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Power isn’t what we think it is
What if no one has power – not the CEO, the president, or the founder? What if it is actually not even possible to “have power”, and “power” is just a comforting illusion – and a dangerous one? Could it be that modern self-management – aiming to “distribute power” – remains in the same paradigm Read more
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Organizations Beyond Purpose
Organizations deserve dignity as collective beings In my recent article, “Burned out on goodness,” I mentioned that I no longer believe in organizational purposes, at least not in the way they are often used. I even find that our purpose obsession is a hefty remnant of our mental colonization. How so? The imperative to be Read more
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Burnt Out on Goodness
It feels a little like I’ve fallen out of the paradigm and I have a hard time finding my way back in. There are so many deep beliefs in organizations that I don’t believe anymore. For example, I have a hard time believing that organizations follow a purpose or that they have “values”. I actively Read more
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Practices and Words
I’ve been talking recently about how meaning arises in the in-between: in relationships between two people. Or when we appreciate a connection between two things we hadn’t seen yet. When a material object is connected to a place or a memory. When a taste or smell reminds us of an experience. Or when we long Read more
Tags: life -
Context stewardship
When discussing what makes organizations work, we often focus on the visible things: decisions, roles, strategy, tools. But beneath all that is something quieter – something we rarely name, even though it shapes everything: context. The context is made up of a lot of different parts – our relationship bonds, our trust, the shared rhythms, the rhythms of Read more
Tags: context -
Do we need decisions?
This is a provocative article – and maybe I don’t mean it as strongly as I will make it sound. I’m writing this article more to prompt thinking and to open ourselves to the possibility that things could be completely different. Let’s start with a useful distinction that we make in the world of sociocracy. Read more
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Why I don’t want to talk about values and principles
The (lived) ability to access, hold and metabolize information is more important than values and principles. Read more
Tags: relevance -
Why Wiser Organizations
Why do I think the current mission-driven, self-organized paradigm isn’t working? Read more
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Mycelium in organizations
This article elaborates on Help Desk Circles – a method to create many-to-many relationships. It connects patterns of organizing with an animistic worldview. Read more
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“But This is important.”
How do we discern what’s relevant to talk about? This article takes the process of Relevance Realization and translates it into the collective realm. Read more
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What might wisdom-bound organizations look like?
A short definition of the characteristics of “wiser” organizations Read more
Tags: wisdom -
From alignment to attunement
How do we get from alignment to attunement, from purpose to meaning, from belonging to interconnectedness? Read more
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Organizations as agents in an ecosystem
Organizations want to be meaningful too! Instead of searching for higher purpose, this approach is more about deeply connecting it to its ecosystem to improve its agent:arena relationship and usefulness and relevance. Read more
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Interconnectedness and new forms of organizing
A collection of guesses of what new organizations might look like – on the inside and on the outside. Read more
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Being less foolish, fitting better
What does it mean to be less foolish? And what does designing for less foolishness mean for the internal structure, the social technologies and the external fittedness of an organization? Read more
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Evolution and 4 types of knowing
Do individuals automatically grow and evolve? And how does that work? This post talks about propositional, procedural, perspectival and participatory knowing on individual and collective level. Read more
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Explicit and implicit
What’s explicit, what’s implicit? This post argues that the explicit corresponds to what we can say in words, and the implicit is beyond that. In organizations, the explicit corresponds to governance and agreements, and the implicit corresponds to culture. Read more
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What counts as a group?
What is a group, what is an individual? And what are the steps to being a group? Read more
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Organizations* as places of meaning creation
This post lays out that meaning is not something one can THINK one’s way into. Instead, meaning is highly dependent on including more immediate (nonpropositional) experiences. Those correspond to culture organizations. Read more
Tags: meaning
Wiser organizations 