Resources
Episode Transcript
Lisa: So Sarah, maybe you could start by telling listeners a little bit about the focus of your PhD and the kinds of organizations that you’ve chosen to research and I guess why now? What is sort of compelling you to dive into this at this stage?
Sarah: That’s a good question Lisa. I’ve had a career in organizational leadership having undertaken a range of executive roles, mainly in small to medium enterprises. And having spent the last couple of years really about organizations, I think we all know what isn’t working. I also have confidence—though I’m confident that we can govern organizations better. And I take seriously that much quoted statement from Einstein that says “we can’t solve our problems with the same thinking we used to make them.” So that says to me looking and trying to tweak the current system and expecting transformation will not lead to a massive change.
So I started my inquiry by really taking a very big perspective, which is the challenges of a thing called the Anthropocene epoch. The Anthropocene, while it’s a contested idea, calls for humans to operate with greater awareness of Earth’s life-supporting complex and interrelated systems. So going from that really, really big millennial perspective, I thought: are there any forms of governing that appear to think systemically, that think holistically? And in that inquiry, I found non-hierarchical organizations. And in doing that, I also came across a number of different approaches for how to create a self-organizing non-hierarchical organization, such as Teal, Holacracy, Sociocracy, etcetera. But really, I’m not so much interested in advocating any of those particular technologies. I’m more interested in what’s happening in the organizations that have adopted a horizontal structure. So that was my starting point.
Lisa: And you’ve picked four examples of non-hierarchical organizations, is that right?
Sarah: Yes. Well, “pick them” is an interesting word. I asked a number of my networks around the planet for organizations they would recommend as being confident in their horizontal structure. And I was actually amazed, Lisa, at how hard it was to find organizations. One of them, the Enspiral Foundation, was recommended to me by someone in the UK, and they didn’t know them—they just heard of them. So that was one: the Enspiral Foundation based in Wellington, but very much a global network.
And then there was the Sustainable Economies Law Center in Oakland, California. One very local to me here in Melbourne in Australia is Friends of the Earth Melbourne, and I’d known them for a number of years and was familiar with their different way of organizing. And the fourth one was the Pachamama Alliance in San Francisco, and that organization I also have had a long-term relationship with as a donor and also a participant in their work. So I knew some of their journey as well.
But it was very difficult to find organizations that really were involved and doing this. And some of the ones that might seem like they were or would naturally be non-hierarchical actually still were adopting very traditional structures. I should say I’m also focusing my attention on nonprofit organizations who have a commitment, a mission for social, political, legal, and environmental change because I was interested in that. I suppose the juxtaposition or the conference between what the mission is for the world, what we’re trying to change as an organization, and then how we structure ourselves and in our relationships with staff and stakeholders.
Lisa: I’m really curious to know more about what some of your findings have been around. How does a non-hierarchical way of organizing or governance structure—how does that support organizations like NGOs or organizations in general be more sort of holistic and aware of the ecosystem in which they’re operating?
Sarah: I think supporting the work of many organizations, whether they be for-profit or not-for-profit, to become non-hierarchical, there are some wonderful thinkers who are creating models for us that help us understand possible pathways to our transformation. And the work of Otto Scharmer and Jean Gebser are two of my favorites. I go to their work to find a sense of where we might be going. But then I look at the organizations and I think of how I work in organization. We don’t necessarily hold those models. Where we’re in practice, we tend to be habitual and pragmatic as well as responsive to things outside of ourselves, and constrained by our community, our particular culture. So part of this research really is about noticing the lived experience of the non-hierarchical organization and then reflecting back to the work of Otto Scharmer or Jean Gebser. And I’m beginning to feel that maybe non-hierarchical organizations might contribute to creating a healthy, peaceful, and just world.
Lisa: So Sarah, I know you’ve intentionally used some creative tools and perhaps a different approach in the research and methodology for your PhD. Can you say a little bit about what some of those creative tools were and what the rationale behind using different research tools was?
Sarah: Creative tools really excite me, Lisa, and having a background in education as well as in leadership means that I’ve worked with and see how groups and children particularly—how children create play and come to new understandings. So I wanted to bring tools that bring lightness into my methodology and to open us up beyond just thinking cognitively and feeling anxious about making the right answer.
There are a number of elements to creative processes, and I think there are some keys if anyone’s thinking of engaging with them. Firstly, they need to be experiential. They want to take us beyond our intellectual engagement and amplify the space between a finished meaning being made. So we want to create time for us to make new connections, new stories, and see metaphors emerge that we may not have thought existed.
Often processes include some sort of artifact or a physical embodiment—standing up, moving—even if it’s standing up and moving from one side of the room to another, that physical movement can change a sense of the room, ourselves, our relationship with other people. And bringing this into an organizational context for me was very important because governance is pretty serious, and organizational leadership—we often forget to play, we forget to laugh, and many organizations don’t have a lot of humor in the boardroom. I was very satisfied to see many of the—well, in fact all four organizations expressing a lightness of being in their governance practices.
Igniting our imaginations and our emotions actually brings us to our heart, to our feelings, and governance for me has been something I felt passionate about. Working in organizations, we want the best outcome, we want things to happen, and when they don’t, we often feel upset, concerned. And all of those water-cooler conversations tend to be less productive if that’s the case. So bringing experiential activities into the interview really gave an opportunity for participants to play, yes, and also to maybe find different connections.
One process I call the “poetics of found objects.” Here we engage with an object, just a random, fairly uncurated object, and that object will call forth our creative interpretation and response. Everyday objects such as a rock will have a feeling. We can pick it up, we can move it around in our hands. We sort of engage with it. Just through that action, it stimulates ideas and images.
In my research interviews, I invited people to put marks on paper, Lisa. That’s meant to be a non-stressful way of—saying “drawing,” people often feel quite anxious as soon as you show an empty piece of paper and pencils—and I invite them to illustrate the dynamics of their organization, the governance, the energy, how it flows, where decisions were made, where decisions got stuck, whatever came to mind. And I became entranced in the way this opened up new metaphors about the organization’s experience and that person’s experience in the organization. It led us into some very rich conversations.
One person, for example, imagined their organization as a rainforest. Within that metaphor, every part of the organization had value, an intersecting role, seasonal change. There was an element of decay, renewal, seeking the light—lots of interesting things. Theoretically, this is described as a formative moment when we draw, and in that moment, our unconscious and subconscious perceptions, such as our memories and our connections, emerge. That’s why these creative methodologies are particularly powerful. If we stay in our usual cognitive-focused intellectual mind, that sort of free flow won’t occur.
So I found that in the parts of my conversations with people where we played through drawing or through selection of images—I suppose more surprising depth, surprising ideas for the interviewee and myself emerged. Images are used as potent weightiness in marketing, on the television, film, and also in research. I’ve used a collection of postcards as stimulus sometimes, and with these four organizations I used the Motherpeace Tarot deck, which were designed in 1981 by Vicki Noble and Karen Vogel.
These cards, if you’re familiar with tarot cards, there are 78 cards which encompass the human life journey. So the cards are very powerful in their archetypal resonance. They also—this Motherpeace card set was designed to be feminist, to represent a diverse perspective of sexuality, of racial types, skin colors, as well as being full of magical and mythical symbols, which inspired people and also excited them and made them laugh.
Lisa: Yeah, I love that. I think it kind of circles back to your point earlier about Einstein’s quote that we’re not going to solve those problems with the same thing that created them in the first place. And I think it makes sense then to look at the very way that we study or research other organizations to learn about them and in order to, you know, create new models of our own. So I love that you’re helping the organizations that you researched to look at their organizations through different metaphors and creative tools and kind of tapping into whole-body wisdom, I guess. It makes total sense, and I think it makes sense in terms of contributing to helping the wider population, yeah, access something about what is it that these people are doing differently and how can we start to think about organizations in a more holistic and systemic way. And part of that starts with how we look at them. It’s been like the whole Schrödinger’s cat thing, that the nature of how we observe things and how that influences what we take away from it.
Sarah: Absolutely. And I’ve found very interesting parallels. If we look in society, we have our mainstream organizations which are hierarchical, and then we’ve got these small, small outlier groups that are exploring different models. The same applies for academic research. Mostly it’s very, I suppose, intellectually focused, having to be rational, linear, argued in an intellectual manner with a lot of facts and data. I have a lot of facts and data, but I’ve gathered them in a different way, substantiating the traditional ways with other creative ways. And again, I’m part of a group of outliers. We’ve existed for many decades, trying to bring different ways of thinking into academe that are going to, I suppose, speak more to the whole person, speak more to social change, intellectual change, and create new systems, education systems. So yes, very connected. It’s not—this sort of research is not separate from the community I’m wanting to understand better.
Lisa: So what are some of the examples then, if you could share with our listeners, that you came across in these organizations? What are some practical examples of things that they are doing differently in these non-hierarchical ways of organizing?
Sarah: I think one of the most impactful examples of difference is the idea that everyone would be paid the same amount in the organization. Both Friends of the Earth Melbourne and the Sustainable Economies Law Center adopt that policy. If there is a pay increase, the group decide whether the organization can do it, should do it, when and how. Here we just imagine that for a moment—it eliminates the need to compete with your peers, with your co-workers, to move up the hierarchy to succeed and to earn more. So that’s a pretty profound difference.
A second one is more than a practice. It’s actually philosophies, and that’s a commitment to transparency. A number of technological tools exist now to really assist this and make it possible. One such tool is Loomio, which is a decision-making platform, and that facilitates the global participation and asynchronous decision-making used by the Enspiral Foundation. And they’ve a lot of conversation about the value of something like asynchronous decision-making, particularly for people who don’t operate as well in a group situation, people who might be more introverted or might require time to consider their decisions outside the intensity of a meeting, and so that’s been seen as very valuable for a number of organizations.
The commitment to transparency also shows up in an open-source approach to sharing policies and constitutions. Enspiral, the Sustainable Economies Law Center, and a larger network of organizations involved in the U.S. called the Not-for-Profit Democracy Network work together to share their information so that this community of practitioners can strengthen and develop further. This approach unpacks the various tasks of management and leadership and effectively separates them from the personality, which is usually where organizations—they see the leader as a personality rather than a role.
Another practice I found was common to all four organizations was integrating everyday processes that helped to develop the human skills of each person in the organization. Words like trust, care, love, belonging, community, and family were used frequently when I ask people the qualities that characterize their engagement together. And I think this really underlines the effectiveness of these organizations.
One extraordinary conversation that emerged in each of the organizations in a different way, depended on what was floating around, that the particular time I walked into it, were conversations around power—unpacking power, understanding power. It might be power related into gender, power related to roles, and being prepared to talk. Not maybe as part of the everyday organizational “got to make decisions, move our projects on,” but having conversations from time to time to understand power.
The four organizations I worked with, of course, were all in colonial countries—Australia, New Zealand, and North America. And these organizations are very willing to understand: what is the impact of being brought up within a colonized country? How do we become aware of how we perpetuate colonizing, particularly if we’re white and male, or white and female in a different way, but there’s relationships with people who have less privilege than ourselves? So that conversation was alive and possible. And the things that I really noticed was that those conversations were undertaken without people becoming upset or offended. They might take time to process or not be ready to continue to talk about it, but people took responsibility for their learning and engagement.
Lisa: So it’s really interesting because you started to touch on, you know, those kinds of conversations about positional power and self-awareness. What are some of the other human skills that you found these organizations were conscious about developing that, you know, other organizations or people could learn from? Like, what skills from a human and relational perspective do you think are important to cultivate in order to work in more non-hierarchical ways?
Sarah: The human skills really speak to a major difference that I observed in a non-hierarchical organization, which is the commitment to interior work. By that, I mean, you know, me work, or you work, Lisa, on the things that you react to, becoming, I suppose, more self-aware of who we are and how we are. And that’s a pretty big change from an ordinary organization where really our interior self is our own business.
But here where we’re bringing more of ourselves to work, Otto Scharmer would say he sees an example of an organization moving from a state of separation to one of integration, of people moving from separation to integration. So here are some of the things that I observed that these organizations need.
One of them was to sit together in circle, which is a very important non-hierarchical symbol in its structure. There’s no edges there. But to sit in circle together daily—might be over lunch, in meetings—but there was a sense of meeting together. And there’s a lot of conversation about listening. This skill of listening really is something that has to be cultivated because within listening, we have the question of how we listen.
So I noticed people using a phrase like “I’m curious about,” and that instantly opened a conversation in a different way than a repartee where I’m having to defend myself more. There was also a sense of being able to listen to the center rather than to an individual speaker. Listening to the center might mean listening to what are we working on here, what is going to be the best outcome for the organization at this point? And so there were, there appear to be less attachment to my idea or my strategy.
I saw a lot of really, it seems like, impetus letting go once everyone had talked through an idea. And I think the process of decision-making, where you wind an idea through a number of iterations, different purposes to each iteration—sometimes to listen, sometimes to offer a concern, other times to vote, etcetera—that really gave people time. Time to listen to many aspects of each idea.
I also noticed patience, and sometimes this was a bit of a learning edge because it’s a hard one for all of us, but the patience for differences to exist, particularly if they’re philosophical. Patience in the onboarding process where you’re learning a new way of working and encompassing a number of different technological platforms, and not just a new way of working in an organization, like a radical shift for your expectations of yourself and your team.
And I think I’ve observed over the last eight months the Sustainable Economies Law Center and the Not-for-Profit Democracy Network, a lot of conversation about: how do we support people with onboarding and giving people buddies, giving people space to share where they need to get how this new system works?
One very important human skill is that of being able to sit in a circle and value that person who brings up an idea very different to your own. I think conflict is expressed slightly differently in a non-hierarchical organization. Firstly, it’s able to be more upfront, and if you are received with curiosity, then my different perspective won’t be seen as something to be attacked or destroyed. You’ll be seen maybe as an opportunity to listen to something that might give us an idea of something we need to attend to, a new pattern, or an opportunity for our organization to respond to in a very proactive and beneficial way.
Lisa: So what are some of the shadow sides and the challenges that you encountered when observing these organizations in this kind of non-hierarchical way of working?
Sarah: I’d just like to start and give you a sense of my sense of what shadow is. Shadow work involves becoming aware of the parts of our organizational self that we are unable to know. So it’s a bit of a conundrum to start with. How do we get underneath to even know what it is that we’re unconscious about?
At the group, the goal of bringing shadows into the light is the insights and the new opportunities and the great power that comes through integration. Shadows aren’t necessarily negative. They are really just unconscious. And because they’re unconscious, because they’ve been put outside the sense of “this is who we are,” they can be emotionally strong trigger points. And I think that’s what I’ve found with the organizations in different ways.
And I suppose the context we have to think about a non-hierarchical organization is: where does a non-hierarchical organization fit with the dominant hierarchical system it’s part of? Because it has to exist within this world. It has to make money. It has to keep on growing. It has to communicate itself when it’s slightly weird.
One thing that came up fairly consistently was a sense of unease or just putting to the side the whole issue of money and marketing yourself. And it was particularly for some NGOs—it can be seen as a bit of a mucky thing, you know. You can be contaminated by that terrible stuff. Yet money is needed to function in society. That was one aspect of money.
Another aspect of money was: how do we communicate our benefits when we are so different? Is there a clear way that we can say “invest in this,” even though—or “donate your money to this,” even though it doesn’t look and feel the same way? So developing a way of selling the value of the structure, it felt a bit like a challenge because it’s something that might be—if you’re making a transition from hierarchy to non-hierarchy, it’s something that takes time.
Another shadow that definitely emerged was a fear of hierarchy. Because, of course, by hierarchy is the opposite to—in some ways. And so what do we do when there are natural hierarchies?
One thing that was a very interesting shadow, again, this was consistent, was the question of founders. And this issue didn’t emerge with the founder themselves. They were usually unaware of it being concerned. It more emerged as a sense of concern or worry about—what would happen when that founder moved on? And so it really showed up that the visionary leadership of the founder still impacts in a non-hierarchical environment. I think that one’s got a lot more to be explored, and I think there are others also starting to see that as a bit of a thread. This is definitely a process, Lisa, of shifting from hierarchy to non-hierarchy because we’ve all been so well trained in hierarchy. And we can’t help but look at that person who was the founder, who told so much knowledge, passion, and vision. It’s very easy to project our hopes and fears onto that person. And then shadow emerges.
Another area of shadow, which really marks the horizontal organization, is the issue of responsibility and accountability, particularly when we look at the power of relationship between these people in these organizations. Giving feedback without the protection of hierarchy and without damaging those relationships emerged as a challenge. I think this is a challenge for personal skills and harks back to the importance for human skills. But also it shows up the importance of collective agreements about deliverables with projects and tasks, and of course for even greater clarity than in a hierarchy or interpersonal boundaries.
The competition and winning is a way of approaching the world that we’ve all been brought up to excel at. In school and possible, and we’ve been nurtured and rewarded to compete and to win. So in a non-hierarchical environment, those qualities of winning can be banished as “that’s not us.” But then there’s a deficit because we also need to celebrate—celebrate successes and collectively share the success. So that’s another, I think, a learning edge or a tension for some non-hierarchical organizations.
Finally, there have been very interesting conversations I was party to about the bringing into visibility the invisible work that was often undertaken by women. Now, this might be things like ensuring the catering is in place for that event, hosting people as they enter the space, not opening the conference or the symposium, but just that the welcoming details of time management, following up, soothing and smoothing people when there’s some sort of disruption.
And Enspiral have been very strong on having these conversations, as have SELC and Friends of the Earth Melbourne that I witnessed. So there is a collective approach to “let’s clean up the space together” or “hand in a conscious way, I’ve been carrying all of these small details. Over to you now,” from the woman to the man. And that’s been really interesting. And I know that some very, I suppose, humble and willing responses from the men really acknowledging what is held in that multitasking care work that is undertaken by women. So that felt like quite a profound central point of shifting and the possibility of moving towards gender equality.
Lisa: Yeah, that’s so interesting. I love your framing about the shadow and bringing the shadow into the light, and that it’s not necessarily something bad, it’s just something unconscious. And making it visible means that we can start to talk about it in the open and make different choices. So I hear some really familiar patterns as well there about accountability and responsibility and a self-managing organization. How do you do that without reverting to the sort of top-down command and control style of working or leadership that we so want to avoid? And at the same time, how can we become aware of our allergies to anything that resembles a hierarchy or kind of coercion and actually embrace some of the aspects of, of that, or integrate those aspects of those worldviews, I guess that are important? Like celebrating successes or, you know, recognizing when someone has kind of influence or leadership and it’s emerged in an organic way and making that visible and transparent.
Sarah: Absolutely. And I think even though we weren’t going to talk about it, I just want to say a little tiny thing about language because I think that fits into it because our words are so much part of our culture. And we’ve talked about these organizations being outliers from the mainstream. Having some consciousness about the words we use helps us transition our organizational culture.
And I wanted to tell you a story from last night. I went to a dinner party and I was talking about my research, and one person said, “Oh, come on, I don’t think human beings want to work like that. I think we need to have someone to make the hard decisions. And not everyone has the same personality, the personality of the leader. Without leaders, we’re going to have anarchy. Who’s going to keep control?”
And I found that so interesting because my experience with these case study organizations is that there is so much order. There’s space for things to emerge, and there’s great flexibility, but the structure is incredibly clear and well understood by everyone. So horizontal organizations are not leaderless. The difference is all people are nurtured as leaders. All people are empowered even though they won’t do the same thing. They won’t be drawn to take the same role or tasks. They have the ability to participate in decision-making. The constitution provides the guidelines to inform decisions and behavior. It’s not up to an individual, a leader to make those decisions.
Lisa: Yeah, that’s really interesting. I hear that a lot, that people think it’s fantasy for people to work without managers or having someone to lead them. And I do think so much of that is our conditioning that we’re sort of unconscious to. But I do think that’s one of the challenges is sort of unlearning some of those ways, ways of being. What would you say is the greatest challenge for organizations who are wanting to transition into non-hierarchical ways of working?
Sarah: Lisa, I think there are three, if you’ll allow me to be so indulgent. One is—two of them are related to capacity building because I think that’s the biggest challenge. We need new capacities for a new organization. So the first is to commit to the transformative culture, to doing the work on the inside and to develop the skills to see collective patterns. We haven’t had to see things in patterns. We’ve focused on too minute-type rather than the whole. So that’s a whole level of skill.
Each of my case study organizations have committed to creating reflective spaces to facilitate their continued learning and transformation. That can be a regular monthly working on the group, and for many of them, they also have an annual retreat that might be a week, a number of days that may be facilitated and have particular themes. And of course, taking time out even for non-hierarchical organizations committed to growth can be resistant, like, you know, regular exercise or a healthy eating program. But everyone reported the value and noticed when they did less of that sort of reflective time. So that was a very important part of capacity building outside the deliverables of day-to-day work.
The second part of capacity building is bringing emotion and imagination into work through play and embodied activity. There are so many creative ways of engaging ourselves. Try drawing movement and as I’ve described, using objects. It was great to see the Sustainable Economies Law Center mob getting out their pens and starting to use that sort of storytelling. And if you’re ever stuck for an idea, just ask a child under 12 for their assistance, and they’ll give you a bundle of great ideas.
One thing I haven’t mentioned that was very much part of the transition was having time for conscious repair and healing. I talked at the beginning about the disengagement that has been documented about people working in traditional organizations. There is a sense of brokenness about the system, and to change a brokenness, there has to be healing and rebuilding of trust in the organization’s trust that we can really say what’s important to us without being penalized and also trust for us to learn how to participate differently, but also to unlearn dominating behaviors that have been previously rewarded in hierarchy and in organizations where extracting the most from employees is the way of working.
So we really—we need to have intelligently facilitated opportunities to heal from the accumulated traumas hierarchy, to build a sense of safety in the group and really in ourselves. I think finally, to move societies beyond extraction and exploitation is a massive shift. If we’re going to start to regenerate our organizations impacting on the environment, it takes time, patience, nurturing, feeding. We also have to have a belief and a sense of a vision that this vibrant human sharing economy can be achieved. So I think there’s a good dose of faith as well.
Lisa: Thank you, Sarah.
