsileo system with the software with a network of other brokers and so forth it’s also there to challenge you maybe even suggest training opportunities through our academy and be a sounding board and even a buddy that you can reach out when you need. So it’s maybe a lot of roles within the title of coach that we have in Konsileo. Some of them have received some level of training actually with Tuff Leadership. Some have taken their initiative and trained themselves through content that we have in the academy that is provided by our external provider. But most of them are more people that will support other people through and mentoring them in the process. And that has been enough for the time being but as we keep on growing we’re thinking what could be next what could support coaches do their work better and we’re rethinking what the coaching system could be. So we’re at that stage of what’s next in the evolution of coaching within Konsileo.

Lisa: Yeah. Yeah, just to clarify in case it wasn’t clear for listeners, the people in Konsileo who have the role of coach, these are not like external coaches. These are not people who, you know, these are other client directors, right? Who have volunteered to take on the role of coach as well, and kind of mentor other client directors. And as you explained that some of them have done different degrees of training in a kind of self directed way perhaps, but I think that’s a really lovely model. And I think there are other organizations kind of teal or self managed organizations that do that, that you don’t have to have external coaches or, you know, these extremely qualified coaches. It’s more about like a way of being and some kind of key skills. And I think it’s really nice to have those relationships, especially I imagine in a kind of remote first company where you otherwise might be quite you know a little lonely island of one perhaps.

Allan: Yes, yes, yeah thank you for the clarification but that’s important and we’ve debated the idea of having as other companies like external companies that provide that service within and they stay only in the coaching space. We would like to think that it’s more like a practitioner coach. So it’s somebody that is doing the work but can help you through with some questions, with some experience to address those challenges and bring what you can bring to the solution of instead of telling you what to do.

Lisa: I’m curious to know, what some of the kind of big challenges are at the moment, because every time I kind of touch it, check-in with you or anyone in Konsileo, it seems like it’s growing all the time, like growing quite rapidly. And also being in, as you said, like quite a regulated sector and therefore also kind of hiring people from, you know, quite a, you could say an industry that’s quite strongly old paradigm to use, for want of a better term. What are some of the challenges that you find, yeah, kind of in that landscape or some questions that you’re exploring right now?

Allan: Well, the business model of Konsileo and it’s based on growth, and growth is mainly by bringing client directors into Konsileo. So every year we have at least three to four cohorts. We’re planning on having more next year. So there’s always the aim of bringing more people in. So scalability is one of our keywords. How do we scale the things that we do? So the system, the practices, the tools, how do we scale it to be able to provide that support and achieve our employee value proposition. It’s how to become the happiest, best rewarded and most professional broker you can be here.

So for example with regards to coaching it’s okay what are the things that we want what are the problems we want to solve with coaching? What are the opportunities we want to create through coaching? Is that being achieved with a system that we have presently? Will that system achieve that if we are 50 more people, 100 more people as planned in the following year? The answer is probably not. So what can we do about it?

As many companies were exploring the idea of artificial intelligence. What does that mean for example for coaching? And we know there’s a lot of platforms and ever more growing number of. There’s some academic papers starting to analyse the competencies of AI coaching versus human coaching, and the conclusion is at least of the couple of papers that we’ve read it human coaching will not be eliminated or displaced it has its place and its importance but AI coaching is catching up to certain competencies very fast.

Could we then think about in Konsileo of a hybrid system of coaching where you’ve got AI coaching paired up with that peer to peer relationship that for us is important. Only like relate Konsileors are very relationship based company between client directors, client directors with their clients, client directors with their insurers. For my surprise, and you come from a family of insurance, insurance is a relationship based sector. I thought it was a numbers and selling sector to be honest. I come from the non profit but it’s fairly relationship based. So that again coming back to coaching relationships are important. So we don’t want to lose sight of that. But we want to complement also the one to one coaching with group coaching with development programs and our community hubs. And all of that provide the learning and development opportunities for a professional within our company. And AI can enhance part of that. It won’t replace but the idea is that it’ll enhance that’s the keyword we’re exploring. I’m not going say that’s the keyword but that’s at least thing. And our product team are really thinking about it. Within the product team there are business analysts and they’re really thinking about this to align it to our principles, to our values, to our way of being as a company. So it’s not gonna be like we’re gonna buy an AI coaching service and just insert it in the company because that’s not the way we work.

Lisa: Yeah. I want to zoom out a little bit because I know that, I mean, you are someone that I have always respected I think you have a really thoughtful intentional way of exploring things and investigating things, so whenever we meet up or talk you know, you’ve been doing some kind of, your own development, you’ve been doing some kind of training or you’ve been reading or thinking or sketching. And I know that one of your kind of passions is about organisational gardening. So let’s talk about that a little bit. What for you is organisational gardening and how do you see yourself as an organisational gardener?

Allan: So I’ll share a little bit where it comes from, the idea. And it’s a mixture of obviously organisational development and gardening. The place that I learned about gardening like truly being able to grow stuff in a certain level of scale was in a year, a sabbatical year that my family and I took in France. Within that community that we lived in for a year I was part of the gardening team and I was taught by one of the gardener leaders about bio intensive agriculture and that was the technique that I learned. Technique practices, it’s got certain principles and the idea is to produce enough food for where we live and also be able to share.

At the same time it was a community that had introduced five years previously sociocracy as a dynamic process of decision making. So it was there that I learned about these new ways of organizing. Although I’ve had heard before because I studied business management, it was here that it became like a reality. Like this group of people were doing decision making a different way, having meetings in a different way. So I got curious about it. I took a course with Universite du Nous, the University of We in France, and that’s where I read about reinventing organizations, Holacracy. That was my starting point but it was through also being a gardener that year. So in my head it was like organizational gardening, it was a thing and I think it was there that it was born the concept.

And I remember starting an Instagram account to share my photographs with gardening. My family was a bit tired of it, I was sharing a lot of photographs. And then starting to make references to what does this mean in organization. So it’s a metaphor it’s not a methodology framework it’s just a metaphor of growing things to achieving things and in both spaces with others because you work with other people to achieve the harvest, the outcomes, the objectives. So it just made sense and also correct me if I’m wrong but a lot of books that we read in this space somewhere or other they reference a garden. So it’s a very common metaphor used in different ways. So I thought well there’s something here that clearly resonates with people. So I continued exploring that and since being here in The UK I’ve got my own allotment as well. For me it’s part of the British experience to have an allotment. So I’ve got an allotment and I post things in LinkedIn of what I’m reflecting upon. And again, it’s just an exploration and my experiment is to see how far it can go and see where it takes me.

It’s an exercise for me of reflection. Some people resonate with it, some people don’t. Some people don’t like the idea of living systems. Some people really resonate with the idea. Some people say, well, are the people? And it’s not like, yeah you’re a gardener and you move people like plants. It’s like no no no. A garden is a garden and the garden is to produce fruits, vegetables or whatever you want and you do that with others. Even if you’re a plot and it’s you who’s mostly there sometimes my son comes or sometimes a conversation with the next door gardener will give me insights of how I can improve something that I’m doing.

So again, if you take that to organizations, you have introduced me to other people doing great stuff in other companies like Mayden, Everoze, and we’ve come together for more than a year, two years I think we did it, exercise of sharing every, at least three times a year, sharing what we’re doing, the challenges that we’re facing and that’s organisational gardening as well because you’re sharing the knowledge, some things apply, some don’t apply. I’ve got my different technique of gardening, you’ve got your technique but we’re sharing ideas something will stick some won’t. Again organizational gardening then it’s a metaphor it’s a metaphor about organizational development with gardening.

And presently, I’m posting, like, what I think could be the method of using the metaphor in different ways, for new teams, for established teams, for team of teams, whatever language you like to use. And the purpose is to keep on writing, seeing what the debate comes out of it, the validation that comes from it, might be an e-book in the future and I would like to present this somewhere else and that’s it.

Also I started my journey of self management, I’m gonna call it, almost ten years ago. So it’s coming to a ten year mark, the next year. So this is my way also, like, to wrap up what I’ve learned in the process, from going full on teal to say, I think I’m a teal skeptic, or getting myself trained in holacracy and practicing holacracy in my company, seeing experiments and supporting experiments in a 100 people organizations and the good and the bad and analyzing that as well and learning from that to now saying well Konsileo is a garden in itself whatever other things happen in the world it doesn’t apply completely to this reality, to this garden, to this system. What are we building here which is unique and only applicable to this model? And there’s other things that yes you can bring in, practices or tools, but there’s uniqueness to the system in Konsileo. And I think it’s the same for every.

A colleague of mine recently said something that is really important, like the gardening technique that you use in one piece of land will have to be very different in another place because of the composition of the soil, the weather, the plants that you can access to, the seeds that you can access to. So it’s very place based. I think this organization of development is very place based. And I think organizational guiding in that sense is also an invitation of what applies here doesn’t mean that you can reproduce it from another place.

Lisa: Yeah, I love this metaphor. Like so many different things come to mind also, like, you know, I might be growing tomatoes and you might be growing cucumbers. So, you know, we’re growing different things too, right? We’re trying to produce different things. So it’s a really, it’s a really fun metaphor. It’s maybe also like kind of a nice bridge to, so you shared, that in The UK, you’ve been part of this community with Mayden, who I had on the podcast as well. And also Everoze, a kind of renewable energy consultancy that’s also been practicing self management for a few years. And there are some universal challenges there. I’ve been lucky enough to kind of join some of those sessions, you know, people struggling with things like onboarding, for example, or I don’t know, salaries or, personal development, career development, all these different things. But ultimately each person has their different garden, as you say, with different conditions.

Then if you zoom out a bit more, I wanted to talk to you because you kind of sit in two worlds too, because up until three years ago, were living in Mexico and I know you were quite involved with a number of communities there and also kind of in Latin America more broadly. So I’m curious, you know, if you look at kind of country gardens or kind of cultural gardens on a bigger scale, like what do you notice there having kind of had conversations in two different continents really?

Allan: Yeah, yeah. So, the reason I got involved like in the Latin American community of people exploring new ways of working let’s use that label was because I learn and probably most people but I learn at least by learning something and doing it and the other one is learning about something and then exchanging ideas. So whenever I when I started my company we were using Holacracy, I connected with other Holacracy companies and in the case of in 2020 with the pandemic I wanted to connect with people in Latin America, Mexico and the rest of Latin America because I had the sense that a lot of the examples that we were reading about in books, articles, the web were Eurocentric mainly and some maybe in The US, a couple in Asia but not much besides Semco in Latin America.

And then you started hearing about 10 Pines that you’ve had Jorge Silva here in the podcast and other Latin American examples but in 2020 it wasn’t common ground It was like you knew that there are things happening because Latin America it’s a land of a lot of beauty and colors, but at the same time a place of great injustices. So there’s a lot for decades, centuries there’s been injustice and hence social movements. Latin America is a place with a lot of social movements, social justice happening and great examples of cooperatives, of unions, of campesinos, collaborating and getting together. So there’s a lot of experience, and also obviously indigenous people that have different ways of organizing, different ways of making decisions. So there’s a lot of richness but that richness wasn’t expressed and if it was expressed it was like in the business world or the non profit world was like importing models from outside which is not bad but then most of the time the challenge was the tropicalization of those models because the culture is different, because the garden is different.

So in 2020 I started something called Reimagina 2030 and that was the excuse just to connect with others. We did a couple of online events that brought people together, and since then I’ve got colleagues now all around Latin America that are doing incredible things from Chile to Peru to Brazil to every country Colombia, Mexico obviously, but all over Latin America, Argentina there’s a lot of things happening. I remember a phrase from the beginning of a Frenchman Olivier Gesbert and he said he was an entrepreneur, a businessman, he turned his company into self management and he always said now he’s back in France but he always said to me there’s something in Latin America that people just get it. Just get on with it. And they’re doing it differently.

And I think it’s the reality also of the chaos of Latin America. As developing countries chaos is part of our nature as well but within that chaos and that lack sometimes of efficient and effective institutions, you have to fend for yourself as a citizen. Self management is just like, well, that’s the way we operate. We all operate as adults, but for some reason in companies we don’t. But whenever the opportunity comes people will take it because there’s that capacity of doing a lot of things. In Mexico there’s always that image of the a person that does a lot of stuff, different stuff, and they’re very creative at it because we’ve got few resources, so you’ve got to do with what you have. So yeah, that’s like my sense, my experience of Latin America Why I think. So a lot of things happening.

What I sense now is that space that Reimagina created and then with me coming here, we decided to close it down. There’s a new initiative from two years ago that they started something in Spain, Marianne, and they started so coming together for what we call Spain and Latin America, we call it Ibero America, so the Iberic Peninsula, Spain and Portugal connected to Latin America. So Spanish speaking countries coming together and they’ve been very successful again to start connecting the network in Spain Portugal and in Latin America because there’s a lot of energy there and very very I’m gonna say powerful people in the sense that with power, with energy, with wanting to bring this to the world.

Lisa: Yeah, I was talking to Javier Costa yesterday about Spain, and why it seems to be so ripe here suddenly, like, and he was saying, I wouldn’t say Spain as a whole, but it seems like maybe the boundaries of Spain, which also sort of interested me, the Basque country, Catalonia, Valencia, little bit, Andalusia. And then of course there’s got to be that connection, I guess, between Latin America and these communities as you say they’re kind of coming together, Spanish speaking communities and it really interests me why yeah the kind of cultural conditions that seem more ripe for this way of working to kind of just catch, know, it seems like there’s much less friction compared to The UK.

Like ten years ago in The UK, it seemed like there was like a big kind of movement. There were a lot of people very excited about Frederic Laloux’s book and there were communities popping up and a few companies doing that and then it seemed like it’s tailed off a little bit and now it’s maybe picking up again in The UK a bit. There are a few more companies and I know there are a lot of passionate people, but also bumping into institutions like the NHS for example, I have a lot of wonderful peers trying to bring kind of Buurtzorg like models to the health and social care sector, but these big institutions is very difficult. Or maybe the more individualistic culture, I don’t know. But it interests me that these kind of conditions, the soil, right, just seems more friendly to these ideas somehow.

Allan: Yes, yes. And again, as I hear you, there’s institutions that will prevail and won’t change. And I don’t think it’s bad that they don’t change. Like, I’m more of the mindset that not everybody has to be Teal, not everybody has to be X or Y other models. You apply what is useful for the fruits that you want to harvest. And we haven’t spoken about the concept of source because I am also a person that believes a lot on the reality of how initiatives are born and within a company how you can bring an initiative as well and source that initiative and give it life and when you’re doing that you’re creating the culture within that initiative which in within that team. Or if you’re starting a company, you create that culture around who you are. And as we’ve spoken before, but you can bring the positives and the light side of you into that culture and reality and that garden, but you will also bring if you don’t work on it on the shadow side of yourself. And it’s for me it’s like crystal clear but it’s crystal clear I think in less complex system than institutions like at the NHS.

But even then I’m sure that if you go into a team you still feel certain way of doing things that is influenced by the person that leads that or that has initiated that. So I think that perspective is really interesting and powerful and I liked it. And when I read the book first of Tom Nixon of Work with Source, what I liked is that because he comes from the self managed world he was challenging a lot of the logics of self management. In the sense that it’s like everything has to be horizontal. Just recently I was in a conversation and a person said no we want to be horizontal, we want to be horizontal and I’m saying well why do you want to be horizontal? What do you understand by horizontal? Knowing the things that you’d operate which are different thing, very different processes and products and services that you provide horizontality might make sense for some things but not so much for others So instead of worrying about being horizontal, why, explore what it means for you and what would it be if you also put the vertical side to it?

So in that sense for me, source is quite challenging, and I like to challenge people with that because like, yeah, as you know, why are you saying that there’s one person that influences the system. Well I agree with the principles that Tom has put in the book but are expressed by Peter Koenig because I see them. Once you put those lenses, like many things, can use different glasses to observe a system and each pair of glasses will provide you just a different perspective. It’s not the only untruth, the true one, but each lens will provide you that and that makes you a it’ll give you a richer perspective of where you’re So I’m talking a lot about now in organizational gardening about that creative field that’s talked about in the source work but also on Theory U what Otto Scharmer calls the social soil which is also important.

Holacracy is very aimed at the structure but I just read an article really good article that says yeah but then the shadow processes happen behind the scenes because the hyper formalization of Holacracy has its dark shadows. You just recently put something in a LinkedIn post that you say well if your system doesn’t have a feedback process don’t worry feedback is happening behind your back but it’s gonna happen. So yeah, interesting things. So again, I’ve moved from a person that took the holacratic constitution as a recipe and applied it and it worked in our small team, but it’s not something that cannot be applied everywhere.

I’ve moved from recipes to understand the system, observe the system, identify the problems that you want to solve or the products or the fruits that you want to harvest and then start designing with others together, sparring, discussing a possible solution. And I like the agile perspective of MVP, minimum viable product. What’s the thing that you can do now? Test it, pilot it, see what happens. Do I do it all the time? No. Do we all do it all the time? No. But that’s for me the ideal process of move by little things. When I hear the weird the word reengineering, it’s like, my god. That’s corporate’s word for now we’re going to mess up the system and just create chaos and politics. And that’s very energy draining. I’ll stop.

Lisa: Yeah, I feel sorry. I speak to so many organizations that tell me, oh, we’re having another reorganization now. So, my team is going to disappear and you know, this is going to happen and I just think, oh, takes so much energy to do that. And then sometimes it feels like just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, you know? But I like this. I like that your journey has, in a way, what I hear is like, you know, you find, and I remember you saying to me actually that you get very passionate about one thing like it might be holacracy or source work or and you kind of dive into it you know you use that pair of glasses you apply it to lots of things okay what does that mean in this lens what does that mean what does that mean and then you kind of go through a phase of like skepticism, know, so you said you’re a teal skeptic also. Of like, but I guess it doesn’t apply here or you know, here’s also the shadow side of that or there’s like the. You know, the trade off, I guess.

And I resonate with that myself as well, like having experienced also being in a holacracy. That was one of my early experiences being in a holocratic team that adopted the constitution. And at first I thought, oh, is great. This is going to solve everything. And then I saw so many dysfunctions happening within that largely interpersonal dynamics. And saw that, wow, holacracy doesn’t at all address those things. Holacracy can work fine with a toxic circle lead for example and that was fascinating to me and when I spoke to Brian Robertson for the podcast actually to be fair to him he did say holacracy was never meant to be like a you know catch all solution. You know, his intention is for people to couple it with other apps, could say like nonviolent communication or whatever. But I think many people do see it as like, this will solve everything. And really it’s one piece of the puzzle, right?

So yeah, it’s, I think it’s very healthy. And I see that if there is such a thing as a movement, and I don’t think there is, but if we collect together these different things, Teal, Regenerative, Theory U, sociocracy, holocracy broadly speaking it seems like we’re in a moment collectively of like questioning things like the hype or the novelty you know people have been practicing for enough years maybe to be like okay so there are some, you know, problematic things here like, or there, you know, this doesn’t solve everything or this is not like the panacea or the utopia. So what do we want to do with that? What things do matter and what problems are we trying to solve? So I think it’s a healthy place to be. Some skepticism is good I think.

Allan: Yes, yes. And for me for example there’s reinventing organizations book was based on a very good research on certain number of companies and then three principles came out of it. But those companies didn’t start off thinking applying a model to start with. They were just applying a logic and a set of experiences of the founders and the people within them to to be able to do the work that they had to do. And then came the systematization of that and three principles came out of. Now you take those three principles and then try to apply it like in Konsileo, it’s like how do you make sense of that with what we want to achieve here? A person like me that is like but that’s the motto like those are the definitions, don’t go out of the concept, very consultant mindset sometimes has been challenged within Konsileo saying well yeah but those principles are guiding us but we’re doing it our way we’re not bringing other ways of doing it. The way that we want to build it is this way.

So that realization for me was, okay, I understand what you’re saying now. But it took me a while because I can fall into the trap of I’ve got, as you say a hammer and everything is a nail with that hammer until I get the message of well not all nails are the same thing and you just need different hammers for different nails. So I think that is important because we tend to look for what’s the perfect model that will work and we waste a lot of energy on that.

I think it’s a good point that you say what is the movement? I had taken some notes like, what’s the movement? The deal, sociocracy, holacracy, x y z, future of work. Although future of work feels so much in the future when it’s actually the present of work. And now with AI coming, I’m really keen on understanding how AI agents could affect influence self management. I recently attended a webinar of Greater Than to understand AI and collaboration was the point or was the topic of discussion and I was surprised that they were tackling the topic of AI because you can have those extremes also on AI or technology but AI now is a topic is like that’s the worst thing that can happen and there’s a lot of arguments of why it’s so risky and then you’ve got the AI enthusiast like AI is going to save us from there in the future the present and the future.

So it’s interesting then go into the debate, what does it mean? But again, AI, if you see it as a tool, then it’s another hammer. So it’s not the question of having the hammer it’s a question of what’s the problem you want to solve. If you see AI as a partner, as a co worker, your mind can blow. And then AI as the boss then it’s scary stuff. Whichever way you frame it it’s just being more mindful of it I think it’s important in the case of Yeah, I just went to the AI stuff because that’s one of the places I’m exploring. What’s the implications and applications of AI in learning and development and organizational organizational development. I tend to go to the application because it’s like I’ve got a new hammer but in this case I think we have to give more time to the implications of, to really have a good think about. Generally speaking in the broader system, as you say, or specifically for the company where you’re working in.

Lisa: Yeah, I guess like AI, like any other technology or like hierarchy or you know, I think part of my journey has also been to not fall into the kind of good, bad trap, right? That like hierarchy bad, structure bad, but more like all technologies are neither good nor bad. It’s everything to do with how you apply them and what the purpose is with applying them.

Allan: Yeah, yeah. And one thing that reminded me when you said the point of structure, I’ve always felt that I’m not very structured but everybody sees me as very structured and it made me think as well of Fanny Norlin and others that talk about this other lens of masculine and feminine, and I think it’s really relevant as well to put that perspective into organization that you’ve got you have had people invited in the podcast that talk better about this. Structure is like that containment way of being of the masculine. The feminine is more the community, the green aspect and the energy. The orange is very masculine as well and red is more feminine. But it’s really interesting to get that also that lens into the dynamics of an organization what is it favoring more than other things why is it doing it that way? Is there a relationship with the source in that sense? Or are we just bringing external systems of the way of doing things that have worked and we just renamed them, renamed renaming them, but it’s actually the same stuff. We’re just putting a new label that sounds really cool and modern or progressive when it’s exactly the same thing.

This phrase, there’s nothing new under the sun. We’re just renaming things in different ways. And then it might be that their moment has come, to be realized to be a thing or not and then you stop back and I think that depends as well on the conditions of the system or the ecosystem we’re embedded in and the realities we’re embedded now. So the times that we’re living now are very confusing and anxiety provoking. How do you come together as individuals to do stuff while maintaining certain level of sanity in the process? So yeah, makes me think of Margaret Wheatley and Nikki, that you’ve also interviewed here, which are very…

Lisa: Yes. Niki Kashtan. Yeah, for sure. Islands of sanity. Yeah. And I think that’s what this podcast is in a way. It’s like, I’m visiting islands all the time and connecting islands, bridging islands, I guess, because we are still, in the minority where this small little niche, around the world of people and organizations practicing another way of being and working together. So it’s important to connect, think, share these things. Like you said, the community aspect.

I’m wondering if there’s any other learning that comes to mind at this kind of ten year milestone for you as you say, having explored a lot of these different things and picked up different hammers. Is there any other learning that you would like to share? Maybe also kind of about you as a human being and your own kind of personal transformation in that or whatever comes to mind.

Allan: So again, going back to this idea that my self management journey started in 2016, could say that but if I look further back to my other life and work experiences I think I was always in the search of a different way of doing something. I even worked, I remember, in a government institution in Mexico and the little team I was leading it was refurbishing all the building so because there wasn’t much of furniture around we improvised a sort of circle. And it was all of us in circle with our computers and our made up desks. We had even a picnic table, I can imagine it. And everybody connected to the same socket because we hadn’t much to do. But it was that search of how can we come together and work in a circle literally and be collaborating with different ages and gender and perspectives. I think it was a search that always happened.

And if I have to think about my stages in this ten years, I think first one was having that lived experience in France that really made it real. Absorbing, there was a lot of absorbing and training and different trainings with different organizations. Sociocracy for All, Sociocracy Practica, and all those gave me more and more ideas on how I wanted to apply it. So I think applying it and experimenting with those things that I had learned was part of my journey. And then I started sharing and people were interested in what I was sharing. So I shared that also I had a 10 episode podcast and then I shared it with a couple of organization nonprofits in Mexico and they brought me in to like think about how they could apply some things to their organizations and now I’m at the decoding stage like okay what I’ve learned in this ten years and I’m decoding it through this language of organizational gardening and I’m presenting my ideas to the world through LinkedIn presently and I would like to do it some other way.

So yeah, I’ve looked to the past of my career, professional career, and there’s always ten year jumps. And I think I’m coming to the ten year, not because I don’t see myself changing to another thing, because I feel that this is the place I want to be. The connection with, the thinking about how we work together, how we bring things to the world. And I’m saying that we’re evolving from coach, from consultant to facilitator to organizational gardener. I do a bit of coaching as well.

Yeah, like answering your question, I think that’s the that’s a process I’ve gone through and I think a phrase that I wrote down was I’ve been privileged enough for somebody else to pay me as a consultant, as a facilitator, or organizational developer to be part of the experiment, to make a living out of it. That has been definitely a privilege. And yeah, those are the things that come to mind. And I think if I had to wrap up the learnings or the last words of ideas was something that we’ve already said. Don’t try to emulate the garden of the neighbor. Define what you have, understand what you have, the resources, the soil, the what you want to achieve and do with that what you can, with the people that you need. And bring them bring them over, to do something with that.

And I think the last one would be I do believe that things move because somebody moves them. So this podcast moves because you’re moving it. It stopped a little bit, but now it’s continuing to move, and it’s because you’ve got the energy. So that sourcing part I think it’s key and I would end up saying also that I think the work that a leader does in a self managed or any type of organization is like helping others reconnect with that source, with that energy source, with that inspiration. And that’s the work to be done as well at an individual level or a team level. Small, not big institutions, just as a small one. That’s it, I think.

Lisa: Yeah. Thank you. Is there anything else you would like to share with listeners or something that you would be sad you didn’t get to say?

Allan: No, I’ve been yeah, about I’m a constant learner and I think for this type of work and being in a self managed company you have to be a learner. You have to have that curiosity. Ruth Deakin Crick a professor that I know that works closely with Konsileo she talks about the learning power so that those dimensions of curiosity mindful agency creativity hope that things will work out are really important and putting yourself there as a learner is very important and creating the conditions for everybody to be learning something within the challenges, the conflict, the disagreement, the different perspectives is important.

It is difficult. I sense it in me like this is not working, we don’t agree, but then step back, give yourself some space, come back to it, try to see it from the other perspective. So those are a different way of listening to. Put different glasses on to see their perspective and then try to get there. As we say also in VTC if you find that you cannot work with that person then move on and work with somebody else because it’s not that self management doesn’t work for everybody it also means that you can work with the people that you can work with. There are limits to you cannot force relationships.

So I don’t know that comes to mind as well, like being open to that, open to learn but open also to pivot and decide to collaborate in different ways or in your spaces to move things over. And I’ve had experiences of we might be working together but we actually have different visions and it’s okay. So if that’s the case, I like this idea of what’s in and what’s out. So within this initiative, within this company, we do this thing this way: what you’re trying to do the way you want to do it it might be that it’s an opportunity for you to do it somewhere else not here and that’s okay also having clarity this is not a place where everything can land I think a beautiful exercise that recently Greater Than published is the reflection of many months of many years of thinking okay from all the perspectives that we can use to do the work that we do we have decided that these are the ones the rest are okay but these ones are the correct ones for us now and that’s important as well what’s in and what’s out of the initiative of the company of the nonprofit and it makes me makes you more focused clarity of where if I want to belong or not and I’m sure we could continue talking as we do when we get together, Lisa, so I’ll stop there.

Lisa: Yeah, that’s that’s as good a place to stop as any, I guess. And, and I’m, I feel fortunate that our conversations will continue. And I’m very grateful to have you as a, as a conversation partner and to learn from what you’re growing in your garden, and how it might help me with what I’m growing in mine.

Allan: Thank you so Yeah, always a pleasure.

Lisa: No, thank you, thank you. Okay.