
Miki Kashtan on the three shifts needed for self-managing organisations to thrive
...d a lot of concrete advice. Miki talks to me about what she believes are the three fundamental shifts that need to happen within us as humans and the systems that we're operating in, in order to collaborate in a self managing way. So it's a really deep conversation about navigating power, about mindset shi...more
...s that people lived in. So fundamentally, our structures are not designed to attend to needs. And if I want a really resilient, robust self managing system, sooner or later, it will need to realign itself with needs. Because otherwise, there comes a moment where it's like, wait a minute, we're self manag...more
...Lisa Gill: Yeah, that's so interesting, because so many people working in self managing systems, have this complaint and say to me: "the one thing we're really struggling with is, you know, how do we get people to take a shared ownership of the ...more

Aaron Dignan on being complexity conscious and people positive
...root of all the humanistic thinking about work. And then the complexity conscious was really more about the systemic understanding. So, you know, in systems theory, there are lots of different kinds of systems - simple systems, complicated, complex, chaotic, disordered, etc. We really, as a culture, think...more
...then the complexity conscious was really more about the systemic understanding. So, you know, in systems theory, there are lots of different kinds of systems - simple systems, complicated, complex, chaotic, disordered, etc. We really, as a culture, think about everything as complicated. So, you know, a wat...more
...ty conscious was really more about the systemic understanding. So, you know, in systems theory, there are lots of different kinds of systems - simple systems, complicated, complex, chaotic, disordered, etc. We really, as a culture, think about everything as complicated. So, you know, a watch is complicated...more

Frederic Laloux with an invitation to reclaim integrity and aliveness
... my own thinking. And just in my own life, just facing the fact that so much of what we do is deeply destructive. That the very basis of our economic system is an extractive system that does just irreparable damage to the planet. One way that I framed it at the beginning of the Coronavirus crisis was that...more
...st in my own life, just facing the fact that so much of what we do is deeply destructive. That the very basis of our economic system is an extractive system that does just irreparable damage to the planet. One way that I framed it at the beginning of the Coronavirus crisis was that the Covid virus seems t...more
...re we okay with that deep down?
I remember a conversation I had with a group of CEOs in Brazil… I was asking them, “Where are you participating in a system where you’re actually acting out of integrity?” And it’s so interesting because one of them was honest enough to say, “Frederic, I don’t even know wh...more

Bill Fischer and Simone Cicero on Haier and the entrepreneurial organisation
...cise Zhang Ruimin and put him in the same camp of this slightly outdated heroic archetype of a leader. But he has this lovely phrase about creating a system where everyone can be a CEO of themselves. And I’m interested in what your experience is of leadership more generally at Haier and how leadership eme...more
...look like elsewhere in the organisation? How is leadership encouraged? What does that look like? Do they have leadership training? Or do you design a system and leadership emerges?
S Cicero: Well, I think there is an interesting aspect, which is the constraint definition. And there’s a lot of leadership ...more
...y complex organisations, they’re mostly managed by constraints. And this is an expression of complexity in general. When you need to manage a complex system, you need to work by setting constraints so that you can flourish within certain directions that don’t, for example, create asymmetric risks. **So I ...more

Margaret Wheatley on leadership and Warriors for the Human Spirit
...ite naive, was that, people will just greet it with open arms and be very thankful for it. Because the paradigm of the new science of self-organising systems, which is another way of understanding self-managing systems - you can organise and get order without control - that was the fundamental 'aha' moment...more
... and be very thankful for it. Because the paradigm of the new science of self-organising systems, which is another way of understanding self-managing systems - you can organise and get order without control - that was the fundamental 'aha' moment for me when I was studying the new science. I mean, I still ...more
...s well as all possibilities. So I'm not interested in - I no longer hold the possibility that we can create change at that level of organisations or systems. I know, we can wake people up at the individual level. And that's where all evolution occurs. And that requires dedication. It requires commitment, ...more

Pasteur Byabeza on transitioning to self-management at Davis College
...Lisa Gill: Pastor, thank you for being here. I know that at Davis College you decided to use holacracy as a self management system. And I think many listeners of the podcast will be familiar with holacracy. But I think it would be really interesting if you could share with us wha...more
...anagement is worth trying. So the next step was then to test that hypothesis. And based on the feedback we received with the early success of the new system in pilot circles, everyone at Davis College, and Akilah, was invited to transition into holacracy. That's how we disbanded the global cancer. We did...more
...I guess, it'd be interesting to hear your experience personally. I know that in your current role, you have evolved into a role called in a holacracy system, a lead link, and you're the lead link of the Student Care Circle. So how has the experience been for you? What have you learned in that new role? Pa...more

Peter Koenig on source, money and consciousness
...ext of Frederick Laloux's work in terms of orange and green, and teal? Peter Koenig: I'm not an expert on spiral dynamics, although I have a parallel system and I know, superficially. I love Frederick Laloux and his work. And actually, thanks to Tom who you've mentioned, he actually came the first time we...more
...fectly the ideology, because I had it myself once. It's going back a while, going back 20, 30 years, I was really right to believe in self-organising systems and I think I mentioned to you once, I was in a group for 10 years. We called ourselves 'self-organising' and were experimenting with this and actual...more
...I think. Because God has impregnated your idea, and the whole thing is, you know, sort of round like that. Now there are people who believe in social systems and secular things who might dispute that, but I would say it's not worth trying to get into the mysticism, in terms practical things, in terms of lo...more

Keith McCandless and Henri Lipmanowicz on acting your way into a new kind of organising with Liberating Structures
...sults of what we were doing, Lisa, were mysterious. It's like, what just happened? How could that be? We had an experience in Ohio with a big health system, and we were doing sort of an early version of Wise Crowds, and User Experience Fishbowl. And we had them doing the work. And Henri and I were both g...more
...an institute - and I mean, Keith was very much at the centre of that too - called Plexus Institute, that was devoted to spreading ideas about complex systems, you know, and the notion that you could use those ideas and those concepts as a way of organising, you know, as a way of running organisations. And...more
...ose ideas and those concepts as a way of organising, you know, as a way of running organisations. And so the idea was that organisations are complex systems, they're not machines. And therefore we shouldn't run them like machines, you know. That they are not controllable, or hierarchical systems don't rea...more

Buurtzorg and the power of self-managed teams of nurses
...in patients homes. It was founded by Jos de Blok, who was himself, formerly a nurse. And he was really frustrated with how mechanistic the healthcare system had become and turning patients into numbers and dehumanising them. So he started Buurtzorg, because he wanted to create a business model where teams...more
... skills in your team. Jolanda: And Buurtzorg is also very far ahead in terms of the digital stuff, with planning for example. We have a very good ICT system....more
...Lisa Gill: Tell me about that. How does that support you, the IT system? Because I understand it's quite key to having self-managing teams at Buurtzorg. Chila: Because it makes everything very simple. You can find everyth...more

Amy Edmondson on psychological safety and the future of work
...k that’s a really valuable dimension to talk about.
AE:
And I love how you just put that because to me that’s exactly right. There’s the structures, systems, tools and then there’s the human. And they both are equally important. I mean you can’t just come in however you might do it and sort of alter the c...more
...LG:
It strikes me that, as you said, the systems piece and the human piece are both important, and it’s also the case that it’s not just leaders that are responsible for creating this climate of psy...more

Margaret Heffernan on how to act our way out of the status quo trap
...ot the only one. So do not think you can think your way to the answer. You can't, it's impossible. You have to do something different and see how the system responds. From that you've learned something that you can build on. But absolutely, none of us can solve these real world problems in our heads. It's...more

Lisa Gill and Mark Eddleston celebrate 50 episodes of Leadermorphosis
...umping up against some of the same challenges and it seems like most many of these organisations struggle with recognising that some kind of feedback system is really important, for example to be able to know, as Miki Kashtan put it: "we learn by knowing our impact on others". And I know like, Bryan Ungar...more