The purpose-organogram of self-organization

Every organization can choose not to work with a hierarchy of people, but with a hierarchy of purposes.

This series is about purpose-driven organizations. This is part 3 about purpose in self-organization. In the first part, Paula Nordhauzen from Energized.org discusses the benefits of a clear and inspiring purpose with Tim Kelley from the True Purpose® Institute. The second article is about how to accept the challenge of redesigning from money-driven to purpose-driven. 

Tim, at Energized.org, one of our daily activities is supporting organizations adopting Holacracy. That is one way to organize work around purpose. Do you see many differences between hierarchical businesses that are purpose-driven and self-organizing companies?

Many of the purpose-driven companies are hierarchical and still get a huge benefit from having a world-class purpose. Being self-organized helps deal with a different aspect of motivation in organizations. In structured self-organizing companies, people don’t assess that they are victims of the system and their opinion doesn’t really matter. This does happen more often in hierarchical companies and is not an engaging and motivating state to be in. In self-organization, there are pathways to have an impact that contributes to the purpose.

The fact is that a relatively small percentage of CEO’s are willing to go for self-organization, or are willing to go for an organizational higher purpose, no matter how good the statistics look, and no matter how obvious it is that that would work better than the old way.

In structured self-organizing companies, people don’t assess that they are victims of the system and their opinion doesn’t really matter. This does happen more often in hierarchical companies and is not an engaging and motivating state to be in. In self-organization, there are pathways to have an impact that contributes to the purpose.

In self-organization, there’s a purpose being used for the biggest circle. Usually, it comes from a statement that was used before as a mission statement. In a hierarchical company, the CEO is most often the initiator. Can we expect the same thing from a Lead Link in a Holacracy-driven organization?

Even in Holacratic organizations, I see a lot of these economic purposes, like ‘better design, better service’. In Holacracy, the Lead Link of the anchor circle or the anchor circle itself, if it has no Lead Link, decides “We need a better purpose for this enterprise.” Anyone in the organization can – and should – be feeling a tension with the current purpose if it does not work.

I can imagine that evolving a new purpose statement, is not something a Lead Link wants to decide all by him- or herself.

If you’re not the Lead Link, then you feel this pressure personally. You can tell the Lead Link: “Go off by yourself and come up with a better purpose than this one. We’re counting on you.” That’s not a responsibility anybody wants. It’s like dental surgery: if you’re not trained, you don’t know how to answer that question. You can’t find it by scratching notes on that back of an envelope; you need help with this. You need a way to create a better purpose. And that’s when you hire somebody.

Having more people trying to sense the purpose increases the odds that you’re going to do a good job of sensing it rather than having one person trying to sense the purpose. As a Lead Link, your next step is to have a project called “Company purpose updated” or something like that. Now you throw basically a purpose party. Invite everybody to participate in whatever methodology you’re using. And some of them come and some of them don’t. Everyone who’s willing is involved in trying to sense a better purpose for the organization. If the methodology is good, the odds of success are extremely high. Good organizational purpose processes have success rates close to 100 percent. The odds of success are higher than for personal purpose processes because you have multiple people trying to sense the purpose. It almost always works if you’re using a good method.

Where to start? Are organizational purposes way easier to find than implementing self-organization?

If you want to start there and then do the self-organizing later, that’s fine. If you help a company find its purpose, after a few years when they’ve been really good at it, if it really took and it really gets adopted, people start to get interested in self-organization.

It’s very interesting. And if you do it the other way around, if you do the self-organization first, then after a few years, they’re going to say, “Wait a minute, this purpose we have isn’t good enough.”
Whichever you start with, you are going to want to do the other one sooner or later.

How to vector work towards the purpose

When your organization practices Holacracy, everybody works in roles. A role is a piece of work that needs to be done in order to vector the company towards its purpose. So Holacracy is like a breakdown or a hierarchy of purposes. It replaces the organogram of persons or job titles with what it is you’re trying to accomplish. Therefore, when you fill one or more roles, you are fully aware of what you’re contributing to. That makes the impact more visible and motivation easier to capture.

In Holacracy, the definition of the purpose of a role is “a capacity, potential, or unrealizable goal that the role will pursue or express on behalf of the organization.” When first learning how to practice Holacracy, it can be overwhelming. The new language, rules, and meeting formats can make you forget that in the end, it is all about contributing to the purpose. We often talk about “role awareness,” which actually means “purpose awareness”.

If all purposes are well aligned it is like in the story of President John F. Kennedy visiting NASA headquarters for the first time in 1961. While touring the facility, he introduced himself to a janitor who was mopping the floor and asked him what he did at NASA.

“I’m helping put a man on the moon!” said the janitor.

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If you are curious about Holacracy or have thoughts about purpose in organizations, we’d love to get in touch. Send an email to paula@energized.org