 We couldn't be happier to have our next guest here joining us as well. She's a familiar name and face for a lot of you and for the rest she will be a nice new acquaintances. So very welcome, Bonita Roy. Thank you. Ah, you get a hug. That's nice. We should do more hugging as agile people. I already learned he was a really good hugger. Oh, there we go. Who told you? God, I'm embarrassed. Okay, anyway, you believe that you need two main parts in order to get an agile organization working and you're about to tell us about those two parts and how to do it. So I'll probably leave the floor to you, but you go around the world and you work with different companies, organizations. You've been to Sweden as well a number of times. You work with some of the companies here. How do we measure up? Okay, so I work primarily in Sweden and Norway and I think Sweden is, they have a building called the EpiCenter and it's I think the EpiCenter of this movement, this imagination, very imaginative people. I also work in Norway and I have to say that the town of Trondheim is doing an extraordinary experiment. They fired all their municipal managers and they asked them to reapply and reapply by stating principles of distributed decision making. What do they envision for their town? So they're in a process of really taking this into the social and augmenting democracy itself. So these are two really exciting EpiCenters, I think, of this work and the Nordic countries should feel proud of that. All right, we will, this is the one, right? Yes. So we will feel pride or proud? Yes. Yes, both. And I'll leave the stage to you. You have the slides there. You have the clicker there. All right, there we go. Thank you very much. Take it away. Let's start with framing that I let itself compose while I spend some few moments with the group and in the company of the people. So I start off with a little cheat sheet because it has just formed itself or informed itself in participation with this environment, with some of the people that I talked with, with some of the earlier presentations. So this is a sense of self-organizing. You let your own thoughts self-organize. And self-organization then can bring you into the context of what is actually happening at any given moment, right? So instead of coming up here with a slide that just starts off, I just want to honor this whole notion of self-organization. So what came up for me is that I'm going to... My presentation, I think, is going to ask you to tap into the edge of your own beliefs, right? So this is maybe the irritating piece that Thomas talked about. And really try to let your imagination go into what you think is possible that's never been possible before. So we want to take a broad look at, perhaps, what is this movement? Where is it going? Where is the momentum taking us beyond our everyday organizational challenges? So it's not that appropriate to this group, but a lot of times I work with, as I said, like in Trondheim, where people want to augment democracy. And I'll say to people, how many people really believe in democracy? You can raise your hands, okay? So raise them high. We all believe in democracy. So how many of you people, be honest, would run an organization through the democratic process, as we know it, one man, one vote? Okay, a little less sure, right? So then I say, well, if you wouldn't run your organization as a democracy, why the hell do you think you can run your country as a democracy? So something in our mindset, in the way we think about these terms, is not really meshing. We need to take a more careful look at how we make meaning with these words, right? Because we're all about reinventing organizations and reinventing organizational life. And ultimately, I would argue, we are about reinventing social institutions and humans, human participation, right? So we just want to try to take a little closer look at what do we mean about these words, and today we're going to take a closer look at what do we mean about self-organization. So how many people, real, I'll be honest, and I know Jurgen's not going to raise his hand, how many people really trust self-organization? Okay? So how many people are skeptical and don't trust it? Okay, and some other people are in the middle. So that doesn't give me despair because I read something about cults. And in cults, if you're up here and you're trying to convince people, the two easiest people to convince are the ones that really believe you and the ones that are really skeptical. So I think I'm in a good shape there. All right. When we think about self-organization, we need to first, what is our starting point? We need to be really honest with ourselves, and for the most part, the way we go about our daily lives, certainly the way we go about participating in institutions is highly conditioned habits, right? They're conditioned by our schools which are still conventionally structured, they're conditioned by the rhetoric we hear on TV and stuff. So right now where we're actually at is basically we're trying to escape highly conditioned habits. So what can we draw on? We don't want to draw necessarily on those conditioned habits to go forward. We need to take a step back into something I call deep code. Who are we as human beings? As human beings, we self-organize, we've evolved to be social participants and we've self-organized. So in this work, we're going to take a step back, try to say who are we as human beings? Can we deconstruct the social conditions and habits down to our deep human operating system and then build new structures from there, right? So it's a two-step. So Stuart Kaufman said order, vast and generative arises naturally, right? So this is something we maybe can believe in. Most of the order seen in nature is spontaneous, a natural expression of a stunning self-organization that abounds. Does anybody know, you guys were all like Star Wars and Pokemon experts, does anybody know what this is a picture of? This is a picture of molecules self-organizing to create very structured stations for the replication of messenger RNA. There's no managers, there's no rule book, right? So self-organization at this level is not a trivial thing. It's deep within the evolutionary code of life itself. So these are pictures from the architect Christopher Alexander. He took these pictures because he was trying to answer the question, what is life? And he also saw that the nature of order was self-organizing and these are ways that we self-organize. And if we had time, we could have a conversation over, what are the catalysts here that create self-organization? What about the environment is rich enough to attract self-organization and support self-organization? So we have different ways of naturally organizing ourselves. This is also patterns of self-organization that are primarily driven by threat or pressure or drastic change. And you see that the different environments or the different conditions create different patterns of self-organization. So these people are not following a guidebook or a rule book. There are no signs up that tell them how to be. So all of living animals and insects also self-organize in creative ways to solve construction problems, right? That's a pretty complex task. To create social bonds, deep, rough-house plays turns out to be a very important aspect of building social bonds, to building family and extended family bonds. These are all ways of self-organizing. So we also see that in nature, there's multiple species self-organized to create rich, complex environments. So there's a whole literature and research around self-organization. And one of the things I wanted to point out in these slides is that years ago when we went and looked at ecologies, like the food web, we had the pyramid, right? Where the dominant, like the wolf was on the top and he got to eat these animals and these animals got to eat these animals and these animals ate the plants. So what did it look like? It looked like a dominance hierarchy, right? But was that hierarchy in nature or in the model of the researcher doing it? And this is one of the questions we can use when we look at our own organizations because a certain person will go in and say, oh my God, it's such a hierarchy. And another person maybe who has more lived experience and knows how has better ways of relating with people will say, no, no, no, it just looks like that to you because, you know, he's really good at giving orders and we just let him do that and really underneath what's going on is much more self-organizing. So we really have to be careful that we're not looking at complex processes of human relations. We're not looking at this and saying, oh, it's a hierarchical food chain because we went from the food pyramid to this kind of thing where this one ate that one but then this one and all these complex relations and now we look at complex ecologies in a very complex networked fashion, right? So this is one of the things to remember when we look at self-organization. So the cells of your body coordinate, the behaviors are about 100,000 different kinds of molecules as matter and energy cross their boundaries and we'll see that in self-organization in human systems this is what's happening. We're exchanging matter and energy. We self-organize to distribute the energy load of our task demands. It works the same in a human cell. The mind is also now thought of as an emerging property of self-organized complexity. So if the mind is not wired into some static habit it can continuously be responsive and self-organized in different ways. So self-organization is not a trivial thing. So why do people self-organize? This is a kind of geeky ecological scientific explanation but the way we can look at it is people self-organize the same reason ecologies do to distribute the energy load of task demands. So that could be biological. When we're born we can't even eat, right? So there are mechanisms where we self-organize with our mother to achieve that task demand. It could be physiological, so we need to move the couch I need to distribute that task demand. It could be psychological, this one's often under look so the need for companionship, for play, for conversation it's one thing to sit and talk to yourself all day but that's a task demand we actually like to distribute with other people. So we self-organize. It could be physical. It could be cognitive. So mostly now the task demands and organizations are cognitive so we need to self-organize to distribute the energy load of that. Okay, so here is a self-organizing work group. Now it turns out that people, unlike other species are really really good at self-organizing with other species. So we've been able to self-organize with other species to distribute these types of task demands. We're also really good at self-organizing with static material. So this is distributing the task demand of have a physical task demand and this is the task demand of psychological task demand of something that is more playful and creative. But the way we work with instruments is really the way we self-organize our bodies, we coordinate our bodies with actual physical things. And this is not trivial. It's not trivial. So when you watch yourself as you go through this conference you can see how many ways in which we are participating in many different levels and scales. And so this is also a way to self-organize computational and cognitive types of networks. Okay, so there's a great TED talk by Sugatra Mitra who showed that if you put a computer in rural India where people don't know how to speak English and they never went to school and they don't know how to use a computer that just by the nature of their participatory support and their curiosity they can learn about recombinant DNA over the course of a year. So they teach themselves how to use the computer, how to speak English, how to surf the web, what questions to ask. So the power of trusting self-organization is really quite amazing. So it's a great talk if you haven't seen it. That's from Mitra Self-Organizing Learning Environments. So the other thing we need to know about self-organization is that they rely on simple protocols. That simple protocols generate the rich environments for self-organization. So this is something, for example, that James in Socioxy 3 is trying to get back down to these simple fundamental protocols that if you seed them into environments where people are allowed to participate, they will generate rich environments, rich complex environments that are responsive. So when we talk about how we can get people to self-organize, we want to look for some of these simple protocols that seed the environment for the expression of the complex responsiveness in humans. And this is, again, this slide presentation shows you that all of this is consistent with science on this deep ecological life-force level. We're trying to tap into something that has evolved as life evolves. So this is the way I started. We're pretty much conditioned to people, we want to go back and understand self-organization from this deeper code because we're about to switch and say, well, what's the challenge going forward? If we can get back and understand ourselves as naturally evolved self-organizing organisms and honor the fact that we're really, really good at it, then how can we take that by past the conditioned habits of modernity and move that into the kinds of future that we envision? So it's a two-step. It's not just about getting back to our roots, our primal roots, but understanding the genius in that evolved system and taking that energy, taking that genius and moving it into a new future. So this slide is a very simple protocol of how to do that. It's also backed by a lot of science, self-determination theory is used in almost all leadership assessments and management assessments, but this is an attempt to get us to understand our own lived experience. Can I get back to understanding myself as a self-organizing being? So there's three aspects of the way we hook up with people and what Ralph Stacey calls complex processes of human relating. First of all, we have our own autonomy as an individual. We're going to hold on to this. This is not something that we can let go lightly. We can't even let it go. We are all born very unique and that's precious to us. So we have our own autonomous identity, but we're also relational beings. So we're also relational beings and we also have agency. We want to act out in the world. We want to perform who we are. We want to solve problems and do tasks. So the collective version of these three that comprised my lived experience as a social being is first my own autonomy. So I have a little being there talking to itself. And then we are all collectively autonomous individuals. So this already makes it a challenge. How do you deal with that? So we share intentions. And the biggest part about sharing intentions that's supposed to be the earth down there is that we have a common world. So not only are we collectively autonomous, but we have a common world. So we're grounded in something that has its own commonality. So that's the environment, the environment that we have. And then primarily, we link together through our value chains. So we have a common world that somehow creates the ability for us to have shared values. And then we seek out and it's like a strange attractor. We magnetically associate with people who have the same value chains as ours. So we get these value chains. And then we can use that to create collaborative action. And if you see this moves, it's a collective version of autonomy, relationality, shared intentions and the value change. And then we have collaborative action instead of our own action in the world. So very simple schematic. So what are the challenges? The challenges are we are also in the revolution of becoming very individuated. We want our singular perspective. There are more ways to be unique now than ever before. So this is also coming online. The same time that our need to have scale agile and have more collective agency, we see that we're also becoming demanding and understanding ourselves as the unique perspective that we have and we want to honor that. Right? We have a common world. This gives you a sense of what I'm talking about. These are three autonomous individuals, but there's a sharing going on already. Shared intentions. We're getting closer now to actually self-organizing to action and world-building type intentions. So this is an interesting slide because they have the same values but they're not actually collaborating, right? So they're still individual and you can see the sense in which at what level of self-organization that's happening here. It doesn't seem to me they can even help each other, right? But they're sharing the value of this crazy activity that they have. So how many of you are like coaches or chapter coaches or something like this? So these are... If you do the workshops, plug, plug, these are the types of ways you can look at your organization. Where's the level of autonomy? Are we sharing worlds? Are we sharing intentions? What type of value sphere do we have? And you can use tools such as sense-making tools to assay the kind of state that your teams are in and have conversations that matter around this. Then we have real self-organized teams. You see there's a sense of vulnerability when you're really at this level because without the collaborated action of all three things would not be that effective. So these are the kinds of switches that happen in actual lived experiences. You get closer and closer to authentic teamwork, right? So all the steps and toward getting to that. And then you have things like teams of teams and scaled agility. This is kind of a cool slide because I think it throws you back into something that may be problematic in the sense of the loss of individuality here, right? So this is a team that may be able to scale, but they don't have a lot of options to be responsive or to have new ideas. And there's always this kind of toggle when you get to scaling large groups is that are you going to diminish the autonomy of the group? If you diminish the autonomy of the group, then you're not going to be innovative and creative. So there's a big toggle between this, which has got some vulnerability, but it's really kind of synergistic action in this. And too many large scale, but relatively safe methodologies. I don't know which ones I'm talking about. They're really, they can pull this off, but they're not going to be as innovative because the autonomy, you're not bringing in the genius of that other aspect of human self-organization, which is the autonomy and the flexibility. So we just have to, this is a very, we would say it's an old structure of collecting people. So I think I'm not sure what my time is, but when we look at human self-organization, we're looking at emergent potentials. We're not just looking at these old evolutionary potentials. So this is a picture of Burning Man, and this is an experiment in emerging potentials. And I'm just going to go through one last slide. It's kind of a complicated slide, but first I do it this way. So what's the challenge in the emerging potentials of human self-organization? What is coming online for us that has never been there before? And if you put your hands together, it's kind of like this. First, there's two people. And when they come into social space, we're all kind of bundled up. These are our motivations and our relational anxieties and our social anxieties kind of bundled up. We're all kind of closed up. And when two people come together in social space, the first thing that happens is they have to negotiate their intentions and their anxieties and what's going on here. But the interesting thing that happens, and this is the key piece if you remember this, is when they come together, they're going to feel the pressure to create roles. This is my identity. Who am I going to show up with her? Who am I going to show up with him? So not only are we trying to figure out our kind of emotional and intentional spaces, which is very chaotic, but in order for these things to sync up, we have to fall into an identity that I accept. So right now all of you are accepting the identity of I get to talk to you. And maybe that could have broken down if I was Milo. If I was Milo, maybe that would have been broken down. But what happens is in organizations, we've traditionally only given people a handful of roles or identities that they can play. And when this happens, it helps us connect because I know who I am and you know who you are. But it gets us stuck in those roles. And what we need to do, the emergent property of human self-organization is to learn how to be very flexible in that identity space and just kind of move toward action, right? So one of the challenges of going forward is if we have these relational values, we have an interplay of needs and wants that has to be worked out, that's a challenge. And then we have emergent identities in social space. We need to agree on how we are going to understand each other. And this creates a lot of social anxiety. It is why people actually in many cases just say, give me a role, tell me what to do. I want to understand me myself as that role. But it robs the system of the evolutionary genius of that interaction. So when we work with people, we work with them saying, well, what role did you take? What were the available roles you could have taken? Can you think of other types of roles? So you can work with this heuristic of self-organization to create very, very high performance teams where innovative ideas, innovative type roles and identities will emerge. And then when that all works itself out, then you get an emergent outcome. So this is a kind of challenge to a kind of human constitution right now. But people have been working at this level, working without roles, letting roles and identities in social space emerge and be flexible and be creative. And I think when I show this slide, what I see here is if you've ever been to Burning Man, that's all what people are doing. They're wearing costumes and showing up. They're practicing roles, new roles, new types of ways of being human in social space. And this is a real challenge. This is one of the real horizons of creating very large, very responsive teams that can work in innovative ways. So when I look at the challenges for agile or the future of work, I want to say, well, what is it about us that we have to recreate as human beings? And we can be imaginative about that. And this is kind of where the rubber meets the road. In this way we are evolutionarily together when we self-organize. I think that's my time. I'm not sure if I started late. Five more minutes. So are there any questions? Or I could speed present the last part. I think you have ten minutes. Yeah, that's why I was asking. Okay, so I'm in good shape. So one of the things that happens in organizations, if you allow them to self-organize, then the power structures will also be innovative. You won't just have a dominance hierarchy. You might have over here at this condition. We've all been in groups that have worked really well and then the shit hits the fan. And you have an expert in the room and you just say, just tell us what to do. This is something we know how to move toward when under certain conditions. So in terms of self-organizing complexity, if we allow the genius to unfold and we know how to support that, then you will get this balance of how people organize, but it will be in response to appropriate conditions. So one of the things that happens, and if you're interested in this, I'm going to give you the download, but we're doing a whole day workshop on it, is that power is also a complex pattern in self-organized teams. What is power? Well, I need to organize, if power is my skills and resources divided by my needs and wants. And I'll just end with a story that illustrates this. Let's say I want my couch moved, right? And my need is very, very high because my mother's coming over and she hates it when the couch is near the TV. And yet I can't move it myself, so I have to self-organize with my partner to move the couch. Well, my partner inside of his needs and wants is like, his relational space is like, oh my God, she's just moving that because her mother's coming over and she needs to grow up and not be in there. So we have asymmetric needs and wants. In this case, my needs are very, very big and his needs are neutral or negative. He doesn't have a need, he doesn't want to move that couch. So this is already a very complex negotiation, right? From the get-go. If we slowed ourselves down and looked at what was happening in our lived bodies, maybe he's getting mad, maybe I'm getting irritated. So we come together and one of the things that is processing in the power matrix is our asymmetrical needs and wants. They're not the same. If he was freaking out because my mother was coming, no problem, we would just move the couch, okay? Skills and resources. Now on the other hand, he might be stronger than me, right? So my skills and resources might be small, less than his. So not only do I have greater needs and wants, which was juices my power, he has greater resources. So he really can, you know, I really need him to move the couch. So this becomes a complex negotiation, right? So this is this part. So we got to figure out our needs and wants and skills and resources. But here's the thing. In this negotiation, I can see a whole range of identities that might crystallize out of this. Do I want to be, you know, the bitch that leverages him? Well, I did that for you last week and blah, blah, blah. Do I want to be the petulant little victim that really needs his help and he doesn't understand me? So that's always the third part when we're negotiating. We have our asymmetric needs and wants, skills and resources. But in the end, it won't turn into collaborative action. If we can't settle on an identity for each one of us. And if you're really honest with yourself, you'll see that in all your interactions at work that aren't just unconscious, there's always this third element. Who am I going to allow myself to be identified in this relational space? And so this notion of that third identity coming out is a crucial part of learning how to negotiate the power dynamics. But what we know is the less asymmetry in the power dynamics, then you can create more value through these higher types of team performance. So the point here is to allow for self-organization to constantly churn away those asymmetric needs and wants, skills and resources, so that the power matrix grows from something that looks like coercion up into something that looks like synergy and co-creation. So these are the ideas around self-organization. They're very robust ideas. They rely on simple protocols and they're tested in practice for people like yourself that are interested in experimenting into new ways of collaboration. So that's it. Thank you very much. That's slide. I'll just bring back home by the way. I'll use it when moving couches and what have you. We actually do have time for questions. You'll also be joining the panel just after lunch, where we will have one very interactive part so you can throw all the questions you have for the panelists, but since we have a few minutes, we have a running microphone who's now behind stage, but questions for Bonita over here? Do you mind? All right, yeah, please do. Yeah, that's a big question. I do have an opinion on it. It's quite provocative, so I'm trying to try to answer in a headline. Oh, sorry. Okay, so the question has to do, what does this have to do with the whole notion of the tragedy of the commons? And I think your question is really on target because it has a lot to do with the tragedy of the commons. And I would say the piece really is in, well, I mean, it's in that triangle. It's how we are reacting when we're sitting down and negotiating the commons. And I think that what I'm saying is that in general, even people who would vote for the commons or want the commons or ideologically are for the commons, they don't really understand their own lived experience. They may, for example, give away their autonomy in that negotiation. So that's the shortest, where you're going is a very rich conversation. I'd love to have it with you. But my work is all about, let's be honest how I'm really participating and what am I participating with? Because to preserve the commons, we have to be able to hook up and be agentic, be doing things with other people, not just showing up, oh, here's my identity, I'm a good person, goes rah, rah, rah, the commons, right? So we can, so does that help answer your question? Yeah, yeah, thanks for the questions. Okay, we'll do one more question if, here we go. I was wondering how you were suffering. I was wondering what sense they could be self-organizing or when we're self-organizing to govern us. Yes, so... Do you want to repeat the question? So the question is, how does, how do I relate to when people, it is true, two people, beings can self-organize to create a dominant structure. So then he pulled at my heartstrings because he mentioned horses and I really love horses. Actually, this is working with horses and training horses has been part of this question. So we, again, I think that it requires both individuals to show up in a very healthy way. So, for example, one of the problems that we see, and then I'll get to answer your question, but one of the things we don't focus enough on in self-organization is that we focus a lot on dominance, who's dominating who, but we don't focus on our own needs and wants, which reduces my, so I can come into a situation, let's say my manager is actually neutral on something, but if I have so many needs and wants, I'm going to show up in a certain way that he might just say no, and then I'll go back and I'll feel dominated, right? And I feel dominated not only because I didn't have skills and resources, not only because of the skills or power resource asymmetry, but because I had too many needs and wants, right? And so that creates, so in terms of horses, when I work with horses, this is exactly the kinds of ways I start to understand this. So in the mantra that I do in the horse workshops is we don't want to be dominated or be dominators in general, that's a psychopathology, but we want to be leaders, right? So in the horse world we say, I'm going to shape the horse's character, I have that responsibility, they have to live in the human world, but the horse is going to shape my leadership because he's always going to be testing me, and so you have to allow that in, that part of the other equation in, so instead of me when I feel challenged pushing down, then I say I want to help, that's going to help me rise up, and then the horse rises up, and then the leader rides up, and the horse is right up. Now in the human world, and sometimes it'll reverse, and part of that part of being relationally, being better at being relational, has to do, when we do the exercise, how many relations, it's not about, can I always be nice, but having a lot of relational intelligence is how many types of relations can I be involved in in my group? Can I be a leader? Can I be a follower? Can I be against someone? Can I be with someone? Can I be beside someone? Can I be ahead of someone? Can I be way behind someone? And most people will see some of those things as negative, I don't want to be behind, and some as positive, or vice versa, and the relational aspect of the work is how many different types of relations can I be in with many different people, and that makes the environment more rich and complex, so that's part of the teaching on that. It's another big question. Okay, thank you very much. All right, thank you very much, Punita. There's some gifts and chocolate, and... Thank you all. You tend to get big questions. You'll be doing some workshopping tomorrow? Yes, and it'll be very dynamic. We're going to do some tai chi and push hands, and really notice what our power leaks and our power grabs are, and some of it will be disturbing, and all of it, we can be very proud of it, and most of it will be fun. Okay, so fun and disturbing. It sounds like a good treat. Perfect. Thank you. Thank you very much, Punita. So...