How do you get a complex organization to pull in the same direction and focus fully on its most important strategic challenges? By unleashing the self-organizing power within the business – in a controlled manner. This is the core message from our experienced founder, Lasse Ramquist.
Lasse knows what he’s talking about – for over 40 years, he has been helping companies tackle their biggest strategic challenges. Often, this involves revisiting and updating the prevailing management model. He has now compiled four decades of experience in his newly released book Kraftsamla : involvera alla för framgång i en oförutsägbar värld (Join Forces: Involve Everyone for Success in an Unpredictable World).
So, how can a leader succeed with this collective effort? Lasse identifies several key areas that are crucial for establishing new habits, mobilizing the entire organization, and awakening employees’ dormant abilities – thereby creating vitality and dynamic collaboration throughout the entire value chain.
You highlight that self-organization and a collective effort are two keys to handling today’s escalating complexity – why is that?
– It’s obvious to most people today that our external environment is characterized by both constantly increasing complexity and an accelerating pace of change, says Lasse.
– This creates immense unpredictability. It is no longer possible to micromanage organizations from the top in the way that once worked. To be successful today, you need to mobilize the collective intelligence. The question is: how do you do that? That’s exactly what I’ve tried to answer in the book.
Trust the Local Expertise
A central principle, according to Lasse, is to place greater trust in the so-called local expertise – the employees who are closest to the actual challenges. This is where decision-making authority should reside, not necessarily at the top of the organization.
– It’s not about letting go – on the contrary. It requires a very deliberate effort to create a structure where everyone knows where we’re headed and why – you need to create arenas for shared understanding, reflection, and joint responsibility.
Avoid Silo Culture with a Common Language
Another key is breaking up what Lasse calls “silo cultures” – where different parts of the organization have separate perspectives, languages, and goals.
– A research and development department sees reality from one perspective, while customer service or production has entirely different viewpoints. If you don’t actively work to bring these perspectives together, your colleagues can easily start to feel like obstacles rather than partners pulling in the same direction.
This is where you often see a lot of friction in large organizations: people don’t work with their colleagues—they make things work despite them. Lasse believes the solution lies in making it a cultural habit to consistently shift perspectives in order to enhance mutual understanding. This is the only way to co-create a more complete picture of the full complexity of the reality you’re dealing with, while also paving the way to quickly agree on the best way forward.
This requires a healthy humility towards one’s own perspective and limited viewpoint. Lasse illustrates this with the image of two people looking into a black box through different peepholes.
– One sees a circle, the other a rectangle. They are both correct – from their perspective. But it’s only when they switch places and view reality from the other person’s perspective that they realize what’s in the box is a cylinder. This humility – the willingness to understand and collaborate – is absolutely central to a self-organized culture.
Build Roundabouts – Not Traffic Lights
Lasse keeps returning to the metaphor of the roundabout. It illustrates how collaboration can work effectively without central control. In a roundabout, everyone knows the rules, stays alert to each other, and makes decisions in real-time – traffic flows smoothly without the need for traffic lights or monitoring.
Translated into organizational development, this is about creating structures that enable self-organization. When the rules of the game, transparency, and trust are established, initiatives and decisions can be made closer to the operations—where most of the relevant knowledge resides. This leads to a more responsive, agile, and focused organization.
Building roundabouts, then, becomes a metaphor for designing infrastructures where cooperation, learning, and development occur naturally. Instead of controlling every detail, it’s about creating the conditions for most things to function on their own, even in complex situations.
You argue that self-organization is a recipe for success – that sounds a bit paradoxical?
– It may seem so, admits Lasse.
– And that’s probably because self-organization has gotten a bad reputation. When I started working in the 1980s, many companies experimented with self-managing teams. But much of it failed because the necessary work structures for collaboration and a clear understanding of where we were going and why were not provided.
What Lasse describes is not anarchy, but a self-organizing system with clear principles: direction, energy, collaboration, results, and learning. These five keys, inspired by nature’s own processes, are what he believes must be in place.
– Everything that is alive – from your body to a flock of birds – organizes itself. It’s not random; there are always a number of system-building fundamentals that must be in place. And we must also understand how we, as an organization, can create similar conditions where people have the freedom to take the actions they see as necessary, but always within the framework of a shared direction.
5 Core Principles for Creating Self-Organizing Systems:
- Energy – That everyone feels something is at stake.
- Direction – A shared understanding of where we are headed.
- Collaboration – The ability to cooperate and shift perspectives.
- Results – Seeing that something is happening.
- Learning – A feedback mechanism that helps us develop.
Public visibility is a powerful force
The reoccurring public strategic dialogue is key. When management and employees align through a sincere and honest conversation, it lays the foundation for everyone to pull in the same direction. Leadership’s message should clarify where the organization is headed—but also explain why.
If a genuine two-way dialogue is allowed to unfold, with plenty of space for questions and answers in a safe environment where people feel free to ask difficult questions and express dissenting views, most people tend to feel, “Finally, we have a leader who can explain things in a way we understand.” This releases new energy and a desire to get involved and contribute.
In this way, public dialogue serves as a kind of control mechanism that ensures mutual understanding between management and staff.
To make self-organization work, an additional new type of control is needed – not the typical traditional hierarchical model, but something Lasse calls “Public Visibility”.
– Each team steps up on stage in front of a large group of colleagues every six months to share what they’ve accomplished, what they’ve learned, and where they’re headed. It’s a form of public peer reporting that motivates everyone to present strong results from the past six months. No one wants to stand in front of their colleagues without having contributed something of real significance to the organization. This approach has proven to be an effective replacement for much of the traditional, often time-consuming KPI reporting that is routinely sent up the hierarchy. At the same time, it brings new energy and plenty of cross-functional learning, which accelerates strategy realization.
Buy Lasse Ramquist’s book Kraftsamla : involvera alla för framgång i en oförutsägbar värld (Join Forces: Involve Everyone for Success in an Unpredictable World).
Questions about self-organization? Feel free to contact us at IntegPartner!
