The learning points are as follows:
- Provide the organisation with meaning and direction
- Rewild the organisation
- Reconnect the organisation with its internal and external ecosystems
- Use employees’ flow and energy as a daily compass
- Foster a sense of closeness and inclusion
- Create space for improvisation
- Liberation demands individual employee accountability to the community
- Design new and more life-giving daily practices
- Create new nodal points
- Liberate professional expertise
- Establish a constructive error culture
Read more about the individual learning points below.
1. GIVE THE ORGANISATION MEANING AND DIRECTION
The first learning point is that a clear, guiding and meaningful shared mission is crucial in a liberating organisation.
In a liberating organisation and culture, a well-defined mission helps create direction and meaning. The mission should be seen as a lighthouse that guides ships safely to harbor at night.
When the leader liberates the employee, there is also a realise from professional management. This means that the leader does not micromanage the employee’s professional work, making it extremely important for the employee to find meaning and direction in the shared mission.
If employees are liberated without a clear and distinct shared mission, the leader risks creating a situation where employees either cannot realize their potential and apply their expertise or a situation where the lack of shared direction allows employees’ professional work to be driven by personal interests. Both scenarios result in a product where employees create less value for the community than they could have.
A shared mission is therefore essential as it provides meaning, direction and serves as a value compass for employees in their professionally liberated daily life.
However, creating meaning and direction in the organisation through a shared mission does not come without challenges. The challenges we have encountered have not been in the clarification process, but afterwards. These challenges have included:
- How to implement the mission in everyday life so that it becomes universally accepted?
- How to make the mission a cultural catalyst for the organisation?
- How do liberating leaders effectively lead through mission, vision and values?
- What new leadership competencies does liberating leadership require from our leaders and how do we develop and train these competencies in daily practice?
2. REWILD THE ORGANISATION
The second learning point is that if you want to create a liberating regenerative organisation, you need to rewild it.
Why is this necessary?
It is necessary because our current organisations have been developed in response to a significant increase in knowledge complexity. Organisations have long attempted to manage this increase by implementing quality, control and reporting instances, policies, descriptions of workflows, templates, structures and not least, management and organisational hierarchies.
This has occurred despite research in complex systems indicating that these complex systems (a system becomes complex as soon as two or more components are involved), such as our organisations, cannot be controlled or managed but can only be handled appropriately by maintaining a proper balance between structure and chaos.
Research also shows that over-structured complex systems become rigid. This has happened to our organisations, resulting in organisations that, through recruitment and quality assurance systems, personnel policies, hierarchical management culture and bureaucracy, inhibit life and employees’ professional expression.
The consequence? It is evident in negative stress statistics and organisational well-being surveys.
The solution is to rewild the organisation.
We need to dismantle the structures, hierarchies and control systems that inhibit the flourishing and development of organisational life. Rewilding occurs through this dismantling.
Our experiences have shown us that we should view employees’ flow as life and our focus has therefore been on getting employees into flow. We have focused on identifying the elements in the organisation’s structures, hierarchies and systems that inhibit and limit employees’ flow and professional expression.
And then we have tried to remove them. But this has not been without challenges. The biggest challenges have included:
- Introducing a division of responsibilities where employees with the necessary professional expertise and knowledge are responsible for professional decisions
- Convincing organisations that the result of the above is also the best quality assurance
- Creating flexibility in the organisation’s professional organisation so that necessary professional networks can form around tasks across departments, teams etc.
- Reformulating and implementing new leadership roles
Our evaluation of our work has confirmed that over-structured organisations can be rewilded and made vibrant again. The effect can be seen in employees’ flow, motivation and professional engagement.
3. RECONNECT THE ORGANISATION WITH ITS INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL ECOSYSTEMS
Our third learning point is that you need to reconnect the organisation with all its internal and external ecosystems when working to create liberating and regenerative organisations.
An organization is a complex system and once you have liberated and rewilded it (as discussed in last week’s learning point), it is important to reconnect the organisation with all its relationships and connections— in other words, with all its internal and external ecosystems.
When you reconnect the organisation’s employees with each other—internally—and with the outside world—externally—a strong and life-giving force arises within the organisation.
A force that emerges from relationships and is expressed through a flow where life and energy move across the organisation’s individuals, professional fields and teams.
What arises is confluence: an organisational merging.
When the organisation is reconnected and confluence occurs, the result is a more dynamic, innovative and most importantly a vibrant organisation. Together, this enables better handling of complexity and the creation of reasonable interdisciplinary solutions.
Through our work to reconnect relationships and ecosystems, thereby restoring life to Danish organisations, we have encountered challenges such as:
- Getting the organisation to perceive itself as a living organism, thinking in terms of wholes, interconnectedness and diversity
- Creating mutually trust-based relationships—both internally and externally
- Removing and dismantling organisational everyday practices that directly prevent employees from feeling connected internally within the organisation
When working to reconnect your organisation, our experience shows that much focus should be placed on internal relationships. Therefore, work on creating relationship-building opportunities across “silos”: create favorable relations for cross-organisational collaboration, professional networks and not least meetings.
4. USE EMPLOYEES’ FLOW AND ENERGY AS A DAILY COMPASS
The fourth learning point is that as a liberating leader, you should focus on getting your employees into professional and personal flow. It is through employees’ flow that you unlock the potential of liberation.
In our work to establish liberating cultures, we typically see three main purposes of the liberating culture:
- Restoring life in the organisation
- Unlocking employees’ professional expertise
- Increasing well-being and reducing stress
The first two points are inextricably linked to flow, making it one of our major focus areas.
When working to create the conditions for flow, our experience is that several factors need to be considered:
- How to adapt the organisation?
- Who has which roles and responsibilities?
- What are the decision-making processes and collaboration methods?
- How do we lead?
It is in the synergy between these factors that flow arises. And flow is crucial.
We believe that a leader’s impact on employees’ flow is the single most important aspect of the liberating leader’s leadership task.
A fundamental requirement for the liberated organisation is that professional decision-making competence is delegated to professional employees. When decision-making competencies are removed from your shoulders, you should instead spend your time on employees’ energy and flow. You must be able to sense and understand it and act as a catalyst for even more of it.
Employees’ flow and energy should be constantly boosted and positively influenced in all daily dialogues—from hallway conversations and chats by the coffee machine to large gatherings in meeting rooms.
To succeed in this, you need to be present. Not only must you be present, but you must also be present in the moment or ‘here and now’.
You should be available to support your employees’ process.
You need to let go of the decision-making processes that typically occur in your mind and often influence your dialogue and impact on employees in your conversations.
In other words, you must master the discipline of in the moment leadership. But in the moment leadership also presents challenges, such as:
- Creating a role distribution that gives professional employees real decision-making authority regarding professional decisions
- Teaching leaders to shift their focus away from always being in small decision-making processes
- Training leaders to identify flow and energy—and in their role as flow catalysts
5. FOSTERING A SENSE OF CLOSENESS AND INCLUSION
Learning Point number 5 revolves around how a liberating organisation requires a slightly different exercise of personal leadership and the importance of fostering inclusion and closeness if you, as a leader, wish to succeed in this liberating process.
Traditionally, leaders—consciously or unconsciously—have developed competencies to exercise personal leadership through professional decision-making processes. This way, leaders have managed to psychologically influence employees and create well-being and cohesion.
The conditions in liberating and regenerative organisations differ somewhat from traditional ones, presenting unique challenges.
Typically, leaders are further removed from the employees’ concrete tasks and detached from the professional decision-making processes, which are delegated to the employees.
As a result, both the leader and the employees are deprived of an essential leadership space—a space previously used by the leader to exercise personal leadership.
In the absence of this leadership space, it is crucial that as a liberating leader, you create a new one, where you must be particularly attentive to addressing the following fundamental emotional needs of the employees:
- The need for inclusion and the feeling of belonging
- The need for closeness and the experience of appropriate personal closeness in everyday life
In the new leadership space, you should create leadership opportunities where you can exercise your personal leadership. But how do you do that? By building/discovering a multitude of new touch points.
Touch points can be informal meetings, hallway chats, lunch conversations, discussions at the coffee machine, etc.
These small momentary meetings are far more important for the leader in a liberating organization than they were previously. It is here that you, as a liberating leader, can psychologically influence the individual employee. It is in these meetings that you create a sense of “we” and “us,” thereby fostering the experience of belonging to this “we” and being part of “us.”
In these encounters, you learn to reflect and match each individual’s need for intimacy and closeness, thus creating a mutual relationship and building personal closeness.
However, these touch points or “micro talks,” as they are also called, can be an entirely new situation for many leaders to suddenly have to work with. At Promentum, our experience is that it requires a significant behavioral change for individual leaders, who in the traditional hierarchical organisation were largely given this leadership space, whereas in the liberating organisation, they must actively create it themselves.
And some leaders need help to achieve this.
6. CREATE ROOM FOR IMPROVISATION
Our 6th learning point deals with improvisation and the importance of creating space for it and supporting a “yes, and”- culture if you want to succeed in creating liberating and regenerative organisations.
And Improvisation is a crucial element in supporting the flow state of the liberated employee. It involves both frameworks and autonomy and how we build on each other’s ideas and actions.
Improvisation is based on a “yes, and” -culture, where we meet the ideas of others positively and build upon them. In a “yes, and” -culture, there exists a psychological state where we see possibilities instead of limitations. It is a state where we meet challenges with curiosity and openness, where we are collaborators constantly seeking synergy with our surroundings and other participants.
This state contrasts with being overly critical and quickly dismissing others’ ideas—a behavior often characteristic of a zero-error culture.
Psychologist Marcial Losada’s research shows that leadership groups permeated by a “yes, and”- culture, with a positivity ratio of 3:1 or higher (where positive things occupy three times as much as negative things), are the most successful and excel in nearly all productivity parameters.
In our work with organisational development programs, we have found that it is important to work on raising the positivity quotient within an organisation. This is done by liberating employees professionally, fostering positive relationships among employees and creating organisational conditions that allow professional employees to engage more extensively in professional ad hoc networks, where they can collectively experiment and improvise new and creative solutions.
Only in this way can we handle the complexity of current and future knowledge.
In our work to create a “yes, and”-culture in development programs, we identified the two greatest challenges as:
- Addressing the leaders’ need for professional control
- The organisations’ ‘settlement’ with silo thinking/-culture and the establishment of a flexible and more ad hoc professional organisation.
7. LIBERATION DEMANDS INDIVIDUAL RESPONSIBILITY TOWARDS THE COMMUNITY
The 7th learning point is that a liberating culture places significant demands on the individual employee’s responsibility towards the community in liberating and regenerative organisations.
Liberation only works if employees have the social maturity and responsibility level to choose to work for the common good and prioritize communal interests over their individual interests and needs.
Therefore, in our development programs, we had to work with the organisations’/employees’ understanding of the concept of freedom.
And we introduced and implemented a “freedom to” approach within the organisations.
A brief explanation:
Fundamentally, there are two different understandings of the concept of “free.” You can be “free from” or “free to.”
In modern everyday language, freedom is often understood as “free from”: being a self-realizing free bird with no obligations to anyone.
However, we believe this is a misunderstood interpretation of ‘free.’
Looking at the origin of the word, it is related to “frænde,” an old word for a clan member. The frænde was protected by the clan, so being frænde was synonymous with being free. One was “free to” do things because the community had one’s back.
Thus, one can only be free if one is part of a community, as it is the community that sets you free. And it is a mutual freedom because, as part of the community, you also commit to setting the other(s) free.
A liberating organisation and a liberating leader must therefore be able to create a strong and binding community that can set its members free.
And at the same time, ensure that the community has each other’s back.
But what does it mean to have each other’s back?
Think of “proposing” to another. When we do this, we offer to enter a binding community where we mutually take responsibility, care for each other and have each other’s back.
Similarly, the freedom in liberating and regenerative organisations requires employees to commit to caring for each other and the community—to have each other’s back.
Freedom obliges and requires responsibility.
And one of our most important experiences is that the liberating organisation is extremely vulnerable if we do not create the necessary sense of obligation and responsibility among employees.
Specifically, in our development programs we have:
- Implemented a “freedom to” approach and worked on the concept of responsibility
- Worked on leaders’ ways of communicating community
- Trained leaders to influence community thinking
- Focused extra on candidates’ approach to community in recruitment processes
8. DESIGN NEW AND MORE LIFE-GIVING DAILY PRACTICES
The 8th learning point is that it is essential to create new and more life-giving daily practices to build liberating and regenerative organisations.
Organisations’ handling of increasing knowledge complexity (and complexity in general) has resulted in organisational entanglement rather than organisational development in recent years.
As touched upon under Learning Point #2, constructive handling of this complexity requires rewilding the organisation—dismantling systems, structures and daily practices that is ending life within the organisation.
Part of this rewilding involves developing new life-giving daily practices that replace the old ones. Daily practices that can revive the ecosystems within the organisation.
These new life-giving daily practices actually form themselves if we keep our hands, control needs and thinking from the old paradigm entirely away from the formation process. And if we are patient enough.
From our development programs with our clients, we know that we can support this formation-/development process by driving targeted design thinking processes.
These are engaging design thinking processes where all relevant employees, stakeholders, etc., jointly develop new life-giving daily practices within and between the organisation’s various ecosystems—both internal and external.
To succeed in these processes, it is crucial that these daily practices are genuinely life-giving. At Promentum, we use a set of principles in developing life-giving daily practices and we believe that a daily practice is life-giving if it:
- Sets professional employees free in relation to their fields
- Creates flow and energy—both for the individual employee and around the task
- Is “boundary-crossing” and supports interdisciplinarity and solutions across fields
- Creates connectivity, movements and changes
- Supports more collaboration and reduces competition
- Creates community and shared solutions
- Provides the conditions for life within the organisation to be constantly created and developed
Our experience is that the greatest challenge in developing new life-giving daily practices is the tendency to revert to the old leadership and organisational paradigm, thereby repeating past mistakes.
A genuine paradigm shift is therefore 100% crucial.
And this paradigm shift in organisations is typically achieved by working on elements such as:
- The need for a new leadership and organisational paradigm
- Introduction to the regenerative paradigm—philosophically and theoretically
- The regenerative organisation in practice
- Regenerative leadership in practice—and the new leadership role
- What does life in an organisation look like?
- How do we restore life in the organisation?
This process often starts with top management—without them, there is no real paradigm shift towards liberating and regenerative organisations.
9. Create New Nodes
The ninth learning point emphasizes the importance of establishing new nodes within organisations.
Years of efforts in streamlining and implementing LEAN methodologies and new public management KPIs have rendered our organisations structured and “straightened out.”
Straightened out in the sense that nodes have disappeared, and processes have eliminated all superfluous time consumption.
We no longer waste time waiting at the printer and the cafeteria queue has vanished thanks to various LEAN initiatives. The number of meeting participants has been reduced to a minimum, as the agendas and topics.
Wasteful internal courses, departmental retreats and travel time for meetings have also been eliminated.
Instead, we have virtual meetings, online training available at convenient times, IT support capable of remote access and automated, streamlined IT systems that facilitate processes.
We have optimized, economized and eliminated all inefficient activities and small time-thieves.
Rational and seemingly sensible.
But it also poses challenges for organisations.
For it is in these time pockets, in the nodes and in the seemingly insignificant moments that life unfolds.
It is in these nodes that we recharge with life and human contact. And it is often here that meaning, community, creative solutions, friendships, relationships and psychological safety are created.
The diagnosis is clear:
We have created such efficient organisations that they deplete employees’ energy and vitality. And perhaps also the overall creative drive.
Therefore, it is crucial to create new nodes, new time pockets, new opportunities for unoptimized interactions in unplanned moments, where the unpredictability and openness of the moment allow us to be fully and completely together.
Together we create life and many other good things…
Although it may sound mystical, it is about breaking some of the efficient work processes for employees. This gives them occasional breathing space and making them receptive to spontaneous moments. It involves creating pit stops in everyday life where employees can receive diverse and unconventional inputs and have opportunities to break routines and the streamlined flow.
This can take many forms, such as “high school evenings” with educational themes, nature walks, small talk during meetings, department meetings around a campfire, days with longer lunch breaks, built-in “hibernation periods,” conversations about philosophical and existential themes, etc.
The only limit is imagination – it should just contribute to the rewilding of liberating and regenerative organisations and must not support the logic of efficiency further.
10. Liberate Professionalism
The tenth learning point asserts that professionalism should be liberated.
And the professional flow of employees should be supported by new responsibilities, roles and a more flexible organisation.
The complexity of knowledge means that many tasks can only be reasonably solved if the organisation’s professionalism is engaged in a collaborative process.
This process must not be hindered by a management hierarchy where the leader becomes a bottleneck.
It kills professionalism and engagement among employees and the life within the organisation.
Thus, it is about liberating employees’ professional work, which is achieved by redefining roles and responsibilities within the organisation. In a liberating organisation, professional decisions are made by the professional employees, not by the leaders.
In essence, these are so to speak, the employees who have the expertise, who ‘have it.’ They are the ones who have the responsibility and the professional decision-making authority.
The complexity of knowledge and the multidisciplinary nature of knowledge also mean that professional organisation is different from the traditional organisation. It is much more flexible and constantly evolving, allowing relevant professionals to be continuously integrated into professional processes as needed.
The central point for organizing in a liberating organisation is the personal and professional flow of employees. And it is essential that the organisation supports the flow in the employees’ handling of complex tasks.
In our development processes, this often leads to the implementation of ad hoc organisation around professionalism and task resolution.
An ad hoc organisation that continually manages to connect and disconnect expertise and professionals based on the task’s needs. And takes the form of dynamic professional networks.
Additionally, we see a trend where ad hoc organisations extend beyond the traditional organisation’s boundaries, naturally involving necessary “external” expertise.
Liberating and regenerative organisations are thus more boundaryless and more collaborative rather than competitive.
The typical challenges we have encountered in liberating professionalism are:
- Training leaders to disengage from professional issues and teaching them to delegate to relevant employees.
- Training employees to take responsibility and make professional decisions themselves.
- Training employees to involve other relevant/necessary professionals in decision-making processes.
- Breaking down existing (professional) silos.
- Facilitating the start-up of ad hoc professional networks.
- Training professionals in their new roles and facilitating the ad hoc professional networks.
- Defining the new role of leaders and training them to fulfill it.
- Shifting the mindset from being competitive to collaborative – both internally and externally.
11. Create a Constructive Error Culture
The eleventh and final learning point addresses that the liberation of professionalism and employees will only succeed if the organisation has a constructive error culture. This is crucial for the development of future liberating and regenerative organisations.
The responsibility for professional decisions will in the future lie with the professional employees – those who possess the expertise.
This is necessary to handle the complexity of knowledge and make wise professional decisions. Very few leaders have the expertise to make these professional decisions – nor should they.
This responsibility belongs to the professional employees.
From Promentum’s development processes, we know that it is challenging to succeed in delegating professional decisions to professional employees if the organisation has a problematic error culture.
Professional employees do not want to take on responsibility if they are blamed when mistakes are made. Understandably. Therefore, in developing a liberating organisation, it is important to work purposefully on the organisation’s error culture.
In short, a constructive error culture is about creating a culture where it is okay to make mistakes. The organisation, leaders and employees should not react inappropriately negatively to mistakes. Instead, a culture should be built where mistakes are seen as a natural part of development and everyday life.
Where mistakes are used constructively for learning – and where the number of mistakes is actually reduced through this approach.
Our experience shows that this is easier said than done.
Organistions typically find it easy enough to agree that they want a constructive error culture, but unfortunately, there are many underlying cultural and interpersonal factors that risk keeping the organisation in an unfortunate error culture.
Additionally, our experience shows that many public organisations are particularly challenged regarding their error culture. There is often a deeply ingrained zero-error culture – which has many obvious reasons, such as the risk of quickly ending up in the media if errors are made in a citizen/patient case.
Despite a great understanding of the triggers for a zero-error culture and the difficult premises, it is detrimental to professional liberation. Therefore, it is crucial that organisations work purposefully to make the culture more learning-oriented and open.
In developing a constructive error culture, we typically work with themes such as:
- Establishing a learning organisation – and implementing concepts such as experiments, trials, sprints, stand-up meetings and evaluation meetings.
- Establishing dynamic ad hoc professional networks.
- Influencing the organisation’s general perception of mistakes and errors.
- Leaders’ handling and reaction when mistakes occur.
- Training in discussing mistakes differently and more positively – both verbally and physically.
