Mette Aagaard on how a public sector organisation with 8,000 employees is exploring autonomous teams

Lisa: Thank you for coming on the podcast.

Mette: Thank you for inviting me, Lisa. I’ve been really looking forward to it.

Lisa: Me too. So I thought maybe we could start with a bit of 101 about Slagelse Municipality. What is the context, what is the organization, and why did you have this project, this idea of implementing sociocracy in a public sector organization?

Mette: Two big questions. So the Municipality of Slagelse is employing nearly 8,000 people. The municipality itself hosts around 80,000 people, so there are 80,000 inhabitants. And for those who do not know how the Danish public sector is organized, the municipality is like the smallest entity that takes care of basically everything related to your public life or your life. So it’s everything from kindergartens, schools, elderly care, unemployment support. It also takes care of roads and public areas. It’s basically doing everything that a public authority would do in a welfare state like Denmark.

So by that, I’m also saying that this is a super complex organization. I have worked in the private sector for many years, and I think any big organization would claim that it’s complex, but here we’re talking about people where some people are working 24/7 in shifts, some people have like a PhD in what they do, other people have a lot of practical training. We have such a diverse organization, and the reason why I’m paying attention to this is that it’s just the basis on which we have to work with these new organizational principles. It calls for us to be very careful in not becoming too dogmatic and to basically have the flexibility and the listening skills to try to figure out how a co-leadership model, as we call it, applies best to the specific context. So it is a very diverse, very complex organization in which we are embarking on this.

Lisa: And from that, if you also add on a legacy of hierarchy and bureaucracy, I’m imagining it’s already a tricky environment in which to say, “Hey, let’s start experimenting with sociocratic principles and self-managed teams.”

Mette: You’re absolutely right, because what I forgot to say is that it’s a politically driven organization as well. In Denmark, there are elections to the city councils every four years, and there’s been a shift in political direction every four years. Of course, that impacts the organization—some more directly than others—but it is a politically driven organization.

And finally, there’s a ton of legislation and regulation pertaining to what we do. So we can’t just decide to do whatever we want. There’s a lot of demands and requirements in terms of service levels, tasks we have to do, and lots and lots of reporting. So some would say a ton of bureaucracy, and maybe more than we need.

Lisa: I’m curious to know, because you joined in 2020, right?

Mette: Right, late 2020.

Lisa: And what was your sort of mission? What were you brought in to help with, this sort of transformation if you like, but what was the aim of that and what is it that you’re hoping to do?

Mette: Two years before I joined, the city council had made a decision to try out different ways of running a municipality because I think they all kind of understood that you can’t just go on doing what we’ve done for the past many years. The huge challenge in our sector is that the resources available, both in terms of money and people, and the tasks, the demand for the work that we do—that gap is simply just widening.

For many years we’ve had this regime of New Public Management, also in Denmark, as in many other places. That’s basically a regime where you constantly turn on the optimization button. So you optimize and optimize and optimize, and I think there was a deeper understanding that you can’t just keep doing that. That apparently doesn’t seem to solve all the problems. So we need to do something new.

They had already started that debate and discussion before I arrived, and that was already kind of the talk of the town. On top of that, there was also an acknowledgment of the fact that you can’t kind of meditate your way through a transition. You can’t just talk about it and think about it and make strategies about it. You have to do something. So the notion of “if you see something that you think should be different, act, do something”—that was already in place.

I think they had come to a place where there was a need for something more specific, an acknowledgment that this is so difficult—to try to replace the fundamentals of how a huge traditional bureaucracy or hierarchy works with something new. It’s so hard to replace that with something that is fundamentally different that there was a need for something specific. And then that’s where I came into the picture.

There was a vacant position, of course, in a senior position where the overall headline is development, and the key task I was given was to figure out how do we do this—not so much the why, but how do we get this done. I mean, how do we really do things differently? It’s a simple question, but as I guess all listeners would know, the answer is super hard to find.

So that’s how I came in. I’ve worked with organizational change and strategies and strategy implementation and employee engagement for 28 years before I joined. I’ve been the chief HR officer in a company and a senior HR executive in others. So I kind of work with these dynamics and have come to realize, like so many others working in this field, that the current model simply has too many dysfunctions and unhealthy side effects.

So I could completely concur with the direction, and I had then some knowledge about the teal organizational models and some training within primarily sociocracy. So that’s what I offered and brought to the table and said, “Do you think this is something that could work in your context?” “Yes,” then I would be very happy to join.

Lisa: Maybe we could talk a bit about the how then, and the question of where do you start, right? Because that’s always what people in the public sector especially are asking me. Like, where do you start? Do you start at the top or at the bottom? Do you make it compulsory or opt-in? Do you start with this or that? So how did you decide where to start, and what did you end up deciding?

Mette: In fact, it was my very first question to myself: how do I start? Because like I said, I’ve been part of driving organizational change for many years, and usually you start from the top, right? So you have the senior leadership team deciding on something they want to implement, and then you start from the top and you work your way through the organization—either from the top down or silo by silo.

I felt it would be kind of weird to work with a more or less non-hierarchical organizational methodology in a hierarchical way. So that was one observation I had. Another observation I had was it was clear to me that this top management wasn’t necessarily in sync in terms of how to get this done. I think everybody was in sync in terms of “we need to do something different,” but we weren’t completely at the same level.

So I could of course have started with making sure that the senior management team was in sync or aligned. I also knew that that could probably take some time, and since I didn’t have all the answers to the many questions that would come up, I thought this is going to be so difficult. So what if we kind of formed like a coalition of the willing? So people who wanted to do it could do it, and then we could work with that energy.

So that basically became the starting point, saying to people, “If you think what we’re talking about here sounds interesting, raise your hand, let us know, and we will support you.” So it’s been this principle of signing in voluntarily, which basically means that today, a year and a half, nearly two years—no, a year and a half down the road—we have 25-30 units from kind of all over the place.

There are also areas who have said, “We are not interested yet. We would rather wait and see.” We also have the kind of resistance, although not that explicit, but kind of like, “Nah, does this really work? Let’s wait and see.” And then you have the very enthusiastic people who say, “This sounds so interesting. I’m ready to dive in.” So it’s voluntary, and that’s how it still is today, and I think it’s going to be like that for a while.

Lisa: So can you share what happens if I put my hand up in my unit and say, “Hey, we’re interested”? You know, what next? How do you support those people who are interested in trying this out?

Mette: Yeah, so thank God we have learned stuff as well. So we now actually do have a setup. To begin with, we were just like, “Okay, come join us,” and no. The second thing that was clear to me, and that’s also based on my many years of experiences, is that usually when you start a transition like this, it won’t take long before you start feeling incompetent. So kind of like, “What is this? How do I get this done? Am I doing it right?” All that stuff.

So we knew that if people wanted to start up, we had to offer a lot of training. And when I say training, it’s not like education. It really is like practicing a lot. So if you raise your hand, to enter your question, if you raise your hands and say you want to be part, first you will have what we call a co-facilitator contacting you.

The co-facilitator would ask you, “Why? What is it that you expect to get out of it? What is your situation today? Do you have any particular challenges you would like to address with this? What is the situation in your area?” Let’s say you are a team leader for a team of 20 people. Has there been a high turnover? What is the working environment? What are your services, your tasks, and so forth? Together, an understanding of your context.

Then we would advise you to accept our startup kit, we call it. So that would mean that you and—you would have to select one, maybe two from your team to go with you on first an online training where we would introduce you to the methodology, then a four-day offline training where we would basically simulate that you’re working in a sociocratic organization. And then we would take you through all the typical dilemmas and challenges of working with these co-leadership methodologies. So that would mean four days of training plus the online training.

And then when you get back home, the co-facilitator would be kind of like your go-to person if you have questions. And what we have done typically is that, depending on your situation, we would then maybe tailor-make some workshops with you and your employees. Or if you feel completely confident that you can start working with it baby steps, then you would just start, and then you could call upon your co-facilitator when you want to.

In addition to that, we will offer you what we call learning cafes every month. So all the people working with this, practicing it and testing it out, will meet to supervise each other. So that would be the starting point, basically.

Lisa: Right, and as I understand it, you’ve sort of distilled some key principles from sociocracy. So it’s not like you’ve installed the whole of sociocracy. Can you say something about which pieces or which principles you felt were most crucial?

Mette: Absolutely, and I think what will be the underlying message for me throughout this conversation is that we’re having a super pragmatic approach to this. So we can’t—I’m not even sure we’re going to be 100% sociocratic in the end, but we will definitely build on those principles.

I think one key learning for me already is that if you want to really make this a huge change, you have to have a framework to start with. And we chose sociocracy because it seems to work very well in the Danish context as well. So we have said to people, “It’s absolutely fine if you don’t stick 100% to the manual, but there are three principles that you have to adhere to.” Because otherwise, the autopilot is just gonna flip you right back into habitual thinking and all habits that belong in the old organization and not in the new one.

So the first principle is the job first, always the job first. So what is the job that needs to get done? I mean, does a team really know what their common task is? Is the purpose of their existence clear? Do they know exactly what it is they have to do? And it sounds sober now, and when I heard about it the first time, this “everything begins with the task and the purpose,” I was like, “Yeah, but of course you know that’s what we always do.” When you go on these mission, vision, values kind of strategy workshops, you always do that.

And I just came to realize, in reality, you don’t. You assume that people know what it is they have to do. But I guess that people could agree with me that a lot of the conflicts that occur in the team is because there are diverse understandings of what is exactly the task.

With that principle also comes that that’s the design principle number one. So if we’re just going to design a team structure, it’s the task that is the design principle number one—not who you like to be in a team with, not whether you are happy or not, not whether the people in your team have the same professional background as you have. So there is a consequence to deciding on that design principle.

So that’s the first. People actually find it the boring part, but it’s so important that we all agree on what is the task that we need to get done. So we have made a specific format in which you have to write it down, and everybody in the circle, as we call it, as well as the—I guess the English word is “mother circle.” I’m just not so keen on these parental words in organizations because who wants to be the kid? But anyway, everybody has to agree upon that, and it has to be reviewed. So that’s principle number one: the job first, always.

Then the second principle is the circle is the boss. And that means that once that task is super clear, and it has to be so clear that everybody around the circle is comfortable, then giving full authority to that team called the circle. It also means that—and those who know sociocracy knows all of this already—but there are certain roles within the circle. But if it’s a shared responsibility, it is the circle that takes the decisions.

So whatever happens in the circle is super important, and that’s why we have very specific formats and structures for how to conduct the meetings, how to distribute the power within the circle, how to ensure that everybody are being heard while at the same time there’s progress, which is a hard balance by the way.

And then the third principle is decisions have to be made by consent. And by consent, a lot of people know what it means, but just in case someone doesn’t, consent is not the same as consensus. So consent is working with your zone of tolerance rather than your preference. And that, I think, is one of the at an individual and interpersonal and at a team level, probably one of the biggest changes from the traditional organization.

So those are the three principles: job first always, circle is the boss, and decision by consent.

Lisa: That’s really clarifying, and I think principles are a really powerful way of designing—you know, having some constraints but nothing too prescriptive, but giving you your kind of compass. So with these sort of 20+ units that have been experimenting with these sociocratic principles, what are you learning so far? What are the things that people struggle with the most? You know, where are the pain points? And—this is a big question—and where are the sort of triumphs? You know, where are you seeing real differences?

Mette: I started out by saying that it’s a very diverse organization, so I think the challenges are very diverse too. So just to give an example of a challenge that we have and that we’re still working with: for example, if you work in an elderly home and you work in shifts 24 hours a day, and the way that you plan and man the shifts means that you have no overlap between the different shifts, how are we going to connect the fact that there are autonomous teams making decisions if they don’t have the meeting as kind of like the organizing hub? So that’s like some of the challenges that are very specific in terms of “how do we get this done?”

And I am actually tomorrow going to visit one of the elderly homes that have come the furthest with this to hear how they have actually tackled this. Another challenge could be, for example, if you are a home nurse and you basically spend most of the time in your car or on your bicycle going from home to home, and you only meet your colleagues maybe once every two weeks, how does that—how do you apply this co-leadership and sociocracy in a setting like that?

We have another situation where you have had like a profession-driven hierarchy before, and now you organize tasks in a different way. How does the dynamic play out in a team where you have professions that used to have like an implicit, sometimes even explicit hierarchy, and now they have to have kind of like the same voice?

We have another circle that’s comprised of people from different departments. So they are basically trying to navigate across the traditional organization in this circle structure. How do they find time to prioritize their tasks when in the traditional organization, they have a manager who is deciding a lot of how they spent their time, and now they’re trying to solve a task in a cross-department circle where they have full autonomy?

So I think it’s very practical, kind of like day-to-day challenges that is also part of the co-creation process that we have. So we offer the framework, but we are also telling people, “You know, a year and a half in, you’re still among the first ones to take a step into this, and you will be part of creating the model that will fit into our world.” So that’s some of the challenges that are specific and practical.

And then I would say the biggest challenge is to increase the self-awareness of the very kind of like unconscious anticipations that is driving our behavior in the traditional organization and that we can’t help import into this new way of working. So for example, the notion of consensus—it’s just amazing how much it can distract meetings and conversations because people kind of cling to their own opinion and kind of forget, you know, it’s not really that important what I think. The important thing is what we decide and what we do with it. I don’t need to campaign my own point of view. I don’t need to convince you.

And with that also goes the old habit of asking for permission. So there’s a lot of, at an individual and team level, challenges that I guess are generic. And then there’s a lot of very specific practical challenges that we’re trying to solve. Sorry for the very long answer.

Lisa: No, I appreciate that. There’s like the pragmatic things, and then there’s like the sort of habit and mindset shifts, in a way. Like, it’s so ingrained in us to default to consensus or to try and convince each other, and that that’s not easily unlearned, I don’t think.

Mette: No, it isn’t. And at the same time, that’s also what makes it fun, you know. Because once you start working with this and you have the shared understanding of what it is, you can also call it out on each other and say, “Hey, Lisa, I mean, what you’re doing right now isn’t it—I mean, you don’t need to try to get me to agree with you. I can give you my consent. You don’t need to take it any further.” And you can laugh about it. So I think it also makes it fun when you can start laughing at your old habits.

Lisa: What support do units get then? Do the co-facilitators continue to play a role, a bit like a sort of coach that, you know, when teams run into some of these questions like, “Wow, how are we going to make this work given that our shifts never overlap?” What sort of ongoing support do they get to help address challenges like that?

Mette: Oh, good question. And also in that respect, we’re still kind of on the move because in the beginning—when we started out the first year, I actually thought that I would be super happy if we had conducted like two of these kickoff training sessions or startup kits, and if three organization units had started working with this, because we could support that.

And then it ended up that basically the traction was just much stronger than that. So we basically had to conduct I think it was six startup kits, and we had more than 17 organizational units starting up. So of course, you couldn’t offer a co-facilitator to everybody. And then again, it turned out that that also had like a positive side effect because it meant that people thought, “Okay, but you know, if I can’t get a co-facilitator right now, I’ll just start. I’ll do the best I can, and then I can always call them.” And then people just started.

And it means that people can actually take this a very long way without anyone helping them. And it also just goes to show that once you get the principles under your skin, it’s actually quite easy to do something tomorrow. So we’ve been talking about these baby steps. I mean, baby steps is better than nothing, and then we will come and help you whenever we can.

And also what we’ve done is we have made sure that those who are co-facilitators were already employed. So it’s now colleagues helping colleagues, which seems to resonate well. And then we have installed a new role that we call—so there’s the co-facilitator that would kind of go with you on your journey until at a certain point, kind of like let you go. Then we have what we call a meta-facilitator, and that’s someone that’s basically just calling in on the units that say, “We think we can take it from here. We can do it ourselves.”

And what we found is—we’ve been a bit reluctant to do it because would that be considered like inappropriate interference or control from a central unit, you know, which is how it’s often perceived in a hierarchical organization. But we found out that there was a huge appreciation of the fact that we paid interest in what people are doing. And we also found out that a lot of people had basically stopped progressing because they found it so hard to get this done while taking care of all the other tasks they had to do. And that gentle kind of like push and support actually restarted the process for a lot of these units.

So the meta-facilitator’s role is simply just to call in and say, “How are you doing? Any key learnings that we can learn from? Is anything standing in your way?” And then we try to accommodate.

Lisa: Can you share some stories or examples of units that have really seen a difference in starting to work in this way together?

Mette: I can take an elderly home that’s actually at the same time the biggest unit. So there are more than 200 employees out there. So that in itself is like a big workplace in itself, right? What they have done is they have reorganized their decision-making structure. So they have different houses where the elderly people live, and they have formed these autonomous circles according to each house. So that everybody involved in the people living in that house are now organized in a team.

And they have appointed the leads, as they are called, in each circle. And I think they are now 14 in total leads, and none of them have had any formal leadership role before. To begin with, they were like super anxious, like, “Will my colleagues accept that I take on this role? Is this in reality a team leader role?” Which it is not.

We had to change the name of the role because “lead” in Danish sounds very much like “leader.” So there was a lot of confusion there. And what we are now hearing is that—a couple of things: much, much faster decision-making. So if confronted with a need from a citizen, they can act upon it immediately. They don’t need to ask for permission anywhere.

We are hearing about people who have been in the past very quiet, not sharing their thoughts, not speaking up at team meetings, now all of a sudden playing a completely different role. There was a huge article in one of the Danish magazines not so long ago that portrayed a woman working there. She’s 59, and she said that she had never ever before taken a part in any debate in her workplace about how to get this done. And now she was given this autonomy to make decisions in terms of the food that the elderly people are having. And she’s now moved from not saying anything, not taking part, to actually teaching her colleagues, which is like a humongous change.

I also heard from the leader out there that their latest workplace assessment was the best in years. So we are beginning to see these same smaller effects emerging. We have another unit that also reports about much faster decision-making. The fact that you don’t need to ask for permission, and the fact that you have people organized around the task—that are exactly the people who need to be there—means that you can actually make the day-to-day decisions much, much faster.

There is a challenge in that when you work in the public sector. The challenge is that, at least that goes for Denmark, that we have installed this concept that is a guarantee. When you work with or are related with someone in the public sector, you have a guarantee of the same service level. So if I am a person living in a home and I need a home nurse, I am guaranteed a certain amount of minutes and a certain amount of services.

If I have an autonomous team listening to your needs, and another autonomous team listening to somebody else’s needs, you’re not necessarily going to get the same service. So if we want to install a larger amount of autonomy and a large amount of responsiveness towards the individual citizens’ needs, eventually we’re going to have to accept that you can’t give everybody the same service. So that’s going to be—I know we’re gonna run into that discussion at some point. I don’t know what the outcome is going to be, but in my opinion, it needs to be adjusted if you really want to give that autonomy to the professional people working around the individual citizen.

Lisa: It’s a really interesting dilemma.

Mette: It is a really interesting dilemma. A third force—I can’t recall how many I’ve been counting, but another thing we’re seeing is that we actually have people applying for jobs in our organization because they heard about this. That to me is super encouraging because I am a firm believer that the future workforce does not want to apply for a job in the old school kind of organization. They want to be trusted with the responsibility and the autonomy of applying their professional knowledge and experience.

So we’ve seen people move internally as well, and people are applying externally because they heard about what we are doing. So it’s an indication, at least, that it has an appeal to people in terms of, “This sounds like an interesting workplace. This is the kind of co-leadership I would like to be part of.”

Lisa: I really like that term co-leadership. Were you mindful of what language you used? And you mentioned before about even the term “lead” and things like that.

Mette: Yeah, we are super mindful of the words we use because the connotations of every word in any organizational culture—it’s just like, unknowingly, you can just run into severe headwind if you’re not very cautious about the words that you use.

In the early 90s, we had the introduction in Denmark of what’s called self-management. And I worked at a huge facility and service company, like a huge global player, and it didn’t work. I mean, people were stressed, the anxiety levels increased, people felt left alone. It was like the law of the jungle. And so there’s a lot of people who had that experience.

We don’t want to get their anxiety level up too high by using the same word. And in addition to that, to me, self-management has this implication of a highly individualized way of working, and that is not what we’re aiming for. We are aiming for teamwork that works, you know, groups of people that come together to solve a task, a collaboration, psychological safety, you know, having good colleagues that together have high ambition levels in terms of what they do.

So there’s a lot of togetherness in using another term than self-management. We don’t want to individualize the challenge of getting a municipality to work. We know from surveys internally that, for example, those that work a lot one-on-one with citizens that have severe problems, they feel the burden of having the entire responsibility for that person’s life. And that is what sometimes wears out people in that profession.

So we want to strengthen the togetherness, we want to strengthen the sense of belonging, we want to strengthen the collaboration and the sharing of the dilemmas and challenges that you have at the workplace. We don’t want people to feel completely alone. So we actually don’t like the word self-management. We’re trying to avoid it.

And I don’t even know if co-leadership is the right way of translating it, but I didn’t want to call it co-management because I think it is more like co-leadership because it is about taking responsibility and actually taking responsibility for the right decisions, but also for the wrong decisions, right? And that’s like the hard part. So that’s why we are much more keen on using the word co-leadership.

Lisa: Listening to you now, it’s sort of bringing up memories of conversations I’ve had with people in public sector organizations in particular, where there’s a lot of anxiety and fear, I think, about some of these new ways of working. And I think a history of mistrust and people feeling, worrying that with new responsibility comes a threat or consequences. How have you found that as well, and how have you sort of supported people?

Mette: I found that a lot actually, to a much higher extent than I found it in other organizations. I mean, nobody wants to make mistakes, and nobody wants to make the wrong decisions. Nobody likes to look weak or incompetent or irrelevant and all that stuff. So regardless of where you work, that’s a super uncomfortable place to be.

Having said that, we are all there, maybe not on a daily basis, but often. And what I found here—and I don’t think it’s specific to this municipality or this organization, because I’ve worked with other public organizations before—is that the anxiety level in terms of being called out as the one responsible for a mistake is very high.

You can be called out by politicians who want to find a scapegoat or someone who’s guilty of having made a wrong decision. You can be called out by local media who make a living out of portraying scandals. You can be called out by colleagues or maybe someone else in the so-called value chain that is trying to not have the arrow pointing at them. So you could be called out by many people as the one responsible for a flaw or a mistake.

And that is like poison for a process like this because, obviously, it makes people reluctant in terms of trying something new if they don’t have a very, very strong safety net underneath. And we can’t really offer a safety net completely. So what we do is we say, “Take it slow. Don’t take—take small steps.” We have this saying that a lot of people that work with sociocracy know: “Is it good enough for now? Is it safe enough to try? And can you change it if it doesn’t work?” So take small steps and have patience with each other.

So it’s like a condition that we can’t change all of a sudden. Obviously, I would love to see that change for the sake of the people working there, also for the sake of the people we’re working for. So I can definitely recognize that. And actually, it’s also one of the reasons why we have decided to start with the teams.

So making an organizational paradigm shift is much more about how the team works. But we’ve come to realize that we have to start closest to home. So we’re starting out by getting these circles to work, getting the decision by consent to work. That’s why we have identified the three principles—start with what’s in the proximity of yourself, basically. Because you could do that tomorrow, and you don’t need to ask for permission.

I mean, yes, it is a politically driven organization, and they are setting the direction. But how I organize my work together with you? I do have some space there that I can navigate in. And I also have to say that fear comes from something, you know. There is evidence. There are examples of people being thrown under the bus or called out in local media or on Facebook or wherever. It’s happening right now, and it’s awful.

So we’re trying to protect people by paying so much attention to the team and the co-leadership again. So share the responsibility and have patience with people who are reluctant to step into that place. I think it’s the best we can offer. And unfortunately, so far, I mean, our experience is like with the woman I talked about before that—there are a lot of people that are very reluctant to step in, to speak up. But we allow them not to do so to begin with. And then what we’ve seen is that they gradually feel comfortable, and that they do speak up.

And that’s what I’m being told—and I’m looking so much forward to visiting them tomorrow—that there’s a lot more people who are feeling confident in taking part.

Lisa: I just want to do a time check. Are you okay to go for another like 10 minutes or so? Is that all right?

Mette: Absolutely, absolutely.

Lisa: Good. So what do you think could be next in this journey? You sort of started with processes, if you like, in, you know, closest home as you said, in the teams. What is starting to emerge as like possible next steps or phases?

Mette: That’s a super good question because there are so many next steps. So one thing is to continue to deepen the integration of these co-leadership principles in the teams and the departments that have already started, so that it doesn’t stop with how we conduct meetings or how we organize the teams, but that it continues. So that’s one step.

Another step, I think, that we need to take at one point—whether it’s now or half a year or in a year, I don’t know—but I think we need to become much more explicit about: how do people who have a formal leadership role in the traditional organization that we still have—how is their role redefined? I mean, how is it that if you are a leader who doesn’t really think you’re going to embark on this for a while, how do you actually support the process still?

We haven’t offered any leadership training as such because we thought, “We don’t want to train the leaders.” That would be like kind of basically just emphasizing status quo. But I think we need—because we’re not going to get rid of leaders in our organization for a while, but that role needs to change dramatically if this is to work. So I think that would be another step.

And I also think, while having started out on a voluntary basis, I think it would be wonderful with a more explicit, you can say, top management support in this. We are cheering the local leaders. And what I found is that for some reason, this seems to appeal more the further out you get in the organization, which I think in itself is an interesting observation.

But at some point in time, we also need to have a discussion around how do we, at the top of the existing pyramid, support the process as much as possible and refrain from installing decisions or mechanisms that would be counterproductive in terms of the journey.

There are so many answers to your question, Lisa. Many things that we could do right now. I think we will—what we will continue to do is to offer this training and to be very responsive towards any unit that would raise their hands and say, “We would like to join.” And I’ve had two of those just this week. So it’s like we’re not done with this. I mean, there’s still so much going on, and there’s still so many people that kind of like go, “Yeah, we want to do that.” And so we’re definitely going to support doing that.

Another thing that we haven’t done well enough so far is to figure out how we document. Like going back to your question on “Does it work? What do people think? Do the citizens feel any change?” and so forth. We haven’t really found a way of figuring out how to document this because we don’t want to install KPIs, key performance indicators. At the same time, we do want to have something that we can measure. So we haven’t really figured that out, and we need to figure that out because we will get the questions, you know, “Does it work? Does it pay out?”

So I think that what fuels me in this process is the enthusiasm and the engagement and the way that this has been received in the organization. It’s as if there was—and I’ve sensed it in other organizations as well—it’s as if there is this hunger for something specific, something that goes above and beyond the cliches of, you know, “We want to fight bureaucracy, and we want to have more simplicity, and we want decisions closer to the citizens, and we want to have more agile organizations.” You know, those kind of declarations, people are like, “Yeah, yeah, we’ve heard about it now for 20 years maybe.”

And these are all good intentions, but the fact is that good intentions don’t drive change. So give us something specific. And this is the best I have come across. And the demand is huge, the interest is enormous, the energy that comes from the people who start working with this is fantastic. And obviously the challenge is that this is the long run. I mean, it’s a long-term effort.

Lisa: Yeah, I think what’s so inspiring to me is that sometimes when we approach these kinds of transformation journeys, it can be a bit too abstract and sort of esoteric. And there’s something very powerful and almost immediate in terms of, you know, once you start to make decisions in a different way, you can see the impact on the citizens that you’re engaging with day to day, and how it feels in the team, and being able to, you know, make decisions more quickly and things like that.

So I think, especially in a large complex organization and especially in an organization that’s not full of people like me who are sort of geeks about this kind of stuff and like reading books and, you know, listening to podcasts and stuff, it makes it very real and tangible. Like, this is what it’s about. This is not some concept. So I can really see how that’s helped people kind of—the enthusiasm grow and spread in the organization.

Mette: And there is a risk in being a geek like you say, Lisa, because I guess I am a geek in this field. And I too have to be mindful of the fact that I don’t get too enthusiastic, because it can be perceived to be somewhat of a sect that you kind of join. And that’s not what it is.

It’s just—I say that—these are principles that are built upon a lot of evidence in terms of what really motivates us, what really works, what is sustainable, what does a sustainable work life look like? And you don’t need to buy into the full package. You can just start out by seeing the difference it makes when you perform decision-making in a completely different way that decreases anxiety levels, increases togetherness, increases the room for your professional and work-related experiences, and allows for disagreement and can still lead to high-quality decision-making.

To me, it’s a win-win and it’s a point of no return. I mean, once you start working with it, you can’t go back. You just can’t go back and work in the traditional hierarchical way.

Lisa: I’m curious to know, what have you learned personally, you know, when you in your own kind of development as a human being in this? You know, how has that been?

Mette: Ah, good question. At a couple of different layers or levels. First of all, I’ve had a leadership role for I guess more than 20 years. And so I also had to de-learn the fact that I couldn’t just play the boss, kind of like say, you know, “I’m the boss and therefore…” And some—you don’t need to say it explicitly because implicitly people would just look at you when they know that—I don’t know—I’m sitting at the end of the table.

So to me, I had to become—and I still have to work with—how aware I need to be of the kind of subtle signs that I could send that I agree or disagree, or if I want something or don’t want something. Because when I’m stepping into a circle, I have to play according to the same rules as everybody else.

And so what I’ve done to my circle members is I said to them, “Let me know if my autopilot kind of lets me play out the old-fashioned leadership style where I’m kind of having this old table of habit of basically knowing that at the end, I’m gonna make the decision.” Because I’m not. And I find it just as challenging as everybody else when I have to let go of my preference. I mean, I can nearly feel it physically. So it’s just as challenging for me as it is for everybody else, I assume.

So that’s like a personal learning. But also, I find it hugely—a huge relief that I don’t have to convince people and that I don’t have to have the final say all the time. And another learning for me is this acceptance of the fact that sometimes autonomous teams make bad decisions. But we can change it if it doesn’t work.

So is it better to demotivate people by basically overruling their decision—and then maybe the decision is better—or is it better to live with it, let them experience that the decision they make in the team is not perfect, and then see what kind of learning comes out of it?

So there’s like a ton of learning in this. But for me personally, it’s the unlearning of the old boss mirror that used to be, you know, having fancy titles in a huge global company. There’s not room for her anymore—room for parts of her, but not that part of her.

Lisa: Yeah, and I’m happy to let her go?

Mette: Yeah, I’m happy to let her go, absolutely. I’ve been talking about that. I’ve seen a couple of places where in other organizations also in our own, where a manager at some level decides that he or she would like to start out with this. And then it becomes this kind of mix between co-leadership or distributed leadership and hierarchy, where that person still is in a leadership role and then has dedicated decision power to a lot of teams beneath him or her.

That’s not what it is all about. I mean, it could probably work, but you still haven’t given full autonomy to these teams. And I think it requires courage because people kind of assume that when I’m in a leadership role, I need to be in control of everything. So also there, we take baby steps, take it easy. I don’t know if I’m answering your question.

It’s like, and that’s what I find—there’s learnings at an individual level, there’s learning at a team level, and there’s learning at an organizational level. And they kind of like develop simultaneously or in parallel. And that’s why, you know, when I started this journey, I found that there’s learning at all three levels. And I’m promising people that when they embark on this journey, there’s an opportunity for learning at all three levels. And you could maybe add the fourth level: at a leadership level as well.

So at the end of the day, this is about—it is about designing workplaces that are fit for humans. It’s also about designing workplaces that are effective in terms of the tasks they have to undertake. And we have a huge challenge that we simply do not have the resources we need to take care of elderly people, to make sure that our kids go to kindergartens where they can be safe and seen, that we have room in public schools for children who aren’t average and maybe have different ways of being in a classroom.

We have a huge problem with young people who don’t know how to find their place in this world or in the labor market and stuff. And we have a huge responsibility as a public sector to figure out how do we support a society that’s fit for humans. And I believe that we do that by developing workplaces that are fit for humans. So it’s not just about the structure in a team, it’s actually a much, much larger mission that we are on. And to me, that is super encouraging.

Lisa: Definitely. I wonder, in sort of starting to wrap up, what advice would you give to listeners who are interested to explore and experiment with more human ways of working?

Mette: First is, start with yourself. So start out by trying it out. And then make sure that you have the skills needed in order to embark on it. So train it yourself, but start with yourself. And then just do it. I mean, what’s the worst that can happen? You do something that doesn’t work. Then you try something else. And start small and do it slow and don’t give up.

Lisa: Thank you. Is there anything else that you wanted to say that you haven’t said that you would like to share with listeners?

Mette: I feel like there’s a ton, Lisa. There’s so much in this, and I’m very thankful for you making these podcasts because there’s a lot of nuances to this. I think there’s no way back. I mean, we have to find other ways of organizing work. We have to find other ways of collaborating, and we have to find another way of making workplaces that are fit for the future.

So it’s kind of like mission critical what we do. It’s not just for fun or—you know, this is serious, and it’s super important. And it is a lot of fun at the same time. So I’m just super happy to find new colleagues that are also doing all of this so that we can be on this journey together.