Leadermorphosis

Michael Bungay Stanier returns to Leadermorphosis, and this time we get right into the messy, human heart of work: our relationships. Michael is the author of the bestselling The Coaching Habit and, most recently, How to Work with (Almost) Anyone. He is on a mission to un-weird the soft stuff, to make better working relationships something we build on purpose rather than leave to chance. We talk a...

Chorus was born out of the merger of three traditionally structured care organisations in 2017, but today its 1,000 employees work in 20+ self-managing, local teams. Strategic Coach Angela Williamson share this remarkable transformation story and how inner development – and not just structural development – has been key. Chorus began as an experiment asking the question: "What if the people closes...

If you ask employees at EPPO who the CEO is, they will answer: there is no CEO! In this episode, Rodrigo Ventre shares the story of transforming his father's company into a self-managing organisation. We talk about his lifelong passion for human development and the increasingly radical experiments he has encouraged in the domains of business, culture, and governance. It was not an easy journey, bu...

Natacha is the co-founder of Freche Freunde, a leading children's healthy snacks brand. She shares insights from the two-year transformation journey she led at the 80-person company – what she says were the hardest two years of her life. Through experiments with Holacracy and self-management, the biggest challenge turned out to be her own personal development. In this honest and beautiful story, N...

Abhijith HK and Vidhya Abhijith are co-founders of Codewave, a digital innovation company in India with over 200 employees and zero hierarchy. In this episode, we explore how they built a self-managing organisation from intuition, their peer-based feedback system called Peerly, and how they moved from "ruinous empathy" to radical candor. We also discuss scaling through "Fractas" (mini startups wit...

For episode 100, Lisa talks with her colleagues Eva Vilella, Trevor Hudson, and Kajsa Thelander Sadio from Tuff Leadership Training about what it's really like to work inside a self-managing organisation. They explore how working at Tuff has transformed each of them, their culture of continuous development with practices like "pebbles" and "mooseheads," and the genuine challenges alongside the bea...

If we want to practise alternatives to hierarchy, what needs to be in place? Perttu has twenty years' experience as an organisational consultant and I've been really enjoying his research papers on Radically Decentralised Organisations. We talk about the four things needed for a Radically Decentralised Organisation to be sustainable, leaderless leadership, group dynamics we need to be aware of, an...

Handing the baton over to someone else can be risky, especially when it's your company you're handing over. Timea Kristof shares her research on six key factors necessary for a successful succession process to happen, and one of the most important factors might surprise you. It's love. Timea shares insights from her research, including examples of organisations she interviewed such as a family bus...

Allan Rhodes is Chief People Officer at teal-inspired insurance broker Konsileo. He shares what he's learned over the last three years about helping to design a self-managing organisation, including how to onboard people into a totally new way of working. We also talk about his favourite metaphor of organisational gardening. We can be inspired by other gardens and gardeners, but what will grow bes...

Why does Spain appear to be a hotbed for progressive organisations lately? Xavier Costa shares three hypotheses: the implementation of the NER self-management approach in over 100 companies, a rich history of cooperatives, and a culture of innovation in the boundaries of Spain. We also talk about lessons learned from Xavier's experience of transforming companies, both with consultancy Full Circle...

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 Resilie...

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 o...

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 '...

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 becaus...

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...

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,...

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...

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 shi...

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...

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 C...

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...

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 Participato...

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...

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...

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 unifor...