Summary

In this episode, Colin and Chris explore the concept of self-organization as a superpower for B2B growth. They discuss the paradox of agility versus control, the impact of bureaucracy on innovation, and the cultural biases that lead to over-control in organizations. Through the metaphor of a bowling lane, they illustrate the importance of clear purpose and boundaries in enabling teams to self-organize effectively. The episode also features a case study on Burt's Org, a healthcare company that successfully implemented self-organizing teams, leading to improved outcomes. The conversation concludes with practical advice for leaders on fostering self-organization within their teams.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Growth Systems

02:48 The Paradox of Agility and Control

05:50 The Impact of Control on Innovation

08:39 Cultural Bias Towards Control

10:31 The Bowling Lane Metaphor for Purpose

12:53 Case Study: Burt's Org and Self-Organization

15:42 Implementing Self-Organization in Teams

17:41 Final Thoughts on Control and Growth

Keywords

B2B growth, self-organization, agility, control, innovation, management, organizational design, growth systems, leadership, team dynamics

Welcome to How to Build a Growth System. So if you've been listening for a while, you'll know that this podcast used to have a different name. The Growth System, as it was called, was always about enabling you to take action to solve some of the most intractable challenges in B2B growth. And now essentially we're just making it a lot easier for you by putting everything under one roof, all of our conversations on the podcast.

all those playbooks and even things like workshops and all those great assets that help you to apply what you learn to building your own growth systems. That said, we are in some ways returning to our roots this season as we go back to delving into those endemic negative patterns that hold back B2B growth. And as always, we'll be challenging deeply held assumptions, we'll be using systems thinking to navigate the sheer complexity of it all.

And of course, we'll have plenty of practical advice on how to move forward with confidence. So today we're going to be looking at the system superpower that is self-organization and we'll define a bit further into the episode what we mean by that. As the season progresses, we'll find out things like what it means when silos keep showing up, no matter how many alignment beatings you run and how dashboards sometimes drive dysfunction. We'll also talk about things like how to spot hidden growth debt before it costs you.

and indeed what growth debt actually is and how to build this self-sustaining system that doesn't rely on quarterly heroics and lots more this season. our goal really is to give you clear ideas and tools that you can use to design growth that's predictable, scalable and a bit less stressful. So as always, I'm joined by Chris Bayless. I am Colin Shakespeare.

Now, Chris, I have been reading your Medium article on self-organization, the system's superpower that will accelerate your growth. And it got me thinking, actually, about this paradox that we have where every leader wants faster, more adaptive teams. And I'm sure we hear all about it at the All Hands meeting. But then we end up creating six approval steps for a simple blog post. So how do we end up here?

Well, thanks Colin, because it's great that at least one person has read the Medium article. So nice to be, you know, being able to have chance to talk about that a little bit. And actually nice to be back because it's been, I don't know, two months probably since the last season. So we've had a slightly longer than expected sabbatical from recording the podcast as we've been doing all the stuff that you just talked about in the intro. So pleased to be back and chatting to you about all things systems and growth. And so how did we get here?

Yeah, good to be back.

That's a good question. I mean, for me, it's really, really interesting when you look at some of the data around this. you know, I think in this season, we challenged ourselves to be slightly less academic, but I'm throwing that straight out the window by starting with the stat because a study by Deloitte found that 79 % of leaders globally say that agility is critical to their business, but only 17 % actually believe that they're agile.

Ha

And this is a really staggering gap, but possibly, as with all good statistics, one that actually is completely, you you adhere to it, you think, well, yeah, of course, that reflects my own experience of the world. But what's behind it? And what I was trying to write about in the Medium article, and I think we'll link that probably in the show notes, is about this kind of relationship between agility and control. And...

For most organizations, control is kind of a reflex. It's kind of an instinctive reaction to how we manage all these people in our building, or virtually or otherwise, that we're frankly paying a whole ton of money to every month. How are we getting them to go do the things that we need them to do? And kind of governance is...

I guess the sort of default position. So what we're kind of exploring with the article and what we're going to explore on the podcast today is this sort of, you know,

problematic relationship there is between control and agility because the more tightly we grip the system the more slow and the more fragile and the less kind of creative it becomes. You know we sort of stifle innovation, we stifle space for thought, the more tightly we grip something but of course letting go is scary so how do we tread that balance so hopefully we can explore some of those topics today.

There's obviously a massive, I'm sure we've all felt it as well, there's a massive gap between what we see we want. And very often this comes sort of top down about what we see we want in terms of autonomy and distributed decision making and generally empowering the people we work with to sort of be creative and do what needs to be done.

in sort of localized context, but there's a massive gap between what we see we want there and what we actually build. are we addicted to control? Is that what's going on here?

That is a really interesting question. think that, you know, are we addicted to it? No. Are we culturally biased towards it? Because we've just come from a hundred years of kind of top down hub and spoke management that has really driven the way that people view the job of getting jobs done. And I think the sort of proliferation of management as a role.

as a specialist within companies has infused people with this requirement to manage. We've got to be controlling the people that I am managing. And it's not that necessarily that control is inherently bad. We're not advocating for some sort of Wild West where everyone just does whatever they want. Control isn't bad, it's just overused, especially in growing companies where speed is...

a sort of, you know, a byproduct of, of the sort of cultural and structural makeup of the organization. And it tends to be when we can act fast, we can grow fast because we can respond fast. And the more control that you ladder in as an organization grows.

it sort of naturally slows the organization down. Where once we had 20, 30, 50, 100, 200 % growth rates, now we're pleased in the enterprise to be getting to five, eight, 10%. There is a natural reality that as you take more of the market, there's less to be taken. But it's actually a relationship with this structure that we add into the organization.

You know, the more gates we put up and the more policies we put in place, the more we actually slow down the ability to make progress towards goals. And from a systems perspective, you know, this is kind of a case of sort of reinforcing loops gone wrong. You know, it all starts with good intent. You know, everyone.

doesn't go to work to do a bad job to slow people down. There is no intention there to cause this problem, but cause it they do because we're listening to the wrong things and we're using the wrong signals to guide us ultimately. And when you start kind of...

using this kind of control mechanism and the measure of success being control, then you start having this kind of self-sustaining issue where management becomes the bottleneck and decisions will flow uphill instead of, you know, outwards and across the team. You slow your own progress by kind of creating this rigid structure.

And if we kind of look at the data on this, there was McKinsey study that was really interesting, that went quite deep into this. essentially one of the uptakes there was that organizations with high internal bureaucracy score 20 % lower on innovation metrics. And when you look at that kind of broader particular, particularly in the US, and actually it's interesting that US does seem to over index in this area, that only around 33 % of employees

feel empowered to make decisions within their role. And this kind of relationship between bureaucracy, innovation and decision making, you look at it on a piece of paper, you think, well, it's obviously connected because it almost certainly is, but why do we do it? And I think that...

It's quite tempting to see a sort of polarity in the industry between, you know, fast growth VC funded startups where, you know, everyone sleeps on a beanbag and spends their day playing table tennis and somehow turns into a unicorn. And you're sort of legacy enterprise organization where everyone's in a gray suit behind a desk in a cubicle.

But actually the vast majority of the world works in a state that's somewhere between those two poles. And the balance is very often wrong, you know, as we scale an organization. And I think that there is perhaps a relationship to my mind between

who scales organizations and where they've come from. Certainly my experience is that lots of people that build good solid businesses that scale fast into the mid-market have an enterprise background and they have this kind of deep-seated kind of cultural ideal that having middle management, know, having...

know, review cycles, having kind of performance index pay, having all of these things that are the sort of yolks of control are all good things. You know, that's a positive grown up way to run your organization. And to some degree, you know, there is nothing wrong with that. Very large organizations run quite happily in that way. But could you be going a lot faster if you didn't do it that way? And I guess that's what we'll kind of explore as we go through today.

Yeah, mean, I do have a lot of empathy for leaders. know, these people aren't idiots, if I could use that word. You know, people are responding to real pressures and tensions between experts. You know, we're talking about people that in some cases that we may have worked with and have huge respect for and be kind of always very impressed by. And yet we understand that these people are responding to

No, certainly not.

real tension between conflicting pressures, bold expectations, quality control, risk, often in sort of contrast to the sort of stated values. And I think people maybe understand to some degree, maybe the sort of headline benefits of something like, let's move towards more empowerment and self-organization.

But think there's a psychological paradigm shift that needs to be made from the idea that more control equals more safety to maybe more control perhaps equals hidden risk. And actually, you're just kind of brushing the risk under the rug to some degree because we've got this illusion that tight control is going to keep us safe from some of the worst.

risks and guess conversely this idea that letting go of some of that control is likely to lead to chaos and maybe we need to sort of help people to understand about how to design for greater freedom within as part of a designed growth system that's really going to enable the kind of agility.

that they need and velocity.

Absolutely, I think there is a sort of, you know...

a sort of cultural ideal that if you're doing a good job as a manager and you're doing a good job as CEO, you you've put the right governance in place. You are managing ultimately a lot of money, often a lot of other people's money in the, you know, in the form of shareholders and investors. And, you know, your job is to act wisely and act responsibly. And we are, you know, 100 % in favor of that as a mindset, but the response to that...

is about I think making sure that you're framing that responsibility in the right way because ultimately the reason anyone puts money into an organization is because they don't want it to turn into more money.

And I guess what we're exploring today is how you tread the sort of tightrope of control from we are being responsible and we're putting the right governance in place and we're making sure that people are acting in a way that is in line with the business's sort of ethics and compliance and corporate strategy and all of those good things. But also that we're not leaving opportunity in the table. We're not sludging the organization up. We don't have, you know, 10 people doing the job of three people because

they've got so many forms to fill in or because ultimately there's just this sort of bloat that exists within the organization that comes from a lack of momentum. And I like to, I think, consider the problem in terms of maybe a metaphor. There is a, when I sort of talk about how we manage organizations through this, I really like the kind of

metaphor of the bowling lane. And most organizations as they're trying to kind of, you know, get the metaphorical bowling ball of progress down to wherever it is that they're trying to aim it, they focus a lot on the bumpers, they focus a lot on the constraints.

know, what's the budget? What's the strategy? You know, what's the compliance risk? You know, what is the ethical risk? What is the, essentially the way that we're going to tightly control the momentum of this ball down the lane? And what doesn't get focused on very much is actually where they're aiming the ball at, you know, the pins, if you like.

The pins are the purpose, they're the way we're trying to get to, they're sort of just sort of manifestation of what success looks like. But so often in most organizations, at least in my experience, the bowling pins are described as a revenue target. know, everything is going to be okay when we get to a million, 10 million, 100 million, a billion, know, whatever that sort of end game is. And...

Yeah, revenue is a really, really bad marker to set for purpose and progress because it is inherently difficult to contextualize. It's difficult to associate the role of the day-to-day life of most people that exist in your organization. fact, unless you're in sales and peripherally, maybe in marketing, there isn't really a lot you can do to directly impact revenue. But

When purpose is expressed as a future state, it's expressed as something that is almost pictorial in nature, something that is the state change that we are going to achieve together. And it's actually quite easy for people to put their eyes up from the bumpers, from the compliance that they're dealing with and work out where they're trying to aim the ball. And that's really, really powerful. And...

We have a lot of experience in this area. We go to a lot of organizations and talk to them about this and very few have a purpose that anybody around the table, even in the senior management team, could agree on if asked on spec. And that's a massive opportunity. And this sort of compliance control, sort of structure that we build.

is there to edge people along because we don't want to go too far, we don't want to put them in the right direction, it's because we haven't built this self-control structure, we haven't built the ability to kind of drive self-organisation into teams. So I guess our sort of rallying cry here is that yes, you might have OKRs and you might have financial goals, you certainly will, you might have a mission statement that someone's written down somewhere and a vision statement that's in an investor deck somewhere.

But how clearly can everyone in your organization see the pins at the end of the lane? And how tight are the bumpers into that lane? Because for me, there is a direct relationship between if people have clarity in terms of purpose, then you can move the bumpers back a little bit because they know where they're trying to go.

The sort of metaphor where the bumpers are tight makes people think that the bowl should be rolling in a straight line down the lane, but it's going to roll very slowly.

If we put the bumpers back a little bit, everyone knows where they're aiming at. They know what that goal is. You know, we can have the ball a bit and okay, it's going to ping around a bit, but it's ultimately going to get down to the other end of the lane faster. So, so really that's that kind of visual metaphor, guess, for self-organization. And it's something that I think a lot of execs, when they experiment with done in the right way, find that actually it's, you know, it's not chaos. You know, it's

It's kind of a form of aligned freedom and the aligned bit is the key thing as long as everyone knows where we're going. And that has that purpose has been made fractal. We've talked about that in previous episodes. I know what that means to me and my organization in this time period. Then yeah, then actually those great people we've hired can really fly by themselves. And I think that's you know, there's a really interesting examples of that out there in the world.

Another metaphor, I love the bowling alley one, another metaphor I thought about, which is probably quite divisive for the audience because some people love this and some people hate it. But I think of it a bit like jazz. It's structured, not chaotic. So everyone's playing from the same hymn sheet, you like, but they're improvising in real time based on what works and what the system needs. That'll probably divide the audience with all the jazz haters out there.

Absolutely. No, that works for me.

So guess Monday morning, Monday morning, growth leaders have asked yourself, does your team actually know the pins you're aiming at and the bumpers that you can't go outside? And I guess whether they're actually allowed to bowl.

Yeah, exactly. think if you can reframe the task of managing the team to how closely aligned are we to purpose and does everyone know what they're doing to help us get there? And do they actually have everything they need to do that?

That's the interesting question. Have we delegated enough authority? Have we made people responsible for a set of metrics or a key metric? Have we really, really clearly aligned their personal purpose and their team purpose to the overall organizational purpose? It's as we used to say a lot of the previous two series, it's the sort of growth system or how to build a growth system. Bingo, it's all about alignment.

that's the key thing. If you align people to the pins, the ball's going to get there in the end.

Yeah, indeed. I was wondering how long it would take us into the series before we said it's all about alignment, which is the, you know, if we had to sum up the message in one line. So what about, maybe we should delve into some real world examples or one in particular, the Burt's Org story, which you talk about in the article was super interesting and I think maybe sort of really kind of challenges what we think we know about management and how it works.

You

Yeah

I really like the Burt's Org one and the reason I put it in the article is because it's so much less obvious than talking about something some US tech company did because that always feels a bit nebulous, a bit inaccessible. There are some great examples out there like Amazon's two pizza teams where any job that needs to get done shouldn't be done by a team that you can't feed with two pizzas is the principle. They set the boundaries, set the bumpers around goals and

API access and kind of accountability, but ultimately, you know, they give them the autonomy to go solve the problem, because it's clear what the problem is and where the bumpers are set. But the reason Burt's Org is interesting is that it is in the healthcare space, you know, it's a European, Dutch, in fact, community healthcare company. And

Healthcare is high risk, it's tightly regulated, it's outcomes driven. And what Birtzold did was really something quite unexpected. They actually eliminated their traditional management structure within the organization. of caught out their mid management, but rather than...

just leaving people to do whatever they thought they'd do and just trying to do that traditional thing of cost saving that you often see in these kind of organisations. They actually did it for a much more idealistic experimental reason and they restructured all of the teams into autonomous kind of, worked in the kind of nursing homes, nursing kind of space, I believe. And they created these kind of autonomous teams of like 10, 12 people each

managed absolutely everything. So they were like a full cycle end-to-end management. They did scheduling, they did budgets, they did care plans, and they had no boss to report to per se. They had no kind of top-down day-to-day review structure, but they were equipped with all of the right stuff to, you know, deliver.

success because they had this, the bumpers were in the right place. They understood where the pins were, they understood what the regulatory framework was, they understood what the requirements were day to day, they understood what the very necessary regulatory and governments based requirements were, but they get these 10 to 12 people to just do the full thing. And the results were, you know, pretty incredible.

So what actually kind of makes this work?

Well, I think...

What I certainly observed reading the case study and doing some of the background reading on this was that it was almost a two tier or a two pronged approach, should I say. They enabled with the right IT.

And that's really, really key. know, they gave the teams real time patient data. They gave them scheduling tools. They put all of the KPIs in one place and they built an IT platform that enabled them to manage.

all of that full stack of things scheduling budgets and care plans and all of that stuff. But they did it within an infrastructure and IT infrastructure that ultimately only gave them the right options based on the kind of regulatory framework and the kind of practicals, know, strategic framework of the organization. They could schedule stuff whenever they wanted to, whenever it suited for the team. But they had to do it in the tools. So the visibility went into the center, the patient record management went into the center. So this wasn't anarchy.

this wasn't kind of, you know, kind of moving back to kind of community care where, you know, they were trying to make everyone the village doctor, it was still very much centralized, but they didn't, you know, they moved from every person that was in a care team, you know, getting their brief on for the day and saying you will go here and you will be there at three o'clock and you will deliver this for this person if they don't turn up, we don't care, to actually putting back local control into it. But the IT infrastructure did this.

The other thing that I really saw was the pins at the end of the bowling lane. They had a really clear and relentless commitment to purpose, and that was around care quality, dignity, and actually community was the interesting thing, because I saw that as being a real driver here.

accountability to the community that they were serving with their care teams, brought the community as a stakeholder into the sort of strategy stack, if you like. It allowed them to more closely align the delivery of the organization to the requirements of the community. And that community was very localized into the requirements of those that were being managed by this kind of care pod of 10 to 12 people.

So I thought that was really, really interesting that they kind of made the pins really obvious and they made the governance easy through IT, which meant that the administrative burden of management also went away, which meant that they could do more. And the results were pretty credible. You know, they had...

9.1 out of 10 patient satisfaction scores, which in European healthcare is unheard of as a, know, for our American listeners, then Colin, we're getting a lot of noise through your mic there, but for our American listeners, where there is perhaps a slightly more commercial sort of.

relationship, should we say, with the delivery of healthcare, you you expect high satisfaction scores in a sort public healthcare system and just fundamentally in the European healthcare system, you know, that was a really impressive result. They also had a 30 % reduction in admin overhead.

and they, nurse retention and job satisfaction went up as they did this. So happier customers, less administration, higher retention, higher job satisfaction, less middle management. So what they weren't saying in their case studies, but was fairly obvious coming through was also probably higher profits, know, higher margin retention, lower cost of care delivery. And

That was self-organization at work. That was moving the bumpers, resetting what the bumpers meant, clearly focusing the people on the pins at the end of the bowling lane and letting them get on with getting the ball down there themselves and doing a much better job of everything in the process. So I really loved this because it wasn't a SaaS company. It wasn't some unicorn tech startup. It was a fairly traditional high regulation European business.

Yeah, I loved it as well because I have seen, I was going to say firsthand, but more like secondhand in a sort of health care and social care company where they decided, I think basically some of the C-suite had been along to a presentation perhaps about the Burt's Org case and decided we're going to have self-organizing, self-managing teams. So what we'll do is a cost-cutting exercise of just getting rid of all of middle management and everything will just fall into place. And what they didn't have was that.

you know, they didn't have the sort of pins and bumpers properly in place. And what they certainly didn't have was this sort of underpinning technological infrastructure that would make it work. And of course, it was a disaster. And then the knee jet reaction was, we're bringing back mental management. And the whole thing was just a very sort of costly exercise, which actually made some vulnerable people essentially, their care quality diminished as a result. So it's really good to look into the kind of opposite example where

You

and understand why that worked. And I guess for the listeners, they're thinking, well, if a healthcare company can do this, why not our SaaS firm or consultancy? Like why not our go-to-market team? Why not our product org? And, you know, they're probably understanding the message that with the right boundaries and tools, autonomy doesn't have to be chaos. It can actually be a productivity multiplier. But I guess for the

The guys are listening between meetings and they need something, kind of a small chunk, they can bite off. What's one thing they can try this week to start?

Well, what I tell execs often about driving self-organization, particularly when they're skeptical because, you know, doing something opposite to what we've been sort of brought up to do through our entire management career over many decades is a bit scary, is that ultimately starting small is fine, but make sure you start.

So you don't need to do a complete org redesign. You don't need to suddenly take, do some sort of massive IT infrastructure project where you're trying to imagine how everyone makes decisions and try and get to the sort of from A to Z in one leap. But I think, and we'll talk about this later in the season, I suspect when we talk about kind of cross-functional teams and mission-based teams is.

just try bringing together a team for a project and do it in a different way. Don't get your PMO involved. Don't do it within the constraints of your existing IT infrastructure. Don't do it in the constraints of your existing hierarchy. But think about how we can take something that maybe feels a little safer and delegate it fully.

So rather than having some high pressure, high visibility project where you just feel like you can't go through all of your normal governance gates because you're probably going to get fired, is pitch the experiment to the board. Try this in something which is a safe space. Allocate some budget to it as an experiment. Call it an innovation project.

just pick a pilot team and give them the freedom to test and learn, but put some boundaries in place. And I think this is the really, really key thing, that the bumpers still need to be there, we just need to push them back. So if we've got this project, whatever that project is,

Make the success criteria really really clear. Where are we trying to get to? What do those bowling pins look like? What does it look like when we have achieved success? You know, don't make it a number.

you know, we're not trying to achieve 10 % savings on something, we're not trying to achieve an extra, you know, half a million quid of revenue on whatever this thing is. We are trying to build something which was tangible, even if only in its kind of visual storytelling. So what's something to do when we're going to get there? And what does that mean to everyone? And then ultimately,

understand what those decisions are going to be and make sure that everyone has the authority to make them within any bounds of control. know, if there's a they want to spend some budget, know, let them spend 10 grand by themselves because they need to spend 100 grand they've got to come to someone, you know, there always needs to be some governance but, but, you know, give them the tactical autonomy to make decisions to spend budget to deploy resource as they see fit. And then watch what happens.

And what you'll probably see is faster feedback loops. You'll get to what's working and what isn't working a lot quicker.

you'll get a lot higher ownership because suddenly when you give people authority and you give people budget inherently, their sense of ownership and therefore their sense of responsibility goes up because they know that the buck stops with them. And this is a really underrated, under talked about point is that in high control organizations, control is always delegated to someone else. know, decision-makers always delegate someone else. I can do whatever I like because I'm existing within the control of the structure and I'm not actually making any of these decisions. So I'll just go.

way and do whatever I think I need to do day to day that keeps me within the plane. As soon as you give people authority and you give them budget, they have responsibility and ownership and that is going to create its own control structure naturally. And yes, what you're also going to probably see is some mistakes, but those mistakes are gold.

you know, their data for system improvement. You know, they're not failure to hit someone with. They are data points in your little pilot project for making sure that when you roll that out to a bigger project or to a bigger team or to a division within your organization, that you're not going to make those mistakes again. So those are absolute gold and you need to reframe any mistakes as data points that can be managed because you're not going to put the bumpers in the right place straight away. It's not going to magically work.

straight out the traps. With Bertzog, they did a bunch of pilots. They kind of got to that place where they rolled this out of the organization, and you need to do the same. And when we see those mistakes, and we see that ownership, and we see those fast feedback loops, the key is how you respond to those things. What we need to do here is create psychological safety. We need to really show the people in that team that we meant it.

And if we go to punishment, if the system snaps back, if we go back to control, if we go to overcorrection, then the team realizes that actually this was all a setup.

You that you didn't really mean any of this. This was just some sort of kooky experiment in which they were the victims. You know they were the lab rats in this that are going to be disposed of after it's done and that's not really what we want here to start moving the organization forward. So psychological safety is the secret ingredient and we need to coach our way as managers through the success of this project. And actually if I were presenting a project like this to the board I would be saying the success outcome here is not the pins at the end of the bowling lane.

actually spotting the holes in the bumpers. You know, we are doing this as a learning project in the organization. And I think with that kind of reframe, then we do this and we do this a couple of times. And if we listen and we coach and we learn and we see that learning as currency that's being acquired through the process of the project, then we're going to push those bumpers into just the right place.

Yeah.

And we're going to make that ball go a lot faster down there. And then suddenly we're going to go from actually the currency being the holes in the bumpers to suddenly, wow, this team just did something which we didn't think was possible in this organization. And that's where the power really comes from. But you know, you have to break a few eggs to wake an omelet or whatever the phrase is.

Yeah, was thinking about the negative example that I gave of the social care company where the knee-jerk reaction, as I said before, was just to snap back to old habits. And of course, that was involved did see themselves as the victim of some of blue sky thinking from the C-suite that nevertheless had sort zero detail involved and also zero psychological safety.

good that you brought that up as a secret ingredient. Chris, we're obviously we're going to try one of the features of this season, I guess, is going to be we're going to try and have sort of shorter punchier episodes a little bit longer as we introduce the new brand and the new season on this episode. But I think we should probably spend a couple of minutes wrapping up at this point.

This has really got me thinking, both the article and the discussion really got me thinking about how we build these control systems thinking that they protect us from danger in effect. But in many cases, it seems like these are the reason why growth feels like pushing water uphill. I wonder what your final thoughts on all this are.

Well, embracing self-organising teams is not about letting go of control, it's not about doing less as a leader, it's about doing things that are different.

And ultimately, you are not going to scale your business at the speed you want to scale. It's only at the speed most of our customers want to scale their businesses. By trying to make every single decision in the leadership team, you know that it's instinctively obvious, but somehow we don't quite get there. So what we need to do is scale by designing the conditions under which smart decisions can happen without you as a leader. And that's the really key thing. We are designing that. We are creating a new structure for our team to excel within. We are not just, you know, taking

the shackles off and you know going down to the place of golf. Self-organization isn't a lack of design, it's better design, it's a more adaptive design for your organization, it's more ultimately a more resilient one. You know we reflect that on Bert Sock.

happier customers, happier employees, lower churn. This form of org design, because ultimately this is about org design, it's about creating an org design in which teams can excel and self-organize their way towards results within, still within guide rails, still within bumpers, but ultimately allowing them the tactical autonomy to do a great job without you. And for me,

This isn't some fluffy thing. This is about creating strategic infrastructure for growth in complex environments. Complexity, systems thinking as we talk about on this podcast is ultimately a mechanism for dealing with complexity, for dealing with complicated situations and organizations are complicated.

driving self-organization is a mechanism for managing complexity because we are delegating the management of complexity to the people who are experiencing the complexity and therefore are the subject matter experts in solving for it. So this is about reframing from trying to rescue your team, from trying to make every decision, from trying to do, dare I say, what some sort of Western government seem to do at the moment and assuming nobody is clever enough to make decisions that we have to do it all for them, to actually embracing the fact you hired great people

in first place, know, get out of their way, but make sure that you are making sure that they don't, you know, come to grief for you or for themselves or the organization by just putting those bumpers in the right place. you know, that's my challenge, I guess, to, the listeners is pick a place where control is slowing things down, you know, replace it with a boundary, a shared metric, a coaching conversation, and then just step back and watch what happens. Because ultimately when you start, start managing people so tightly,

then you start enabling your system to to fledge and to fly and to to start delivering and managing its own complexity without you needing to be there and and that is super powerful as we've sort of heard from Bert's organ we've heard from those other examples and we see in our day-to-day lives so you know go do it go try it go pilot it

Yeah, I'd love to hear some feedback about even just what revenue leaders out there and growth leaders are thinking about what they might try and indeed those who are actually sort of brave enough to try. mean, here's a thought for those guys just to throw something, a spanner in the works right at the end. Chris, you've just been talking about, you've already hired these great people who kind of already have a sort of talent for handling this sort of complexity.

Another way of looking at that is your best people are already doing some self-organising. The question for the revenue leaders out there is, are you fighting it or are you enabling it? Now, it would suggest perhaps that what we're saying here is that you need to enable it. Fighting it is not going to help anyone.

Absolutely. And actually, funny enough, you know, I thought we've got to a neat end there, so I shouldn't really be opening up another line of inquiry here. you know, there's two things that really come to mind when you were saying that to me.

we've often in organisations venerate our star players, you know, we put them on a pedestal and say, aren't they great? And guess what? The reason that they're star players is because they actually just went out and took some initiative and did some stuff themselves and it worked. And that is unfortunately the key marker.

we're not responding the initiative, we're responding and applauding the result. But ultimately, they probably did it because they just got on and got around to systems and did some stuff. So like you say, the people are already doing it.

For me, I once read a book by Richard Branson a long, long time ago, for perhaps the US listeners you might not know. He's the CEO of Virgin Group, which is sort of airlines and all sorts of sort of diversified things, both for the music industry. He's a really interesting guy and probably not someone that most people hold up on a pedestal as being their sort of, you know, beacon of kind of...

business insight now, but he had a quote in one of his books and it was really stuck with me and has really applied to my own management style, which is hire great people and stay out of their way. And ultimately that's self-organization in a nutshell, but just maybe make sure that they know where they're going and put a few bumpers up to make sure they get there.

Yeah, yeah, you know, maybe we're not as succinct as Richard Branson, but I think maybe we did need to delve into the details a bit. OK, that's all we've got time for this week. It's been great to be back. How to build a growth system, as we are now called, is brought to you as always by RevSpace, a growth systems consultancy that connects B2B organizations like yours with the future of growth.

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offering account-based growth managed services and go-to-market engineering projects. Please don't forget to follow and rate the podcast. As always, it really helps us to bring the content to wider audience. And we'd really appreciate a moment of your time to tell us what you think and even what you've tried off the back of some of the advice that we've been giving. Join us next week where we're going to be

So delving into a bit of diagnosis, how to diagnose cross-functional friction and why silos maybe aren't just the be all and end all of the problem. Maybe silos are actually a symptom. So join us next week for that. But that's all we've got time for. Thanks very much. Thanks, Chris. See you next time.

Thanks, Colin.