This is part of a series of articles that unpack some key insights I have had from being part of the OuiShare network for the past 6 years.

When I first joined OuiShare, in 2012, there was a lot more excitement than structure. We had an association in France, a list of values and a guide on how to organize a “OuiShare Drink”. The Sharing Economy was about to become a very hyped topic, attracting the attention of many early adopters.

Because that was the core subject that OuiShare had emerged around, we found ourselves in the heart of the excitement, mobilizing dozens of self-organized groups that enabled us to run almost 200 OuiShare events in 75 cities less than two years into our existence.

There was an influx of excited people from all over the world who wanted to get involved, start new projects and local communities. There was so much creativity and energy, it was baffling.

Accompanying this growth and increasing level of activity was also a lack of clarity. How does work get done? Who makes decisions? Who can join, how? None of these questions were answered yet, which led to tension. It seemed like it was time to get more structured, quickly… or so we thought.

We embarked on a journey to “design OuiShare”. In the summer of 2013, a handful of active members secluded themselves for two months to go through an intense “organizations design process”. The outcome would be a clear manual with rules and processes for how we would work together. When the summer was over, the team came back with the first version of the OuiShare handbook, a 40 page document.

Unfortunately, it met the sad fate of many such documents, it ended up in a (virtual) drawer (the google drive), gathering dust. We did not use it, because it did not match the lived reality of how people behaved in the organization.

Yet the knowledge that certain rules now existed in OuiShare made many people feel constrained and less empowered to take initiative. Our attempt to create a structure that supported the work of our contributors almost destroyed the spontaneous and chaotic energy that had allowed us to be creative and innovative until then.

Clearly ahead of its time, the OuiShare handbook nevertheless created an important foundation of our current governance principles (we just established a new handbook a few months ago). Though we were probably right that OuiShare needed more structure at the time, we were trying to design a-priori. We had moved too far towards order on the chaos-order scale, too quickly.

“The best-run companies survive because they operate at the edge of chaos.” — Burnes, Bernard, in Complexity Theories and Organizational Change

The experience of the OuiShare organization design really changed my mindset fromseeing chaos as something that needs to be eliminated under all circumstances, to a valuable resource. Like an engine blowing particles around when they get too static, the right level of chaos at the right time, can provide a fertile ground for behaviors to emerge organically.

To foster chaos in a productive way (which basically means becoming a complex adaptive system) in a world that demands a certain level of structure and bureaucracy, there are two elements that strike me as crucial and in need of further development.

Leadership to navigate a murky ocean

As I talked about in my last post, the nature of leadership is changing. In emergent organizations, leaders need a different skillset. While anyone working in an organization like OuiShare needs to have a high tolerance for chaos, there are a few things I have observed that leaders specifically need to be good at.

Firstly, recognize the positive energizing quality of chaos and then treat it as a resource in need of protection. However, it’s not only about fostering chaos, it’s about balance.

A new challenge for leaders is to enable chaos and order to co-exist in their organization.

To get things done, leaders can help create ‘spaces of clarity’ by pulling together resources in the organization to create a tangible action. I like to think of these spaces as islands in the middle of a wild, chaotic ocean. If OuiShare were the ocean, the individual projects such as a OuiShare Fest, a POC21, a research exploration would be the islands.

Project leaders are crystalizers that facilitate and hold space for a team to have a high level of focus and clarity in the midst of an ocean. Following the notion of sense and respond, they observe behaviors and then create the minimal necessary structures to support them. Like this, the role of OuiShare Connectors was created in a response to an emerging behavior of people taking on ambassador like activities by coordinating local communities.

Scaffolds that support emergence

The second crucial element that I think needs more development in a new world of work are the minimum viable structures for emergent organizations.

This includes both structures for internal organizing such as tools for communication, project management and collaborative decision-making, but also infrastructures that can act as intermediaries between more chaotic spaces and the real world. Opencollective is a great example of such an infrastructure.

They make it easy for loosely organized groups to grow and receive funds in a very lean way, by letting them operate through Opencollective’s legal “host” entity (instead of having to create their own). Encode and various new dynamic equity tools are creating structures to make it easier for holocratic and self-managed organizations to comply with legal structures and processes.

These are great starting points, but we still have such a long way to go. Organizations like OuiShare and Enspiral are trying to operate across borders and sectors, as well as outside of binary non-profit / for-profit categories, and the more we grow, the larger the pressure becomes to replace chaos with orderto conform with the administrative and legal requirements of the various countries we operate in.

The more an organization grows, the larger the pressure to replace chaos with order

The question I have been asking myself is whether it is just a matter of time until the chaos has to end.Is this just another classic story of a new organization that goes from from its early innovative and agile phase to becoming rigid, slow and institutionalized?Or will we be able to resist the pressure and enable a different generation of organizations to thrive?

Because I believe the latter, I have decided to dedicate more of my time to join those building infrastructures for emergent, collaborative ways of working at scale. With my team at Greaterthan, we’re working in the area of infrastructures and practices for collaboration around finance, starting with the development of the collaborative budgeting tool Cobudget.

More coming soon about how my experience in OuiShare has led me to work more on collaborative finance.

To learn more about the inside of an emergent organization, go to opensource.ouishare.net. If you’re interested in applying these concepts to your organization, check out OuiShare’s services on rethink-remix.ouishare.net.

These thoughts are based on my personal anecdotal experience, not academic research. Though I am not an expert on it, research on how complex adaptive systems can be applied to organizational theory appear to be a fruitful line of further inquiry on this topic.

A special thanks to my editor, Bianca Pick.

Photo credits: Davidaltabev (1); MassiveKontent (2); wwarby (3)

Thanks to Kate Beecroft and Susan Basterfield.

Originally published on Medium.com

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See the shared notes from this session too.

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Do completely horizontal organizations truly exist? Fueled by growing excitement about self-management, bossless leadership and new governance models such as Holacracy, I increasingly hear large claims about the potential of “flat organizations”, which are being used as synonymous to “having no hierarchy”. I often wonder whether I am reading correctly: Organizations with no hierarchy at all, with real live people in them? I feel like there has been a misunderstanding here. I might be wrong, but from my 5 year experience running the distributed organization OuiShare, my conclusion is: there is no such thing.

To explain why I’ve been quite frustrated with this misunderstanding, let me describe a scenario I have been confronted with multiple times in the past years: a new person, let’s call her Lisa, joins OuiShare to actively contribute to our network. Most likely, due to the way our organization was initially presented when we started in 2012 (the first draft of our values described us as a horizontal organization), but also the way this description has been interpreted and retold again and again by people from all corners of our network, Lisa arrives with a set of expectations. She expects to find a workplace free of power dynamics, where “everyone is equal”, she can do anything, nobody will tell her what to do and often, where leadership is not tied to specific people.

Pretty soon after joining and getting to work, Lisa notices she is having a hard time putting things in motion and garnering support for their work. This is when Lisa comes to me for help. I then suggest she talk to a specific person with more “power” than them on this matter—a “superior”, which is mostly followed by a confused and disappointed reaction. “I thought you had no hierarchy. Now you are telling me that some people here are superior to others? OuiShare is just like any other organization.” The fact that person A could be superior to person B in a given situation clashes with Lisa’s expectations. The answer I give her is “YES, we do have hierarchy; I don’t remember having ever said otherwise. But there is hierarchy and hierarchy.”

It’s dynamic hierarchy, stupid!

In most organizations today and in line with much of organizational theory, job titles correspond to a specific position within the organization’s hierarchy. There is a defined path for getting into this position (a specific degree, followed by climbing the corporate ladder for x number of years, maybe skipping some steps if you are good at politics) and job titles correlate with specific lines of communication and decision making power.

Rather than having abolished hierarchy all together, what I have perceived as different about the new genre of “emergent organizations” to which I count OuiShare and the Enspiral network, is that hierarchies in these organizations are dynamic. Authority shifts based on who has the most knowledge and experience in a specific context. There is no clearly defined path for holding a specific role.

Hierarchy does not need to disappear from our organizations, but it needs to change.

In such dynamic structures, sometimes authority correlates with age or time spent in the organization, but not necessarily. A new person entering may have superior expertise on a subject to others in the organization, putting them at the “top of the hierarchy” for this area. Simultaneously, they may be answering to a person with more history in the organization in the context of another project. I can both be the chair of OuiShare Fest Paris and answer to those same team members in another context.

Without formal structures, informality rules

So why not just get rid of hierarchy all together and “declare everyone equal”? In any system with humans in it, power relations exist, whether you formalize them or not. And as Jo Freeman states in her essay the Tyranny of Structurelessness, “structurelessness in groups does not exist”. If you refuse to define power structures, informal ones will emerge almost instantly. Not expressing these can be extremely harmful to your organization.

Though I understand why telling stories of fully flat and bossless organizations is enticing for those of us working on new organizational models, I don’t think we’re doing ourselves a favor with this. That’s why my request is that we stop creating unrealistic expectations for newcomers to this field and use this opportunity to truly understand what differentiates us from traditional hierarchies and how we could help others transition to becoming more dynamic hierarchies themselves.

To distribute power and leadership in organizations, we need to acknowledge their existence first.

What happens to bosses in a dynamic hierarchy? It might just be a matter of finding a new term, but contrary to what one often reads about self-organization, I am not convinced organizations should be bossless.

Rather than removing bosses from the workplace, I think their role needs to evolve to that of a facilitator, coordinator and leader—

Stewarding and coordinating rather than commanding,
Holding space and supporting rather than controlling,
Empowering team members to do their best work,
and be their best selves.

More reflections on what it means to be a “boss” in a dynamic hierarchy are upcoming in future articles!

You don’t agree? I look forward to your comments!
These thoughts are based on my personal anecdotal experience, not academic research, so please bear this in mind when commenting.
To learn more about my experiences with dynamic hierarchy, please get in touch and check out francescapick.com.

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“It’s this whole idea of do-ocracy that we talk about,” says Francesca Pick, OuiShare Connector and Chair of the upcoming OuiShare Fest. “We want people to be able to go forward and do something—to take leadership and let others follow them.”

In OuiShare, a leader can pop up anywhere on any project. The organization embraces dynamic hierarchies where hierarchical relationships exist, but these leadership roles are dependent on a project, situation, or time, not fixed.

“An issue with hierarchy is that once in place, they are very hard to change or get rid of,” explains Pick. “We try to distribute leadership, but we are for leadership. People want to talk about self-organization and say, ‘You don’t need a leader.’ In OuiShare, we do need leaders—people who are willing to take on responsibilities—but we can have many of them and they can lead different areas and jump between different roles.”

OuiShare Fest 2016 will host 200 sessions in seven different spaces.

Within the organization, OuiShare experiments with different ways of organizing, thinking, and collaborating. A key element is a willingness of community members, and the organization at-large, to experiment with new ways of being—to put into practice theories about how we might collaboratively create a healthy, just communities.

For the past three years, OuiShare has hosted OuiShare Fest at Cabaret Sauvage in Paris. The four-day event is a gathering of international thought-leaders, change-makers and doers, brought together to share ideas, challenges, experiences, projects and more. The idea is to learn from presenters and other participants, and think critically about trends and emerging ideas in the global culture of solutions activists.

At last year’s event one of the hot topics was blockchain. Conversations about the technology and how it could be used in arenas and platforms other than financial, flourished. In particular, how it could help create collaborative autonomous organizations that aren’t controlled by any one person.

As Pick writes in Decentralizing (Part of) OuiShare with Blockchain: Experiment 1:

Blockchain is most known today for its applications in the world of finance. But its proliferation has also sparked the development of a growing ecosystem of infrastructures and tools that build on top of the blockchain or decentralized protocols, for example Uber-like ridesharing app La’Zooz, digital art attribution platform Ascribe.io as well as Swarm and Backfeed, both tools for distributed, collaborative organization.

To experiment with ways the technology could help address numerous challenges related to decision-making, transparency, governance and value distribution, OuiShare put blockchain technology into practice. UsingBackfeed, a “social operating system for blockchain-based applications,” they decentralized part of OuiShare Fest by using the tool to help create the festival program. Using Backfeed, they hoped to improve the sourcing of the best content from the community and make it easier for the members to contribute to the project and get recognized for the value they provide.

“What’s really important to us,” says Pick, “is that Backfeed is a tool that can enable technological decentralization, which is one level of decentralization…There’s so much growth in the area of finance, but it’s not limited to finance. There are so many other things you can decentralize.”

True to its reputation for experimentation and critical thinking, the OuiShare team launched the experiment with an open mind.

“I went into this experiment definitely not assuming that this is the thing that’s going to change everything and it’s going to solve all these questions we’ve had about value distribution, and people contributing, and being volunteers, and being paid,” says Pick. “My aim was to see what the potential of blockchain is, how could it be used, and to debunk the myths and the hype and utopian stories that are being told…There are very few people who have been applying it so that’s why we wanted to give it a try.”

The result of the Backfeed experiment, says Pick, is that they had some interesting results very fast, but they hit a wall in terms of how far they can go with it. The experiment brought to light the need for a reliable tool designed to meet their own needs, and they learned that decentralizing a project is easier said than done.

The theme for this year’s OuiShare Fest is After the Gold Rush. It’s a nod to the fact that the sharing economy, like the California Gold Rush of the 1800s, appears to be benefiting not everyone, as idealists hoped, but a handful of stakeholders in mega-companies. As Pick writes:

Now we can only look back fondly at those early times of abounding, and possibly naive, excitement and hope for these new models. For now, it appears only few are benefitting from the abundance of value that has been created by communities and entrepreneurs worldwide – few organizations that are starting to look suspiciously similar to those they were disrupting – or worse? The gold rush was not profitable for many who set out on the initial journey. And the biggest sacks of gold are going to those providing the picks, shovels and infrastructure, those fueling the gold rush itself.

Now on the other side of the sharing economy gold rush, OuiShare is calling for action and to mobilize and build from where we are now. The extreme examples, created by mega-platforms including Airbnb and Uber, helped identify questions that need to be asked and problems that need to be addressed.

“Last year was, we’re lost, we’re criticizing, we’re having critical discussion,” says Pick of last year’s Lost in Translation theme. “Now, it’s about action. After the Gold Rush is about having the realization that this happened, but it’s passed…[and] there are all these people that have mobilized all these resources to come to this place, in a metaphorical sense. They learned all these things and they’re ready to do stuff, now we actually need to build something new from what we have.” Pick adds with a laugh, “The gold rush got us to move our ass so now we can actually do something.”

The theme of this year’s OuiShare Fest is After the Gold Rush.

The 2016 OuiShare Fest comprises 200 sessions in seven spaces, dozens of speakers from around the world, including Shareable’s Organizing Director Tom Llewellyn who will lead a workshop about Sharing Cities, and 15 satellite events. One of the key topics to be discussed at After the Gold Rush is the future of work. The fest promises to play host to countless conversations about ownership models, the new workforce, the freelance economy, worker cooperatives and platform coops, organizational transformation, new forms of governance, purpose-driven businesses and organizations, and blockchain.

“We’re trying to have a critical view of all those things,” says Pick. “It’s a spectrum of different types of organizations that are being experimented with. We’re really trying to understand the differences and not saying that everyone should be a cooperative in a sort of ideological way, or everyone should be a social entrepreneur and have a company. We’re trying to just look at the spectrum.”

New at Ouishare Fest this year is Fest Forward, a three-day accelerator for collaborative, open source projects with high social impact. Growing out of innovation community POC21 and the OuiShare Awards, Fest Forward is replacing competition with an opportunity to collaborate and be action-oriented. The goal is to help projects overcome challenges in areas such as product design, business models or scalability by giving them a customized program and pairing them with mentors.

As OuiShare continues to grow and evolve, and OuiShare Fest thrives as an international gathering of new economy changemakers, the organization is always looking for new ways to empower individuals and communities around the world.

Moving forward Pick is working on open sourcing OuiShare Fest by creating a tool to document how they organize, create and run the festival, so other teams can do the same thing. The goal is to empower others and encourage the growth and evolution of OuiShare Fests and related events in cities around the world.

With a new tagline: Exploring the Edges, OuiShare Fest hopes to catalyze new ways of thinking and acting in regards to the economy, society and ourselves.

“There’s a process that happens in society,” says Pick, “that new ideas appear at the edges then they move into the center. Once they’re in the center, they’re no longer new and there are all these new ideas that are coming from the edge into the center. The purpose of the fest, and of OuiShare overall, is to take those ideas from the edges, to find them and find the people, and to bring those to the center so they can be brought into society overall. It’s a perpetual process.”

Written by Cat Johnson for Shareable.org

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(The conversation was conducted by Alanna Krause in the context of an investigation of how organizations use Loomio.)

Watch the video here:

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