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Episode Transcript
Lisa: So Ravi, welcome to the Leadermorphosis podcast, take two. Thanks for being here. I thought, like, because you’re such a multifaceted person, maybe you could describe for listeners who don’t know you: what is it that you do? How do you describe what you do and who you are?
Ravi: Yeah, great, great question. Well, I always start this with going back to my parents because I owe a lot to them for who I am today. So I like to say that I am a child of hippie environmentalist parents who was born in Brazil in the deep countryside. I had the privilege to grow in contact with nature and having parents who since my early childhood exposed me to the most amazing social technologies.
As any good teenager, at some point I rebelled against my parents and decided to study to become a computer network engineer. My mom would cry and question why did I choose to do that. And eventually she actually convinced me I should focus on my talent as a guitarist and composer. So in the middle of the process, I gave up on this idea of network engineering and decided to dedicate my energy to music.
And with music, I have traveled the world and discovered my passion for facilitation, collaboration, social design. Well, as you can see, I’m curious about many things. Today I am a digital nomad who has traveled the world for eight years with lots of curiosity about everything related to collaboration.
I like to see myself as a multi-potential being. Well, actually, everyone is a multi-potential being for me, but I decided to embrace this idea that I don’t need to super-specialize in anything in my life. And in my few years of existence, I had an intense relationship with organic agriculture, bio-architecture, carpentry, and so on. And more recently with Jungian psychology—I started a post-graduation on that matter.
I like to brew my own beer. I like to grow mushrooms. I also love cooking. But for the last years, my energy has been invested in organizational design with a focus on self-management. This is basically the great umbrella that brings together some of the themes that I’m most interested in: things like network and complexity science, systems thinking, systems mapping, ecology, sociology, psychology, and of course philosophy.
So well, if I would have to give a name to my favorite persona, the way I would present myself to myself and to others, I would say that for the moment, because this is always changing, I am a social activist. I interact with social systems looking for breaches to foster win-win-win relationships, and I like to think that I do that with a hacker approach because I always find non-linear ways to provoke intentional change, or at least I think I do.
The activism part is related to my work with the corporate world, where I try to help organizations to work without bosses, and I also try to help bosses to distribute power through liberating structures that are going to actually enable collaboration. Well, I think this is basically the temporary story I tell about myself to me and to others.
Lisa: Yeah, it’s really good. It’s almost as if it’s so articulate, it’s like you’re reading from a script except you’re not because I can see that you’re just speaking from the heart.
Ravi: So you’ve much better described what you do than I ever describe what I do. I did have the chance of rehearsing this script in my last five years so…
Lisa: Yeah, well that’s good. [Laughter]
So what is energizing you at the moment? What’s your kind of latest project or projects that are giving you energy?
Ravi: Well, right now I am an active collaborator at this networked organization which is called Target Teal. I act as a consultant there, and basically we do what I just described—we help organizations to work without bosses and not just leaving this empty space where leadership is now distributed into liberating structures, but also helping these bosses to find their own place in this kind of working environment, right? So they’re not anymore the kind of people who are just approving things or giving feedback and telling how much people we were in the next team, master or this kind of stuff. So this is really what it—where my energy is at the moment.
I am also—I mean, I am always divided—working with social matter, so social subjects and with social institutions, usually governmental ones or NGOs. This is what I like to do with my free time, and I try to subsidize my work with my social work, working with corporates. [Laughter] Those who have more, they will finance those who have less, and this is basically where my energy is at now.
So I am trying to deliver this thing that we call self-management to all sorts of organizations. And so I have been working a lot with hybrid systems where you have organizations which are still operating in a hierarchical setting, but they have a part of it running on self-management and experiencing and seeing if they’re going to make the transition or not.
Another thing that I’m doing a lot now is working with systems mapping, and this is really embedded in my whole work with organizational design. I love maps. I am totally in love with them. Since I decided I was going to travel the world, I fell in love with all sorts of maps, and I realized that they are really useful as well to deal with complex environments and social systems and this kind of stuff.
So my geek capabilities that I have acquired studying to be a network engineer, they’re being very well used now to systems mapping, where I usually involve people together and we do these participatory processes to absorb the systems where we are inserted in and to design experiments and interventions. This is basically where my energy is at the moment.
Lisa: I’m curious what you’ve been learning about working with hybrid organizations then. Like, how does it work? Because a lot of people share with me that they’re skeptical about whether that can really work, where you have like a maybe a hierarchical organization with self-managing system within it. So what have you learned about how to do that in a good way?
Ravi: Yeah, well, I don’t know if it’s in a good way. I am also very skeptical about it. What brings me to this field is, first, I don’t think we as people who are working to spread these working practices, I don’t think we should work only with those who are already converted.
Target Teal as a brand has developed a lot, and fortunately we have been calling attention from these orange organizations, let’s say, let’s put it like that. We have lots of them coming to us and asking for consultancy, this kind of stuff. And of course, my strategy, usually working with this kind of—in this kind of organizational setting is to make the person to give up on doing it.
So usually I try to scare them a lot like, “They will not be able anymore to centralize power if you—if you start playing the game, you gotta play by the rules,” and blah blah blah. And then after we do like a long process of shocking people and saying like, “This is not going to be easy, you got to know where you’re going, you’re putting yourself at…” then we start the thing, right?
And I have been experiencing lots of very interesting stuff. Lots of them makes me feel like completely depressed and not wanting ever again to work with this—in this kind of setting. But other aspects of it really gives me the energy I need to keep going.
Like, for instance, I was working with a company—now it’s a company that works with education—and we were implementing self-management in an interior HR thing with 10 people. Okay, it’s a huge company, like 2,000 employees, and we were only in the HR, and they were short on people. They were only 10; they were supposed to be 15.
And my sponsor there was basically the manager, the HR manager, right, the director there. And what happened is he was like a complete enthusiast. He came and he did all of our courses. He was reading all the books. He was asking for individual mentorship and this kind of stuff. I was really enjoying working with this guy.
But then they used this evaluation process that you probably know, which is called a nine box, where they just put the people in boxes and say how they are performing against management. Oh my gosh, it’s horrible. And this guy, he was fired. So my sponsor was fired in the middle of the process, and I still had like two months to go.
And what happened is he was replaced right away. There was a new manager there, and she’d never heard about self-management. So yeah, that was really, really crazy. And we had a meeting—me, her, and the other guy that was fired. We explained her what was happening and so on.
We were already doing money pile for them to decide like what would be their bonus on remuneration in the next semester. We were already doing this kind of stuff. And the girl arrives, and—well, what are we going to do now? That was really challenging. I am actually still working with them. I explained to her, and she was impressively open to this. And she was like, “Okay, well, I have always been listening to this kind of stuff, but I’ve never experienced or actually seen it happening. So I think now it’s the time. Let’s take a look at it.”
And well, yeah, she did keep sponsoring me and believing in the process. It was really nice because the first meeting she participated, there was an intern, this girl that I really love. This girl, she was like already a self-management geek from the start. I could already see it.
And this girl, she proposed a policy that was saying how they would manage their files and manage the internal knowledge in Google Drive. And she proposed the policy saying that the taxonomy that should be used and so on. And this girl, the manager, she entered and she saw the intern proposing a policy in the first meeting.
So it was like, “Okay, I’ve never heard or never saw anything like that working, and I come here, I am the boss, and I come here and there is an intern in my team proposing a policy. Like, how does that work?”
So this was really cool, and this is the kind of stuff that gives me the energy to keep going—when I see like an intern making a proposal, or when I see someone who is holding in great power having a proposal blocked with an objection, for instance. This is what gives me the energy to continue.
I don’t think that in this company, for instance, I don’t think we are going to deliver self-management to the rest of the organization, especially because this transition was so daunting, was so crazy that I don’t have energy to keep going. Like, after changing my sponsor in the middle of the process, I do feel that the process was compromised with that, and we didn’t—we weren’t able to actually do things with the depth that we expected we were going to, right?
But at the same time, going back to your question—well, I see a place where people, they didn’t have anything explicit about their worlds. The only thing they had was a job description. The job description never changes, and people there are doing lots of stuff which is not there in the job description. It’s not explicit in anywhere, right? And now it is.
So they are all working from roles, and even if they are still working in a hierarchical setting, it’s a lot easier now for these employees to come and say, “Hey, this is not expected from me in my roles. I’m not going to do that. Sorry, I don’t recognize your requests as being connected to the purpose of my role.” So this, for me, is already a huge difference, like, usually this person would be pretty much forced to accept whatever requests, right?
Another thing is they actually can build policies together. It’s not centered anymore in the figure of the manager, right? So they can actually establish processes that are going to be implemented at least in their own circles. Maybe they cannot do it in their whole organization.
Another thing is they are not working in small groups of teams anymore. They have a General Circle meeting where everyone is meeting and exchanging ideas and giving transparency about everything that is happening in HR, right?
And so this is the kind of feedback that I hear from them, from the people that I have been helping in this kind of hybrid ecosystem. That they—although it’s kind of a fairy tale, like if we say that we are going to run self-management in a hybrid scenario, I do agree with that. I don’t think this is real self-management as I see it and as I envision. But I do see that we are already offering more autonomy. We are offering clear expectations about the work that people should do. We are offering clear pathways to evolve agreements and clear ways to actually propose agreements because this usually doesn’t—it doesn’t exist in the organization. It’s just policies and policies of 60 pages that no one reads.
So yeah, I am totally skeptical about it, but again, I don’t think we should work only with those who are already converted. And I do think that what we have discovered in the last 70 years of self-management in sociocratic-inspired models can give great benefits to any kind of organization, in my opinion. Of course, it will always be adapted because this is the nature of this kind of approach.
But I think when you compare with a system where people they are being being treated as machines and or as clogs in a clockwork, this really gives some sort of refreshment. And some sort—I would risk here and even say that we, by offering these pathways and by offering a way of having clear and explicit agreements, we are actually bringing more psychological safety to the working environment. So people, they can actually say no. So they can actually make proposals, they can take action, and so on and so on.
And another thing that we do a lot in our work specifically—we really like to create spaces where people, they can bring emotional tensions. So we acknowledge that it’s important to have a distinction between the organization and the human space, but we really create a space to bring these emotional tensions, right?
And I have been seeing so many crazy things, like people using these spaces to talk about how they are being abused, to talk about how they are completely depressed in their working environment and this kind of stuff.
So yeah, more important for me than having an organization which is running in a hundred percent in self-management scenario is actually bringing love and care to people and actually helping them to find the pathways that they need to evolve their work and to adapt. I think this is my take on this.
Lisa: Yeah. I love that. I’m really inspired by what you say about, “Let’s not only work with the converts,” and that the journey is more important than the destination, ultimately. It’s what I hear.
Ravi: Great, yeah. I love that one.
Lisa: And I think you were starting to allude to, I think, a social technology that I know you’ve been part of developing and playing around with, which has come out of Target Teal called Organic Organization, or O2, which is, as I understand it, kind of a fork of sociocracy and holocracy. And I was really excited when you first told me about this, and I think listeners will be really curious to hear, you know, how is it different from sociocracy and holocracy?
Ravi: Yeah, yeah, well, this is—I am trying to write this article differentiating the three for two years now, so…
Lisa: No pressure then.
Ravi: It is so, so subtle that sometimes I need to write like 10 pages to explain this subtlety. But yeah, let’s go with that.
So Organic Organizations is basically, as you said, it’s a fork, a lot more of holocracy than actual sociocracy. But I mean, we can look at holocracy as a fork of sociocracy. So we have the basic principles there, right? We have circles, we have consent decision-making, we have elections. And as we come from a more holocratic approach, we also have roles. It’s everything role-based, right?
First thing which is different from holocracy, for instance, is that in holocracy, the default approach is that you have a different meeting for operations and a different meeting for governance. And here we have everything in the same meeting, but we have different modes.
I like to think about the modes as a different momentum of the meeting or a different head that you were using, like the Bono’s six thinking hats for different processes. So we use the same process of tactical review of holocracy, for instance, and we call this the review mode. Our operational mode is called synchronize because we understand that here we are synchronizing effort, operational efforts. We call our governance meetings the adapt mode because you are adapting the structure, right?
And then we have another meeting mode, which is the care mode, which for me is the biggest difference between O2, Organic Organizations, and holocracy and sociocracy. This would be the biggest difference.
For me, what Brian brought with holocracy, when he brings this idea that we must acknowledge the differentiation between the organizational space and the tribal space, and the soul is not the role, and so on. This, for me, was a great “aha.” It’s something that was really missing for me in sociocratic models in general.
But when we started trying out with this—wow, it didn’t work well because, especially in Brazil, like people in Brazil, they are Latin, and they are very, very, very emotional. So like, if you go and say, “Hey, from which role are you bringing this?” and “No, you’re not bringing from any role, so I’m not going to process your attention,” this is never going to work, you know? People are just going to scream. And what?
So yeah, it was a group of women actually, and I think it’s very important to say that because I mean, who else would bring this kind of intervention to organizational design? We need women to do that, right? So they started developing what they would call the “emotional backlog.” [Laughter] And they started using this a lot.
So you had Nara Hood, Andrade, and Tanya building this, and then they started sharing this with people from Target Teal. And when they started developing O2 as a social technology, they—I wasn’t part of Target Teal at that moment—they decided to actually integrate the care mode as something explicit. Because if we acknowledge that this tribal space is also important, we want to make explicit that we have in our meta agreements, which is equivalent to the constitution of holocracy, we have this explicitly laid down in a way that anyone can invoke a care mode at any moment, right?
And what we do in the modes, we also learned a lot with liberating structures and Sociocracy 3.0, taking this idea from Christopher Alexander of the pattern language. And what we do is that you have these different meeting modes, and then you use different patterns inside the modes, right?
So inside the care mode, for instance, you could use a Zag Forum, you could use restorative circles, you could use Imago dialogue, you could use the non-violent communication deck cards and play emotional poker game with them, and so on and so on. So the facilitator will be able to choose the different patterns it’s going to be applied in specific mode.
This is something which is very different from holocracy because holocracy is known for having very rigid facilitation and for having like very specific expectations about how things are going to be facilitated. And in O2, it’s the person’s authority. If you were facilitating, you’ll decide.
That’s usually one of the things that people who come from holocracy, they say like, “Oh my gosh, you are so smooth here, it’s so much easier now.” And at the same time, it’s not as loose as it is in sociocracy, because in sociocracy, you don’t actually have like a constitution. You have this thing which is being passed over generations, that you will go and learn in a mouth-to-mouth basis with people.
Of course, there are many books written about it, but it’s not as pragmatic as it was proposed by holocracy or even as O2, all right? So yeah, I mean, you have a lot more freedom to improvise than you would having holocracy as a facilitator, but it’s a lot more structured than what you would have in sociocracy. And so this is a way of putting things, right?
And well, what else can I say about it? Different from sociocracy, we also use criteria—validation criteria for objections. We inspired ourselves pretty much in the same criteria of holocracy. We found that that is very important because one of the things I felt—I started working mainly with sociocracy, and one of the things I felt was really different is that first, in sociocracy, in the Sociocratic Circle Method, not in S3, you don’t have the concept of tensions, right?
And for those of you who are listening and maybe you are not aware of that, a tension, it’s a very common concept for who works with S3 or holocracy, which means basically the difference between the reality you perceive now and the reality you desire, right? And everything that we do in this kind of approach is stewarded by these creative tensions.
So with S3, they are filling the tensions and they must own their own tensions, they must make themselves responsible for the tensions and involve, engage other actors and look for pathways to navigate this tension by themselves. So if you bring a tension, it means you are going to take responsibility for it and you’re going to look for the ways to solve it, to navigate it with the help of the facilitator, right?
This doesn’t exist in sociocracy, and this, for me, was like the first major difference that I realized. And I saw how much this has an impact in this kind of work, because in a holocratic slash S3 slash O2 approach, we are always trying to connect the person with the tension that is being brought and trying to help the person to find the pathways to do that, while in sociocracy, there is absolutely no recommendation about this and nothing being talked about this at all. Like, you don’t even hear about the term “tension” unless it’s like in the general way that we talk about it, like “Oh, I’m a bit tense.” So this is a huge difference. We deal with tensions exactly in the same way that they do in holocracy.
One thing that I find very different is the way that we evolve the technology. Okay, so in O2, it’s an open source technology, and if you want to evolve it, we have developed these different pathways for doing so. And we don’t evolve the—our contract, our meta agreements if we don’t have empirical data to sustain what we are changing.
And when you look at the development of holocracy, of course there is a lot of empirical data there as well. But if you go on GitHub, you’ll see basically Brian making lots of comments and saying his concerns and looking for reactions from the community and so on. But he is automatically kind of doing the updates there, right? While here, we are asking for people that—you, anyone can propose changes. And if you want to propose a change, we are going to ask you to start first with what we call a patch.
So a patch, it’s an amendment that you can do to the meta agreements, and you can try it out for a while and see if it works. So for instance, right now I have a patch which is another meeting mode that I call the play mode. In play mode, we are not concerned about work, about operations, about governance. We are not concerned about talking about hard conflict situations. We are only concerned about playing. And so there, the facilitator or anyone else can propose all sorts of win-win games, preferentially the games that they are not competing—collaborative games, and they connect it and release play signals and so on and so on.
So this is something I am using in the organizations I work with as a patch in the meta agreement, where I changed and I add this new kind of meeting. I also have another patch that I’m using a lot, which is the exploration mode, because you know, often you have this scenario in meetings where sometimes people, they are not actually wanting to talk about operations or governance or even about feelings. They would like to explore themselves. They would like to talk freely and just, you know, bring—“Hey guys, I had an idea about this, and I would like to explore this with you. I don’t want to get anywhere with this. I don’t know what the tension is. I just want to, you know, explore this with you.”
So we created the Explorer mode for that, and we are experimenting this as a patch in many different organizations where we try it out, we gather empirical data, and then after a while, after we test it, we actually go there and propose in our GitHub a change to our meta agreements. And that’s what we also ask for people. If they want to propose changes to the social technology, they must first try it out, acquire empirical data, and then we change based on what they’re bringing and in the deliberation process between the people who belong to this O2 circle inside Target Teal.
Okay, so this is very different, in my opinion, on how the social technologies evolve. S3 is also kind of centralized on Bernhard and Lily and—oh my gosh, what is his name? James.
Lisa: James, yes.
Ravi: So yeah, it’s not—I wouldn’t say that—I’m not saying that they are centralized or anything. It’s just a different route for evolving a social technology. I fully admire the process of all of these other technologies as well, right?
There is another thing that we are trying as well, which is doing skins. Because sometimes this—I mean, we are getting all of this—we are all kind of gamers. We are getting these concepts from the games we play. And there is this idea that, you know, for some organizations, they will prefer to call the lead link an external link. They don’t want to have anything involving “leader” in their names. And sometimes they don’t want to call it an external link or a lead link. They want to call it the activator, you know?
And they want to call the representative an internal link, whatever. They want to change stuff, right? So we are gathering opinions from different organizations that we have been trying with, and—like, for instance, in WWF that we work with, we started building panda currency with them. And it’s the same meta agreements, but with a different skin. It completely changed to their own scenario.
Lisa: Holocracy in a panda.
Ravi: Yeah, I love it. Consensus-oriented, and we always joke with them, saying like, “Every time you guys make a decision by consensus, a panda dies.” So yeah, we want this kind of technology to spread, and we wanted to spread fast. So I don’t want you to learn a language because I—or me and my friends, we decided that these were supposed to be the names of that we use in the social technology.
No, go there and just change your names and bring it back to us because maybe you’re working inside a scenario, in a context that can help us to adapt the social technologies so we can expand it further, you know? So that’s what we have been playing with. You have this idea of patches, you have this idea of skins, and then there is this idea of build. Because if you take the normal meta agreements, the, let’s say, the pure meta agreements, and you start playing with overlapped patches into it, you have a different build, right?
Like, for instance, I am using a specific build now that I have already used with two different organizations, where I have the care mode, the play mode, and the exploration mode in the meta agreements. This is a different build than the original one, right? And yeah, this is the kind of approach we are trying to build.
So we are not centralizing the development in our own hands. We are encouraging people to experiment and not to follow the rules by the book. And I like to think that this is very different from similar social technologies, where they are usually a bit more centralizing in their own creators, and they’re a bit more prescriptive per se. Of course, I cannot say this about S3 because S3, it’s just a bunch of patterns there, and you decide what you do. But I would definitely say that this is the case when compared with holocracy. But I’m not saying that this is either better or worse. It’s just different.
Lisa: I’m curious to ask you, because as someone who is like a social technology nerd, do you think—do you think everything can be solved with governance? Because it sounds like—so because my hat is coming from, you know, I do a lot of trainings in skills and mindset shifts that I find are really helpful to develop and practice in order for self-management to work better, to be more conscious about how we’re showing up and things like that. But do you think—do you think that there’s a value in that, or do you think if you have a really good social technology like O2 with those different modes, that that takes care of a lot of that? Like, because you have a facilitator and patterns that sort of bring out those behaviors? Or do you think there is also something about, you know, our blind spots and sort of developing skills or kind of becoming aware of our assumptions and things like that?
Ravi: Oh yeah, we are getting to a very hot topic for me.
Lisa: Yeah.
Ravi: Well, no, definitely, I don’t think anything can be solved with a single anything. So let’s start from there. And then, you know, I have a lot of resistance with delivering only trainings. So usually my approach is, and this is the kind of request I receive the most and we receive the most as a consultancy organization, right? Especially in the end of the year where they need to burn their budgets. Then, you know, “We need trainings. We gotta use the budget from this year, or else we cannot use it in the next year. Please help us.” [Laughter] “Half a day, okay?”
So yeah, what I usually try to do there, I like to look at this kind of experiences in this kind of, you know, trainings and workshops and this kind of stuff. I like to look at this as rites of passages. It’s a moment where you bring everyone together and you build a very powerful container so you can start something. But if you only go there and you build this very powerful container and you do all of this ritual and then you leave, well, nothing is going to happen, obviously. This is what usually happens.
I have been giving trainings for 10 years now, and well, I can say from experience that the organizations that I didn’t stay there and I went back there after a while to ask, “Hey, did you do anything with that?” “We didn’t.” Of course.
So yeah, I think there is a thing on, you know, trying to raise awareness, to build a strong container, and to work directly in this mindset aspect. But I would say that working specifically, trying to change people’s mindset first, for me, this is not going to happen with trainings. We need something else to go there.
I think trainings and workshops, they’re very good to give a kickstart on this, to build the container, to make the ritual, and so on. And then we keep going. And then I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily about governance, but for me, if you only have a new worldview, a new mindset being brought, and you don’t have structures that are going to support this, it’s very unlikely that change is actually going to manifest, right?
So my approach for this, it’s usually—what I tell my clients is, “I don’t want to offer you a workshop and just get your money and go away. If we are working together, I would like to propose something that—okay, we do the workshops, but then we have a follow-up and we have an intense follow-up where I am going to be inside your organization, and we are going to design experiments together with these people. We are going to have mentorships and this kind of stuff.”
You know, so it’s not only about a workshop. It’s not only about a single experience. We use the experience as a leverage, as a way of building this container so we can keep going, you know?
But yeah, this is actually one of my biggest critics to the—to the world, to the consultancy world in general. Like, I think we can’t keep going with these ideas of workshops and trainings. But can’t we connect these trainings and workshops with something that is actually going to have an impact in the structure? Because if we only go there and offer like a two days immersion for some people in your organization and then we leave, I find it very hard to actually unfold into something.
Lisa: Yeah, that’s kind of music to my ears because I think for me, it’s like both and not either/or. That I, you know, I’m generally working in the world of skills and mindsets, sort of training and practice, but I’m doing that mostly with organizations that already have already done stuff with structures and processes, or, you know, I might connect them with or advise them on structures and processes because I think you need both.
And I’m not really attached to in which order you do it or how you do it, or with which social technology, or whatever, you know? But I think it’s it’s interesting. I just read a lot of absolutist opinions where it’s like, “It’s only about this,” or “It’s only about that,” and “It’s all about this,” or “It’s all about that.” So yeah, I think we’re on the same page.
Ravi: Nice. [Laughter]
Lisa: We are not going to fight.
Ravi: We would have to open a care mode for you.
Lisa: So you’re going back to Brazil soon, right? Because you’ve been, as you said, traveling for a while. What are your thoughts about that? Are you kind of bringing—going to be bringing everything that you’ve learned and applying it back in your homeland, or, you know?
Ravi: Yeah, well, it has been six years I am out of home, and I did learn a lot in this time. At the same time, I also feel that I have a lot more to learn in Brazil than to actually bring there because Brazil is like, it has always been the reference for me in terms of social technology development.
And I am very excited to be there again and to reconnect with all of these pioneers who are doing amazing stuff there. And I am now getting involved with organizations in Latin America like very, very, very big organizations.
Right now I’m working with an organization which is very well known. They’re called EnDev. It’s a huge corporation from the beverage market. And I’m also right now just about to close a contract with Coca-Cola that I never imagined I would work with, but they are actually up to doing a network transformation in whole of Latin America.
So I’m quite excited about this, and I’m happy to come back. So I would put it like, I don’t think I’m actually bringing something from here to there. I am kind of returning what I brought from there to here to the world or old world, back to Brazil, back to Latin America. See it more like that.
Lisa: Nice. Are there any—any social technology—social technologies or examples of progressive organizations that you would love for listeners to know about that they may be unaware of?
Ravi: You mean in Brazil or in general?
Lisa: In general and Brazil.
Ravi: Yeah, okay. Yeah, well, there is a movement I am very much interested now in this—in this movement of blockchain. And I have been questioning myself a lot, how is this whole blockchain thing going to have a dialogue with this whole self-management thing in the way that we know it today? And in the social credit inspired approaches and so on.
And I am doing amazing experiments now with a network called Seeds. I think Seeds, it stands for something like “sewing equitable something decentralized societies.” And it’s basically—they’re proposing like a cryptocurrency which rewards people for doing regenerative practices and acts, and they’re just getting born now.
And I am helping them with O2, bringing O2 there in some of the sub-movements that are there because it’s a huge thing. And I highly recommend that you all take a look at it. It’s—if you want to find it, just go at jointseed.com. It’s a very inclusive movement. I think everyone is still going to hear a lot about this.
And there are many, many, many challenges there on how we are going to propose a dialogue with a trustless system, which is the blockchain, and a completely trust-based system, which is the way that we work with self-management. So this has been very challenging, and I am totally excited about this. I hope I can share more stuff soon about it.
But well, what I can say so far is that inside this movement, there are many initiatives where they’re trying this kind of stuff, and I think we have a lot to discover there. So I’m most excited about ways of decentralized budgeting and remuneration in organizations by using this whole blockchain things. So yeah.
And then maybe I would also recommend, if you don’t know that, you would look for the Three Horizon University, which is from Tony Hudson. You can find them at h3uni.org. These people, they are offering amazing practices, like offering ideas of how can you take a complex subjects and map the complexity together in a participatory way with people, how you can design for better futures using specific approaches and this kind of stuff. I really enjoy their work. So these are more global, global movements.
And in Brazil, there is a lot of interesting stuff going on now. I would highlight the first participatory political mandate that we had in Natal in Brazil, which was led by a woman which is Henni Freitas. And they are using sociocracy in a very small town called Auto Paraízo to self-manage their political governance in the city.
I wanna dig more into it, but it’s something I heard about, and I was really excited about it. So I would also recommend that you check it. I think in SoFA (Sociocracy for All), you can find an interview directly with her, Henni Freitas, who did this.
Another global movement that I always spread is the Children’s Parliament, Women’s Parliament, and Neighborhood Parliament. This is something which was proposed actually in the 70s, and it’s quite alive nowadays. And they’re basically using something which is kind of sociocratic-inspired to build a parallel government in Kerala in India. And they already have more than one million people participating on this.
And in such a way that if you go to the town and you say that you have a problem and you need the police, they ask, “Did you go to the local station of your community first?” So they really created like a parallel governance system. And it’s very easy to find. You can also find an interview with Edwin on SoFA as well. Actually, I totally recommend Edwin as an interviewee here for Leadermorphosis as well. He’s a very good take.
Lisa: Thank you. Actually, that’s—it’s been on my radar for a while. That’s awesome. Thank you.
Well, we’re sort of wrapping up, sadly, even though I know we could talk for hours more. What sort of tips for the journey would you share with listeners who are exploring self-management or maybe they’re interested in playing around with O2, or…yeah. What would you share?
Ravi: Yeah, well, if you are interested in playing with organizational design and self-management, I would ask you to be very careful with the inferences that you make about the social systems that you will observe. Try not to replicate things that you have seen working somewhere else as if you could just make like a control-C, control-V.
I don’t know any organizational designer which is copy-pasting stuff in this kind of setting because it’s pretty much alive. So yeah, this would be my first advice.
And then, if you are inside an organization, a hierarchical organization, and you would like to experiment with this kind of stuff, I have good news for you: you don’t necessarily need permission from your bosses to start implementing experiments in your organization.
We actually have an approach for that which we call cultural hacking, where we try to help people to design interventions without permission in your organizations. So you can take a look at our resources. We have been writing a lot about this. We love to publish our social technologies in a way that anyone can have access to it without being present in our workshops and so on.
And if you want to learn more about O2, there is a section about it in our website targetteal.com/en. Then you go to the English version, and there you can read the meta agreement, which is—this is the social technology, it’s the meta agreements. And we also have a pattern library, patterns that you can use in different modes, meeting modes.
We have an e-book where you have a commented version of the meta agreements, and you can actually understand what is happening. Because if you only read the meta agreement, it’s a 10 pages document, and you will probably not learn by reading the meta agreements. It’s like when Brian says, “Don’t try to apply holocracy by reading the Constitution.” We would say the same for sure.
And oh yeah, and I hope that next year, probably in the—next year—I don’t know, depends on when you are listening to this. We are recording this in 2021. So in 2022, in the first semester, we want to launch the O2 Workshop in English. So you can also join us for that, go there subscribing our newsletter. And I think that’s it.
Lisa: Awesome. Thank you so much. I’m so excited to have had the chance to talk to you, and I just love your enthusiasm and your way of being. It’s like such a good example of how this stuff doesn’t need to be serious, you know, that it can be fun and playful and experimental. And you’re such an embodiment of that.
Ravi: Oh, thank you so much, Lisa. I’m totally—I loved that we were able to make a second take on it. I’m also, you know, very grateful for the invitation. I listen to this podcast a lot. So for me, it’s very funny to actually be talking with you, and this got me a bit nervous actually, like, “Damn, I’m listening to this like pretty much every day. I’m gonna be talking with Lisa.” So thank you for that. And wow, I hope this is just the beginning, and I see you in the next episode in other contexts.
Lisa: Yeah, thank you.
