Hazards on the path to organisational self-management
Pitfalls to watch out for when exploring new ways of working
In October this year I spoke at Agile Slovenia about the ‘leadership revolution that’s needed in Agile and self-managing teams’. As part of my talk I mentioned the Pendulum of Doom, which I’ve written about on Substack previously. Basically, the idea that when we start exploring new ways of working, we sometimes swing too far in the other direction, ending up in a whole other set of dysfunctions stemming from our total rejection of anything resembling leadership or hierarchy.
Later in a break, I spoke to another speaker, Andrea Provaglio, who mentioned that my ‘pendulum of doom’ concept reminded him of a keynote he’d done in 2019 about ‘obfuscations’. As a native English speaker, I was embarrassed to admit I’d never heard this word. Andrea explained to me that an obfuscation is
‘a state of limited information, limited feedback, limited communication that prevents self-reflection.’
In other words, something that prevents us from seeing reality as it really is and therefore doing anything about it. Andrea had identified nine obfuscations that he saw as obstacles to us being able to observe our ecosystem and infer its behaviour so we could then improve it – things like ‘Segregation’, ‘Scapegoating’, ‘Feudalism’. (You can watch the recording of Andrea’s talk here – it’s really good!)
It got me thinking about obfuscations in my field of self-managing organisations and if I could map the patterns I was seeing onto his. Being a visual person (and perhaps a lazy person) I wondered if there was a simpler way to represent them, and also to make them more memorable, more fun, even. Maybe it’s because I was watching Agatha All Along, the new Marvel series about witches, but the idea of playful tarot cards popped into my head. Here is what I’ve come up with so far.
The purpose in sharing these hazards
I share these hazards not as a criticism or as proof that self-management doesn’t work. Rather, I have two intentions:
Normalising the pain points – I find that whenever I share these patterns, people breathe a sigh of relief. “I’m not alone! And we’re not doing it wrong, this is just part of the process!”
Helping each other to spot pitfalls and perhaps avoid unnecessary pain – Frederic Laloux shares that there are two types of pain on the journey to self-management. One is ‘growth pain’, the ‘pain we experience when we grow into larger, more powerful versions of ourselves’, and the other is ‘avoidable pain’, which is ‘pain that could be avoided if we managed the transition a little better’. He explains that when he are experiencing unavoidable growth pain, then we can ask: how can we have spaces for conversations where this pain can be spoken, acknowledged, and transformed?
So in sharing these ‘hazards’, and also by giving them somewhat silly names, I hope we can normalise them as part of being human and being in a process, and also support each other to spot them (“Ah! This is that pattern I read about!”) and talk about them so that we can, as Frederic says, transform them into something we do want.
Again, I’ve already written about the Pendulum of Doom here. But let me share something about the other hazards. Bear in mind, this is a work in progress!
Whirlpool of Dynamics
There are always dynamics going on in any organisation, between individuals or groups. One example is the ‘us versus them’ dynamic, which could be between:
Managers and individual contributors (“Managers always decide things without involving us!”; “Employees are always complaining but they never take any responsibility!”)
One department and another, such as finance versus sales (“Sales never gives us the information we need!”; “The finance team is so rigid, just let us do our jobs!”)
Veterans and newbies (“These new people don’t appreciate all the history and hard work we’ve put into this company!”; “The oldies are so stuck in their ways and never listen to new ideas!”)
In a self-managing organisation, these often pop up as well. And another ‘us versus them’ dynamic I’ve seen is:
Enthusiasts versus sceptics, i.e. people who love new ways of working (and perhaps reading books, blogs, listening to podcasts etc.), and people who are sceptical (who maybe have uncertainties or concerns about this unfamiliar way of working and what it might mean for them)
The reason I’ve named this card ‘Whirlpool of Dynamics’ is that when we end up in this pitfall, each camp sees the other camp as the ‘other’. It’s easy to end up in a ‘right/wrong’ paradigm, complaining about or feeling victimised by the other group. You’ll hear people lament “they always” or “they never”, for example. And the more we vilify the other group, the more the following happens:
We communicate less and less
We interpret and make up fantasies about what the other group’s intentions are
We gossip and have backchannel conversations about the other
All the while, our collaboration is really infected by this. Hence, the whirlpool sucks us down further and further. The enthusiasts see the sceptics as backwards, rigid, blocking our path forwards, and not listening. And the sceptics see the enthusiasts as arrogant, impatient, careless, and not listening. In some organisations, I’ve seen this dynamic get so strong that the word ‘self-management’ becomes like Voldemort in the Harry Potter novels – that which must not be named!
Green Trap
My good friend Tom Nixon was the first person to mention the ‘Green trap’ to me some years ago. It aims to describe how people can get stuck in the ‘Green paradigm’ (referring to the stages outlined in Reinventing Organisations) where everyone must be completely equal and cared for.
It sounds harmless enough, and the people involved have really good intentions, but it creates all kinds of problems, such as:
A prison of politeness – where we daren’t do anything that might disrupt the harmony, such as giving feedback or addressing tensions
A leadership vacuum – where people with crucial experience, expertise and creativity feel unable to contribute lest they disrupt the equality norm
Creative entropy – where the organisation flounders in the absence of a clear, creative vision, usually because we have agreed that no one person can ‘decide’ this and therefore we end up sort of waiting for it to emerge
All of these symptoms stem from a limited worldview that things like hierarchy, authority, and direct feedback are ‘bad’. But so long as we shun these things, they haunt us as shadows. A key learning for me, thanks to many conversations with Tom and also with Peter Koenig, is that hierarchy is neither good nor bad.
Frederic Laloux also talks about this as a misconception about self-management in this video:
“The goal is not to make everyone equal (yes equal in value, but not in roles and contributions), the goal is that everyone gives the best they can…Let’s not try to make everyone equally powerful. Let’s try to make everyone fully powerful.”
As for the prison of politeness, I’ve also found it helpful to challenge a common misconception about psychological safety. I find the image Shane Snow has created (below) clarifying.
If we want people to grow and progress, and if we want self-managing teams to thrive, it’s beneficial for us to learn to be with discomfort. That means having difficult conversations, but it doesn’t have to be at the expense of care (or safety). In this new paradigm, we can be both uncomfortable and safe. Both empathetic and direct.
Accountability vacuum
This is very connected to the previous hazard, the Green Trap. I find that teams exploring self-management struggle with holding each other to account (what they would call in Morning Star ‘impeccable commitment making and commitment keeping’) because we don’t know how to do that if not in a top-down, boss-like way.
I also hear teams constantly struggling with the question: “Who is responsible for what?!” and what my colleague Karin calls ‘the eternal cry for clarity’. Here the pitfall (especially for leader types) is to try and answer the constant need for clarity or to try and solve the lack of accountability. But it will not be resolved because you will never get to the ‘bottom’ of it unless people can create a total shift in how they relate to responsibility and accountability. It is not something that can be given but something that has to be taken.
Canyon of Consensus
When moving away from top-down, autocratic decisions, it’s easy to again think in terms of binaries and assume that therefore everyone now needs to decide (or agree on) everything. I sometimes call this ‘death by consensus’ because it can become tedious and frustrating very quickly if all decisions get put through this filter.
Of course, you might agree that for important decisions ‘below the waterline’ (as they say in W.L. Gore), consensus is important. But for everything else, it’s good to get clear on how and who decides what.
In the ‘old paradigm’, we’re pretty used to three types of decisions: autocratic (one person decides, usually the boss), majority vote, and consensus. In the new paradigm, it’s good to get literate in a few new ways, like role-based (we give the mandate to a particular role), advice process (an individual decides having gathered advice from those with expertise and those affected), consent (a proposal is consented to if there are no objections, i.e. it doesn’t harm us or move us backwards), and concordance (similar to consensus but where we also take into account feelings/the non-rational and really listen to each other until there is ‘wholehearted’ agreement).
But as I’ve written about before, installing new decision-making ‘apps’ isn’t enough. We’ll still bump into our old habits and ways of being if we aren’t consciously upgrading our communication skills and our self-awareness as well.
Something that might interest you…
If you’re interesting in training in the mindset and skillset shift needed to actually address the hazards I’ve written about in this post, check out the course that I’ve created together with my colleagues at Tuff and Corporate Rebels called ‘Self-Management Bootcamp’.
It’s one thing to read about these ideas and tools, but quite another to actually practise them. The gold is in the doing! This programme is designed to give you plenty of opportunities to try out conversational frameworks with individuals and groups that help you a) reveal your ‘old paradigm’ pitfalls and tendencies, and b) give you a taste of an alternative way of being, one that unleashes the potential in others.
You can read more about what the bootcamp entails – and the self-management pitfalls it addresses in each weekly, practical module – by clicking on the link below.