“Open some space, and spirit will certainly show up. Allow the magic of self-organization to work for you, and the complex adaptive system that we are will find its own power.” – Harrison Owen

Purpose of Self-management

As Personal Mastery is a foundational ability on an individual level, Self-Organization is such on a team and community level. Self-Organization is the most natural way of organizing any activity but at the same time it is one of the most difficult ones. We start to control each other and cumulate power on just a few hands. We imagine that is the way to be efficient. But the true power lies within sharing the power through every member of the community. In a complex environment only way to adapt efficiently is to use every member eyes and ears as sensors. And when everyone has a right and responsibility to work for the greater good of the whole community, constant transformation is natural part of everyday life.

The purpose is to help every member of the organization to see themselves as eyes and ears of the whole community.

The purpose is to help every member to see themselves as powerful agents with right and responsibility to change their enironment.

The purpose is to help every member to see the bigger picture and be part of discovering the purpose of the whole organization.

When we talk about Self-Organization, it is always part of a bigger picture. Self-Organization requires that there is a constant process of discovery and dialogue of finding out what is the purpose of the community. There can’t be efficient self-organizing activity if the members doesn’t know what is the bigger goal of the organization. In Fredric Laloux’s terminology, we need to embrace the concept of Evolutionary Purpose.

Another key concept is Wholeness. The old paradigm in organizational development comes from the age of industrial revolution. People are seen as parts of a big machine. This doesn’t work for creating a self-organizing community. We need to embrace all the aspects of being human. We are whole as emotional, spiritual and psychological beings. We are fathers, mothers, sons and doughters. We have life outside of our working environment and we can’t leave that part outside of the door when we come to work.

When we start to work on our organizations to transform them more into self-organizing way, first step is to start two dialogical processes. 1) What is our purpose? and 2) How can we make our work and co-operation better? Gradually these two dialogical processes help us to create ways that work particularly in our context. There is no one-size-fits-for-all solutions. No quick-fixes. Only lot’s of dialogue and lot’s of work.

These reflective dialogues give us ideas how to improve the collaboration between the members and to do it more purposefully. We conceptualize the ideas gathered from the conversations and create pilot’s and MVP:s (minimum viable product) to try them out. Then we get more information through reflective dialogue and we can make adjustment in the next iteration. And so it goes through this cycle of reflection – trial – reflection and continuous transformation takes place.

My passion is to help organizations to create processes to discover more clearly what is the purpose of the community of people and help them to find ways to communicate with higher quality so the co-operations works better as well.