Leapfrog: transform organizations into places of meaning
Interview by Holaspirit
Could you tell us what Leapfrog’s main activities are and which community you federate/animate?
We are a small italian organization consulting company with a clear purpose: “to catalyze the transformation of organizations into places of meaning, making and participation where people can rewrite their future together”. The way we go about doing that is simple, we engage them into self-management experiments of various degrees of depth and complexity so that they can autonomously raise their level of awareness, understanding and practice, and become the masters of their own self managed future.
How did you come to self-management and build your team?
We were the first ones to coach holacracy in Italy, and I was the first holacracy certified coach in Italy. My business partner Demetrio Labate was the first person to implement the framework into an italian-based multinational company. My passion in the area grew by trying to address some organizational challenges during my extensive management experiences in the realm of IT consulting, whereas Demetrio has an HR background, and he stumbled upon the Holacracy ecosystem when the CEO of his previous company decided to adopt it. From that point on, he was hooked, and when we met, we decided to pursue a common purpose and founded Leapfrog. Our team is slowly growing. We are happy that Valentina de Matteo has also joined us. She has a strong consulting and academic background, as well as a lot of experience with anything that has to do with design, and first and foremost she is volcanic and a joy to work with.
Do you consider you practice Holacracy by the book or do you adapt the framework methodology?
As much as we love holacracy (we translated Brian Robertson’s book pro-bono),
we tend to use the best of both worlds. We are very happy when clients reach out to us for our holacracy expertise, yet their understanding is often purely speculative and they approach it in an overly enthusiastic, or overly doubtful mindset, without really knowing what it is about. When it comes to that point, we have the duty to help and when they are not ready to adopt such an advanced and fully fledged system we are happy to craft custom practices that are easier to master, and allow them to start their own journey towards a greater awareness on more inclusive ways of organizing. Sometimes they end up using holacracy at a later stage, while at other times they develop their own system.
How did you discover Holaspirit and what are your favourite features of Holaspirit?
When my interest in Holacracy began growing, I met Philippe Pinault at a conference and he introduced me to the concept. I also contributed to the first draft of language localization. What I like a lot about holaspirit is its level of configurability and flexibility, that allows me to set up a variety of meta-rules for power distribution when I develop an organizational system for a client.
How did you design your organization on Holaspirit and how do you use it on a daily basis?
We mostly use it with clients, and are very aware of what’s on the market, but we think holaspirit shines in the speed at which it develops new features, the customer support is also excellent and bugs are fixed extremely rapidly. Not all our clients use the full range of features, sometimes we only use it to help them on some org-design innovation, although that is not our favorite activity as we are against static designs, for reasons that are obvious to anybody who has a minimal idea of what self management is about.
How do you position such a platform on the customer’s transformation journey?
Could you give us some real examples of significant Italian organizations you supported in their transformation? How did you introduce the platform and onboard the people?
It’s simple, all our most successful customers use holaspirit, we never push it, it would be against our purpose, we just show them alternatives and pros and cons, they end up making that choice most of the times. To us, especially when a project spans beyond the borders of a single team it is of vital importance to rely on a tool that provides clarity and ease of access to organizational information: companies such as Gruppo AB, Agile Lab, or ATS to name a few have adopted holaspirit from day 1 of their transformation.
What do you think will be the future of self-management in a nutshell? Shall it scale?
We believe self management is inherently scalable, but we have to take into consideration the other meaning of the term “scale” , that of -time scale-… It took 100 years for hierarchical management to show its own limitations. It will most likely take another 10 to say the least for self management to become somewhat of a de facto new standard of managing a company.
What is your analysis of the Italian market in this dimension?
We are not particularly optimistic on this specific market at least in the short term. Italy has a very “highly contextual culture” (see Edward T. Hall in “beyond culture”). These types of culture seem to have stronger antibodies against systemic approaches to organizing work. I’d say this is a common characteristic of all mediterranean countries, and the fact that self management is not spreading very fast in Spain, Italy, Portugal and Greece, seems to confirm my hypothesis. That said, I am fully confident that it will be just a matter of time. In the meantime, we work extensively on projects around Europe, sometimes in partnership with other companies such as dwarfs and Giants, The Dive, Xpreneurs.
If you had to characterize Holaspirit in 3 words?
Great transparency companion
