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Episode Transcript
Lisa: So Erik, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for being here.
Erik: Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Lisa: So I was thinking to open up our conversation, many listeners listening to this, like me perhaps, know you from your book “Teal Dots in an Orange World.” 2020, when it came out, feels like a long time ago already.
Erik: Yes, sure does.
Lisa: So I’m wondering, you know, here we are October 2022, where are you? Where are your thoughts now in terms of this kind of new ways of working movement, if you want to call it that? What questions are you sitting with? What are the things that are energizing you at the moment?
Erik: I think that new ways of working is becoming a term that people actually embrace increasingly, and they also—it seems like they actually understand what it means, and that several organizations are having new ways of working in one way or the other as part of their organizational strategy. Maybe to say that within a few years, we are going to have that as a crucial element of what we’re doing. So in some sense, the future of work and the new ways of working has becoming more popularized and more familiar to people.
At the same time, I also see that the embracement of how people actually work with it, I also—well, are becoming very local. So that they tend to interpret it in local ways. Let’s say starting with “Teal Dots in an Orange World” and Laloux, the understanding of what teal is is becoming localized so that people are interpreting all the practicals in their own way.
And honestly, I like that. Some people misunderstand the idea of what new ways of working is or the principles are if they look back to the original sources, but they try to—but they increasingly try to unpack it in different ways. And I really, really like that.
Lisa: Say something more about that then and how—what you’re noticing in terms of people are applying teal principles and practices in in a more local way. What does that look like?
Erik: So the teal principles are a very good starting point. It’s an umbrella for a number of things you can put under that. The more humane approach to work, the more wholeness way into that, the evolutionary purpose, or maybe even better, evolutionary meaningfulness—and all of that is something that resonates very well with people. And then they start looking for implementations of that. They start to translate that into practices, and then they either end up with something where they do that bespoke, or they say, “Hmm, there might even be something about scrum who actually interprets it pretty well.” In scrum and agile, the teal principles resonate together. So does sociocracy and holocracy and to some extent Lean Startup.
So there are a number of well-proven and well-documented mechanisms for new ways of working that we can just look to and say we know those work. So they don’t need necessarily to look for answers; they more need to look for how to do this stuff, how to embrace it, how to adapt it. And that’s what I see happening—that they are inspired by the principles of co-leadership, co-ownership, co-whatever, by humanism and the human aspects of work, and then they are interpreting that into local dialects.
That will, of course, mean that those dialects inside an organization might be different. So you might end up with—or most likely, you will end up with—a local interpretation where, let’s say, the people in finance, they do it in their way, and the people in legal, they do it in their way, and the people in R&D do it in their way. But that’s actually okay because it’s only dialects of the interpretation.
So that’s what I see happening—that it is increasingly becoming fragmented. So the leadership also is about stitching all the pieces together again, like this kind of patchwork that we have. There’s a leadership task in stitching it all together right now to create the ecosystem for it.
Lisa: I’m wondering about—because I know that you tend to work with more larger organizations, or you could say sort of orange organizations, and perhaps more traditionally structured organizations—and I wonder if that freaks them out a bit, this idea of having these kind of diverse local interpretations of principles?
Erik: Yeah, it does indeed, because on the axis of full alignment to full autonomy, it is increasingly going towards being autonomous. And absolutely, that’s not what the orange world is designed for. So it freaks them out. It’s like infusing it in tiny bits and making experiment, controlled experiments with maybe one tiny business unit. Say, “What will happen if we, inside our organization, try to work with aspects like self-leadership or whatever it takes to embrace or understand new ways of working?”
And then at the same time understanding two things: What’s the scalability of this? What are the challenges when it comes to scaling stuff like new ways of working, where we focus so much on social capital? And the second part was the interface to the old world. And those are the two aspects that I work with more. It’s not that much the implication, the translation, the implications themselves inside the team. It’s much more the interface with the other worlds that we focus on. That’s what freaks them out, actually.
Lisa: I would say, unpack each of those a little bit then. Maybe share some examples of how you’ve supported organizations to approach those two aspects.
Erik: So the two things that we could unpack is the scalability and the interface. So let’s start with the scalability.
I have this feeling that when we work so much with kind of business model or and a mechanism to collaboration that really relies on co-coordination, co-decision making, co-whatever, one of the things that we need to make sure that we can do is actually talk together and that we can make agreements in suitably large groups. And that actually, I think, it has an upper limit for how many people can be joined together in these groups.
I have a feeling from doing this for some years that there are some upper limits when we reach like 50 employees or 50 people. And when we grow beyond that, making agreements, making change management, making sure that we do things in alignment is really hard. And working with consent-based decision making is really hard when you get beyond like five or seven. I talked to Ted Brown on this also, and he has a kind of “eight is the maximum number” when you do these rounds.
So there is scalability issues in this. And that means that it will be wrong to have that kind of vision of everybody going teal in the same way. If some of your listeners have—and I think they have—if they have listened to what Bill Anderson from Roche, what he said in “Brand New Work,” and I do believe it was episode 68, because I have listened to it so many times and recommend it all the time. Roche on global level going teal could work if you focus on the teal principles, but it would rely on that you interpret it locally in different ways.
And it ties into that—a homogeneous interpretation, I think, is impossible because we have so many different people. People are people, people are different. And the context is different, and the business challenges are different, and the stakeholders are different. And all of these things mean that we need to make sure that our translation from the teal principles to the teal practices must be local in order to make sure that this is a place where we feel belonging and recognized, and everything is designed in a way that we find right.
And the consequence of that is that we will have a fragmented world. We will have many, many, many local interpretations of teal. Some of these interpretations might even have a resonance into the orange world where some of the interpretations mean that we like the hierarchy. The hierarchy is not necessarily in contradiction with teal—it’s just a matter of what you focus more on. Is it the titles or the roles? So they can coexist.
And the consequence of this is, as I said, a number of fragmented components that are all based on the same principles, but they have local practices. And the size of these fragments are heavily limited by social capital, thus maybe 50 employees, 50 people being the upper limit of these pockets of teal.
Lisa: Yeah, that’s so interesting because I think the traditional way of approaching, you know, change initiatives and stuff—I think about how many organizations have had initiatives called “One [whatever the company is]” or “One DHL” or whatever it is, you know. And this is like a completely different approach.
Erik: It is. I have been part of those “One Company” cultural programs or whatever, and they were—well, they were real, and there was a need for that in the zeros due to globalization, due to technology, due to internet, due to whatever made it possible for us to actually work globally.
But we’re seeing something else coming right now. We’re seeing regionalization of work. So the idea of moving goods from where they are produced, maybe on the other side of the globe, to where they are consumed—we’re going to change that. We’re going to regionalize both ideation and R&D and production and scale-up and whatever. That kind of view regionalized.
So the idea of having one culture globally is fading away, and instead we’re gonna see heterogeneous cultures. We’re going to see lots of local approaches to this. So that’s absolutely right.
That also means, back to the second part that we need to unpack, that we have interface challenges. First of all, between the fragmented components, and second of all, between the parts that are—well, since we have scalability challenges, something must be installed, like figuratively below the components or above the components, to make sure that they actually run in the same direction, that we have communications, that we have dialogue that makes sure, and money flow, a cash flow that makes sure that we run in the same direction with the same speed or same speed-ish.
And that’s where I actually believe we can look into a modern interpretation of orange, where we need some shooting bureaucracy. I think that’s absolutely needed. So a kind of hierarchy above or below these dots, these pockets—I think that is needed. That’s the interface we need. We need that to make sure that we can make our pockets, our dots, run in the same direction within the same speed. And that’s the balance between autonomy and alignment that we’re looking for here. That’s the interface.
Lisa: I’m thinking about my own development over the years and exploring these ideas, and early on, I was very kind of purist in my way of thinking about teal, for example, and that, you know, all hierarchy is bad and evil, and we mustn’t have any of it. And I really like this image of teal dots in an orange world or teal dots on an orange platform and sort of embracing and being conscious about which pieces of what we’re choosing. And that nothing is kind of good or bad; it’s how it’s applied and how conscious we are when we’re applying it. I think it’s very useful.
Erik: Yeah, absolutely. And I’m not that afraid of the hierarchy as I have been. I have been a purist too, check me. We need the hierarchy in some sense, but we need it to be role-based, and we need it to be dynamic. And I think if we can change the hierarchy from being title-based to role-based, and from being static to dynamic, I do believe that it can work—if we shift roles with a suitably frequency when it’s needed, and when we make sure that we work in episodes and not in fully gold-plated blueprints when we make decisions.
I think that’s the way forward when hierarchy is useful. I really, really like that saying of “good enough and safe enough to try” when it comes to any kind of decision power or influence that we’re moving around. I think that’s needed, especially when we talk about scaling things like teal or whatever kind of modern principle that we’re looking at because it has scalability issues. And a modern and episodical approach to how we distribute the hats, the decision-making hats between us, I think would work. I think that is needed.
Lisa: I’d love to hear what you’ve learned about this distinction between titles and roles and how that plays into a different way of making decisions. Because I find that when I’ve tried to talk to, you know, train people in that distinction, it sort of takes a while for people to get that. It’s sort of subtle, I think. So what would you say about titles versus roles and the implications that has on decision making?
Erik: I think that most people will say that you have one title but you have several roles. And I think just alone that distinction between the number of titles and roles that you carry around is a trigger for people to try to understand what we are actually talking about.
To me, it starts with what kind of impact do you want to have as an organization, what kind of impact stories do you want to create. “We do this so that somebody else can do this”—and that is an impact story. Those impact stories then quickly translates into what are the jobs that we do, what are the jobs to be done. And from those jobs that we need to do, again quickly, we start to identify roles. So we need some role who can do this and who has this responsibility.
So we start listing roles and responsibilities, and we quickly realize that we have more roles than we have people. And then we say, “Okay, obviously, everybody needs to have more roles.” And then it kind of clicks for people like, “Okay, this is what’s different between titles and roles.” Titles is something that you have—one person, one title. But here you have several roles to each person, and they can be fluid, they can be dynamic, they can be episodical—things that we distribute between us based on the year wheel or how we—what kind of energy we have in this quarter or what we feel like learning or whatever it is that we can distribute this over time.
I think that’s the big shift we’re gonna have. That they’re going to be definitely more roles than people, that we need to juggle around. And when we start tying decision power or decision influence to roles, we also start to go into the conversation, “Okay, how can we make sure that we agree on how we make decisions? How do we make sure that we feel comfortable in mastering that distributed decision making?” And then that is a learning curve, a learning path that we have to do gradually.
One of the things that people normally start challenging when it comes to titles and roles is what’s the correlation between that and, for example, salary. That’s a really tough conversation. I haven’t really cracked that yet personally. It’s like I’m going to say go away. We haven’t really nailed that one. So I know somebody is trying to do that, but on a corporate level, we haven’t tried that yet. We haven’t done that yet. So we’re kind of shuffling that away and see—we will save that for a rainy day to handle that. So that’s how I see it.
Lisa: I like that. It makes me think of—I think Samantha Slade talks about that roles don’t belong to you; they belong to the organization or the team. An individual stewards them for a while, and that, you know, as you say, that might be dynamic, and I might hand over roles from time to time. So like my title is what I put on LinkedIn, and roles are the sort of purposes that I steward in the team or the organization for a while.
Erik: Ah, that’s good. “My title is what I put on LinkedIn.” Yeah.
Lisa: I also know there’s this self-managing company in the UK called Matt Black Systems, and all of the people that work there, apart from the two owners, their job title to the outside world is “Project Manager.” And in reality, they have many, many roles. They do everything from sales to designing these engineering parts to triggering their own payroll even. And sometimes they have customer meetings where the customer says, “We want to talk to your VP of Sales” or your “Head of This” or whatever, and they get colleagues to pretend that’s their job title for a while, just to stand in because that interface, as you say, like the rest of the world is orange, and sometimes you have to find ways to translate what you’re doing as an organization to the outside world in a way that makes sense, which means sometimes kind of hacking it a little bit.
And I think the same thing is true of organizations that are regulated. If they’re, you know, teal or self-managed, you have to find creative ways of meeting the criteria of these funny, you know, antiquated regulatory systems.
Erik: Totally. I have so many anecdotes of things that we have tried out for the past decade when it comes to actually lubricating that kind of friction. Funny stories like in a bank that I worked with, there was this junior analyst, and she had a double PhD. So she was both skilled and intelligent, and she was the master in whatever domain that they were working with. I’m deliberately being vague to not disclose it, but she was the one who knew everything about that kind of mathematics that was going on in the bank.
And they had a meeting with some other business unit, and they sent their Senior Vice [President] because he was the one with the power. And from this teal dot in the bank, they sent her because she was the one with the insight. And you can see where this is going—she was not invited into that conversation because she was not being seen as one with the right title. However, she did have the role.
So that was a deliberate clash, and we had to lubricate that some weeks afterwards because that was not funny. And there are many anecdotes like those that we can pull out where the interplay between titles and roles are very obvious, and also when it comes to like salary expectations, when it comes to promotions, all sorts of things that are clashes between two worlds.
Lisa: Yeah, that’s often the other question that people ask me very quickly is like, “What about career progression? And if you take away the ladder, where am I going? You know, how am I going to develop?” And I don’t have a good answer for that because I see that it’s so different in different organizations who have found creative solutions to create development paths for people, and they never look the same. But it’s a question that comes up a lot.
Erik: Yeah, I think it’s a very good point that there’s no clear answer. There’s no clear best practices that you can pull down from the shelf when you’re answering that. Whereas I definitely see this more as a career plateau or career platform that you navigate, where the amount of influence that you want to have is the same, but you distribute that in different buckets based on where you are in your life right now.
What do you want to focus on? Is it business? Is it project leadership? Is it special skills or taking care of people, which have four different aspects of leadership? And it should—I do believe that it’s more like distributing your energy into two of these four over time and then moving them depending on where you feel that your energy is flowing.
Lisa: Hmm. Let’s talk about leadership then, because you mentioned earlier in the conversation that one of the roles of leadership is to sort of stitch together, you know, these fragmented organizations. So what are your thoughts about leadership and what leadership is in this kind of future of work type space?
Erik: Oh, I can answer that in two ways. I can answer what I see going on and needed right now, and I can see what is needed in the future. So which one do you want to unpack?
Lisa: Well, maybe we can do both. Start with one and then move into the future space.
Erik: I can see what is needed right now is absolutely empathy, and it is being multi-faceted, not being just a one-trick pony leader or manager. We need somebody who really can speak a lot of dialects, cultural dialects, and someone who can enter a group, understand the group dynamics, and make sure that people are heard, involved, listened to, being part of the co-creation. So facilitation skills and empathy skills are highly needed. That’s what I see right now.
Also, people who can connect also virtually, who can connect online to make sure that people feel seen and heard in the virtual world, in a hybrid world, and also when we work asynchronously. So it’s a multi-faceted person who can make sure that people feel a sense of belonging to what they’re doing. That’s what I see.
And those people who can do that are actually capable of stitching the worlds together, this patchwork to get the fragments as well, because they can go into the local areas. They can have the massive overview of what their business is doing and the ecosystem that they are part of, and then they can hone in on this one aspect in this team and be there and be present and facilitate discussion and solution making. And more than decision making, it’s a facilitation skill more than a decision-making skill. That’s what I see right now.
Lisa: I’m wondering also—earlier on, you were talking about impact stories. Is it also kind of story gathering in a way, and sort of kind of, you know, connecting the dots and sharing what they’re seeing? And I’m thinking about a talk I was watching yesterday by Dave Snowden, and he was talking about mapping stories against different sort of principles of things that you think are important, and you know, which stories do we want more of and which stories do we want less of? And using that as that kind of social contract construct as a way of finding a direction together.
Erik: Totally. The overall skill or domain area—I would call that white space mastery, where you mastered identifying and closing the gap between things. And it can be a gap between business units or gap between teams or a gap between people. But identifying that there is a gap, understanding whether or not to bridge or to dive into that gap or close that is a skill.
One way to do that could be storytelling, story gathering. I really like that—gathering and sharing anecdotes and being good at actually standing on the scene, knowing how to communicate, how to use your first 90 seconds of any town hall meeting the proper way. Absolutely, I can see that. But to me, that’s called white space mastery. That is a—it’s a very good point, and that’s part of stitching the things together, is identifying and closing the gap between things.
Lisa: Yeah, I like that. Looking for those white spaces and trying to decide what is best to do with them—to stitch them, to bridge them.
Erik: There’s a nice article by—or was it HBR who actually unpacked what is the difference between white space and black space. And if you want to dive into that, maybe we should put that in the show notes, because it’s a really nice article just carving out the definite differences between black space and white space and what to do when you want to explore the white space.
Lisa: Yeah, we’ll put that in the show notes. So turning to the future then, I know you’re really passionate about futures literacy and how that benefits all of us who call ourselves leaders. Say something about that.
Erik: I think futures literacy is extremely interesting and extremely relevant for the leadership in the futures. And I really like the pluralis in “futures.” We don’t have that in Danish. In Danish, it’s called “fremtid,” and that’s in singular. And I have read that word, the English term “futures literacy” or “futures thinking,” thousands of times. All of a sudden, it just struck me there’s a pluralis, and I said, “Wow, this is like a light bulb—poof! This is actually what we’re doing.”
When we think about what might happen or what we want to happen, “futures literacy,” combining that with the future of work, provides the leaders with the skill set to explore and evaluate the possibilities. And then to find out of those possible futures, which ones are the preferable ones and which do we want to invest time and money and love in to make happen. That’s the combination between futures literacy and the future of work.
Lisa: So if I was interested in developing my futures literacy capacity, what could I do? What would that look like?
Erik: Maybe you have it already. Maybe already now you’re planning for what you’re gonna eat for lunch. That is futures thinking. So there’s something about that skill that we already have right now—actually just a polishing of and start thinking about not near-term but long-term.
Think about 10 years from now, what might happen, what do we want to happen. So the idea of literally thinking not only five years but ten years into what might happen is one of the skills that we train ourselves in doing. What might happen or what do we want to happen in 10 years or 15 years?
It’s also about opening your eyes to all these kinds of odd things that are happening all the time—that we spend online scrolling through LinkedIn, scrolling through Reddit or Twitter or Instagram, or when people post something that we then take to the office. Say, “Did you see they talk about these Google Glasses again?” and “Have you heard about what Mark Zuckerberg is doing in the metaverse?” or “Did you see all the NFTs that they work with when it comes to blockchain?” All these things that we share with our colleagues.
What will happen if we make a gathering of all these things, and then we start to evaluate those and ask ourselves two questions: What is the likelihood of this thing affecting our organization? And what’s the likability of this thing affecting our organization?
Let’s just take one example. Let’s unpack Google Glasses. Google Glasses is capable—it is a pair of glasses that you put on. It is capable of listening into a conversation, translating it to your own language, and then on the inside of the glasses to provide subtitles of what is going on. So if you’re speaking Portuguese, I can view my glasses, I can understand you because I get subtitles to what you say.
Some people like it because then we can communicate across the language barriers. Some people hate it because it feels like surveillance. So what’s the likelihood of this affecting our organization? Is it zero percent, a hundred percent, or fifty percent? And the second question is: What’s the likability? Do we like the effect that this might have on our organization?
And that kind of conversation provides us with the best skill that we can have in the future when it comes to—well, also when it comes to leadership—imagination. I just made a list this weekend about the 10 or 12 leaders that I’ve been working with over the past five years that I see being the most modern and the most progressive leaders. And all of them had one thing—they had two things together. They were all really, really good at imagining what they want to happen, and they were—the second thing—they were good at, back to your point, storytelling. So the imagination and the storytelling parts are absolutely things that are needed as futures leaders. I can definitely see that.
Lisa: Yeah, it’s making me think back to a video that Frederic Laloux shared about the trap of—if you want to enroll people in your organization of exploring teal, for example, let’s say—that a trap is to focus on the teal thing. You know, “We want to be this, we want to be like Buurtzorg,” or “We want to…” you know, focusing on the practices or on that as the end point. And he was talking about instead kind of tapping into something bigger than that, which might be ambiguous, but as a leader, for example, saying, you know, “I have this longing for people to have so much more freedom in the decisions that they’re making day to day, and for our workplace to be so much more human. And I don’t know what that looks like exactly or how to get there, but I’m really interested in exploring that together.” You know, how different that is compared to “I’ve read this book, ‘Reinventing Organizations,’ and I think we should be teal.”
Erik: Oh, it’s a very, very good point. Whenever I help organizations transform or start a development, I always ask them, “Why? What do you want to obtain? What problem are you solving? What challenge are you tackling? What opportunity are you looking for?” And people feel so provoked. And I insist on them, in the leadership team, that they answer these questions solo. It’s not group work; it’s an individual work. “Why are we doing this? What do you want to obtain? What’s your vision? What pain do we want to release or relief? What gain do we want to harvest? What do we want to get out of this?”
And what I want people to—that kind of conversation I want to have is for them to share their imagination of what they are actually looking for. Not to say “We want to go teal,” because that is going to be very utilitarian. Is that a word you can say? Yeah. Whereas I would much rather try to understand what you want to obtain.
And that actually circles back to what we talked about half an hour ago, about it might end up the organization being fragmented because they want different things. And alone that imagination, that acknowledgment of that—that we actually want different things, but we are capable of stitching it together because we understand what’s between us. That’s the conversation that we need.
Teal might be a good answer, but it might just as well be a good question. Do we want—what part of teal do we want? And how can we explore the future of teal? How can we imagine that? How can we explore those possibilities? And out of those, how can we evaluate those possibilities?
We can do that by having an experiment. What will happen if we, in our sales department, actually try to, like, really, really do it? And we do it for three months or six months or 12 months to explore. So when we have done that exploration, we can evaluate and say, “Okay, was that a good idea or bad idea? Where did it work? For whom did it work?” Because it always works for somebody.
So I think that conversation, I think, is really, really beneficial. Strengthening our imagination so that we can explore and evaluate the possible futures, and then we can pull out those that we like, and we can invest time and money and love in those.
Lisa: I like that you keep saying “love,” “time and money and love.” And you’ve talked about empathy. It also strikes me, listening to you, that there’s something about tapping into a much more holistic, like, embodied sense when we’re exploring new ways of working, and not only a kind of intellectual or a sort of, I don’t know, pragmatic sense.
Erik: That’s a good one. I haven’t thought that much about it; it just came natural to me. I’ve had many conversations about the futures of work in variations. And the further we get into those over weeks with the teams, with the duty teams, the more we start talking about feelings and talking about emotional anecdotes and what kind of energy that we bring into a meeting right now, and whether or not we are present or not.
So the more nuanced conversation that we get, the more empathy and the more—so you would say love—that keeps popping up between us. It’s what ties us together. It’s this fictional idea of having an organization. It’s just imaginable; it’s an image of our imagination that we are together in an organization. And it only sits together because we actually relate to each other. So yeah, I think it’s a good point. It’s a torch in the light, I would say.
Lisa: Yeah, it also brings to mind—I don’t know if you’ve come across “source work” via Tom Nixon or Peter Koenig?
Erik: No.
Lisa: It sort of resonates a bit with what you’ve been saying regarding imagination and each, you know, and it being an individual activity of exploring what resonates for me or, you know, why are we doing this? What’s important to me about this? And the idea of source is that each of us is the source of something—so that there is this special role that’s held which kind of holds the space for something to exist. It’s like a loose vision.
And Frederic added it later on in the illustrated version of the book and in his videos that he realized that this was often the role that, you know, the founder or the CEO was playing. Like Jos de Blok in Buurtzorg, or, you know, where it’s not—it’s not kind of leadership in the sense of power over, but it’s like a creative hierarchy, in a sense. And to be a good source means to be in touch with, like, what are my needs? What’s important to me? You know, what is it—what does it mean in me to create this initiative or this organization or this team or this way of working?
And also, a good source is someone who helps others to tap into their “sourciness,” if you like. So if it becomes clear, you know, what the edges of this organization or this team or initiative is, then other people can tap into their source energy as well. So it is kind of a—it’s almost a spiritual thing, in a sense. It’s like trying to listen to that part of you that wants something, that imagines something, that has a longing for something, and starting from that place. It’s much more personal in a way.
And I guess it speaks a bit to what you were saying before about this fragmented organization and kind of diversification is—I think there’s a lot of potential and energy liberated when individuals get more in touch with that aspect of themselves and how that fits with, you know, the kind of bigger purpose.
Erik: I like that, and I also see that it brings a lot of nuances to the teamwork, to the collaboration that we’re doing. Because we—if we start bringing our sources together, we might quickly understand new aspects to who we are and who we’re dealing with, who we’re working with, the collaborating with. And the diversity and inclusion of that—it’s just much easier when you’re open with your sources. I really like that.
And I can also—I can already now imagine the kind of conversations that we have in these teams, how candid they are, and what—how it actually helps us have better conversations and better decisions because we have nuances. I like that.
Lisa: Yeah, I find I find it’s quite helpful, kind of connected to the roles discussion we were having before, that you can map initiatives in a team or an organization, and when you identify like gaps, you know, you might have, like you said, a handful of roles where that haven’t been picked up by people. And you can have conversations with individuals: “You know, this is this role, and this is its purpose. You know, who has energy for that? You know, who would like to?” And it and as you said before, it may not be that they’re an expert in that, but they have an interest to learn about that. So it’s much more, uh, listening for, you know, where does the energy want to go? And does it meet needs or not?
Erik: I really like that. I have been using that as a guiding principle for when we distribute tasks between us for many years. It’s a hierarchy of distribution. First of all, who has the energy for it? Second of all, who has the time? And thirdly, who has the competences? It is in that order.
And when you stick to that order of hierarchy for distributing roles, I think the output is just better because you take care of the tasks that you sign up for. The role that you have or take is is in better health if you have the energy, if you have the time, and thirdly, the competencies for it.
Lisa: Which kind of comes back to something we were talking about before as well. Now I forget what it was, but I saw another connection.
Erik: Development and career progression.
Lisa: That you know, I may have a company competency in something—spreadsheets, for example—but that might be kind of a bit dull to me now at this phase in my life. You know, I’ve become very competent at that, people expect that of me, but actually, I have a real longing to, I don’t know, become more of a coaching person, and I want to develop my coaching skills, and I want to go in that direction. So if we only asked the question of competency and time, for example, I might never get to flourish or explore that path of my development. So I like that kind of hierarchy of energy first, and time, and competency.
Erik: And that ties me back to one other thing that we talked about, is to make sure that the work that we form is episodical and any decision that we make are episodical. It’s a relief for the leaders that I work with when I start saying that you only have to make sure that whatever you decide can be a valid decision for three months, and then we can change it—making sure that also, like, roles distribution is something that is episodical. So it is never forever; it’s not a gold-plated blueprint solution to whatever that we’re trying to find out, with any kind of loopbacks and whatnot and taking care of anything. Just make sure that the decisions are good enough and safe enough to try.
And that can easily find your way into personal development plans. What do you want to do in this episode of your life? Maybe you want to act it because you like—you have energy in spreadsheets. You have energy in making sure that the finances are distributed correctly to the right people, and we pay our taxes and all of that, which is something in this episode of your business life that feels natural. And then in the next episode, you want to maybe leave that behind and put your time and your money and your love into some other domain area that you want to explore. I think that is—I really, really like the thinking about being episodical.
Lisa: Hmm, feels very fitting for this, like, age of streaming as well, that people are very familiar these days with episodes.
Erik: True.
Lisa: I’m wondering, in sort of starting to wrap up our conversation, what other kind of words of wisdom you could share with listeners who are on their own journey with new ways of working, in terms of, you know, some pitfalls to watch out for or some principles to guide them, common mistakes you see?
Erik: Yeah, a common mistake, also one that I have made myself, is to go solo. It is nearly impossible to embrace new ways of working or to train yourself in futures literacy if you go solo. So I always say to people, “Don’t go solo. Team up with somebody in your organization or with some colleague in the other business unit or somebody where you can have some conversation, where you can be shadowing each other in your meetings, where you can share your methods, where you can start translating all the principles into practices together.”
Don’t go solo. I think that’s the worst mistake. Well, there are many, but it’s a common mistake that I have seen happening—that one vice president somewhere with, “I’m doing this,” and it’s really tough. Don’t go solo. That’s a clear learning from my side.
I think the second part that you should try to do is to actually tip a toe into the realms of futures thinking. Start to work with imagination of what might happen. What will happen if we unfold and unfold and unfold an anomaly? What will happen? And storytell about those kind of futures and what it might mean for the organization and for the leadership and for the teamwork. Play around with it.
Carve out a half a day with your teams just to say, “Let’s imagine that now 10 years has passed, and we are in 2032, and let’s build our world in Lego.” And then we calculate backwards: “Do we—what’s the likelihood of this happening? And what’s the likability of this happening?” And in that way, we are making a map of things that might happen and futures that we might see. And then we might point towards, “Oh, that one, I like that one. That’s the future that I want to be part of.” It’s a good way to start imagining or re-imagining how our work is going to be.
Lisa: Yeah, I love that. There’s a really lovely liberating structure called “Future Present,” which is inspired by Joanna Macy’s work, which is a kind of exercise in imagination where you, as a group, identify—you can kind of write down a few sentences if you dream big and imagine, you know, it’s 10 years in the future, and we’re doing XYZ, and we’re saying these kinds of things, and this has happened. And then you do, through a series of steps, some conversations where you kind of step into roles of like the elders and the young people. Then you try and describe how you got there and what it’s like.
And it’s funny that when I see people go through it, initially, they feel a bit silly, a bit, you know, “This feels a bit—I don’t know how can this really be relevant or useful?” But just through the nature of kind of stepping into that imagination play space, by the end of it, they get something, you know, that they wouldn’t have got through just an intellectual discussion or or not even thinking about it at all.
I like this prompt from you that like, you know, when we see these things in the news—metaverse and legs and whatever—making that extra link of like, you know, “What if…?” and “How likely is it that that will affect our organization?” and “What’s the likability of it?” It’s a really nice [framework].
Erik: If your listeners are really eager to to dive into that, Jane—what’s her name?—Jane McGonigal has made a nice book called “Imaginable.” It’s an easy read, it’s well written, and she’s very competent in actually doing what she does. And Riel Miller has written a—his is the former chair from UNESCO on futures literacy—has written a really, really scientifically based book that’s called “Transforming the Future,” which is a tougher read, to say it politely. It’s really thorough and combines anthropology and psychology and social science into one big melting pot and trying to really understand from a scientific point of view what is futures literacy, what is anticipatory thinking, which is the crust of what we’re talking about—is how can we think about anticipation.
Lisa: Thank you. I’ll put those in the show notes as well. It’s got to be a long list.
Erik: Yeah.
Lisa: Is there anything else that you came to say and haven’t yet, or that you’d be sad if you didn’t say?
Erik: I don’t think so. It should just be like—I think many people are that lucky that we have the opportunity to actually affect our future. And with all the crisis going on in the world right now, it creates hope that we can revisit our possible futures. And it has even been scientifically documented that working with futures literacy and the future of work and imagining the ways forward can create hope in people because we have options and we can affect those. So there is hope through it, and that’s—I think that should be a closing statement.
Lisa: Thank you. Well, let’s close it there, then. It’s a beautiful place to finish. Thank you so much.
Erik: Thank you.
