So far, I’ve been following instinct when wanting to explore how organizations could work better, beyond teal. But I realized I haven’t done the groundwork of explaining better what I think is not working in many decentralized organizations (teal, sociocracy, Holacracy) and warrants a deeper look.

Single-purpose optimization

Any purpose (or mission) will only capture a small part of what is needed in the world. That’s fine – not everyone can do everything. But it becomes tricky when we optimize for that purpose over the other needs. 

A simple example would be if we have a nonprofit that has the mission of providing affordable housing to low-income families in urban areas. That is undoubtedly a worthy purpose. However, if the organization single-mindedly optimizes all its decisions and actions towards this purpose alone, unintended negative consequences can arise. For instance, they might construct housing in areas far from job opportunities, good schools, and public transit to acquire cheap land, inadvertently exacerbating cycles of poverty.

In the for-profit world, of course, the main purpose is profit. Negative effects in the ecosystem are declared negative externalities. So the effect is even worse because not even the primary purpose has to be life-serving. Success means to have made money. 

But this is about the general pattern of optimizing for one purpose, no matter whether a primary or secondary purpose or the triple bottom line.

Any purpose beyond “the wellbeing of all life on earth” is too narrow, and maybe even that is reductionist. Optimizing for a single purpose may fail to recognize how its actions ripple out to affect the larger community and environment in complex ways. 

I’m aware that purpose serves to inspire, and aims to serve to focus an organization’s activities. And focus and aspiration are important factors in discerning where to put our energy. But that means we need to learn better how we can, as organizations, balance multiple needs, and that brings us to the issue of relevance. 

Collective, complex organizational strategy 

I emphasized “as organizations” because I’m aware that we are already doing this every day as individuals. In our personal choices, we constantly balance and integrate a lot of multiple needs. For example, right now, I’m meeting my needs for stimulation (I find it exciting to write!) and contributing to the betterment of Western societies. There are also client emails in my inbox, and I should probably check in with my oldest daughter. There are unread books, and untended weeds in the garden. I could take a nap, or go for a walk. The equivalent is true for you. For every moment of our lives, we make choices. And given the complexity of the task, for a lot of the time, we do a pretty good job – not perfect but mostly what we need to keep us alive, fed, and connected. 

Now an organization is dealing with pulls in the same way. There’s the mission, sure, but also financial stability, the well-being of the workers, funders, environment, connection, and belonging, and investing in feedback and learning. The concept of the triple bottom line is a step towards more consideration but is still crude, prone to leave out parts of the system and box-ticking rather than deep transformation. It is framed in terms of minimizing harm, not serving ecosystemic wellbeing. 

Ultimately, many of the decisions break down into small choices. And it’s to trace the impact of big-picture decisions to those small choices. Let’s take an example. A few years ago, we ran our first book pre-order campaign. When it was time to ship physical copies of the book, I realized I had to buy packaging material. My choices were to (a) Bubble wrap padded envelopes. That would ensure the cheapest and most protected shipping. (b) Paper envelopes with recyclable paper-based padding. Those were expensive. (c) Reusing packaging materials. (Luckily, living in a community of 70 people made it easy to make a call for packaging materials en masse.) But working with reused materials means spending more time on fitting it to the purpose, covering old addresses etc. Also, I often wondered whether the lack of a polished look was harming or serving the purpose.  I’ve received dozens of emails over the years complaining about packaging of all kinds or shipping costs.

No matter our choice, it’s important to see that: 

• Not having a purpose means meandering aimlessly. 
• One purpose is too narrow.
• A multi-pronged approach like “we care about affordability, protecting the environment, and low overhead” compromises on at least one of them, and puts us into “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situations. 
• A possible strategy is a weighted list where the higher purpose overrides the more specific ones. (This is done in some projects of Dark Matter Labs. I still need to find out more about the practicality of that.)

Now this is when it’s a good idea to look at how individuals make choices. As I said earlier, we are constantly pulled between our different needs – our aspirations, community, family, minds, and bodily needs. But we somehow navigate. 

Cognitive scientist John Vervaeke talks about the complex “machinery” of cognitive systems that help us determine what’s relevant. I’ve written about that elsewhere but the main point here is that a lot of the information we use to make these choices is subconscious. A simple example might be if we’re feeling tired and decide to take the bus instead of walking home. Our body did not issue a verbal statement of “energy level at 64%.” We just feel it. 

What might the counterpart of organization-level discernment be? I see three options:

• Reductionist. We make formal strategic statements and then see which option is most in alignment. This is prone to leaving out useful information. It’s the organizational counterpart of a hard rule like “work is more important than well-being” that will likely fail to respond to the circumstances in the moment. 
• Holistic but not participatory.  We can include all intuitive information of potential income streams, potential pitfalls, and our aspirations in a holistic way by using our intuition that includes more than a cut-and-dry rule – but that only works if it’s one person or a very small group deciding. I’m unclear how a decentralized group of individuals or groups would make such a decision.
• Holistic and participatory. We can call it “collective intelligence” and have decentralized groups make their individual choices and assume it will all create patterns aligned with what we want. But the issue is that without sufficient coordination, communication, and shared understanding, local optimization can lead to global sub-optimization or even outright conflict. What this means is: we’re creating a wild west of individual and team decisions and losing agency on the organizational level. It’s like the left hand grabs the yummy cake, and the right hand buys a weight loss magazine, while we’re running out of money. So what’s missing is the collective agency – who makes sure we’re not undermining our actions within the whole? 
• Holistic, participatory, and collective. This is the solution I’m looking for where information isn’t reductionist but remains multi-modal, where sense-making happens in a multi-perspectival and participatory way, but where the organizational-level optimization is considered appropriately – enough to serve the collective agency. I think certain practices and social technologies are good building blocks but I’m experimenting with how they might connect in a way that balances their biases and blind spots and makes non-linear change towards ecosystem wellbeing more likely.

Why this matters

The question of how to create organizations that can sense and respond to the full complexity of their social and ecological embeddedness is not abstract or theoretical. It affects the day-to-day for anyone who cares about the future of our species and our planet. Here’s why: The dominant models of profit-maximization and narrow purpose-orientation are not only failing to address but actively exacerbating, the existential threats we face.

If we are to have any hope of navigating the civilizational crises before us, we will need to fundamentally reinvent the way we organize human activity and decision-making and that can dynamically align their actions with the wellbeing of the whole.

By weaving together insights from cognitive science, organizational development, systems thinking, and indigenous wisdom traditions, we can begin to develop the tools and capacities needed for a new paradigm of regenerative organizing that starts and continues with a whole-system perspective.