Equality and autonomy: what is essential in self-organization?

You may have asked yourself: How do we get commitment in our organization or in our team? Or maybe you work in an organization where the engagement is low and people keep coming back to the same question: What can we do to make people feel engaged at work?

Most of us understand that there is a link between engagement and productivity. This is also supported by research, e.g. from the Gallup Institute (2019) on how engaged people are six times more productive than people with low engagement. Commitment and engagement matters. Not only for productivity but also for well-being. When teams have the possibility to organize their work themselves, the commitment and engagement will increase. What can you actually do to support your organization or team to move towards self-organization?

During the session we will talk about:

• what is important in the initial stages of introducing self-organizing?
• the challenges in moving towards self-organizing
• the assumptions behind distributing power in the organizations and teams

Equality and autonomy are two very important aspects for building commitment at work, Rolf Medina would say. Equality in this context means that everyone has the same value as human beings regardless of what they do. We may have different roles and competences, but everyone has the same value and each role is equally important to achieve the goals of the organization. Status symbols such as a bigger office or special parking space are avoided and there is no connection between role and more power, rights, or financial compensation.
Autonomy means that the team can organize, act, and make decisions within that area of responsibility without asking permission from others at the top of a hierarchical organization.

The way of living and role of work changed radically in the latter part of the 20th century and into the 21st century. People expected more than just a job and also how they could influence the way work was organized among themselves. Many self-organizing models emerged, such as Teal, Sociocracy, Sociocracy 3.0, Holacracy, Deliberately Developmental Organizations (DDOs), Agile, Management 3.0, and others. What they have in common is the decentralization of power in the organizations.

Between 2018-2020, Rolf Medina together with Alicia Medina conducted more than 300 interviews in more than 100 companies. Based on the research, the Distributed Power (DP) model was created, which combines suggested self-organizing approaches and frameworks with specific organizational practices. The DP model is a systemic model that is based on trust, respect, organizing work together, and seeing the organization as a whole that evolves while not using too much of the planet's resources. Alicia and Rolf elaborate their ideas behind the DP model in the book Teal, Trust, Transparency which was recently published in English (May 2023) and can be found at Amazon.com

Rolf Medina is a Swedish Doctor of Philosophy in management. With a background in computer engineering after graduating in 1989 from Halmstad University in Sweden, he worked professionally in different technological areas, after which he moved on to various management positions where he also had the honor of establishing new business areas. Since 2002, when he left Ericsson, he has run his consulting company Quini and worked with a number of different clients, such as Sony Ericsson, GN ReSound, Skånetrafiken, Sony Mobile, Vattenfall, and IKEA.
He undertook his PhD at Skema in France where he also received the Valedictorian award.

In parallel with his business activities, he has during the last ten years worked in academia as a lecturer, module leader, and researcher at the School of Economics at Umeå University in Sweden, SKEMA in France, and UCL in London, UK. He has been fascinated by the mechanisms behind the management of complexity and the fact that everyone has a talent.

He has written several scientific papers and is the author of the book The Lemon and the Loop, which presents new ways to manage and define competence and how to improve organizational learning. The English version of his recent book Teal, Trust, Transparency was released in May 2023. It can be seen as a continuation of Frederic Laloux’s book Reinventing Organizations and as a practical guide on how to organize and lead based on Teal and modern ways of organizing.

He is co-founder of Future of Organizing Inc. and Highly Engaged People Inc. Nowadays, he devotes all his time to his consulting business, in which he focuses on digital journeys, competence-centric organizations, and supporting companies to move to the new organizing paradigm, as well as being a speaker and debater on topics related to organizational design, culture, leadership, and innovation.