The gist of a self-organizing company
A lot of people make fun of me about my concept that an organization, company of people can self-organize. Friends ask me — “but how can you self-organize, there will be always someone who organizes everything?”, “won’t it be very chaotic?”, “how can you control it?”… They ask me all sorts of questions about self-organization but don’t want to listen to my answers. They only hear them.
I’ll try to outline how Camplight is thriving for the last 5–6 years, how it manages to achieve tremendous growth even when “shit hits the fan” so many times that it’s scary to think about it.
Self-organization, also called spontaneous order … is a process where some form of overall order arises from local interactions between parts of an initially disordered system.
The idea is that this process doesn’t require control by any external agent. The benefit is that this kind of organization is wholly decentralized, typically robust and can survive or self-repair severe perturbations/turbulences. Chaos theory discusses self-organization in terms of islands of predictability in a sea of chaotic unpredictability. So it can be found in nature, why not in human relationships and companies? Although we have a lot to learn we do it within Camplight with three easy principles:
Proactivity vs. reflectivity
Proactivity in organizational behaviour and psychology refers to anticipatory, change-oriented and self-initiated behaviour in situations. Proactive behaviour involves acting in advance of a future situation, rather than just reacting or reflecting after the fact. In Camplight we don’t distinguish between proactive and active. We call them both “being active”, so you can deduce that operating in a “proactive” state is actually our baseline of daily existence :)
In order to be in such state of mind we rely on a set of basic ingredients:
- Strong dynamical non-linearity
We don’t have job titles and occupations in a horizontal way. We have roles which can change across our “vertical” activities. We can invent new roles or dismiss old ones. We can interchange roles, merge them, branch them out. This happens dynamically, sometimes via consensus, sometimes just by seeking advice from your peers.
- Balance of exploitation and exploration
One cannot be active 100% of the time. That’s why we need time to reflect, to explore, to tune with the organizational noise and pick signals which inspire us to move forward. We must know how to rest in order to be productive. Sometimes being 100% active can be destructive — both organizationally (you can create value without meaning or purpose, which increases the noise) or individually (you can burnout). This balance provides us with energy for our endeavors. It’s the reason we strive to be active 100% of the time :) Yeah, I know there’s a contradiction … That’s the beauty of it.*
- Multiple interactions, feedback loops and discussions
We’re constantly giving or seeking feedback. This way we improve our interactions and build up synergy. I don’t think self-organization can be achieved without team symbiosis or at least some form of build up.
Those ingredients are the triggers for executing an initiative. A trigger can also be a random event, or our individual inspiration and ambition.
Participatory leadership
An initiative is our work domain, task vector, spark for progress in which we self-organize about its inception, execution, delivery and nurturing. Sometimes we have expected outcomes, sometimes we just iterate and experiment like kids in a sandbox. But every initiative should be brought to life by a leader otherwise it will rot in the abyss of leaderless initiatives. We have a lot of undelivered initiatives … ideas that didn’t gather enough interest or their time hasn’t come yet.
A leader can be one person or a team of people. Leaders can change during the lifespan of an initiative. One leader can become worn out so others from the team can step in if they want to continue the momentum. The leader listens and moves the initiative forward with integrity and collaboration with other initiatives/leaders/peers/teams if applicable.
Entropy control
Usually if we’ve synchronized our energy levels and became active in overlapping periods of time there can be a lot of moving parts within Camplight. This can result in a lot of chaos for the untrained mind. Camplight can seem quite busy and everyone on the outside is asking how do we thrive in such random conditions?
The short answer
We bring order out of chaos through best practices, principles, habits, discipline and motivation.
We have wisdom sayings like “The future depends on what you do today” which always reminds us that entropy is part of our life but we should not let it escalate to uncontrollable levels. We have templates and documents describing processes for achieving excellence. We constantly evolve our knowledge base and strive for perfection although the mindful journey is really what matters.
Everything is progress.
