Leadermorphosis

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 societie...

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...

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...

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...

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 n...

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 te...

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.' W...

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 co...

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...

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 tensio...

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 explorin...

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 wa...

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...

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 Pract...

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...

Pasteur Byabeza is the lead link of the Student Care Circle at Davis College, a higher learning institution in Rwanda. He is one of the pioneers who has been driving the college's transition to becoming a self-managed, Holacratic organisation. Though they are early in their journey, taking steps like disbanding the global council and replacing management hierarchies with distributed decision makin...

Bayo Akomolafe is a Nigerian author, professor, chief curator of The Emergence Network and is often known for his poetic and provocative take on big topics such as global crisis and social change. We talk about what he calls 'generative incapacitation' and the kind of leadership that's needed in these times, how the Covid pandemic is disrupting our norms, embracing failure and allowing ourselves t...

"Command authority is a poor basis for life." Jocelyn Davis is an author, speaker and the former head of R&D at global consultancy The Forum Corporation. We talk about how she weaves together the threads of leadership, Eastern philosophy and dramatic literature. Her insights on group development, leadership as influence, and 'climate' in teams are really relevant for those interested in self-manag...

Sam Conniff and Alex Barker's books 'Be More Pirate' and 'How to Be More Pirate' have sparked a movement of people around the world who want to shake things up, to create new business models and systems that are better for people and planet. The tagline on their website says: "Being more pirate is a shift in your mindset; a willingness to think differently, to challenge and be challenged, and to s...

Topi Jokinen is one of the founders of a small Finnish company in the construction sector called Vertia. Since 2018, Topi has been leading a transformation in the company based on the idea of self-organising cells to help it grow and develop. He is perhaps the first CEO I have met who has done this level of personal and professional development and he shares with heart and humility what his leader...

Filmmakers Anna Thomson and David Baksh talk to me about Yoghurt Utopia, their documentary about a yoghurt company whose mission is to provide work and accommodation for people living with mental illness in the Catalonia region in Spain. Having spent several years with some of the workers of La Fageda and its inimitable founder, Cristobal Colon, they share what they have learned about this remarka...

Yuji Yamada is the founder of EnFlow and is interested in exploring the differences between approaching organisational transformation from a 'Western lens' and a Japanese lens. We talk about teal organisations from Frederic Laloux's book 'Reinventing Organisations' (which has sold 100,000 copies in Japan) and Yuji's homegrown concept of 'Jinen management'. Could East Asian organisations be at an a...

Rich and Nati are the founders of collaboration consultancy The Hum and part of the Enspiral network. Between them, they have a background in activism, engineering, community organising and entrepreneurship and are well-respected thought leaders when it comes to decentralised organisations, self-managing teams and collaborative culture. We talk about personal shifts, 'trojan horse' radical practic...

Nand Kishore Chaudhary is the remarkable founder of Jaipur Rugs, a company employing 40,000 weavers in 600 villages selling beautiful carpets in 40 countries. The artisans – most of them women in India's "untouchable" class – are the "heroes of the business", and self-managed principles like distributed decision making have long been a hallmark of the company. We talk about how N. K. Chaudhary has...

Anna Elgh is the CEO of Svenska Retursystem, a Swedish circular economy logistics company. We talk about the transformations she has led at the company since joining in 2014, from Lean to nearly three years of moving towards self-managing teams. She shares what she has learned about transforming conflicts, distributed decision making, disbanding the management team, as well as leadership and the p...