As the COVID-19 pandemic unfolds many businesses are being forced to make hard decisions. Not only are teams working remotely, leadership is triaging financial bleed through staff layoffs and restructuring. In many companies with a traditional top-down organisational structure, managers alone make these decisions without broad team consultation. Workers lower on the ladder have...

Dan Pink knows something about what motivates us. In this RSAnimate video he shares some surprising findings about what really moves us to perform better, to do our best, to stretch ourselves. His most general finding is that for all but purely mechanical tasks – that is, for anything that requires a bit of...

This is the third in a three-part series, and is an excerpt from a white paper by the same title. Part 1 and part 2 listed four pitfalls of a top-down organization: (1) communication goes one-way, (2) the person who makes the decisions creates a bottleneck, (3) management and workers become adversaries, and (4)...

Would you be surprised that the research on workplace effectiveness addresses the value of psychological safety? The notion of “psychological safety,” a term coined by Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson,1 has been researched extensively over the years. Psychological safety in a work context relates to a person’s perspective on how threatening or rewarding...

This is the second in a three-part series, and is an excerpt from a white paper by the same title. Part 1 listed two pitfalls of a top-down organization: (1) one-way communication, and (2) decision bottlenecks. Here are two more. Pitfall #3. Management and workers become adversaries. We all know of companies where relations...

The structure of a top-down organization, standard during the industrial age, ill-suits a world with fast-paced change. An alternative is the Sociocratic Circle Method, a whole-systems approach to decision-making, governance, and project management. It creates more inclusive, resilient, and effective organizations where all stakeholders have a voice in the policies that affect their work....

We’ve all been to meetings that are a disappointment or even a disaster, and hopefully others that are a dream – where the group gels, people think creatively together, and the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. What makes the difference? Here are five ways to avoid mistakes that can tip...

This Inc.com article on leaders as strategic thinkers, by Paul J. H. Schoemaker, offers a framework for illustrating how to build strategic leadership into self-managing organizations. The article suggests six habits of “Adaptive strategic leaders – the kind who thrive in today’s uncertain environment.” It describes how those habits support a successful organization. Schoemaker...

A November Gallup Poll finds that employee engagement – trending downwards in recent years – is still distressingly low. Consequences for companies in all sectors include increased employee turnover, with associated costs for hiring and training. What causes this – and more importantly, what can be done to address low employee engagement? In this press release,...

In this post on the Exceptional Boards blog, Michael Kelrick, chair of the biology department at Truman State University, describes his experiences as he and his fellow PULSE (Partnership for Undergraduate Life Sciences Education) members begin to implement Dynamic Governance in their organization, with training and support from members of The Sociocracy Consulting Group...