image by Derek Farr ( DetroitDerek )

Today is Labor Day in the United States, a day of celebration and rest for the workers on whom our economy depends. Some of us labor for love, but most of us work for a paycheck, so we thought it a fitting day to start our inquiry into money and how it both enables and inhibits our lives.

When I think back to the economics classes I took in high school and college, all I can hear is the droning wah-wah of Charlie Brown’s teacher. Supply and demand, macro and micro, interest and capitalization: words like this cure insomnia for me and I’m sure for many others. And this is part of the problem—the rules that form our economic system are inscrutable to most of us, and so we tune them out in favor of sound-bites and code-words.

Read more...

Last weekend, I attented a workshop on Holacracy given by Brian Robertson and Tom Thomison in New York. Holacracy is a radically new way for people in any kind of organization to work together. In my mind, it is the cutting edge of organizational structure and development. It transcends and includes the most common hierarchical structure of companies, which tends to stifle individual initiative, creativity and accountability and oftentimes works on the basis of fear. And at the same time it goes far beyond the democratic or consensus-driven model that an increasing number of organizations are trying to work with, which usually ends up being ineffective and frustrating in its focus on each individual involved rather than the goal of the organization they are involved in.

Holacracy is about getting things done faster and more effectively. Every person involved not only has a voice, but is called on to participate in full transparency, accountability and capacity towards the goal and vision of the organization.

The brainchild of Brian Robertson, who founded Ternary Software in Philadelphia in 2001 for the sole purpose of finding a better way for people to work together, Holacracy has now been brought to a point where it can be taught and used as a generally applicable system and is so far being promoted around the US, Australia and Europe.

Obviously there is a lot more to holacracy than can be learned in a weekend. But through a lot of practical exercises and a very clear structure, Tom and Brian managed to convey a good deal of the context and application of this practice.

As they took us through the material, many sacred cows of business wisdom got pushed off their pedestals and one aha experience followed another. In a certain kind of way, Holacracy follows a very human, almost intuitive logic. As Brian put it, it makes the implicit explicit, and in doing so frees up a lot of attention and energy.

Teams are organized into circles, each of which is a self-organizing unit pursuing its own goals, which are provided from higher-level teams. Circles include members from whatever parts of the organization can provide information relevant to the issues at hand. In this way, decisions are made with multiple perspectives in mind, from big-picture to detailed.

When these circles get together to tackle their goals, two major tenets are kept in mind:

1. The goal is a workable decision, not the best decision.
2. Any issue can be revisited at any time.

Together, these two ideas remove fear, allowing circles to proceed both logically and quickly, knowing that they can adjust course as needed. 

One of the most striking aspects to me was how this system of governance does not allow anyone to be special in it, be they the lowest or the highest ranking member of the organization. The methodology is so structured, the meetings and decision making processes so clearly defined, that the only way forward is into a very objective, impersonal space from which the next workable steps for the organization could emerge. It’s a way for people to get out of the way and allow the organization’s intent to come through.

For anyone used to endless discussions in order to find a perfect or best solution, in which everyone has to put in their two cents worth, worried about their job or their image, it was a real breath of fresh air. I could see the potential particularly for non-profits, where good intentions and real care can get completely bogged down by (inter)-personal struggles for influence and control.

Through years of experimentation, trials and errors, Brian seems to have come up with a governance and operational system that really does keep our egos, personal ambitions, and fears in a cage, as long as we stick to it. The result is an organizational practice that allows for swift and creative responses even for large organizatons in a world that is constantly changing faster.

Holacracy does demand a lot of those practising it and, if Ternary Software’s story is anything to go by, also produces extraordinary results.

(image by tanakawho via flickr)

My friends Nora and James introduced me to The Wire a few months ago, after which no one saw me for several weeks. I was completely transfixed by the story, which goes way beyond and much deeper than your typical police procedural show.

What really got me about the show was the way the characters struggled to fit into their contexts. In his commentary on the pilot episode, creator David Simon puts it this way:

It seems to be a cop show ... but we were trying to mask something different when we created this. This show is really about the American city and about how we live together, and it’s about how institutions have an effect on individuals, and how regardless of what you’re committed to, whether about whether you’re a cop, a longshoreman, a drug dealer, a politician, a judge, or a lawyer, you’re ultimately compromised and must contend with whatever institution you’ve committed to.

The Wire doesn’t show us a simplistic black and white world—we see junkies who live by a junkie code of honor and others with no honor at all. We see gangsters who delight in “The Game” (the drug trade) and others who approach it as businessmen and others who participate simply because there’s nothing else for them to do, even though they can’t quite make it work. Same thing on the cops’ side—some love working cases, others are waiting for their retirement pensions to kick in, and others just like to kick around criminals.

Everyone’s in it for his (or her) own reasons, but it’s clear that one cannot play The Game without being altered by it. The police department and the drug family and the longshoreman’s union are not going to change for you. In each organization, there’s a chain of command, and either you follow it or you get your ass kicked.

Even though I have a much cushier job than anyone on the streets of West Baltimore, I can completely identify with this. Most of my working life has been a struggle to figure out where I end and the company I work for begins. How much “me” can I be and get away with it? I like to think that I’m not your typical corporate working stiff, but, really, is anyone BORN a corporate working stiff? Or are we molded in subtle and obvious ways to fit the corporation’s needs?

And what does a corporation need, anyway? In this day and age, businesses exist for one purpose only: to make money. That’s why it’s called “the bottom line.” By the definition of what a corporation is, nothing else matters. Grow or die is the creed, and stock price is the only metric to which any real attention is paid.

That definition has worked well enough up till now. But at this point in history, corporations and indeed all organizations are facing a huge crisis, the same one we’re all facing: environmental devastation. If we don’t have water to drink and air to breathe and arable land to live on, stock price doesn’t matter much. It’s clear we need to turn this boat around.

And it’s obvious that there’s money to be made in clean technologies, non-fossil-fuel-based energy, and green design. So then why is the turnaround effort taking so long? Why are so many businesses dragging their feet and clinging to the status quo?

The answer lies in the nature of organizations themselves. Dee Hock, the founder of VISA (the VISA you pull out of your wallet every day), describes the problems of the modern organization in his brilliant book One from Many: VISA and the Rise of Chaordic Organization using the metaphor of “float.”

Back before checks were processed electronically, float referred to the period of time from which a check was written to the time when it was drawn on the issuer’s account. In addition to finance, float once existed in information (letters took a lot longer than email), science and technology (the time between a new discovery and its practical application has shrunk to almost nothing), and culture (new words and trends can sweep across continents in weeks). Here he discusses how float has almost completely disappeared from our lives:

Today the past is ever less predicted, the future ever less predictable, and the present scarcely exists at all. Everything is accelerating change, with one incredibly important exception. There has been no loss of institutional float.

Although their size and power have vastly increased, although we constantly tinker with their form, although we constantly change their labels, there has been no new, commonly accepted idea of organization since the concepts of corporation, nation-state, and university emerged, the newest of which is several centuries old.

Hock argues that organizations that rely on rigid hierarchies and heavy-handed advance planning, what he calls command and control organizations, are constitutionally incapable of dealing with the modern rate of change. There’s so much bureaucracy to wade through that, by the time the group has decided on a plan and moved towards implementing it, conditions will have changed to the point where the plan is irrelevant. Not to mention the fact that, in modern organizations, individual workers often have better and more up-to-date information than leaders do. Top-down management just doesn’t work in this environment.

Instead, he advocates more fluid structures that rely on members’ sovereignty and co-operation, a mixture of chaos and order he calls “chaordic.” Such organizations empower people to make decisions within a framework that is strong enough to keep hold of the mission and operating procedures, but flexible enough to adapt to rapidly changing contexts.

Of course, in a group which respects the humanity and gifts of the people involved in it, the myopic focus on the economic bottom line is shifted to a broader focus on serving the needs of humanity and life in general. The idea is to enable organizations to fulfill their missions—when that is done correctly, the profit takes care of itself.

Hock proved that these are not pie-in-the-sky ideas, and that such an organization can thrive. VISA was founded on chaordic principles, and has been unbelievably successful, revolutionizing the financial services and information industries. Although Hock is not involved with or particularly proud of where VISA has ended up, there’s no denying the achievement of creating a completely new kind of organization and showing that it can prosper and even dominate the marketplace.

Dee’s book describes a vision for organizations co-operating and competing with each other to provide the best level of services to the marketplace in education, health care, every possible field. Organizations based on these chaordic principles honor people’s desires—to do good work, function as part of a team, and make their own informed decisions—and they also function at a very high level.

Think about it—a company that uses all of the gifts and skills of the people involved in it will automatically be more productive than one that requires employees to check themselves at the door. And when we bring all of ourselves to work, including the parts of us that want our kids and grandkids to have a nice functional planet to live on, we perform our jobs and make choices from a broader perspective.

A concept of institution that inspires instead of dominating, one that doesn’t require us to fundamentally change who we are, or pretend to be something we are not—this is The Game as it ought to be and must be played if we are to meet the challenges facing us.

Tomorrow we’ll hear from Uli about another exciting new organizational structure that unleashes not only the power of its members, but of the organization itself. Stay tuned!