#17: Restart – How I plan to start helping organizations become wiser

Hello there, friend!

I’m finally restarting the newsletter – this time without the training wheels, as I posted my first article on Linked In.

For your convenience, here it is:

Today, Finland starts its annual Entrepreneurship Week, so I take this opportunity to announce that I'm stepping fully into self-employment. In a nutshell, my ultimate goal is helping organizations become wiser. Though getting there will take time and experience, I don't mind thinking long-term. Here's the plan and reasoning:

Why wisdom?

First, why "wiser" organizations? Why not more agile, sustainable, or socially responsible? Why use such a strange, woo-woo-sounding word like "wisdom"? Because the very fact that it sounds woo-woo is the problem. Because wisdom achieves all attributes like agility and sustainability simultaneously, in the proper balance, while also pointing to something higher.

As Isaac Asimov wrote:

It's telling that everyone knows where to find information, most know where to find knowledge, but hardly anyone knows where to find wisdom.

Because of all that, I want to reclaim the word, as wisdom is the best goal we can aspire to. So with that said, how can organizations become wiser?

It's possible that sending the leaders of a company on some version of "wisdom training" might help a bit... but probably not. Wisdom is not something that can be understood or achieved, it can only be cultivated and practiced. 

That's why the only real way of making organizations wiser is to turn them into spaces that facilitate complex growth [1], with wisdom as the goal. Modern Stoas.

At the moment, I see two main components of that: self-management and intentional wisdom practices.

Self-management

Self-management in its purest form means organizations without managers, where everyone can work on anything they like and make any kind of decision, provided they follow the rules of the company and strive to make decisions that are best for everyone involved.

Instead of managers, coordination relies on shared values and rules, transparent information commons (i.e. digital repositories of knowledge the organization creates and uses, accessible to everyone), and open direct communication.

Though it might sound chaotic, there are many successful self-managed organizations [2] (SMOs) demonstrating that betting on the responsibility and competence of people pays off.

Wisdom cultivation

However, such responsibility requires not just skills and knowledge, but also a level of character development. That's why I see self-management as being deeply synergistic with wisdom cultivation – the conditions and demands of SMOs provide opportunities for character growth, while an ecology of wisdom practices (one is not enough) provides structure [3].

And even though many SMOs already implicitly facilitate character development as an integral part of their functioning, it still bears highlighting as a separate element.

Without wisdom cultivation being an explicit goal, self-management can be seen merely as a way to cut costs (by firing middle management) and increase productivity. Fortunately, that usually doesn't work well, because the true magic of self-management builds on trust in people and their drive for autonomy, growth, and belonging.

Cutting costs just... doesn't cut it.

Stepping stones to organizational coaching

Obviously, transforming an organization into this can't happen overnight. It takes patience, courage, trust, and thoughtful experimentation with the Adjacent possible [4].

And just as obviously, I don't yet have the experience and credibility needed for coaching organizations through that. So for now, I will focus on what I know, while growing my expertise towards the long-term goals.

That means Notion consulting and productivity coaching. At first glance, these might seem rather unrelated to self-management, but for me, they're the perfect stepping stones.

First of all, the information commons essential for self-management need some tool to run on, and Notion is perfect for that, as it can integrate and connect all the core systems like project management, knowledge management, and others in one place.

Second, though self-management is not just about skills, knowing how to organize one's work and knowledge is essential when there's no manager to do it for you. That's where productivity coaching comes in (I prefer to call it self-management coaching, but productivity is alas the most common term).

In addition, I want to focus on working with established SMOs and solopreneurs, to better understand their context and needs, and thus start getting closer to my goal of organizational coaching.

Writing online

Finally, as this post is meant to indicate, I'm planning to start writing and posting online regularly. Primarily I will stick to Notion and productivity, as that's where I most need to demonstrate expertise.

That said, I still want to write about self-management and wisdom cultivation too, both because those are the topics I primarily care about, and because writing helps me crystallize my thoughts and learn better.

And hopefully, opening my thinking up for feedback will help me improve it even more.

So, that's the plan. If you read all the way here, you have my deep thanks.

Now that you know my primary interests, I'd be happy to hear any suggestions for what you'd like to read about, and I promise I will strive hard to make my writing more digestible and engaging 😬

1: Robert Kegan and Lisa L. Lahey talk about Deliberately Developmental Organizations in their book An Everyone Culture

2: For example, here is a list of companies that publicly practice Holacracy, which is just one possible form of self-management.

3: Such an ecology can include practices like meditation, Socratic questioning, Guy Sengstock's Circling, John Vervaeke's Dialectic into Dialogos, and others. Many of these are explained in John Vervaeke's excellent YouTube series After Socrates

4: I picked the term up from Dave Snowden’s TEDtalk on managing in complexity