The Self-Management Institute recently interviewed thought leader Dr. Lori Kane, the founder of Collective Self, LLC, her Seattle-based consultancy based on the principles of self-organizing work groups. Lori shares her insights based on over 12,000 hours of intensive study into the power of the “collective self.”
Self-Management Institute: Lori, can you just tell us your story? How did you acquire your passion for self-organized work-groups?
Dr. Lori Kane: Well, about six years ago, now, I was part of a grass-roots group of employees that brought about major changes in our organization, our very large, global, pain-in-the-butt organization. And it took us two years, but we ended up changing the way our division planned its products. We fostered a reorganization of the division, the creation of a new formal team, the hiring of new people. And near the end of my time with that group, I had started my doc program, and I was reading a book, and I came across the word “self-organizing-group.” I think it was Gareth Morgan’s Images of Organization. And I was like, “That’s what we are.” You know, “That’s me.” And so, I decided to conduct my doctoral dissertation on the subject. And for me, the real passion came not from the results we got for the organization – well, part of it came from there, because those results were nice and they got us recognized in the division, then across the organization, and then out into the industry. But, we personally started seeing benefits that none of us had imagined, and none of us had intended or brought into being. We started to be able to make decisions and take actions that were in sync with each other, we would learn after the fact. There were five of us in this group. We could think and move and make decisions and take action faster than the other not just teams around us, but individuals around us, including management. And so, my passion came from the fact that that’s the kind of group I want to work in.
SMI: Very good. Your blog [www.collectiveself.com] talks about self-organizing work groups. Do you see a distinction between those two terms (self-management and self-organization), and if so what would it be?
LK: Well, I can tell you what self-organizing work group means to me. And you can tell me what self-management means to you, maybe. My favorite way to describe this is to use this picture, and I’ll give you this picture because it will make no sense when you attempt to listen to this, again. This is a figure from a book by Holly Arrow, at the University of Oregon. The book is called, Small Groups as Complex Systems: Formation, Coordination, Development and Adaptation. So, they talk about forces in group formation. They talk about external versus internal. External means created from outside of the group. Internal, created from within the group. And emergent versus planned, emergent meaning apparently spontaneous. And these are their terms, which I actually love. For groups that are planned by externals, which is, when you think about all of the documentation we have about how to make a team work, teams and groups in business and organizations, and I’d say probably 99-percent of the research that I could find was in this space, which is a space they call “concocted groups.”
SMI: Right.
LK: There [are] three other types of groups here that they talk about in the internal and planned arena. They talk about groups called “founded groups,” which is a group that is started from within, but intended to live long-term. So, those are on the planned side. On the emergent side, they talk about circumstantial groups, which are groups [that are] really much more about the environment causing the group to happen. So, you are riding a bus home from work, there is a snowstorm. Your bus gets stuck. Suddenly, you’re a group. You have to decide: are we going to dig the bus out? Are we going to walk in all different directions? That’s a circumstantial group.
SMI: Right.
LK: And the last sort of group they talk about is self-organized groups, which are created from within in a much more emergent, spontaneous fashion. So, this definition that I have down here is just a working definition. I don’t believe in finished definitions. So, my study, self-organizing work groups, are a category within self-organized groups.
SMI: Okay.
LK: So, I look specifically at self-organized work groups. So, people within an organization, in my case, stepped outside of their formal organizational structures to collectively take responsibility for a complete work process or project. I was specifically interested in this kind of self-organizing group, which I called a “self-organizing work group”, because I love to work. And so, some other things I know about them is that, within the group, roles and jobs are defined and re-defined as needed, so that group members can work in more interchangeable ways, and the group can function in more flexible, organic ways. They appear to come into being without much planning, and to emerge from local interactions among people pursuing their individual agendas. In these groups, internal and emergent forces prevail. And people stay with these groups until they succeed. That’s a contribution from my study, and it’s a working idea. But, the groups that I studied, and the groups that I have been part of, which I would call self-organizing work groups, they are about people who care about two things. They care about themselves and what they want at work, and they care about one other; whether that is a customer, or a student, or a management level above them.
And my belief is that, because they come from an internal place, and an apparently spontaneous place, people stay with them until they succeed. That’s a theory of mine. We’ll see if it bears fruit. But, the groups that I studied, that was the case.
SMI: Are there any attributes, personal attributes, that the ideal work group members should have, or do they really – they really embrace just about anybody?
LK: I love that question. I think you have to be a human being to be in a self-organizing work group. Although, I’ve got two Australian shepherds who come pretty dang close. I think that the attributes that matter most are going to depend on what you’re doing, your organization, when you’re doing it. I have no interest in putting barriers up in front of people who want to try self-organizing work groups. At the very beginning, when fostering a group, a lot happens within you before you can actually see action. I think that it takes somebody who is aware enough to recognize something, to see somebody that they’re working with, and to think, “Wow, that person is really good at X.” And to have enough awareness to recognize, “that person is better at that than me.” Or, “I could really use what that person’s got.”
So, the smallest amount of personal awareness at what you could be potentially better at, and what other people are good at around you, I think is all it takes. Like I said before, with all my years of looking at data under my belt now, I think people self-organize. I think that’s the nature of living beings. And I think the greater barrier to becoming part of a self-organizing work group is a simple awareness of recognizing yourself as part of one, than any attribute that you can think of. And it’s so funny that that’s what management and administration in my study fell back on. When I said, “What do you think fostered the group? What do you think sustained the group?” they had a lot of great ideas, and they taught me a lot that I had never thought of from an employee perspective. But, they eventually fell back to, “Well, I think it was because X had this attribute, and Y had this attribute.” The group members themselves didn’t go there.
It was all about the group, and the attributes of the group. And so, I look forward to studying more groups, because I think that they will look very different with other people and in other places. But, I don’t think that there’s any one attribute, or any set of attributes that that opts people into these groups. I think that it’s being a human being, and if you’re going to be able to recognize yourself as a group member, you have to be able to recognize that there’s something that you, personally, could be better at, and something that people around you are good at.
SMI: Indeed. Your website refers to a very cool day where you personally experienced the transformative power of a self-organizing work group. Can you talk about that day?
LK: Yeah. There was a day – maybe it’s Malcolm Gladwell’s “Tipping Point” – we had been working our butts off for two years in my group, trying to get our division to shift. And it seemed hard. And there was a day, I remember, sitting in my office, that it became easy. I was sitting in my office and I got a phone call from a different division, from a person I did not know, and we had slowly kind of changed our groups, and then our division. And we were trying to push the ideas out into the larger organization. And we were doing some kind of traditional things. We were having brown bags and giving talks and getting a lot of push-back. And one day, somebody just called me up and said, “Oh, I hear you’re doing this thing, and it sounds great. Can you come and tell us about it?”
And the rest of that week, I got a bunch more of those calls. Like, you guys are doing this so great, and I heard all this great stuff about you. And it just got easy after that. That was the day that I remember, just, “Okay, this was hard, and why is this suddenly easy?” It was like magic. And then, over the course of the next couple of months, I really started noticing some of the things that I’d mentioned on my website. I really started having an awareness that something was special about this group. I was experiencing abilities I did not have before, that I did not set out to learn. And suddenly, the guy who was the manager, who was part of our self-organizing work group, he and I were like oil and water. But we respected each other. We needed each other. And you know, I could go into a meeting and I could speak my point of view, the point of view of the person who was in the marketing team, and I could speak this manager’s viewpoint, even thought it was the opposite of mine. And then, I could kind of sum them up and say, “And that’s why we’re gonna do this, because it makes all of us happy, and it makes, you sales happy, it makes marketing happy”. But, then there was this other kind of feeling, “Wow, there is something special about this group.”
