Perttu Salovaara on Radically Decentralised Organisations and leaderless leadership

Lisa: So Perttu, welcome to the Leadermorphosis podcast. Thanks for being here.

Perttu: Thank you, Lisa. Thanks for the invitation.

Lisa: Yeah, I thought maybe we could start because then we can use this throughout the conversation with a bit of terminology, because we’re often on this podcast talking about self-managing organizations, or self-management, which is a term that I’ve never really loved. I’ve never really been a fan of that, but it seems to be one that’s kind of widely used. But in your writing, you’re using the term radically decentralized organization, right? RDO, so could you maybe say something about that and why you use that term?

Perttu: Yes, we were not too happy with the word self-management and self-managing organization because we’ve studied the images that people create with that wording. And self-management is whether it’s academic circles or lay persons or people at work life, it very often starts to refer to oneself so I manage myself, which is partially true, but it’s only partially true. So it’s actually misleading. When we talk about organizations and the forms, they’d like to organize themselves the way they’d like to make leadership happen. It’s not about the self but it’s rather about the common purpose that we are all after.

So then, you know, in an extreme case, self-management would mean there’s people sitting on the couch and playing video games after the lunch when they actually should be selling, which is, it’s fine, and then they decide for themselves how to use their time. But we’ve seen a lot of cases where it leads to suboptimal behavior, and also suboptimal results.

So then RDO radically decentralized organization is just one more version of the same thing. We have another word in Finnish. We don’t use the self-management, but rather community-led organizing, but it’s very difficult to—it’s not a good term in English either. So in this we’ve ended up with the radically decentralized organization which is a more general form, and it doesn’t, of course, people create different images out of it too, but at least it’s not quite as misleading towards I can decide for myself, because actually it’s about the group who decides for themselves.

Lisa: Yeah, I really resonate with that, because I hear a lot of organizations where people start to say things like, “Oh, well, we’re self-managed, so I can do whatever I want,” right? Or, or even people misconstrue it for self-management, like, you know, like prioritizing my time or task management, you know, that kind of narrow. So it is kind of a problematic term, I think, and puts the emphasis on the self, which, as you say, is really much more about putting the emphasis on the whole, on the community and how we can best kind of collaborate towards a common purpose. So I like that.

Perttu: Exactly, so there’s these two sides. On the one hand, actually, we always, when we join an organization, we join a community and a common purpose, on the one hand, but on the other hand, the other sort of, if you like, the negative side of self-management, the way it’s often understood is that people think they are on their own. “Oh, I need to cope with this,” and it’s no wonder it leads to stress. I mean, this is, of course, a very common phenomena in a self-managing organization, that people think they are responsible, and then they actually feel a lot of stress because of that, and that’s not the point—we should be able to help each other. So it’s not actually self-managed, but it is about the community that we all create together for organizing things in the best possible way. So that’s why the, you know, the sort of community-led organizing…

Lisa: Yeah, and I can see why in English, that doesn’t work so much, because then it conjures up a picture for me, more of like, I don’t know a grassroots community, like Occupy movement or something like that, which has completely different connotation.

Perttu: It does, and for instance, community leadership or community management, community actually refers, in those cases, to the neighborhood, yes, the community around the neighborhood, and so on. But I’ve really, I mean, I’ve asked also a lot of my academic colleagues about, so can you get the idea? What would you recommend? We haven’t finally determined it doesn’t matter. We can here still talk about self-managing organization or radically decentralized—it’s more about what we’re trying, aiming at and the purpose of the whole thing.

Lisa: I wonder if you could say something about because you’re based in Finland, and as I understand it, the organizations that you’re kind of studying and trying to kind of gather some patterns and discern, like, what does it take to have a kind of successful or optimal RDO like, what is the landscape in Finland in terms of these, these kind of self-managing organizations? And also, how did you end up being interested in this topic?

Perttu: Well, that’s two questions, but I’ll take the Finland first. Finland as such, is a pretty fruitful platform for developing self-managing organizations, because people in general, they are quite independent. They are—it’s not about the level of education, but the independence and it’s not the cultural feature as such. But it’s definitely true that I’ve lived for quite a many years. I live now in Austria, and I’ve lived in Germany and in the US for five years, and in Hungary and so on, also in the UK, all these cultures are more authoritarian than the Finnish culture, and it’s been interesting the recent five to seven years to see how even in public sector, I mean not only private sector, where non-authoritarian forms of organizing have been like more common and it’s easier to try out things. But even in public sector, these things have become very popular that Finland, the Finnish public sector, has realized that it just doesn’t work out anymore that well with just a bureaucratic hierarchy way of leading things and leading people. So it’s definitely a fruitful time.

But my interest goes back at least 15 years. I did my PhD in 2011 on post-heroic forms of leadership. And around it must have been around 2007 or eight. When I started collecting a list of—I came across organizations and teams or books or articles that talked about bossless organization, or, you know, leading without hierarchy and stuff like that. I started creating a list for myself, and at some stage, after a couple of years, I had already 60 entries to that list of articles, books, videos, sources that were talking about this thing, and I thought, “Oh, this is really real.”

And at the same time, I had been working as an organization consultant since 2000 in a Finnish company that was self-managed. However, the word self-management wasn’t around yet, at least in Finnish context, because we have an old word for that. Yes, it did exist, but we called back in the day this company—we thought we were a team-based organization, but we didn’t have any bosses, because everybody around 50 people, were entrepreneurs. We were organized in teams, and you could work flexibly, of course, between teams and between colleagues too, and there were no leaders, because you can’t really tell entrepreneurs what they must do. You have to have the trust and see that we all work well together. So we had been practicing that already, and so it was not a totally new idea for me, but my dad and my granddad were both officers, so this was a bit of a break to that tradition. I’ve been—so I have a long-term interest in this kind of thing.

Lisa: That’s really interesting that I’ve been talking more and more to people about different cultural dimensions of countries and where this kind of style of organizing seems to take root more naturally, like here in Spain, for example, particularly in the boundaries of Spain, there seems to be like a hotbed of self-managing organizations in the Basque Country in Catalonia. And I think one of the first cases I came across in Finland was the Helsinki central library. So it’s interesting too, that you say it’s also not so unusual in the public sector as well, which is, I think, for many people listening, very hopeful to hear since I think people are really longing for the public sector to be reinvented, and many people think it’s more difficult?

Perttu: Yeah, I actually thought about it in advance, because we got quite a number of examples here in Finland from public sector. A number of libraries. And libraries are always public sector. They belong to the cities, but then also kindergarten systems and health care—lately, also, schools have started that kind of development.

But the interesting thing in public sector is responsibility, because everything is designed by law. It’s also defined, I mean defined by law, meaning that, for instance, how does a ministry work? Actually, there’s a Finnish Constitution that says this and that and that, we got this kind of ministries, you know, certain kinds of ministries. And it then goes down to law that says that the task of a certain ministry is this and this and this. And then it goes down to describing the responsibilities of certain roles. And this is where we often end up with that. Well, you know, responsibility belongs to this person, so it’s a bureaucratic hierarchy system where you describe the roles.

And it’s, of course, the benefit of it is that not a person who occupies a role or certain job, say a kindergarten manager, he or she cannot work the way he or she wants, but everybody in that role needs to has the same kinds of responsibilities. But the interesting thing is, for instance, kindergarten manager, or we can call her, let’s say her a leader. They are responsible for everything that takes place in that kindergarten. 99.9% of the work that takes place in the kindergarten, they don’t do, but they’re responsible for that whole by law.

So how do you as a person, as a responsible person, carry that responsibility? Is it that you take very strict controls and see that everything works the way it’s designed? And, you know, create processes and have measures and watch the people with cameras. And I don’t know, of course, we all know this is not the way it works. But you have to have good staff, good personnel. There, 30-40 people working with 120 kids, 150 kids. There’s a lot going on all the time. So of course, the kindergarten teachers, they have to be professionals in their work and see what’s going on all the time, so they are observing the surrounding and so on.

So the task of the kindergarten manager or leader is to create an environment that he or she can trust, and only that way you can be sure that you can carry your responsibility that you have anyway, but you’re not doing that work, and you’re not also commanding the forces, but you’re trying to create a learning environment for the people so that they can work there in the best possible way. There are certain, of course, there’s a lot of, you know, frameworks and limitations and rules and instructions and so on, but it’s still up to the people to keep those rules, keep those boundaries, or to see, how do we deal with this?

So the public sector might be in a way, people say it might be more difficult, but it actually isn’t. Once we see that it’s made for these organizations there, they are made for a purpose. And that’s, of course, the beauty of it. They always have a really great purpose—kids, the healthcare, library, with civilization and educating people.

Lisa: Yeah, that’s true. I hadn’t thought about it that way before, that you have a very clear kind of mandate and purpose and area of responsibility. So that’s kind of useful then for designing how you want to organize around that, given that that’s clear, because, yeah, you’re right in especially like in startups, I think about as well when, when it’s sort of easier to be flat when you’re small, and then as you get bigger, it becomes things get less and less clear and I think where self-management can go wrong sometimes is where it’s not really clear what the purpose is, or we have different ideas of what the purpose is, whereas in the public sector, it’s very clear.

Perttu: Yes, and, and also, you know, it’s interesting because, you know, I work with people, so there’s always, yeah, it’s there’s a lot of dynamics. There’s things going on. We need to react. They need to react as emotions in play and so on. And at the same time, it’s quite plot about structures too. So this is not only work with relationships or emotions or individuals, but also with the structures and processes.

And it’s one of the things we just found out a couple of months ago is that Finnish law concerning communities and municipalities, what it says about organizing, one of the first sentences there is that the form in cities and municipalities in Finland, the form of organizing is free to choose, so it does not say it’s a bureaucratic or hierarchical organization. But underneath these responsibilities, and there’s a lot of levels just alone in kindergarten, lot of levels where responsibilities are written down and described also by law, and in the new law for early childhood education, there were new descriptions for certain roles.

But then what we realized is that underneath that role and that description, you can actually choose how you work. But for instance, it says, this is the common example in Finland for every child there is, there is a plan for each year that the kindergarten teachers create a plan for their education and learning. And in the new law from 2016 it says something like, you know, this is all in Finnish, of course, but it says something like, for creating that plan, the person who is responsible is the kindergarten teacher, and that’s a certain level of education. That’s, it’s master’s degree. So it’s not the candidate degree, but it did. You have to have a master’s degree. So it has to do with education too. Now this is what law says. This is the responsibility of the kindergarten teacher too, that every child has a learning and education plan.

This has been almost in all communities and cities and kindergartens in Finland, it has been interpreted as okay. It is the kindergarten teacher who makes the notes, makes the plan with colleagues and parents, and has those conversations with parents that also take place once or twice a year. But the thing is, the law doesn’t say that. It says that the kindergarten teacher has the responsibility for those plans, but it doesn’t. The law doesn’t say who does what, and there was some—I interviewed those 30 kindergarten teachers from the city of Jyvaskyla in Helsinki, and one of the in close to Helsinki, and one of them said, “Well, you know, the new kindergarten, the Early Childhood law and about this educational plans, there’s still a lot of frustration because of that.”

And I was like, “What do you mean with frustration?” Well, you know, there were people who have been working in this profession for 20-30 years, but they don’t have a master’s degree. They’ve been doing these plans, the individual plans, for the kids, for 20-30 years. They have been conducting those discussions with parents for 20-30 years, and now they are denied that. So when you now ask them to do something voluntarily. What they say is, “Well, you know, my professionalism is probably not on the level that I could do that extra work, because I was not respected early on either.” So the consequences of certain laws and the interpretations are drastic for the morale and for if you like, even effectivity and effectiveness in working in kindergarten and for cooperation.

But that interpretation, that only kindergarten teacher, the master’s degree can do that plan, it’s actually wrong. But this is the systems that we live in, the kind of thinking that we are used to in Western societies and in most work life, that we have a mindset of a hierarchy. And if it says, this is your responsibility, then you should probably do it. But it’s funny that we know that kindergarten managers, they don’t do most of the work in kindergarten. But then, when it says that the kindergarten teacher is responsible for that educational plan that he or she should do it, that is actually not true. Anybody can write down observations. They can have those discussions with parents, if they design the process so that everybody has, or the people who do that that they have the skills and professional knowledge how to do and a lot of people do.

Lisa: Yeah, that’s really sad to hear. Like, how ingrained that is, the way that we interpret these things, and also that sort of sense of, “Well, if I’m not respected, then, then why should I kind of go beyond the basics?” And maybe that’s a good sort of transition into what you’ve been writing about in some of your research papers, because you’ve been looking at, you know what, what’s needed to have a radically decentralized organization that kind of works instead of one that maybe slides back into—there’s this great term in one of your papers, the iron law of oligarchy. You know, it seems like we’re so ingrained with these hierarchical ways of being and relating to things that it takes more than just announcing that, “Oh, now we’re going to be self-managing.” Or, you know that, and I see this all the time with people that they struggle. They need to have something to step into. Or we need to have ways of helping us kind of reprogram our brains in a way, because we’re so conditioned in this hierarchical way. So what are the things that you’ve been discovering in studying these organizations? What are the things that need to be in place for it to work?

Perttu: In short, this, you know, you can have this or that kind of model. I’m not too much into generic truths. But one could say, you know, four things, structures, processes, practices and culture. Any organization has this, but in self-managing or radically decentralized organizations, these are different than they are, for instance, in hierarchies. But why do we need those?

To get back to—you mentioned the iron law of oligarchy. So there is this interesting research paper about our law of oligarchy. It was actually created in early 1900 by a German sociologist, Michels, and it basically says that any organization, whether it is designed to be more or less democratic or more or less hierarchic, but our law of oligarchy says that in the end, they will all end up in a certain kind of oligarchy, which means the rule of the few, which again, is sort of, if you like, your kingdom or hierarchy, but that they would, you know, revert into that. And that would be sort of a natural law.

This research paper, then, from some 10-15 years back, it then says that actually the iron law oligarchy is not true. First of all, it’s not law and it’s not iron. So it doesn’t always happen that way, because we know that we have democratic institutions. We have more or less democratic organizations, and that have been able to maintain this, maintain this form for longer, in long term. So actually, it doesn’t necessarily happen.

So what this researcher, Diefenbach would be saying, is that, yes, there is a threat of oligarchy. There’s a risk of falling back to that. And we’re, you know, this is the discussion going on in self-management circles. We’ve seen that happening a lot. So there is this possibility, but it’s not so that it would be natural for human societies or communities always revert to a certain form. That would be the leader-based that is definitely not true based on, you know, whether it’s a sociologist or anthropologists—Graeber and Wengrow in their book, the Dawn of Everything. And there’s other research to that too, about the older and, you know, different kinds of societies, also historical ones. If we interpret them in a new way, we can see that they were not all kingdoms or led by rulers alone.

Lisa: Yeah. Yeah, that you’re talking about research and books and stuff that are challenging this notion that that humans are kind of evil and we will always end up kind of dominating others. And been a number of writers recently kind of challenging that that’s not always the case. Yes, that’s the case in some ways. Rutger Bregman in his book too, saying maybe the human image that we have that humans would be only egoistic and ruthless to each other. Maybe that’s not true.

Perttu: Exactly. It happens too, but it’s not the whole truth. So can walk us through that.

Lisa: So you said, and I really, I really appreciate what you say about, like, there’s no universal truth here, of like, what works, and so I don’t want to fall into trap of that, but, but these kind of four principles or elements that you mentioned, so, structure, processes, practices, culture, could you say something a bit more about, like, what are those? What are some things for us to consider in those areas in order to have a kind of optimal RDO?

Perttu: Yeah, there’s, of course, a lot to say. So I tried to be short and precise so structures, processes, practices and culture. Again, just to frame you can have your own. But here, this is what we see happening there in when we talk about the transition and transformation from hierarchical organizations towards more decentralized forms.

So for instance, a typical your normal workplace with the normal hierarchy would have a structure. It’s typically an organization chart. The funny thing with organization charts is that, you know, the way it looks, it’s a bit in the form of a pyramid. Often. The funny thing is that what it says and what it does not say, for instance, you know the work, that the purpose that the organization, what is it there for all the work that they do? Or the processes are never visible in an organization chart?

One of the reasons being, of course, it has to be simple enough, but simple enough, is very deceiving, because there’s also a principle of aesthetics in an organization chart, a principle of beauty. You know, it’s supposed to be rational, or this is the way it’s designed, and this is the way it should work, and you leave this and you leave that. But actually, there’s a principle of beauty. Have you ever seen an organization chart that is very confused? And you know, it’s, it goes back and forth, here and there, not really, because there has to be certain kind of simplicity and certain kind of geometrics of balance. So it’s not that everything is on the right hand side and in the left hand corner there’s something, again, a cluster, but it’s very centralized. It’s a geometric form that refers actually to certain kind of balance and beauty.

A real organization is never in that kind of balance, and it’s just a deceiving picture to ease the mind. The reality behind that chart is that there’s a lot of processes, a lot of back and forth, things happening, and the processes and the clients, where are they now?

So actually, so that’s the structure. The question then being so, what is the structure of a decentralized organization? How do we visualize that? Or how do we explain it? And of course, we know we are now talking about networks, rhizomes, cells, you know, circles and so on. Circles of circles and different forms. It’s getting pretty interesting. So what do we mean with that? How are these roots underneath the ground? How are they connecting?

And these structures, this is where we need collective imagination, and this is one of the basic things we’re doing when we’re developing these organizations that we’re trying to enable to people to talk with each other and create new language and visualizations for their own human community and then structure. What it means is that we need to start talking about what is real, because organization chart, to be blunt and honest, is not real. It’s a deceiving picture of reality, of all that dynamics and emergence and everything is, you know, I’m not saying everything is—well, I am saying everything isn’t in the process anyway, all the time. So actually, we should think about those structures more in process terms. How do we how can we enable visualization, or a form of leading that still contains that liveliness, that process, processual nature of organizing.

So that’s my you know, try out, try to be crisp and short, but just a little structure. What we mean is we need to start thinking new. But then and then come processes and practices and culture. I’m not going into details of those. You see the point being all these existing hierarchies in your any organization and also in radically decentralized organizations, be it any form, these things exist there, but they are in a different position and form, and they emerge in different forms than in that mainstream system that we call hierarchy.

And maybe I’ll just mention the practices that, you know, the processes are there, but they need to be co-designed and so on. But practices is interesting. That’s the way working. And, you know, advice process or conflict resolution or feedback, these are typical practices in any organization that are often described. And the question is, how do we design these common interaction patterns so that they not only, you know, convey the top down message, but they actually support the horizontal also the top down this network kind of the idea of equality, not the idea of authority.

Lisa: Yeah, in your in your paper, you, I think you often refer to them as, like, collective social practices. They’re practices that we, that we are collectively responsible for. And I really like that, because I find that if, if, if we don’t all own it, or if it’s not a habit for all of us, then it’s meaningless in a way like it only works if all of us take responsibility for doing it.

And I think when I was reading this in your paper, was connecting to in my head a guest I had on the podcast, Miki Kashtan, who talks about the five core organizational systems, which are, how do we make decisions? How does information flow? Who gets to know what? How do resources flow? How do we decide things, about money, human resources and so on? What is like the feedback system? How do we know if we’re doing well or not? Like, what does good look like? And then conflict, engagement. What do we do when there’s conflict?

And what she says is, you know, those, those five organizational systems are, are in all organizations, like you said, we have structures and processes and practices in all organizations. But if what she says is, if we don’t reimagine those in line with the purpose and the values of what we’re aiming for, in this case, maybe to be more decentralized, to have more distributed leadership, if we don’t reimagine them, then we will inherit the versions of those in this case, I guess you could call them like collective social practices from traditional organizations. So if we don’t think about how we’re making decisions, we will naturally, probably end up in what we’re used to, what we’ve always known. If we don’t consciously think about how we deal with conflict when it emerges, we’ll deal with it with how we’ve dealt with it in the past, instead of collectively co-designing something that’s more in line with what we want.

Perttu: Exactly. And this collective co-designing, or as I sometimes call it, collective imagination, is surprisingly important, because adult people, whether it’s individuals or groups, they won’t behave in a new, different way, if they don’t know what that should be. It’s sort of simple, like that. You know, in any new situation, or in any situation, we behave the way we are taught to, and we, you know, we’ve inherited, as you said exactly. I mean just repeating the idea that you already introduced, but it is exactly that way.

And at work, we don’t always, or we actually very seldom, think about the ways of working, a part of processes. But how do we deal with each other so that it would be actually more equal? It’s very seldom addressed. And then. So it means that we actually need to create those. And I think at the moment this, I see in the self-management discourse, so it’s seldom mentioned the word best practices. But I see that there’s a lot of people ask for best practices, and so, okay, do we need to reinvent this in every organization? No, because there are certain best practices. Yes, on the one hand, there are. But to be honest, best practices comes from the thinking tradition that we’d like to get rid of.

There’s nothing wrong with best practice, say, advice process, okay, we have something there, but actually it’s much more about the implementation of it, and much more than what we realized, because we worked with those 17 kindergartens in the city of Jyvaskyla too, for instance, that each kindergarten, even if they should be exactly alike, so to say. Or they are not. They have their own personnel, they have their own history, they have their slightly different ways of working. Should it be there or not? That’s a different issue. But all of them have to go through that process of thinking about those things and reinventing they have to have the real question for themselves first, so that they can create these, these answers. And they have to, you know, no matter how difficult this, but they have to go through the process of thinking themselves. And at some stage, there might be some external help. Have, you know, there are ideas other people have thought about these two, and they might try it out, and then they develop their own version. But as you said, the whole collective imagination thing is utterly important to you.

Lisa: I really like that. I really resonate with that. It reminds me of a case of this Portuguese organization? Well, they’re international, but originally they were born in Portugal, Mindera. They’re a software development company, and when I visited their office in Porto, they told me that they kind of co-designed their salary process. You know, how do we do compensation?

And it took them a long time. It took them a number of months where they had groups coming together in workshops, and they would go away and research different models and come back with different proposals, and then they would kind of vote on the proposal that they liked the most, and then they would prototype that, and then they would, you know, do a retrospective. And so this whole process probably took a lot of time and money in terms of the people involved, and did they come up with something that was perfect? No, of course not, but they came up with something that was theirs and that was co-designed.

And they were telling me that it was interesting when new people join the organization now, very often they question the salary process quite quickly, like, “Oh, wouldn’t it be more fair if you did this or this, or Wouldn’t it be more efficient if you did this or this?” And they’ll say, “Well, you know, it was a very long process of people co-designing it, and by all means, we’re always evolving it and taking in feedback. So, you know, try it out for a little bit, and if you have some thoughts and feedback, by all means, suggest them.”

And then they said many times, people, after a while, realize, okay, well, there’s no perfect solution that everyone will agree is the perfect solution. But what we can aim for is something like, clearly explainable that we’ve co-designed, and that’s like, you know, the sort of the most appropriate for our context, for us, specifically this group of human beings, in this context.

Perttu: It’s so much about the ownership and the people who were in the process, the origin of that whole process, month-long negotiations and planning and voting and so on. Behind that process is a question. What they’re doing in that project. They’re trying to search for answers, but there has to be a question. And what happens is that if they all join for searching, okay, we have a question. So what do we do? The search starts, and they all learn in the process. So when someone joins the whole thing, couple of years later, they will have the same questions. No, there’s no question about that.

But and the others might, at some stage become also a little bit frustrated. You know, we’ve thought it through. We had that question. Yeah, we had that question too. Oh, yes, that too. But have you thought about that and then, but I said the ownership comes through the experience of going through all the all that thinking and those variations, and also there’s definitely pain involved. It’s a little bit of a pain in the ass to go through this whole thing and oh, what do you mean with that detail? Why is it so important for you? And if we do that, we’re just so much better off, because then it’s our own. And we’ve been through those questions, we know why we’re doing this.

Lisa: Yeah, I really like what you’re saying there, that it’s, you know, maybe a cynical person might argue, “Well, that seems like a hugely inefficient process to get to, you know, a compensation practice like, why couldn’t they just have one small team doing that, or an external consultant or whatever?” But what I like about what you’re saying is that it’s not only that there’s co-ownership of what they come up with, but also the benefit to the company is that everyone has experienced that learning as well that will be applied to many other things, not just that one process, but also like, how do we solve challenges together? How do we imagine things together? How do we, you know, navigate different tensions, because they were dealing with in the end, they decided, for example, that…

So there were some people who said, “Let’s make salaries transparent, fully transparent. That’s the most fair, if we know what everyone is paid.” And some people were saying, “No, I don’t feel comfortable with that at all. That doesn’t feel safe. I don’t want that.” And so then they had this interesting dilemma of like, okay, well, what do we do with that? Do we have some kind of compromise?

And in the end, they decided that one of their core organizing principles was autonomy, and another organization might have a different one that is their main organizing principle. But in this case, they said, “No, for us, autonomy is the most important. So how can we design a system that accounts for both?” And they ended up creating a system where they had, you know, a small group of representatives who could see transparency of salaries, but everyone else could only see salary bands. And so they designed something that worked for both but, but it was also a learning process of, you know, there’s never a one size fits all solution. There’s very rarely a solution that everyone loves or would be their preference, but finding that kind of space of mutual willingness, something that’s sort of, you know, the best possible case, I think, is also a good muscle to develop, right for any kind of teaming.

Perttu: Definitely. And you know, some people, as I said, some might call that ineffective. Well, first of all, you don’t involve people to all the decisions that would be ineffective. But this is one of the crucial things, compensations, salary money that you get out of it. And as I said, the whole process, the learning out of it that we we’ve discussed it, and I think it’s a leadership it’s a collective leadership experience now you see what the leaders are dealing with, and then they come up, whether it’s leaders or the group. Now, all of them, they come finally, they come up with a solution that, as I said, it’s not perfect, but we know how it was designed and it is purposeful for us, and we can still, you know, fix it here and there. But we know that it’s an imperfect world. We have imperfect solutions, but these are actually fine, and these can work well, but if that comes to you top down, I mean, what is ineffective here you spend, say, three, four months and everything’s, everybody’s on the same page at the end of the process.

But what happens, typically is that a leadership group or a project group comes up with a solution. After a couple of months, it was much more effective, but then people argue about it two years later and they’re not happy with it. Some people are leaving because we don’t know. I mean, this is such a shitty compensation plan. What is effectiveness here exactly?

Lisa: You’re also reminding me of I wrote a post about asking the question, are self-managing organizations for everyone and kind of identifying different things? And you sent me an email saying, “Oh, it’s always interesting when people ask this question, because nobody asks, are hierarchical organizations for everyone?” And yes, you could say self-managing organizations aren’t for everyone, but neither are hierarchical organizations. And yet, that’s the one that’s sort of enforced on like 99% of people around the world.

Perttu: You were pretty sensitive with these new forms. You know, how would this work? And how would that work? And, well, actually, it’s better in hierarchy if you do it like this, and then some people might start complaining. We’ve got hierarchies where most of people are complaining. That’s the issue. And, yeah, so of course, when we design these new forms of organizing, we need to see that we create formations that can function.

But then, you know, like very one of these first questions always, so what if someone hijacks the powers? If some people just take the leadership, the extroverts, the more rude ones, what happens? And my question is to know, what? Why would we design a system where that can happen that easily? Because, I mean, it comes instantly, in five minutes, 10 minutes, people understand the group dynamics, and then then there’s often this argument. Well, this and that might happen, well, if we come up with those questions and those, you know, doubts in 10-15 minutes, why would we design a system that does not pay attention to those features, and that’s what practices are for. Of course, the structures too, but the practices that they take care of the system, so that we can have working system that can prevent.

And someone hijacking the power. It doesn’t mean that everybody’s power is all the time equal, not at all. There are mandates. There are different kinds of systems that you can design, but hijacking, or, you know, somehow hiding behind the scenes and leading things, that’s not what what should happen, of course. And then we need to design a system that’s transparent enough to avoid that?

Lisa: Yeah, I’d like to talk a bit about group dynamics, because that’s something that I’m passionate about, and my colleagues and I at Tuff we spend a lot of time talking about that. And in you sent me a copy of a draft paper that you’re working on at the moment, and you reference the work of someone called Wilfred Bion, which I think came from the 60s originally, right? And he was talking about kind of three assumptions that groups have, when, when they’re, my interpretation was like, when they’re when there’s sort of anxiety, or things get a bit crunchy, like, oh, how do we deal with this or solve this? That people fall into these three kind of tendencies.

One, being like, dependency, maybe I look to a leader or someone else to solve it, for me to take the pain away. Second one, being like, fight or flight. You know, kind of reacting, I guess, being in a reactive state. And the third one was about was pairing, which I understood as, like, people, kind of pairing off with someone else, and sort of complaining about the system, or, you know, looking for safety. And, you know, I think this is really stupid and, and it was so it was such, like an aha moment for me, because I was like, I’ve seen all three of those things happening in organizations where they try to introduce self-management, where as soon as things get tricky, and it’s not clear, you know, it’s not clear what the way forward is.

I see that people fall into these things where they where they kind of revert to almost like teenagers, and they want someone else to solve it for them. I see there’s a lot also when people are like, “Oh, maybe we need to let this person go from the organization. It’s not working out.” And then I see often, like employees being like, can we give that responsibility back to a leader? That one’s a bit of a messy, difficult one. I don’t want to have to fire someone. So, yeah, I wondered if we could talk a little bit about those, those tendencies and and in general, kind of group dynamics. And how can we pay attention to these things when they happen, in order to, I guess, make informed choices, rather than see it as, oh, okay, self-management doesn’t work. People need to be told what to do.

Perttu: Yeah, it’s group dynamics. It’s an aspect of self-managing organizations, of decentralization that this, I’m not saying it’s hidden, but it’s been invisible. It has not been talked about enough. I think, because what? Because we can all understand that the dynamics that takes place in a group that has a leader, you know, the your normal team or organization, let’s say a team of 10 people, if there’s a leader and there’s a wise leader, you know, the team leader and and his or her assistant and and the dynamics that is there, we know how it is. Any you know, struggles between members, they would go to the leader. If there’s problems with the task or the client, and they can solve it. Let’s go to the leader. The dynamics is a bit of a top down.

Whereas in a group that does not have a leader, the dynamics is different. They cannot go to the leader and ask for help in every occasion. And Wilfred Bion was actually he was born in 1897 and most of his work he did in 30s, 40s, 50s, and he was a psychoanalyst who had fought himself in first world war. And what he did his work was then with what was then called shell shocked soldiers after the First and Second World War. And they, he was studying these kind of groups and and how can they? Can those soldiers, those people, mainly men, return back to battle after they’ve been shell shocked, which nowadays would be called Post traumatic stress disorder.

Lisa: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Perttu: So that’s what they were studying. And they had this innovative system that they then studied at some stage that the groups became independent. I mean, he was, for instance, there in the room with the group, but he realized that the group is always, if it was six to 10 people, men, soldiers, they were all the time expecting answers and solutions from him, and he was sort of turning it back. And what they were trying to do was that those people would take responsibility for their life again and for their becoming healthier, you can’t do it from outside, but out of this situation and this context he developed because he was then observing these groups, and he wrote the book called Experiences in Groups.

I’m not sure I would recommend that book, but for those who are interested in reading that kind of stuff, it is interesting. It has its critics too. No question but, but the three basic assumptions that were there, you know, a group falls into certain kinds of modes. And as I said, dependency, fight, flight and pairing. And I think, I hope that paper will come out soon, but you can also Google this. But you know, Wilfred Bion, basic assumptions, you will find them there.

But these, as you said, they often relate to the groups that are going through that are in the process towards more decentralized forms of organizing that they start negotiating with each other, and when there are problems at work or anywhere, there’s always been the teacher or the kindergarten teacher or the professor or the leader, if there are struggles, you go to them and they try to solve it. But what happens in groups if we are in a decentralized form, you should not go back to the leader, because there is not the leader, but you should be adults dealing with these issues yourselves.

And what Bion was observing that that what happens often is as you already actually described, you know, this fight or flight, that they might flight the situation, or someone might, you know, attack other person, or then pairing and dependency that you know, dependency that you actually create within the group, even if it’s an informal group or group without leader, that you sort of start to depend on one or two persons in certain kinds of issues that they would deal with it, and people turn to them for some reason, you know, they start to project their expectations. And actually some, if you like, it’s a psychological process of relating to someone because of something in your past, and this is also a collective process. So that’s what Bion observed. And we can see this.

This phenomena happening a lot in when we work with groups and organizations that want to become more decentralized, because we’re so used to that hierarchy form. It’s all around. It’s the dominant system anyway. But then these alternatives are not there yet. And this is the what we talked about early on, the collective imagination that Okay, so what do we do now? They need to go into that experience of what do we do now that we cannot ask someone to make the decision for us. How do we make decisions? How do we solve that kind of thing, whether it’s a conflict or we need to redesign the process, or we’re losing clients, what do we do and what happens then?

Is interesting, and there is often, you know, it’s said in this psychological research that these are defense mechanisms that, in order to avoid dealing with that difficult situation, people and groups, they defend themselves by creating different kinds of reactions. So to avoid that painful experience of, oh, we need to really negotiate it. We don’t. It could be that we don’t agree. And what Bion would be saying and these psychologists, is that this is the eternal struggle between the individual and the group. We always want to be part of the group and belong to somewhere. Humans have that definite, some sort of natural urge for that we couldn’t live alone. And at the same time, we want to be the independent, the individual, somehow different, and have our own will.

And this, this coping and anxiety of losing the group if I don’t agree, or what happens if we disagree? Are we falling apart? You know, this comes very quickly. You know, I just had that sensation somehow when I was describing this, you know, a group that’s been okay, and then they’re without leader, and then they start to, for the first time, struggle with this, and then they okay, they deal with it, but the next time something else happens and and they realize, oh, is this falling apart? Are we not the group anymore because we can’t agree? And the fear of losing the group is what creates the anxiety and and the nice solution would be, oh, if there just was a leader who would decide this for us, then we’d be okay.

Lisa: Yeah. Does that ring a bell? I suppose you, you know, what do you think about this? I mean, you come across this, yeah, too, right?

Perttu: Yeah. It really rings a bell. I think about organizations where there’s sort of the honeymoon phase where, you know, in the beginning, when you start to introduce self-management, maybe people are excited, or at least there’s a group of people who are excited about it and who are particularly engaged, and they’re like, “Okay, how are we going to make decisions, and what should we do? And how are we going to, you know, reinvent our salary process.” So there’s this sort of honeymoon phase.

And then, as you said, like people start to bump into trickier things, where, where it’s difficult to make a decision, or we’re not sure how to move forward or approach something. And then I see people, yeah, like looking for someone to save them and and this is also where I’m interested what you think about this, because, you know, we’ve been talking about, and I know your paper is called leaderless leadership, and you’ve been talking about leaderless groups, but all of these organizations typically have people in them who have been managers formally, or have power of some kind, whether it’s like, you know, they’ve been in the organization for a long time, or an expert or or something, and so that they, even if they’re no longer a leader, they bring with them a lot of automatic tendencies.

So when, when a group is struggling, and they kind of look for a leader, the danger is that someone might step in and try and fulfill that need, thinking that that’s being helpful, thinking that that’s what’s needed. And in some cases, it might be, but if they do that in a kind of parent child way, then you kind of keep you kind of, then it’s no longer decentralized, and that group will become dependent on that person, you know, for good and for bad.

Or I’ve seen people kind of fight flight. They’re looking for someone to blame. So I’ve seen a lot of people being like, this self-management thing is stupid. It’s the founders fault. We should never have done this in the first place. Or, like, we don’t like what you’ve designed here. Or, you know, or flight, people just kind of abdicate, just like, “Okay, I’m just going to keep my head down and hope this all blows over. Maybe it’s a phase, and we’ll go back to things the way they were,” or pairing, where people kind of get together and and kind of bitch and gossip. Like, “Have you heard what so and so was doing? And, like, I can’t believe they’re doing that. I mean, we’re not really self-managed at all, are we? Because so and so is just making the decisions anyway,” you know?

So I see all of those play out for sure, and I see that very often the founder or the CEO, or, you know, people who were sort of, who were, you know, in in the so called senior leadership or previously in the senior leadership team, they start to freak out, and they start to think, “Uh oh, maybe we should go back to how things were before. Maybe this is like a disaster.” And in many cases they do that quite prematurely, you know, might be six months or something like that. “Oh, okay, kill the experiment. It doesn’t work. People need hierarchy,” so we misdiagnose these things as well.

And what I like about group dynamics is like, you know, we human beings, we go through phases in groups. Like, if you look at other group researchers like Susan Whelan or Will Schutz. You know, we go through these different phases of like, inclusion phase, like, do I fit in? Do I belong? Tentative, cautious, polite. But all groups need to go through this conflict stage to get to the other side of like, kind of high performance. Like most group researchers seem to agree on that. So it’s really important when these things happen, for us to to have an alternative and and I’m curious what you would say about, you know, my colleagues and I, in Tuff what our approach, of course, is to train people that we believe there’s a role in in training people, in how to be in another way.

So we train a lot of former managers, for example, on like, okay, let’s role play a scenario where we have to make a decision as a group, and there’s all these conflicts popping up, and practice how you would deal with that. And what you see is people kind of come into like a parent child mode, where they try and put a lid on the conflict or solve things or take care of people or fix it, and that robs the group of the opportunity to learn together and use that collective imagination you were talking about.

So we train people in in abilities and a different mindset and a way of relating to that that helps them instead, see, okay, this is a group in conflict. Great. So how do we want to deal with? You know, to be more coaching, in a way, asking questions, sharing observations, placing it with the group, instead of me being responsible for solving it. And then everyone else who’s like, you know, hasn’t been a manager in the past, who’s used to being passive and dependent and waiting for the leader to solve it. You know, there’s also a role there, of like, how do I learn and practice stepping in? You know that I need to unlearn this habit of waiting for someone else to solve something I need, but I that’s kind of scary, especially if I’ve never been given the permission to do that before. So there’s a value also in me training that, or having a space where I can practice that in a sort of safe way.

So. And I’m not saying that training is the answer and that’s the only solution, but I’m curious what, when you’re working with organizations and trying to support them, you know, to do this collective imagining, or to to address things together, instead of falling into some of these traps, like, how do you support people to do that?

Perttu: Yeah, I think your description, your description is, of course, spot on the dynamics that is there inherently between whether it’s former leaders or certain people. There’s relations anyway, all that exists. What I think about the the organizations is that there is constant dynamic, the the organization and teams might evolve step wise, if you like. But I said I’m not the big fan of of make, of mechanic models or or, you know, of course, we need to have some sort of constellations in mind. How do we see these things? So I also think that the groups and individuals go through experiences and, for instance, conflict resolution, and they learn out of it for next situations.

But I think it’s a it’s an eternal struggle. It’s very natural that an organization is actually a living organism. There’s things going on. People relate to each other. Customers are asking for this. We need to create something new. People are in interaction. And in that kind of dynamic environment, things happen. People start. They have differences, differences of opinion, which is very natural. So there are this, there are agreements, there are innovations, there are disagreements. All that happens, no matter on which stage they are. It will still happen. However, the people will, of course, as I said, they will learn to deal with this. Okay, this is our natural dynamics. This is not a catastrophe. We don’t need to fall apart. This is what happens. The question is, how do we deal with this? And unfortunately or fortunately, that’s it’s called life, that we continue these negotiations and dealing with each other.

And definitely, there are organizations that are on a different level or in a different place when they deal with these kinds of issues than other organizations. I mean, you know, say, I joined an organization of six people who are trained in group dynamics. They deal with these issues in a different way than other organizations I’ve been in, yes, they have much more experience in it, and actually, we don’t need to, you know, go into personal conflicts. We can still agree or disagree, but we can find a way to out and we understand what’s a group dynamic. So how to get to that training is definitely, I have nothing against it.

And at the same time, we put maybe a little bit more emphasis on the groups, so that I think, you know, working with leaders and so on. That’s definitely in a normal organization that’s needed. They need to rethink their positioning and so on. But we use quite a lot of simulations. And a simulation is a real life, you know, it’s, can be a team exercise, not too simple, not too funny, but the real challenge, challenge for them to solve and deal with, where they experience in real life, their own reactions. They’re, you know, someone is trying to offer help and advice and a this is the solution. Someone disagrees. What happens? Then? Where do they end up?

And they and what explains whether they succeed or not is not the sum of individuals, but the group dynamics that they create there. Can they use all the ideas that people have. So it’s the everybody’s trying to be helpful. There’s no question about it, whether you offer something, whether you keep silent, whether you form a pair, all that is helpful. But these are natural dynamics that’s going on anyway. And in simulations with groups, they start to learn about the group level type phenomena, for instance, that when someone offers something, how do people react? Do we just, you know, remain silent, because it’s actually that person, and if that person says something, we’re actually not paying even attention. This is not the individuals, this is the group creating this kind of environment where they listen to someone else more than other people, or some people they are not listened to because we’re used to that there’s nothing there, or whatever the reason and and so the simulations is what we use for for the group level phenomena to emerge.

And then after the simulation, we, of course, reflect it, see what we can learn about it, and we can try it again. And this, of course, lots of different kinds of simulations, again, sometimes a training based scenario, in a way, but then we try to take those learnings into real life and as two or three weeks later. So what’s been going on so far? Do you remember the simulation and what you saw there happening? How’s it going now in your real life organization? So we make them sort of observers of their own culture. So we talk about anthropologists. I mean, it’s a strange word in Finnish too, but we sort of, we do use that word that we’d like you to observe your own culture, the way you work your practices, so that you become a little bit anthropologists who study how people deal with each other and their culture.

Lisa: I like that, yeah. I think, I think our approach is similar. Then we’re also kind of simulating group scenarios and helping groups to see we talk about, like the working climate. Like, you know, what is the working climate here? What are the dynamics? And try to put words to those so that they become we can get a shared picture of it, instead of them being like invisible rules of the game that we don’t really see or talk about. So I think there’s a big value in that.

And it’s and it’s funny too. I was thinking when you were saying, like, you know, every group will handle it differently, and if you’re trained in group dynamics, maybe you’ll handle it in one way. And I think sometimes people think that we, in my company, Tuff, must be really great at this kind of stuff, because we’re all trained in these things, but we have conflicts all the time.

Perttu: Yeah.

Lisa: But it certainly helps that we’re all trained in and we have collective social practices, and we have a culture of talking about those things. So our rituals, we call them moose heads, putting moose heads on the table.

Perttu: And we do, actually, I’ve got your book here. Ah, yeah, yeah.

Lisa: So that’s our version of like, and it helps us to have that, that name and that term, that ritual, to have it tangibly like that, because it’s always, it’s always risky. It takes courage. It goes against, you know, our fight or flight response, I guess, and what our brain wants to do. But we’re kind of committed collectively to doing that, and so that helps, at least when we fall into those, some of those dependencies, for example, we can some of those assumptions, sorry, we can sort of say, hey, oh, I noticed now that we’re, you know, blaming this person or looking to this person to solve it, like our founder, Karin, for example, talks about in many organizations the eternal cry for clarity that people sort of complain like, “Well, it’s not clear on how we should do this or what we’re doing,” and again, we look to someone to give us that clarity. And so she’s very often trying to kind of hand that back and say, “Well, I don’t have the clarity. We create it together. So let’s talk about what’s unclear or what’s needed for us to have more clarity. And maybe it’s not possible to get clarity. But let’s have that conversation instead of looking outsourcing it to someone or something else,” you know.

Perttu: Yeah, exactly. And so this work that we do, it’s actually a lot about philosophy, if you like, existential philosophy that we don’t know, we are thrown into this world, we are thrown into these groups, and there is no final clarity, except some might call death final clarity. But you know that is the existential idea that we live with these uncertainties with these people. We don’t know if we can rely. We don’t even know what they think, what will happen tomorrow, what is my destiny here? We’ve got these questions, and we need to be able to live with this.

And today, the trend is that everything should be clear, precise, nice processes, transparent, this and that, and I think the expectations have gone slightly to the wrong direction. It’s not human anymore to think that there are no uncertainties. And companies are, of course, you know, in modern in today’s climate, they’re trying to avoid those, this and that risk and predict things and the future and so on. Which is fine, but they are basically trying to avoid the trap of uncertainty with all those measurements and predictions and so on, which, again, it’s fine, but it gives somehow sensation that the idea that everything can be predicted, it can be clear. We can know what we do in one or three or five years, which is actually, to be honest, you know, to be more philosophical, it’s not true.

Anything can happen, you know, the war or the pandemic or whatever. And I’m not saying it has to be these catastrophes, and sometimes things go as planned. But as anyone who has done any bigger project knows what we planned in advance, something else happened in between. We ended up approximately where we wanted to, but the process was often very different than we thought.

Lisa: Yeah, I guess that’s maybe one of the reasons why, circling back to something we talked about earlier, why many people in hierarchical organizations look upon self-management and decentralized organizations with skepticism, because they have this illusion that hierarchical organizations are somehow more predictable or more safe or more able to you know, that There’s more control, the illusion of control, right? Where?

Perttu: Well, exactly. I mean, there is more control. They they predict much more. And in certain environments, they are effective and good environments, I have not necessarily that much against hierarchies, if they are run well, but it is just so difficult to be a good leader. I mean, it’s, it’s not the leader’s fault, it’s the system, yes, that has created these impossible notes that you should be able to do this. And that’s all. It’s basically an inhuman role, if you like, yeah, yeah.

Lisa: I think, yeah. I see a lot of people suffering in hierarchical organizations, which is a shame, and that brings me on to actually something. When you and I initially talked, there was something in your your paper on leaderless leadership that sort of triggered me almost. Maybe that’s too strong a word, but, but the word leaderless, for some reason, for me, is like difficult, and I understand that. It’s like you’re describing leaderless groups, as in, there isn’t a boss or a manager, sort of deciding things or solely responsible for things. But I wonder, like, what is your sense of, like, the role of leadership, not as a role, but as a concept in a decentralized organization? Like, is it is it leadership less, or is it just leaderless?

Perttu: It’s basically leaderless, but there is more leadership than in any forms or than in other forms of organizing. So there’s definitely much more leadership. You know, if there’s 100 people and 10 leaders, then there’s leadership that this carried by those 10 people, but what if it’s a self-managing organization and everybody takes part in leadership? There is suddenly much more responsibility taken. There’s much more leadership. It’s also in a very different form. But the whole idea of leaderless, I mean, we had back in 2011 to 2014 in Finland. We got funded by the Academy of Finland for a project called leadership in spaces and places. So we studied how spaces and places materiality leads us.

And it’s a basically, very simple thing. You know, I can’t walk through a wall if I go to an airport. There was no there’s no one telling me where to go that I can find because of the signs and so on. If I go to a self-catering restaurant or cafe, I can see, okay, this is how it works. No one’s telling that to me. Spaces and places, for instance, materiality leads people enormously. So it’s clear that there is leadership without humans too. I know that idea might go a little too far for some people, but it’s just to show or challenge the idea that leadership is only that what those who are nominated leaders do, because, like in collective leadership, we realize that, or shared leadership, or distributed leadership, these are the forms that say that leadership is created by the group. You know, this group dynamics, their expectations, what they’re doing and not doing that has an it has a tremendous effect on what is possible and what is not. You know, the informal conversations that they’re creating an environment, a reality all the time. So definitely this there’s leadership, there’s leadership, if you like, everywhere, but which means it’s not only the leaders who make it happen.

Lisa: I like that we’re on the same page. Then I suppose we’ve been on the same page most of the time. Yeah, what do you think? What’s what’s in your mind right now? About discussion, it’s been a little over an hour. Where are you at right now?

Perttu: Yeah, I think a main, a main takeaway for me has been this collective imagination, as you put it, which I really it’s putting words to something that I’ve thought about and experienced, but also just talking about it with you has made me realize to a deeper degree how valuable and important that is for like collective learning and for for shaping the organization of people owning it instead of copying and pasting something from another organization. Which is not to say that it’s bad to be inspired by other organizations, but I see the problems when people just copy paste and then go, “Oh, it’s not working. Why?” Well, it’s because it’s, you haven’t used that collective imagination muscle. So that’s, for me, been a big takeaway from this conversation, I think.

And also this, yeah, this the role of group dynamics, and I like what you’re saying there at the end about leadership, almost like leadership belonging to the group, instead of the individual, like leadership being generated in the group and shared and distributed in the group, instead of domain of one individual.

Lisa: That is the radical decentralization that, for instance, leadership, that power that often resides in one person or in a certain role, it is scattered around and that it is allowed to be used there in the decentralized form.

Perttu: Yeah, I often say that bossless doesn’t mean leaderless, that exactly self-managing organizations. We want to aim for them to be leader full. But that’s leadership more is like an energy. I think of it like water, like flowing to where it’s needed and then flowing to where else it’s needed. It’s more like we, we each see leadership as a shared entity that we can claim at any moment when it’s needed and the and the group needs that from each of us. And you know, some of us might do it more than others, but each of us has a collective responsibility for that leadership energy, so none of us. It doesn’t really work if, if, if if one of us is always sort of waiting or passive, or, you know, we need everyone to be a sensor, you know, an anthropologist, right, noticing what’s working and not working, and at least naming that like, that’s leadership, I think, is seeing something, I mean, ha, something’s happening here. What do we want to do about that? That, to me, is a leadership act.

Lisa: So in starting to wrap up, I guess I wonder what advice you might give to or or some considerations that you might give to listeners of this podcast who are exploring, you know, a radically decentralized organization of their own. What would you like to share with them, some pointers or something that might help them on their journey?

Perttu: It might be easy to wrap up, but to give advice, I, you know, I would not, yeah, we’ll wrap up, of course, you know. And also, and also wrapping up maybe at the end it’s about, it is, of course. I mean, I don’t like to saying, finding your way, but, but there’s something in this ownership thing, and that you don’t own it yourself, but start discussing with people that, how do we own this together? Like your example of water, that everybody’s everybody’s part of it and but that’s really difficult today, not most of the people are not part of the organization or they don’t feel like they own it.

Where does that come from? Should they Is that too much? Much of a demand? Who do we want to have here on board? Where are we really going if we start thinking about it together? Are we asking too much? If we ask people, What should we do, how should we do this? And because they’re saying, “No, I want clarity. I just want to do my work.” Where does that come from? Is it? Did they want to have a life where they are told what to do and the way it should be done, definitely not. So there is actually a tension here between what people say and what they actually want and how human life is actually lived, if we are, you know, more real about it.

And then sort of somehow, how do we get this into these discussions where I’m not saying we start challenging this as such, but when we open up the discussions about what this work, about why are we here? What can we responsible for and what not? Where does it come? Too much. Why is that too much? Do you feel being left alone? Because that’s something we need to be doing here. I suppose everybody would be saying, and you’re saying, you can’t do it, no one else can do it. What’s going on so we don’t own this, and then we fail because no one’s doing it. So it’s rather these questions about, How do we start talking with each other so that we start creating new realities.

Lisa: I like that. I think that’s a good place to start. Is there anything else that you would like to say that you would maybe regret later, like, “Ah, I wish I’d said that.”

Perttu: I don’t know there’s a lot of sources in the internet for these things, but I realized that that, for instance, instead of Google, today, I get this AI thing here. I should say, Don’t get fooled about artificial—do it your own way. Start thinking about these things. And it’s nice to have that clarity, but it’s again, as if we gave the leadership to an external element.

So it is so much about, you know, you can get into these things, and people are wondering about this, but that’s the right way to do it. And then you can start some sort of analytics, assist a system for yourself, and talk with other people. What do you see here and so on, and then creating these realities just so important, this collective imagination, and creating these realities that we don’t follow, so to say, false gods and that that we wouldn’t believe too much in ready made models. Models are good, but you need to think them through. Where does this come from? And sometimes certain things for a certain period, they can nicely be crystallized into a model.

Lisa: Good advice. It’s also I like the idea of not, not very often, when I speak to I don’t know founders or CEOs or something. They think that they have to design a whole new organization themselves. Or like, “Oh, we’re struggling with this. We’re self-managing for two years now. We’re struggling with this. So how do I solve that?” And I’m always saying, like, well, it’s not you that needs to solve it, you know. So like, talk with people. Share that observation. Name that tension. See what people do they see it too, talk together about how you can address that and, and I like what you say too about, I imagine nowadays it would be quite easy for people to type into ChatGPT or Claude or whatever. Like, okay, how do we, you know, do self organization or, how do we change our salary process? And it will give you like, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, here’s five different processes, and you can just copy paste, but that would be a shame, because you would be missing out on all of the wonderful things we’ve been talking about.

Perttu: Great. Well, thank you so much for this conversation, and I’ll share in the show notes links to your papers and your research so that people can dig into that themselves. And I really appreciate the work you’re doing. It’s really helpful for me and others to kind of have people coming at this from different angles and putting words to certain concepts that maybe we might have been intuitively sensing. So really appreciate that. Thank you.

Lisa: Thank you for making this happen, not only between us, but between a lot of people that you’ve been connecting and for your work.

Perttu: Thanks. Thank you so much.