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Lisa: Simon, if you could tell us about what you’re working on currently and how did you get into this line of work?
Simon: I think the narrative really started in law school where I thought I was going to be doing criminal justice reform and restorative justice work. After some time doing that and doing public defence, I realised that my heart and soul was not capable of fighting a system for my life - it was kind of corroding me.
So then I slipped into doing new economy work in solidarity economy work with the sustainable economies Law Centre. The project that I worked on there was a worker self-directed nonprofit project where we were reimagining how nonprofits might be organised internally and then also how we might shift large systemic dynamics of the nonprofit sector.
After doing that for a few years, we started a nonprofit democracy Network which is a group of nonprofits working on that. Then we realised the demand for some of this organisational change and deepening and transformation work was so high that the Law Centre didn’t want to pursue it themselves, so we decided to spin out a new organisation that I’m in the midst of founding that will likely be called Harmonised. The goal is to allow human creative processes and collective creative processes to be more in line with natural and sacred processes in order to shift how our collaboration works in both process and outcome.
Lisa: Wow, that sounds really cool. I came across you because of an article you wrote for the Nonprofit Quarterly called “Autopsy of a Failed Holacracy,” and it was really interesting to see the debates and the discussions that arose on social media. So I’d love to hear a bit about what was your intention behind writing this piece and what were some of the main criticisms that you were getting from readers - particularly, I know there were pretty loyal Frederic Laloux fans that were quite upset by some of the things you were saying.
Simon: Yeah, I’m very humbled and grateful that it started some conversation because the intention of the article was to start conversation. I’m grateful that it struck a chord. It was particularly interesting to see that some of the loyal holacracy and Frederic Laloux fans were much more reactive to the piece than Frederic Laloux was himself.
The point that I was trying to make with the article was that holacracy and other strategies of self-management that focused primarily on formal power dynamics aren’t sufficient to fully transform all of the dynamics that play in a workplace to make it one where people can be full and liberated and work towards the best parts of humanity. I was making the point that a lot of what the organisational change and transformation community is doing isn’t enough to get what we really want done.
I think that many people were frustrated to hear that and also challenged by the fact that some of the things that I think are required - specifically things about trauma, identity, large economic systems - are things that are outside of the conversation that’s currently taking place in a lot of organisational transformation.
Lisa: I think that’s really interesting, and that was why I was really drawn to your piece and I reached out to you. For me, one of my discoveries has been that changing structures and processes in an organisation - the same realisation as you’ve just expressed - isn’t enough, that there’s something deeper about how we relate to each other as human beings, how we communicate, who we’re being in the context of working together that isn’t addressed by simply overhauling the operating system of an organisation. So what do you view as the missing piece or pieces? In this new organisation that you’re creating, for example, how are you aiming to address this gap in the conversation?
Simon: I think there’s a few ways. The first way is to zoom out of the organisation and look at the organisation in the context of the economic ecosystem. To be more practical about that, you can take an example like Monsanto. So if Monsanto totally rearranged all of its formal power dynamics to be a self-managing organisation, and it was still a collective that was essentially organised to create profit for a small group of people by extracting value and resource from the earth in a way that was diminishing the Earth’s ability to support life, then even if the system was beautifully self-managed, it would still be a corrosive entity both in terms of its relationship to the world. And I believe that humans at work for a purpose that is essentially destroying our life support system is corrosive to the human experience there.
That’s an extreme example, but I think we need to look at all of our organisations and the large structure of our economy and ask: are organisations set up to extract wealth and resources in order to consolidate them in small groups of people? If so, then self-management is really just a tool to make that process happen more effectively, efficiently, and palatable.
So I think we need to have that larger economic question as part of our analysis of what an organisation is and what a self-managing organisation is in the context of a self-managing economy and society and civilisation.
Similarly, as we need to kind of move up a level of abstraction or up a fractal, we also need to move down from organisation really deeply into individual humans and relationships there, and ask the question that you asked, which is who are we being and how are we showing up and how are we living and experiencing the world and ourselves as we do this? That’s where I think a lot of things around the informal power dynamics and the trauma and microaggressions related to systemic oppression really start to show up.
Our minds, spirits, hearts, and bodies have been so infected and colonized by things that keep us down and tear us apart from each other and from our own truth. Until we heal that, we can’t really show up in our wholeness. So the idea that we can be whole selves without going through that deep healing and transformation process, I think, is mistaken. I think we need to see the organisation, we need to see the individual, and we also need to see the large economic system.
Lisa: What you’re saying makes me think of theories and practices that are starting to emerge and get more traction, like autoethnography, theory U, and Kate Raworth’s doughnut economics. I think it’s called sometimes… I talk to people on the podcast about where people get stuck in thinking only about the concept of self-management, and that kind of zooming out and seeing what self-management is in service of.
Simon: Yeah, and I think it’s interesting. One of the intentions I hold in this work is helping groups that all possess necessary but insufficient pieces of this puzzle to recognise the contributions of each other. Because I do think that something like holacracy is an incredible framework to think about formal power delegation. Holacracy, sociocracy - they’re great frameworks.
When I talk to groups that are really focused on anti-oppression and movement building and have the deep criticism and analysis of economic trends, often what I’m doing is introducing them to Reinventing Organisations and holacracy because there’s a huge value there. And then when I’m talking to folks who are more in the kind of inlight of holacracy space, I’m really trying to say: there are people who have been talking about whole self in the workplace for generations. In some senses, being a whole self and thinking about the soul in the workplace is like an essential concept of Marxism and communism - an essential criticism of capitalism itself has been the lack of whole selfness.
So people have been unpacking that in a different context for generations. We just need to kind of connect these dots and figure out how we’re gonna work together to get the level of transformation we need.
Lisa: And so then in the context of nonprofits, how does self-management and beyond self-management come into play?
Simon: I think the best place to start that answer is by giving a lot of love and credit to an organisation called INCITE! Women of Colour Against Violence, who wrote and compiled a book called “The Revolution Will Not Be Funded.” It’s an incredible resource for people who want to understand the history of the nonprofit sector and how relationships of power and funding can often cause nonprofits to deviate from their true intentions in order to simply survive. So a lot of love to INCITE! and “The Revolution Will Not Be Funded.”
I think the basic lesson from that that I hold is this question of what do nonprofits serve and what are nonprofits responsive to? Currently, a lot of nonprofits survive on grants, and a lot of grants are made by large foundations, so those large foundations get to set the agenda for what nonprofits will do. If nonprofits don’t follow that agenda, then all of a sudden funding becomes very scarce.
So there’s kind of this lifeline where a lot of organisations are dependent on foundations, and then we have to ask where are these foundations getting their money and who is making the decisions around these foundations. If you have a large foundation that made all of its money and exists and is supported by the very economic system we’re trying to transform, that foundation likely won’t be able to fund a transformation of the system that’s keeping it alive.
Sometimes, as “The Revolution Will Not Be Funded” details, that’s intentional - funders do try to make systemic change harder. And sometimes it’s just kind of a structural question of like: you have people who have power to make decisions, big decisions, in foundations. They are many steps removed from the real ground-level need and connection and kind of emergent wisdom of what’s needed.
So the question then becomes how do we align the relationship between the funders and where money and resources are coming from and the actual needs on the ground? We look at the nonprofit organisation itself as one intervention point. By democratizing how the organisation works and how it relates to the people it’s serving or the dynamics it’s trying to shift - democratizing that - that’s one way to open up a conversation about how power and decision-making are working in the sector. That will allow us to then start democratizing the relationship between funders and organisations and communities so that we’re all just working together to respond to things as they exist, as opposed to what’s happening right now, which is people a few levels removed from the ground using their minds to try to create frameworks and paradigms and then work within those models to enforce something which isn’t quite working.
And then the other dimension of this whole thing is that in nonprofits, we’ve got a lot of leadership burnout. We’ve got a lot of people with a tremendous ability and desire to contribute to the world that are getting caught in structures that feel confining and contracting, and they don’t feel good to exist in.
There’s a quote, and I’m unable to properly attribute it now, but the quote is essentially: “The journey toward liberation should be liberating. The way we walk that path matters.” So if we’re constantly working for some liberatory beautiful future but the way we’re getting there is making us feel terrible and contracted and we’re oppressing each other, then we’re not really going to do much.
Lisa: So in terms of the organisations that you are participating in currently or have participated in in the past, could you share some kind of practical examples of practices or things that you’ve done as a group to try and be conscious of these things that you’re talking about?
Simon: In an organisation I participated in, we had a training with AORTA, which is the Anti-Oppression Resource and Training Alliance. They had a great resource that helped us unpack the culture that we had built between ourselves. It was a resource that detailed and allowed us to see what white supremacist colonial culture looked and felt like. They broke it down into a lot of different components and then asked us to evaluate whether or not we were embodying that in the relationship between us.
That was a really powerful exercise because first, we started to see this kind of cultural norm that had imposed itself on and through us, and we could reimagine it in our own interpersonal interactions. And then also, once we start seeing it in our personal interactions, we develop a better ability to see it out in the world as well. So our strategies and our organising tactics then start to not only accomplish a different end - like we’re not trying to just create an organisation or create a co-op or something like that - we’re really trying to do the whole process in a way that’s shifting a deep-seated cultural norm.
A good example of that would just be the privileges of linguistic expression, particularly the written word in America. Particularly, you can get power by being an authoritative speaker and writer. There’s lots of kinds of knowledge and wisdom and truths that are not best expressed in those formats, and even the ability to express well in those formats is often a function of someone’s family wealth that allowed them access to education.
So by tracking how the written word was showing up in our organisation, we started to be able to track and influence how power and identity and wealth also was operating. That’s one practice, and I think regular anti-oppression trainings are really essential to shift an organisation and to develop this strategy.
I think another one is subtle but powerful, which is just really, really deep listening to each other - spaces where you’re not doing anything, we’re not trying to accomplish a goal, not trying to plan. We’re literally just trying to understand each other’s experiences and just trying to open our hearts to that reality and to learn how to have every different person’s truth and the truth of their experience all coexist at the same time, and not trying to impose some uniform understanding on it.
That’s a really powerful thing. Not only does it kind of build trust and build cohesion, it also just humbles everybody to realise how little of anything any one person really knows.
I think gratitude and intentionally lifting each other up - specific moments of trying to call out people for positive things they’re doing, specifically noticing people for things that they’re contributing that I would not myself be able to contribute - is really valuable. Elevating and thanking people for contributing things that often aren’t even noticed as contributions.
A good example of that would be kind of emotional work. So if somebody is the emotional support person for many people in organisations, that’s an essential component of working together. It often is labour that goes unpaid and unseen and often is done by women, and that contributes to like another type of pay gap. But simply by noticing and speaking those things, you start to shift what’s present in an organisation.
And then another one on that same topic - something I learned from Sandra Kim who was at Everyday Feminism and has now started Everyday Liberation - is the practice of having designated emotional support and processing coaches just to expect that really deep stuff will come up and to make caring for ourselves and each other a paid position.
Lisa: That’s super interesting. It makes me think - I’ve had conversations with so many people in nonprofits who have said the nonprofit world actually can be one of the most bureaucratic and hierarchical amongst all of the sectors. And it always strikes me that people are so much more likely to have a real connection to the purpose of the organisation. There’s so much potential there - if you could liberate people from all of the things that are getting in the way for them to really live that purpose and to really bring their whole self to that, then it would free up just so much energy.
Simon: Yeah, that would. That’s the vision. That’s the vision.
I think it’s interesting, there’s some patterns I’ve noticed. One of the patterns I’ve noticed is that people who are starting nonprofits are often passionate, visionary people with real understanding of how societal dynamics are working, and that’s a different skill set than the ability to create management systems and collaboration systems.
When they start into the nonprofit, they go into the nonprofit space with this vision, and then when they’re forced to ask themselves, “Well, how am I going to manage and organise this thing?” they go straight to kind of like some nonprofit best practices. But those nonprofit best practices tend to be mainstream business practices from 20 years ago of the system that they’re trying to change today, and it doesn’t really work.
There’s not a really great understanding of exactly how much room there is to experiment, to do new things. And that’s one of the messages that we’re carrying through the nonprofit democracy Network, which is just there’s way more ways that we can organise ourselves and hold our board of directors and our staff and our funding and our budgeting. There’s way more ways we can do that that are great, so let’s start experimenting with it.
Lisa: So on that note, if you take a nonprofit organisation that is typical of what you’ve just described, what would your advice be to them in terms of first steps if they really wanted to start experimenting with new ways of organising and being together? What starting points would you offer them?
Simon: I would start by suggesting that they take a few hours to really just talk to each other about the lived experience of what it is like to be working together and to start identifying patterns and tensions and discomforts that exist within the organisation. And then to come into a state of acceptance and recognition of those things - not blaming each other for creating friction between each other, not blaming the manager. It’s just noticing that the systems that we’ve inherited that we’re using are creating outcomes that we don’t want, and we’re experiencing and feeling those outcomes, and we’re carrying that knowledge and that perception, that wisdom in our body.
And then I think it’s important to then start small shifts, small practice shifts in the organisation that start to address some of the points of tension, and having the larger big change grow out of small changes and small observations, and to live that question and live that experiment and constantly take small risks, work smaller edges. Because not only does it develop the organisation’s ability to strategize and plan together on this level, it also just starts to build trust. And a lot of what we need, I think, is trust and good conversations in order to make this work.
There’s a great book that some colleagues just wrote at Sociocracy For All - it’s called “Many Voices, One Song” - about sociocracy. Pretty well. Even looking at holacracy, or even like “Reinventing Organisations” or holacracy, I think those are all great resources to get a big vision of what a very different type of organisation could look like.
I think holding that five-year-out vision in our minds is useful, and I don’t think that the way to get there is to immediately yank ourselves from the current reality into the future one and say “Let’s all redesign every system,” because I think that’s overwhelming.
If you can start with a good honest conversation, maybe a different way of facilitating meetings, maybe a different way of creating agendas, maybe some participatory decision-making around aspects of the budget, maybe a new way for people to decide which grants to apply to - so small little things - and trying to make collaborative decision-making around these specific intervention points ends up training the organisation to be more collaborative.
Lisa: I think that’s a great way of putting it because to your point earlier about different skill sets - I think what so many organisations, nonprofit or otherwise, are struggling with is the founders, the CEOs, or the leaders have these skill sets that are suddenly inadequate somehow to deal with the new way of organising and being together that’s required in order to deal with the challenges that we’re facing in the world at the moment.
So those things that you’ve just described - these small experiments and small ways of starting to do things differently and in a more participatory and democratic way - is really helpful for people who are not used to being or considering themselves as facilitators, for example.
Simon: And I think we really need to love our leaders more. Like, I’ve worked with a number of founders who are just phenomenally capable at doing some things and not particularly capable at doing other things, just like all humans. And then they’re expected to do this huge amount of things and be able to hold this huge amount of complexity and work perfectly somehow.
So if you’re a business - I know somebody who’s like a visionary who can raise incredible amounts of money, build incredible connections, pull tons and tons of people into an organisation. And also, feeling is not a very good manager. So if we try to force that person to be a manager and expect that person to be a manager, everybody is going to be unsatisfied, right?
But if we try to understand like this person can do a certain type of thing incredibly well, let’s just not expect them to do all this management stuff. We need to create a different system - different people need to step into that. So as opposed to criticising people, really trying to support everyone.
And I think that can be really, really hard to do when the person that is not meeting expectations or needs is someone who has an official title of power. I think it’s really hard to see them as someone who needs support as opposed to someone who needs to do better.
Lisa: Yeah, that’s a really good point. It also strikes me that it would come as such a relief to so many of the founders and CEOs and senior leaders that I speak to who acknowledge and realise that something needs to change in their organisation and feel so incredibly responsible for having this perfect strategy or plan or blueprint for making that work. When in fact, it’s such a liberating thing to realise actually I can hold the space for that to happen, but I don’t have to be solely responsible for how we do it. It’s so much more about extending the invitation to the people I’m working with and say, “Hey, I really have an intention for us to change the way that we’re organised and how we’re being together, and I have no idea how to do it. Let’s have a conversation about what we want and how we can do it together.” And I’m sure some people will have energy and skill sets that are far more suited to this kind of challenge.
Simon: Yeah, and that brings us all the way back to that really deep personal work and personal work that connects to big societal dynamics, which can be really hard. And it’s hard for me often - it can be really hard for other folks that I know who are in these leadership positions to come out and say, “I feel overwhelmed,” or “I don’t know what we’re doing,” right? And that’s because there’s all sorts of societal and often identity-based expectations and outcomes when we start to speak those kinds of truths about ourselves. That’s kind of edgy work, as personal interpersonal stuff to do.
So I think it’s really important that we do it. I think it’s also really important that - to me, it seems like if we’re gonna get this level of formal power and systemic power transformation, we need to create the spaces of vulnerability and trust and caring that allows somebody who’s been founding an organisation and keeping it alive through their sweat for 20 years to have a moment where they can just release some, you know, and admit some smallness. We need that - we need to be able to create that for ourselves and each other.
Lisa: So what is your dream for the future of nonprofits and organisation and, I guess, bigger than that as well, for society?
Simon: I think that humans want to care for each other. I think that humans have a tremendous ability to infuse things with purpose and meaning and sacredness and connection, and that when we do that, we become more fulfilled, accepting, happy, close, and connected. And I think that we all really, really want that. And I think that that’s a direct experience, a physical embodied experience that we all have access to, and what I hope is that we can have more and more of that.
I think what it will require is a lot of personal - like in myself - for me to get access to some of that, it requires a lot of personal healing, a lot of personal transformation to clear out the blockages that exist within my own psychology, in my own body, to be able to actually live my truth and actually connect with people and actually enjoy the awe and majesty that the mystery of the universe has to offer.
But the struggle of my own personal healing is that it’s always limited by the structures that I exist within. I can’t be the self I want to be unless people can hold space for that, unless the organisations I work in, the communities I work in, can see that - see who I am and love me for who I am and invite me to be more of that.
So I think we need organisations that can really, really do that. Simultaneously, we need these organisations to be directing this human life force and allowing me to flourish and achieve my purpose and direct my life force back into a way that serves the earth and the beings on it - the beings that are seen and unseen on that earth - so that I can be in a reciprocal regenerative relationship with the universe and with the world that I experience.
As opposed to where I am now, which is that most of the things I’m forced to do to stay alive are actually extracting and diminishing the earth’s ability to sustain life. And actually a lot of my comfort is predicated on the suffering of other people, and as long as that is the case, I cannot truly be free.
So what I would like to see is us work on that. I’d like to see all of our organisations and all of our sectors really responsive to the needs of earth and people and really aligned with natural processes, really aligned with the sacredness that infuses the world, as opposed to aligned with a need or a desire for profit.
And the nonprofit sector specifically, I think what we need is organisations focused on becoming incubators of liberation within themselves. And I think we need to get in relationship with funders and sources of economic power that help us all understand the role that we have to play in the process of healing liberation, and understand that our strategies need to be, as Adrienne Maree Brown puts it, they need to be emergent. They need to be growing from the realities, the embodied realities that exist in the world, as opposed to being imposed by ideas of people whose minds have been trained to think in particular ways.
So I think in order to do that, what it really comes down to is we need to be thinking very critically about how power and how decision-making works inside us as individuals, as groups, and us collectively.
Lisa: Thank you, Simon.
