Most organizations need to become better at adapting to unfolding and changing circumstances, leading to long-term sustainability. This includes being fast in responding to challenges — i.e. becoming more resilient.
Many organizations also face a leadership crisis. People check out mentally, disengage, and just do what they are told, or the organizations can’t find people willing to take the necessary responsibility; today especially young people don’t seem to want to take up the traditional leadership role.
The claim is that these challenges cannot be tackled through more top-down planning and control, and more imperial CEO leadership. Instead, the solution is to set people free to engage and take responsibility, to push authority as far out as someone able to carry it, can be found. To create an environment where this can happen and where people would want to take the responsibility of leadership
It is our mission to collect knowledge about how to build and sustain such liberating, constitutional organizations, protecting decentral liberty while being able to make decisions for the common good. However, we should also look at the challenge from the other side, which is to build an environment where freedom and the taking of responsibility are attractive to people.
The Case for Freedom
We have been working in the territory of improving the flourishing and performance of people in teams and larger organizational units for 20+ years. Over the years the concept of freedom became more and more central to everything we did. We started referring to this as building “The Case for Freedom”, occasionally investigating it as a cold case for freedom, as it seems that not many are working on this case.
The Observations
Before around 1840 society was largely stratified into those who were masters and owned things and those who were servants, in 1844 the telegraph – a revolutionary technology – was introduced and over the next 60+ years, it was followed by other landmark technologies, such as electrical light, the telephone, combustion engines, automobiles, airplanes, radio, and much more.
Innovation became visible and appreciated, and experience was built around how to create environments that would make innovation flourish. In many places – especially in the US – pockets of progressive leadership developed, and many people flourished.
After WWII there was a proliferation of people, who were just educated to manage, coming out of business schools. This led to the rise of a new stratification in organizations, between those who think, plan, and manage and those who actually do the work – the upstairs and downstairs of organizations. The reverence of the imperial CEO and the lavish compensation of the upstairs people followed.
Finally, in the present century, we have seen a proliferation of oligarchies and totalitarianism in countries, but also in large companies – especially the large tech mastodonts. It seems like there is a general acceptance in the media that if someone has to power to self-realise what he or she wants, then it is what it is. In this post-post-modern era, aggressive expressive individualism is all there is and trumps all other arguments.
The Challenges
From the observations come a lot of visible challenges, here are just a few:
- Traditional hierarchical organizations are too slow-moving to respond effectively to the fluctuation in the present-day environment. That, by the way, includes most governments.
- People are generally disengaged at work, the latest numbers from Gallup indicate 78% being disengaged, and 18% actively disengaged on a global scale. This leads to substandard effectiveness in dealing with other challenges.
- People are choked in stifling bureaucracies, regulations, metrics, or deep hierarchies of experts, all of which are preventing innovation.
- People are demanding more from organizations, especially more freedom. It is however a real leadership crisis where the current leadership does not know how to or does not want to grant authority to people; on the other side, many people do not know how to live with or even want the work and the responsibility that comes with freedom.
- The generation gap is pronounced in many places; many older leaders are clueless on how to create a space for, or even attract the younger generations with very expressive demands.
- Hybrid work has made it much more difficult to achieve coherent collaboration.
The Objectives
There are many objectives to be derived from these challenges, here is a set of some of the most important ones – there are however, dependencies and overlap between them:
- We want an organization with a clear purpose, goals, and a set of values, that bind people together.
- We want an organization that generates optimal value for all stakeholders: customers, staff, owners, and society.
- We want an organization that is sustainable and resilient long term, including the ability to maneuver effectively in rapidly unfolding circumstances.
- We want an environment of respect and trust where people can and want to engage, collaborate, be responsible, and flourish.
- We want an environment with psychological safety, where people dare to speak up, learn from mistakes, and improve.
- We want an organization that develops people to be able and willing to take on responsibility and leadership
An organization has to be seen as a complex system, not as discrete elements.
The Strategies
The strategies that we discovered during the investigation are practical things that can be done to impact the objectives. Again, they are interdependent and they may contribute to more than one objective:
- Define clear values, goals, and procedures for collaboration – a manifest or a constitution.
- Build structures that support freedom and individual authority through mutual agreements and due process.
- Use small self-managing and cross-functional teams wherever possible to promote local mandate and innovation.
- Define how decisions are made through delegation and representative decision-making, including handling crises.
- Remove fear and the use of coercing people from the repertoire of leadership.
- Implement checks and balances to reduce the likelihood of anyone amassing power and start abusing it.
- Institute disciplined weeding of bureaucracies and rule sets, persistently eliminating unhelpful elements.
Strategies should always be deployed carefully and stepwise with good feedback. Dealing with complex systems one can never be completely sure about how something will work, and nobody wants the organization to plunge into chaos.
Liberating Organizations – The Book
We decided to collect all the relevant experiences and facts discovered through the many years of working in the field and document it all in a book. It required some extra research and investigation. At some point, we were recommended to seek perspectives from a wider range of people, which resulted in the launch of an interview campaign, in which 90+ people contributed. You can find out more in these places.
- Order the book in print here…
- A quick overview of the book here…
- Read the table of contents and the preface here…
- Read the appendices to the book here…
- Find the illustrations from the book in large format here…
Resources – To Get Going and Keep Going
If you decide to embark on a journey towards a Liberating, Constitutional Organization, it can be helpful to pack some supplies in your rucksack. Here are some you can choose from:
- Agile Lean Leadership – The Bird’s Eye View here…
- Templates to use in the process of creating and upholding a Liberating Organization here…
Events – Opportunities to Learn and Discuss
Events are hosted under the umbrella of AgileLeanHouse AS, find more information here…
The first event is a Webinar: On the Road to Freedom – The Interview Findings. Wednesday 2025-01-15 at 19:00 CET, read more here…, register for the event here…
Contact – The Team
Here you can find the team behind Liberating Organizations, we are all ready to answer questions and support you on your journey toward a Liberating, Constitutional Organization.
- Christian Myrstad. Trainer, coach and CEO. Read more here… Find Christian on LinkedIn here…
- Kurt B. Nielsen. Trainer, mentor, author and CTO. Read more here…. Find Kurt on LinkedIn here…. Book a conversation with Kurt here…
- Vibeke Kristensen. Trainer and coach. Read more here… Find Vibeke on LinkedIn here…
- Robert Fujdiar. Trainer and coach. Read more here… Find Robert on LinkedIn here…
- Arne Åhlander. Trainer and coach. Read more here… Find Arne on LinkedIn here…
