The way groups are working together is not working. But introducing new structures alone is not enough. Tamila and Simon talk to me about how we need to develop our ways of seeing, being and working together if we want to act in the highest possible alignment with our vision. A key part of this is using the lens of Power, Belonging and Justice (PBJ) and strengthening our muscle in Conflict Resilience. Strap in for some powerful wisdom, giggles and deep learning. Harmonize is a worker-owned coope...
May 21, 2024•58 min•Season 1Ep. 95
SINA (Social Innovation Academy) is a network of social enterprise incubators in Uganda and neighbouring countries with a mission of supporting marginalised young people to create their own solutions to social problems in their communities.There are currently more than 10 SINA communities which have catalysed 70+ social enterprises and more than 500 jobs. The goal is to create a global movement of 1,000 SINAs and 100,000 social enterprises by 2035. Etienne Salborn, founder, and Tonny Wamboga, Op...
Mar 28, 2024•54 min•Season 1Ep. 94
In this episode we talk all about psychological safety – the misconceptions, what it actually means in practice, what we can learn about it through an equity lens, and how we can design organisational structures that support it (like decision-making protocols). We also talk about how August does onboarding and creates an adult learning environment through feedback, peer reviews and the role of a ‘Development Advocate’, plus how they relate to the ‘new ways of working’ movement right now. Tirzah ...
Feb 28, 2024•56 min•Season 1Ep. 93
Miki is the seed founder and Emma a founding member of the Nonviolent Global Liberation community (NGL), which runs entirely as a gift economy. They and NGL as a whole are knee-deep in visionary experimentation about what it would take to realign humanity with life through online and community living experiments. Even without bosses we can still struggle to embody new ways of being together because of our internalised systems of patriarchal conditioning and capitalist thinking. The capacity lens...
Feb 01, 2024•54 min•Season 1Ep. 92
Deerns Spain, a team of around 60 engineers, has been on a transformation journey since March 2020. Inspired by K2K Emocionando, they now work without managers which means that everyone is “creating our company all the time”. I talked to Miquel Castellvi (General Coordinator), Blanca Capdevila (People & Culture) and Pau Riera (Commitment Coordinator) who shared stories about how they changed their organisational structure, their self-managing salary process, giving feedback and dealing with conf...
Sep 26, 2023•1 hr 6 min•Season 1Ep. 91
I'm thrilled to have adrienne maree brown on the podcast, someone who 'grows ideas in public' through her writing, her podcasts and her music. Ideas like Emergent Strategy, Pleasure Activism, Radical Imagination and Transformative Justice. We talk about what it means to be in right relationship with change, how to be comfortable with the uncomfortable, sustainable relationships, Pleasure Activism, three thoughts about leadership, what adrienne would do if she was mayor of a large city, and final...
May 31, 2023•53 min•Season 1Ep. 90
What can the realm of self-management and new ways of working learn from the realm of polyamory, Relationship Anarchy and open relationships? And how can practices in self-organising work teams help us improve our personal relationships? Ted Rau is the co-founder of Sociocracy for All and author of books like ‘Who Decides Who Decides?’ and ‘Many Voices One Song’. In his personal life, he has been in monogamous relationships and, for the last seven years, in open relationships. We explore the par...
May 10, 2023•58 min•Season 1Ep. 89
Douglas Rauch was thinking of selling his construction business until he read Reinventing Organisations by Frederic Laloux. After that, Aquadec went on a transformation journey to becoming a self-managing company. Douglas and his daughter Jessica share the ups and downs of this process over the last five years, including why their initial approach was a spectacular failure, why it was an inner shift that ended up making the difference, and something called “S**t Day.” Resources: Jessica and Doug...
Apr 25, 2023•52 min•Season 1Ep. 88
Kimberly Loh works in the worlds of conflict resolution, coaching, embodiment and mindfulness. She is also the co-author of ‘Compassionate Conversations: How to Speak and Listen from the Heart.’ We talk about learning to be aware of patterns we have when it comes to engaging with conflict, and Kim shares some ground rules for having ‘Compassionate Conversations’, as well as some really useful self-reflective practices to help us be more conscious of how we show up in conversations, especially ‘d...
Apr 12, 2023•52 min•Season 1Ep. 87
Since 2014, Sanjay Fernandes and his colleagues at SOLE Colombia have been teaching citizens the principles of a Self-Organised Learning Environment. He is passionate about reimagining learning and tackling issues like inequality, inspired by decades of research by Sugata Mitra which has shown that SOLEs allow children (and people in general) to learn almost anything. To date, more than 450,000 Colombians have participated in SOLEs and Sanjay shares some wonderful stories of how this methodology...
Mar 23, 2023•57 min•Season 1Ep. 86
Bernadette Wesley’s work is all about bridging the world of inner development with the world of being in an organisation together. We talk about Deliberately Developmental Organisations (DDOs); self-organisation and why changing structures is not enough; the Inner Development Goals (IDGs); and three practices that Bernadette has found particularly powerful: Peer Learning Spaces, Immunity to Change Maps, and Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) Tapping. Bernadette is an Associate Partner with Fraend...
Mar 08, 2023•1 hr 5 min•Season 1Ep. 85
Jon Alexander is the author of the hugely popular 2022 book ‘Citizens: Why the Key to Fixing Everything is All of Us’. He talks to me about the people he interviewed and the stories he collected which show how it’s possible to go from what he calls a ‘Consumer’ mindset to a ‘Citizen’ mindset – like Taiwan’s innovative approach during the COVID pandemic. We also discuss the Three P’s of Participatory Organisations, what leadership would need to look like in a Citizen Future, and why we should try...
Feb 22, 2023•51 min•Season 1Ep. 84
What would it look like to reimagine the systems of a whole city? To really involve citizens in addressing the huge challenges we face today? Imandeep Kaur reflects on what she has learned in the last ten years from being part of an ecosystem of social entrepreneurs in Birmingham who are cultivating ‘radical reimagination’. From TEDx Brum, to Impact Hub Birmingham, to Dark Matter Labs and finally as the director of CIVIC SQUARE, where she has been greatly influenced by Kate Raworth’s work on Dou...
Feb 09, 2023•1 hr 9 min•Season 1Ep. 83
Three authors of the book ‘Made Without Managers: One Company’s Journey to New Ways of Working’ join me to talk about what they have learned at Mayden, a cloud based health tech solutions organisation in the UK. Ruth Waterfield (developer and scrum master), Taryn Burden (product owner of Mayden’s new ways of working) and Philippa Kindon (coach) share how Mayden’s ways of working have evolved over the years, including what career progression looks like, the role of directors in a bossless organis...
Jan 11, 2023•1 hr 10 min•Season 1Ep. 82
Erik is an executive advisor on transformation and the future of work, leadership, and collaboration, and the author of ‘Teal Dots in an Orange World.’ We talk about how this 'new ways of working' movement is evolving, and in particular a positive trend that Erik calls 'fragmented organisations' that's happening because it's hard to scale self-managed or 'teal' practices and principles in a uniform way. Erik shares what he has observed, particularly in larger organisations, including challenges ...
Nov 23, 2022•51 min•Season 1Ep. 81
For the past year, the Municipality of Slagelse in Denmark has been experimenting with autonomous teams. Of the 8,000 employees, some 25-30 units so far have opted in to learn how to make decisions as a team using key principles of Sociocracy. Mette Aagaard, Head of Development, shares what they have been learning and why she thinks it is the responsibility of the public sector to develop societies, and workplaces, that are fit for humans. Anyone wondering how to introduce self-managing teams in...
Sep 20, 2022•58 min•Season 1Ep. 80
Lina shares the story of her time at Finnish commercial real estate company Technopolis where she led the transformation of the Lithuania business unit. Inspired by Frederic Laloux's book Reinventing Organisations, she got the mandate from her boss to run her business unit of 20 people in a totally different way, with no managers. She shares the story of what her team learned, the challenges they faced, and the results they achieved. Highlights include some harsh but valuable feedback from her t...
Sep 07, 2022•1 hr 4 min•Season 1Ep. 79
Sofia and Luís talk about the self-organisation journey at global software engineering company, Mindera. With 900+ employees and counting, they have evolved as a company without managers through experiments guided by questions like: Will this bring more autonomy? Is it human friendly? This has resulted in some remarkable employee-designed processes, like their self-managed salary system, and their unique office space in Porto, Portugal. Sofia, Mindera’s co-founder, and Luís (whose title is ‘Self...
Aug 17, 2022•1 hr 28 min•Season 1Ep. 78
Aaron Dignan, author of Brave New Work and founder of The Ready, is back on the podcast, this time to talk about how his new software startup, Murmur, can help organisations scale new ways of working. We talk about the importance of team agreements and how to keep them alive, plus what Aaron and his colleagues have been learning from their latest explorations in the worlds of self-management, DAOs and their Brave New Work podcast. Resources: Learn more about Murmur: https://www.murmur.com/ Learn...
Aug 02, 2022•59 min•Season 1Ep. 77
Ria Baeck and J.D. Nasaw. Ria and J.D. are both coaches and facilitators who combine scientific research of trauma with embodied practices of collective intelligence and wisdom. In our conversation, we discuss questions like: what does trauma have to do with new ways of working? How can we be more conscious collaborators? What are examples of embodied practices we can use so that our journey of new ways of working is not only an intellectual one? Ria has thirty years of experience as a therapist...
Jun 29, 2022•1 hr 6 min•Season 1Ep. 76
Alice Sheldon is the author of ‘Why Weren’t We Taught This at School?’ and the founder of Needs Understanding, an approach for finding creative solutions and building relationships at home and at work. I love how Alice shares practical tools and stories to bring to life some of the principles of Nonviolent Communication. She also coaches me through an example of an organisation where there is a tension between two groups: those who are enthusiastic about self-management and those sceptical about...
Jun 13, 2022•53 min•Season 1Ep. 75
Matt Perez realised that his successful career as a boss in a Silicon Valley tech company had made him a worse person and so he co-founded Nearsoft in 2007 to be a company that works for everyone. His recent book, Radical Companies Without Bosses or Employees, takes self-organisation one step further to include co-ownership so that people aren’t dependent on what he calls ‘enlightened monarchs.’ We talk about what he’s been learning, including the development of a distribution mechanism that dec...
May 06, 2022•45 min•Season 1Ep. 74
Kate Beecroft works on ecosystem and community building at Centrifuge, the decentralised asset financing protocol. She has been involved in Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) since 2018 and brings to them her experience of self-managing organisations as the co-founder of Greaterthan and a long-time member of Enspiral. We talk about common critiques of DAOs and Web3, as well as how we could share learning more across the worlds of self-managing organisations, DAOs and cooperatives. For...
Feb 24, 2022•57 min•Season 1Ep. 72
Swarnalakshmi Ravi is the former national prime minister of India's Inclusive Neighbourhood Children's Parliament. The children’s parliament movement is an example of how simple but effective governance principles and structures can make children’s voices heard and empower them to take collective action on issues that affect their lives. Swarna shares her experiences both as a child participating in these parliaments and now as an adult supporting the development of the Provisional World Childre...
Feb 09, 2022•1 hr 1 min•Season 1Ep. 72
Marwa Farouq leads the Global Operations Circle in Teach for All, which is a global network of partner organisations developing collective leadership to improve education and expand opportunity for all children. Marwa shares what she’s learned from exploring new ways of working at Teach for All, including dismantling the senior leadership team, moving decisions closer to the work, embracing tensions and liberating untapped leadership through their core value of diversity, equity and inclusion. M...
Jan 17, 2022•45 min•Season 1Ep. 71
Ravi Resck was born to hippy parents in Brazil, became a computer network engineer, and then travelled the world as a guitarist, discovering a love of facilitation and social design. Today he goes by tags like hacktivist, org designer, facilitator, and systems mapper, sharing social technologies with others in a fun and accessible way. He works as a consultant at Target Teal, a collective exploring new ways of working, including an open-source fork of Holacracy called Organic Organization (or O2...
Jan 04, 2022•55 min•Season 1Ep. 70
Jos de Blok is the founder of Buurtzorg, a home care organisation in the Netherlands with 15,000 nurses and no managers. We talk about how their decentralised, human approach has helped them during the pandemic, why he believes ‘protocolising things’ in organisations does damage, and his advice for leaders and traditional top-down organisations that are embarking on transformation processes. It was an honour to talk to one of my heroes and to hear him speak with such heart. Enjoy! Resources: My ...
Dec 05, 2021•57 min•Season 1Ep. 69
Michael Bungay Stanier is on a mission to ‘un-weird coaching’ and make it a skill set available to anyone. His books have sold over a million copies and Michael has taught more than 200,000 people. As a big fan of his writing, I wanted to talk to him about why being more ‘coach-like’ is so valuable – both for us and for the people we work with – and how to get better at it. We also discussed what Michael’s learned from handing over the role of CEO at the company he founded, his new book ‘How to ...
Nov 22, 2021•54 min•Season 1Ep. 68
The current models for how we measure things in organisations tend to produce compliance at their best, and dysfunctions at their worst. Andy Brogan has developed an alternative tool called Confirmation Practices that he hopes could one day completely shift how we see regulation, accreditation and accountability in general. Joined by Helen Sanderson, we discuss examples of where Confirmation Practices have made a difference (such as in a pathology service) and why this tool helps ‘put the elepha...
Nov 09, 2021•1 hr 15 min•Season 1Ep. 67
Margaret Heffernan is an author, speaker, business leader and professor. She has written six books and her TED talks have been seen by more than 12 million people. We talk about the ‘status quo trap’ in organisations, myths about whistleblowers, her thoughts on self-management and learning to embrace tough questions. Finally, she shares why her main focus now is the climate crisis. Follow Margaret on Twitter: @M_Heffernan Resources: Margaret’s website and more information about her latest book M...
Oct 12, 2021•51 min•Season 1Ep. 66
