Authors Alessio Fattorini Allison Matlack Angela Robertson Bryan Behrenshausen Catherine Louis Chad Sansing Curtis A. Carver DeLisa Alexander Heidi Hess von Ludewig Irupé Niveyro Jen Kelchner Jim Hall Jim Whitehurst Jimmy Sjölund Jos Groen Laura Hilliger MaryJo Burchard Michael Doyle Philip A. Foster Ron McFarland Sam Knuth
License CC-BY-SA-4.0
The Open Organization
Leaders Manual
The Open Organization
Leaders Manual
A handbook for building innovative and engaged teams
Second Edition
With an introduction by Jen Kelchner
Contributing authors
(in alphabetical order)
DeLisa Alexander Laura Hilliger
Bryan Behrenshausen Jen Kelchner
MaryJo Burchard Catherine Louis
Curtis A. Carver Allison Matlack
Michael Doyle Ron McFarland
Alessio Fattorini Irupé Niveyro
Philip A. Foster Angela Robertson
Jos Groen Chad Sansing
Jim Hall Jimmy Sjölund
Sam Knuth Jim Whitehurst
Heidi Hess von Ludewig
Copyright
Copyright © 2020 Red Hat, Inc. All written content, as well
as the cover image, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribu-
tion-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.1
Catherine Louis' "Creating teams that aren't afraid to fail"
was originally published at https://opensource.com/open-organiza-
tion/18/7/culture-of-experimentation-in-4-steps.
Michael Doyle's "Setting goals transparently and collabora-
tively" was originally published at https://opensource.com/open-
organization/18/10/collaborative-team-goal-setting and https://
opensource.com/open-organization/18/10/collaborative-transpar-
ent-goal-setting-2.
Catherine Louis' "Developing a culture of experimentation on
your team" was originally published at https://opensource.com/arti-
cle/18/5/cultivating-attitude-experimentation-team.
Alessio Fattorini's "Innovation through community" was orig-
inally published at
https://opensource.com/open-organization/18/1/why-build-commu-
nity-1 and https://opensource.com/open-organization/18/2/why-
build-community-2 and https://opensource.com/open-
organization/18/3/why-build-community-3.
Jen Kelchner's "Stop hiring for culture fit" was originally
published at https://opensource.com/open-organization/18/10/re-
consider-culture-fit.
Heidi Hess von Ludewig's "Creativity is risky (and other
truths open leaders need to hear)" was originally published at
https://opensource.com/open-organization/18/10/open-leader-cre-
ativity-guide.
Jim Whitehurst's "What it means to be an open leader" was
originally published at https://opensource.com/open-organization/
16/3/what-it-means-be-open-source-leader.
1 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
Jen Kelchner's "To survive Industry 4.0, leaders should think
beyond the digital" was originally published at https://opensource.-
com/open-organization/18/5/transformation-beyond-digital and
https://opensource.com/open-organization/18/7/transformation-be-
yond-digital-2.
Ron McFarland's "When empowering employee decision-
making, intent is everything" was originally published at https://
opensource.com/open-organization/16/4/when-empowering-em-
ployee-decision-making-intent-everything.
Allison Matlack's "The Tao of project management" was orig-
inally published at
https://opensource.com/open-organization/16/2/tao-project-man-
agement.
Curtis A. Carver's "Leading through the power of 'thank
you'" was originally published at https://enterprisersproject.com/
article/quickest-way-build-mini-champions-it-your-organization.
MaryJo Burchard's "More engaging meetings begin with
trustful relationships" was originally published at https://open-
source.com/open-organization/18/8/7-questions-engaged-meetings.
Sam Knuth's "Planning for the future isn't what it used to be"
was originally published at https://opensource.com/open-organiza-
tion/19/1/3-misconceptions-agile.
Jim Hall's "Open leadership lessons from a galaxy far, far
away" was originally published at https://opensource.com/open-or-
ganization/18/12/open-leadership-lessons-from-rotj.
Colophon
Typeset in DejaVu2 and Red Hat.3 Produced with
4
LibreOffice. Cover design by Emma Eble.
Version 2.3
Updated January 2021
2 https://dejavu-fonts.github.io/
3 https://github.com/RedHatOfficial/RedHatFont
4 https://www.libreoffice.org/
Also in the series
The Open Organization Field Guide: Practical Tips for Igniting Pas-
sion and Performance
The Open Organization Leaders Manual: A Handbook for Building
Innovative and Engaging Teams
The Open Organization Workbook: How to Build a Culture of Inno-
vation in Your Organization
The Open Organization Guide to IT Culture Change: Open Princi-
ples and Practices for a More Innovative IT Department
The Open Organization Guide for Educators: Transformative
Teaching and Learning for a Rapidly Changing World
Contents
Preface to the second edition 16
Bryan Behrenshausen
Introduction to the second edition 18
Jen Kelchner
Introduction to the first edition 22
Dr. Philip A. Foster
Planning & Goal Setting
Creating teams that aren't afraid to fail 29
Catherine Louis
Owning your career in an open organization 37
Laura Hilliger and Allison Matlack
Setting goals transparently and collaboratively 46
Michael Doyle
Visualizing your plans and progress 54
Jimmy Sjölund
Developing a culture of experimentation on your team 60
Catherine Louis
Planning for the future isn't what it used to be 64
Sam Knuth
Organizational Design & Culture Building
When open values drive open behaviors: Defining open
leadership 73
DeLisa Alexander
Stop hiring for culture fit 85
Jen Kelchner
Innovation through community 93
Alessio Fattorini
What it means to be an open leader 108
Jim Whitehurst
An open leader's guide to better meetings 114
Angela Robertson
Making cultural transformation manageable 129
Heidi Hess von Ludewig
To survive Industry 4.0, leaders should think beyond
the digital 137
Jen Kelchner
Creativity is risky (and other truths open leaders need
to hear) 144
Heidi Hess von Ludewig
Becoming a leader with inclusive awareness 154
Irupé Niveyro
Motivation & Engagement
Let engagement lead the way 163
Chad Sansing
When empowering employee decision-making, intent is
everything 177
Ron McFarland
The Tao of project management 181
Allison Matlack
Leading through the power of "thank you" 189
Curtis A. Carver
Transformation and leadership in a hybrid world 192
Jos Groen
More engaging meetings begin with trustful relationships 203
MaryJo Burchard
Open leadership lessons from a galaxy far, far away 209
Jim Hall
About the contributors 213
Appendix
The Open Organization Definition 219
The Open Organization Ambassadors
Learn More
Additional resources 228
Preface to the second edition
Bryan Behrenshausen
I know "leaderless organizations" are all the rage these days,
but I have to confess that I've never seen one. To be perfectly
honest, I'm not even sure I could imagine one. I get the sense that
"leaderless organization" sits alongside "open floorplan" and "pa-
perless office" in the pantheon of buzzy but ultimately untenable
workplace neologisms.
Any time an organization materializes—any time a group of
actors gathers to accomplish something collectively—leaders
emerge. Organizations are collections of relationships, and any
ability to shape those relationships (to hold them together or break
them apart or channel them in a particular direction) is a leader-
ship ability. Without leaders, connections don't last long. Without
connections, organizations don't stay organized. A leaderless orga-
nization is no organization at all.
What most pundits tend to call "leaderless organizations"
seem to be those organizations in which leadership looks different
—organizations in which the title of "leader" has been successfully
dissociated from formal position in an organizational schema.
Leaders can (and do) arise from multiple locations in the collection
of connections we call "an organization," not just the tip-top boxes
on a pictorial mapping of that organization's hierarchy (this has al-
ways been the case, though contemporary organizational theory
and design is much better about recognizing it). When we acknowl-
edge that the term "leader" can potentially apply to any
organizational actor, not just the select few for whom we've histori-
16
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cally reserved the label, our approaches to recognizing, under-
standing, and training leaders need to change.
As the chapters in this book amply demonstrate, the best
way to think about leadership today—indeed, the best way to be-
come an organization leader in one's own right—is to adopt a
perspective on leadership informed by open principles. The au-
thors gathered here have all endeavored to re-imagine some of the
most common connection-influencing activities in light of those
principles. The work is part of a much broader effort from a global
community of writers, theorists, consultants, managers, and other
leaders thinking about the ways open values continue to reshape
organizational culture, and by reading this volume you've already
become part of it. For starters, you can share, remix, translate, and
add to this book—or any of the Creative Commons-licensed books
in the Open Organization series for that matter.5 You can also join
us at Opensource.com to continue our conversation.
We await your influence.
5 https://github.com/open-organization-ambassadors/open-org-leaders-
manual
17
Introduction to the second edition
Jen Kelchner
D isruption is "existential," notes an article from professional
service provider Wolters Kluwer.6 It's not just an organiza-
tional design issue. It cuts straight to the core of who we are, how
we see ourselves, and what we contribute to our environments. To-
day, the furious pace of disruption is forcing executives to make
existential decisions and commit to them much faster than they've
anticipated.
One source of that disruption is digitization. Digitization is
reshaping the way we lead, manage, and work. Even in the scope
of the last decade, we've seen rapid adjustments to how we live,
connect, and receive services. While we've been discussing ad nau-
seum how (or whether) we should be redefining organizational
cultures and business models, the clock has been ticking, and the
pace of digitization has not been slowing. In his book The Digital
Matrix: New Rules for Business Transformation Through Technol-
ogy, author Venkat Venkatraman argues that, by 2025, differences
between digital and non-digital functions, processes, and business
models will no longer exist.
So what's the top priority for leaders in business today? Un-
derstanding the existential impacts digital transformation is having
on every aspect of human life, and addressing the immediate need
to reshape the way we work, organize, and do business. In other
6 https://wolterskluwer.com/company/newsroom/news/2018/10/lessons-
in-leading-digital-disruption.html
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The Open Organization Leaders Manual
words: changing our organizational cultures and developing people
capable of thriving in these conditions.
It'll take nothing less than immediate action. We need to
change the way we work and lead our organizations into this new
era.
But culture change is hard, and organizational redesign
takes time—at least, that's what nearly every leader says when we
agree change is either necessary or inevitable. The major problem
is not that we can't agree change is needed; it's that we're stand-
ing on past methodologies, processes, and mindsets to make
decisions about how to address and engage the change of today
and beyond.
Why is this observation so critical?
Old playbooks and models (for leadership, for business, for
people development) that have previously garnered success are no
longer effective. Relying on these, I often say, is like expecting your
emerging technology to work on the bandwidth and speed of dial-
up service from 1997. They're not quite up to the task of meeting
speed, demand, and performance outcomes. Contemporary "best
practices" are unable to meet the demands of the present, let alone
the future. We require new ways of doing things in order to lead in
the digital age of rapid change. In fact, I would argue that your
success beyond 2020 depends on them.
So if we agree we need to change and develop competencies
for engaging rapid change, then how do we proceed?
Open principles and processes—and ultimately open organi-
zations—are vital to the success of digital transformation efforts.
By creating space for the key tenets of open (transparency, adapt-
ability, collaboration, inclusivity, and community) to be infused in
our workplaces, we can then begin to engage change continuously
throughout the entire organization (not just on your DevOps
teams).
Change needn't be difficult. It is only as difficult as we
choose it to be. As leaders, we are ultimately responsible for em-
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The Open Organization Leaders Manual
powering those around us to engage change, new information, and
uncertainty with a measure of ease. We need to guide them as we
discover the new details, to provide support as routines are dis-
rupted, to help new voices be heard, and to create places where
people feel they belong to something greater.
The "simplest" entry point for large-scale change in your or-
ganization the way your teams work and the processes they use to
solve problems. As Jim Whitehurst writes in The Open Organiza-
tion, while conventional organizations utilize a top-down approach
to driving change, open organizations take a bottom-up approach
to addressing what they do, how they do it, and why they do it.
This means (among other things) beginning the work of culture
change by fueling passion and uniting everyone under a common
purpose while sourcing collective wisdom and collaborating to turn
the great ideas into actions. Only then can our organizations func-
tion as fully engaged and empowered ecosystems catalyzed by
inclusive decision-making.
Open (and all that open entails) is also the key to our global
future.
Implementing open values, principles, and processes into all
facets of our lives—such as culture (both organizational and soci-
etal) education, access to information, co-creation models,
engineering, and computing—is the best way to build a balanced
and free society that paves the way not only for future technologi-
cal advances but also new ways of working together to build our
world.
If you're still uncertain about the value of openness, I would
immediately point you back to the very book you're currently read-
ing. It's a prime example of how an open, collaborative, inclusive
project works. A distributed group spread across multiple indus-
tries, with varied experiences and working styles, can combine
their individual talents to co-create a valuable resource based
solely on a shared set of well-defined values in a community (see
Appendix).
20
The Open Organization Leaders Manual
As you continue learning about open leadership—and, ulti-
mately, open culture—this book will provide tools and insights you
can use to begin changing how you work.
December 2018
21
Introduction to the first edition
Dr. Philip A. Foster
L eadership is power. More specifically, leadership is the power
to influence the actions of others. The mythology of leader-
ship can certainly conjure images of not only the romantic but also
the sinister side of the human condition. How we ultimately decide
to engage in leadership determines its true nature.
Many modern understandings of leadership are born out of
warfare, where leadership is the skillful execution of command-
and-control thinking. For most of the modern era of business, then,
we engaged leadership as some great man or woman arriving at
the pinnacle of power and exerting this power through position.
Such traditional leadership relies heavily on formal lines of author-
ity through hierarchies and reporting relationships. Authority in
these structures flows down through the vertical hierarchy and ex-
ists along formal lines in the chain of command.
However, in the late 20th century, something began to
change. New technologies opened doors to globalism and thus
more dispersed teams. The way we engaged human capital began
to shift, forever changing the way people communicate with each
other. People inside organizations began to feel empowered, and
they demanded a sense of ownership of their successes (and fail-
ures). Leaders were no longer the sole owners of power. The 21st
century leader leading the 21st century organization began to un-
derstand empowerment, collaboration, accountability, and clear
communication were the essence of a new kind of power. These
22
The Open Organization Leaders Manual
new leaders began sharing that power—and they implicitly trusted
their followers.
As organizations continue becoming more open, even indi-
viduals without "leadership" titles feel empowered to drive change.
These organizations remove the chains of hierarchy and untether
workers to do their jobs in the ways they best see fit. History has
exposed 20th century leaders' tendencies to strangle agility through
unilateral decision-making and unidirectional information flows.
But the new century's leader best defines an organization by the
number of individuals it empowers to get something done. There's
power in numbers—and, frankly, one leader cannot be in all places
at all times, making all the decisions.
So leaders are becoming open, too.
Control
Where the leaders of old are focused on command-and-con-
trol positional power, an open leader cedes organizational control
to others via new forms of organizational governance, new tech-
nologies, and other means of reducing friction, thereby enabling
collective action in a more efficient manner. These leaders under-
stand the power of trust, and believe followers will always show
initiative, engagement, and independence. And this new brand of
leadership requires a shift in tactics—from telling people what to
do to showing them what to do and coaching them along the way.
Open leaders quickly discover that leadership is not about the
power we exert to influence progress, but the power and confi-
dence we distribute among the members of the organization. The
21st century leader is focused on community and the edification of
others. In the end, the open leader is not focused on self but is
selfless.
Communication
The 20th century leader hordes and controls the flow of infor-
mation throughout the organization. The open leader, however,
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The Open Organization Leaders Manual
seeks to engage an organization by sharing information and con-
text (as well as authority) with members of a team. These leaders
destroy fiefdoms, walk humbly, and share power like never before.
The collective empowerment and engaged collaboration they in-
spire create agility, shared responsibility, ownership—and, above
all, happiness. When members of an organization are empowered
to do their jobs, they're happier (and thus more productive) than
their hierarchical counterparts.
Trust
Open leaders embrace uncertainty and trust their followers
to do the right thing at the right time. They possess an ability to
engage human capital at a higher level of efficiency than their tra-
ditional counterparts. Again: They don't operate as command-and-
control micromanagers. Elevating transparency, they don't operate
in hiding, and they do their best to keep decisions and actions out
in the open, explaining the basis on which decisions get made and
assuming employees have a high level grasp of situations within
the organization. Open leaders operate from the premise that the
organization's human capital is more than capable of achieving
success without their constant intervention.
Autonomy
Where the powerful command-and-control 20 th century
leader is focused on some position of power, an open leader is
more interested in the actual role an individual plays within the or-
ganization. When a leader is focused on an individual, they're
better able to coach and mentor members of a team. From this per-
spective, an open leader is focused on modeling behaviors and
actions that are congruent with the organization's vision and mis-
sion. In the end, an open leader is very much seen as a member of
the team rather than the head of the team. This does not mean the
leader abdicates a position of authority, but rather understates it in
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The Open Organization Leaders Manual
an effort to share power and empower individuals through auton-
omy to create results.
Empowerment
Open leaders are focused on granting authority to members
of an organization. This process acknowledges the skills, abilities,
and trust the leader has in the organization's human capital, and
thereby creates positive motivation and willingness for the entire
team to take risks. Empowerment, in the end, is about helping fol-
lowers believe in their own abilities. Followers who believe that
they have personal power are more likely to undertake initiatives,
set and achieve higher goals, and persist in the face of difficult cir -
cumstances. Ultimately the concept of an open organization is
about inclusivity, where everyone belongs and individuality and
differing opinions are essential to success. An open organization
and its open leaders offer a sense of community, and members are
motivated by the organization's mission or purpose. This creates a
sense of belonging to something bigger than the individual. Indi-
viduality creates happiness and job satisfaction among its
members. In turn, higher degrees of efficiency and success are
achieved.
We should all strive for the openness the 21st century leader
requires. This requires self-examination, curiosity—and, above all,
it's ongoing process of change. Through new attitudes and habits,
we move toward the discovery of what an open leader really is and
does, and hopefully we begin to take on those ideals as we adapt
our leadership styles to the 21st century.
Yes, leadership is power. How we use that power determines
the success or failure of our organizations. Those who abuse power
don't last, but those who share power and celebrate others do. By
reading this book, you are beginning to play an important role in
the ongoing conversation of the open organization and its leader-
ship. And at the conclusion of this volume, you'll find additional
resources and opportunities to connect with the open organization
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The Open Organization Leaders Manual
community, so that you too can chat, think, and grow with us. Wel -
come to the conversation—welcome to the journey!
September 2016
26
Planning & Goal Setting
Creating teams that aren't afraid to fail
Catherine Louis
S uccessfully executing on a business goal implies raising ques-
tions about that goal—and it absolutely requires safe-to-fail
experimentation on the path to achieving that goal. When business
goals become inflexible mandates, experimentation goes by the
wayside and a failure-adverse culture will prevail.
This four-step process can help open leaders cultivate a cul-
ture of experimentation in teams working toward a business goal
(rather than creating the kind of failure-adverse culture that risks
becoming less innovative).
Step one: Define your business goal
In general, there is no shortage of verbiage for defining busi-
ness goals; however, as a starting point let's use Victor Basili's
definition7 of a conceptual goal:
A goal is defined for an object, for a variety of reasons,
with respect to various models of quality, from various
points of view, relative to a particular environment.
I prefer this definition of a goal, because by analyzing its di-
mensions you'll end up creating a more clear, more compelling
business goal:
1. "A goal is defined for an object": What are we discussing
here? Could it be our issue tracking system? Could it be
the relationship between the issue tracking system and
7 http://www.cs.umd.edu/~mvz/handouts/gqm.pdf
The Open Organization Leaders Manual
customers? Whiteboard this to visualize where your scope
is.
2. "For a variety of reasons": What's the problem that needs
to be addressed? When we state a goal, we include the pur-
pose driving the goal.
3. "With respect to various models of quality": What's the
quality issue with which we need help, and why is it an is-
sue?
4. "From various points of view": From whose viewpoint are
we discussing this goal? Customer? Project Manager?
Whose opinion matters?
5. "Relative to a particular environment": Where and when
is the issue being reported?
A business goal implies questions like these, and achieving it
absolutely requires safe-to-fail experimentation. Providing a busi-
ness goal as a mandate without allowing teams to question and
fully understand the goal will shut a team down.
Take this poorly written business goal, for example:
We want to stop people from abandoning their shop-
ping carts before purchasing.
Now, using Basili's definition, consider the following ques-
tions someone is likely to raise about this goal—and the kinds of
responses that person is likely to receive from a leader less aware
of the qualities that make a goal a good one:
• "What kind of shopping is being abandoned?"—"Any
cart that isn't purchased."
• "Why?"—"Because I said so."
• "What's the quality issue we need to address?"—"Just
get the cart purchased faster."
• "Who's 'we'?"—"Me, your project manager."
• "Where and when is this being reported?"—"Every-
where. Anywhere."
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The Open Organization Leaders Manual
How's your motivation now? Do you feel like experimenting
towards achieving the goal?
When taking a question-focused approach to setting goals,
be sure to start with the goal! The ultimate test of effectiveness for
a business goal is whether it motivates a team. A well-written goal
stirs the blood.
Let's try this again. See if you can find all five points in this
example of a goal:
The CEO of our e-commerce site selling women's ap-
parel would like to see a significant improvement on
the 1,000 to 2,000 abandoned shopping carts we see
per day in the North American market to address this
potential revenue gain. He is targeting at least 70%
fewer shopping carts being abandoned per day.
Step 2: Ask questions about the goal
Next, encourage team members to ask questions about the
goal. You'll need to start digging into the goal so you can under-
stand it better, and the best way to get started is to ask a bunch of
questions.
Some questions that come to mind are:
• Have we interviewed any shoppers about their shop-
ping experience?
• How many clicks must users make from when they
begin shopping to when they complete a purchase?
• Are non-North American markets not seeing these
abandoned carts? Why?
• How long in duration is the average online shopping
experience?
• Are the products presented in a clustered, attractive
way versus being presented as one product per
page?
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The Open Organization Leaders Manual
• Are we using any advanced or custom filters which
can improve on-site discovery and navigation?
• Do we support a fully-automated visual search for
products?
• Do we understand the customer journey for ordering
women's apparel online and how much time each
step in the journey takes?
Lots of questions are possible. Prioritize these questions. Be-
gin with the customer. In the example above, if you haven't done
any customer interviews to hear and feel customer pains, then
that's where I'd start.
Step 3: Decide how you're measuring progress
Data-driven improvements are possible. After you've ana-
lyzed your business goal, and then asked and prioritized the
necessary questions about it, you should work with your team to
establish baseline measurements of where you are today. This is
your starting point. Begin using these metrics to structure your ap-
proach to answering your questions. For example, how many clicks
do users typically make between the moment they start shopping
and the time they've completed a purchase? Let real-time data
guide your experimentation!
Using our example above, we might target:
• RESULTS OF INTERVIEWS WITH 80 PERCENT
CUSTOMERS WITH ABANDONED SHOPPING CART
EXPERIENCES. Have we interviewed any shoppers
about their shopping experience?
• CYCLE TIME AND NUMBER OF CLICKS PER PURCHASE.
How many clicks are needed from when someone
starts shopping to when they complete a purchase?
• CYCLE TIME PER CLIENT. How long is an average
shopping experience on our platform?
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The Open Organization Leaders Manual
• NUMBER OF PRODUCTS PER PAGE PER CATEGORY. Are
the products presented in a clustered, attractive way
versus being presented as one product per page?
Gather data so that you can develop a coherent baseline
measurement of your starting point. If the customer journey today
is a seven-click experience—and you think that reducing the num-
ber of clicks associated with this journey will lead to fewer
abandoned carts—then gather data on the average time users
spend at each of these steps.
Step 4: Experiment
Innovation does not occur without experimentation. The
good news is that each one of the questions above can now become
an experiment.
Let's take one of the questions above and form an experi-
ment so you get the idea:
Are the products presented in a clustered, attractive
way versus being presented as one product per page?
Let's address this question in the context of experimentation.
• RESTATING THE QUESTION AS A HYPOTHESIS. We be-
lieve that if we cluster our products in an attractive
way, rather than looking at one product per page,
more purchases will occur. (I recommend using the
free Strategyzer test card8 to help you organize your
thoughts around creating your experiment once you
have a hypothesis.)
• KNOW YOUR RISKIEST ASSUMPTIONS. One critical,
risky assumption we're making is that more pur-
chases will occur if different products are grouped in
an attractive way. But what is an "attractive group-
8 https://blog.strategyzer.com/posts/2015/3/5/validate-your-ideas-with-
the-test-card
33
The Open Organization Leaders Manual
ing," and to whom? Is it multi-colored blouses with
neutral shoes? Is it blue shoes with white blouses?
We'll need to experiment further to begin to answer
this.
We've now created a solid foundation for experimentation.
Next, we need to create a simple test experiment that we can be-
gin to work on today to test our critical assumptions. We could
attempt several kinds of experiments, including:
• A/B TESTING, a method of comparing two versions of
a single variable—typically by testing a subject's re-
sponse to variant A against variant B, then
determining which of the two variants is more effec-
tive.
• CONCIERGE TESTING, or performing a service manu-
ally (just like a concierge at a hotel) with no
technology involved. The idea here is to learn as
much as you can via increased human interaction. A
classic example of a concierge service is the begin-
ning of AirBnB, where two guys rented out air
mattresses in their home in San Francisco to validate
what types of customers they might get with this
type of service.9
• LANDING PAGE, a web page on which someone
"lands" in response to some advertisement or social
media campaign. The goal of a landing page is to
convert site visitors into sales or leads. You can ana-
lyze landing page activity to determine click-through
or conversion rates and gauge the success of the ad-
vertisement. One classic example of this method of
experimentation comes from Buffer, which launched
9 https://blog.adioma.com/how-airbnb-started-infographic/
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The Open Organization Leaders Manual
with just two pages.10 The first was a link to "plans
and pricing," and if users clicked that link, they re-
ceived a message saying "oops, caught us before we
were ready."
• VIDEO, or some audio-visual artifact to explain your
product. Telling a story from a user-centric point of
view, including a call-to-action, is a wonderful way to
test a hypothesis. Dropbox did this in 2008 creating a
three-minute video posted to Digg, which expanded
their waiting list from 5,000 to 75,000 literally
overnight.
• WIZARD OF OZ, a method in which it looks like you
have a fully functioning product/feature, but there's
really someone "behind the curtain" doing all the
work. A classic example of this test is Zappos.
Founder Nick Swinwarm reserved the domain name
and, without building any sort of inventory system,
walked down the street to the local shoe store, took
photographs of shoes, and posted them on the web-
site.11
In our example, let's say it's the first day of summer, so we
decide to do a simple A/B test grouping summer shoes with sum-
mer blouses arranged by summer colors. Perhaps we create five
groupings of various colors of shoes and blouses in order to begin
gathering data. For example, we might run five experiments with
the groupings of multi-colored blouses with neutral shoes, blue
shoes with white blouses, red shoes with multi-colored blouses,
green blouses with beige shoes, and yellow shoes with yellow pat-
tern blouses.
10 https://blog.bufferapp.com/idea-to-paying-customers-in-7-weeks-how-
we-did-it
11 https://www.safaribooksonline.com/library/view/the-lean-
entrepreneur/9781118331866/
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• DECIDE WHAT TO MEASURE. Perhaps we decide to
measure click-through rates on products grouped
versus products displayed one at a time, as well as
the number of shoes sold versus the number aban-
doned in shopping carts.
• NAME YOUR CRITERIA FOR SUCCESS. For example, if
10% fewer shoes are abandoned in carts per month
when grouped with blouses by summer colors, we'd
be happy with this experiment.
For this example, the resulting test card might end up look-
ing like this:
• HYPOTHESIS. We believe that if we cluster our prod-
ucts in an attractive way, rather than looking at one
product per page, more purchases will occur.
• TEST. To verify or refute this hypothesis, we will run
A/B tests grouping summer shoes with summer
blouses arranged by summer colors versus display-
ing blouses and shoes one product at a time.
• METRIC. We will measure both click-through rates
and sales of both shoes and blouses displayed one
product at a time and those same products displayed
in summer color groups.
• WE ARE RIGHT IF 10% more shoes are sold per
month when grouped with blouses by summer colors.
• FOLLOW UP. To further refine attractive product
groupings, we will compare the results to learn
which product groupings are more appealing and de-
sign our next experiment based on this.
Note that experimenting doesn't end here; it's just the begin-
ning! Stated another way: Your team won't achieve its business
goal without cultivating and embracing a culture that allows us to
experiment, fail, adjust, and learn.
36
Owning your career in an open organization
Laura Hilliger and Allison Matlack
W hen we were children and people asked us what we
wanted to be when we got older, we tended to choose pro-
fessions with fancy uniforms. We wanted to be a firefighter or a
police officer or an astronaut. In our teens, career aptitude tests
produced broad, unspecific results telling us to work in healthcare
or education. These insights also happened at a time before digital
technologies fundamentally changed our world.
Today, those archetypal career goals are changing—and
rapidly. As The Economist reports, we live in an era when roughly
half of jobs are vulnerable to automation, and "14% of jobs across
32 countries are highly vulnerable, defined as having at least a
70% chance of automation." 12 Furthermore, "32% were slightly less
imperiled, with a probability between 50% and 70%." As the maga-
zine reports, "at current employment rates, that puts 210 million
jobs at risk."
Advances in automation and machine learning mean that
technologies can perform certain manual functions and tasks much
more efficiently than humans can. As these and other new tech-
nologies begin freeing up some of the time we've historically spent
on rote, manual work, many (if not most) of our careers are veering
toward "knowledge work."
12 https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2018/04/24/a-study-finds-
nearly-half-of-jobs-are-vulnerable-to-automation
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The Open Organization Leaders Manual
The knowledge industry is the invisible corpus that lies be-
hind the financial industry, the technology industry, the healthcare
industry, and every other industry that designs, builds, and man-
ages our social world. It develops at pace with the technologies we
invent. And it's much less prone to obsolescence. Artificial intelli-
gence (AI) cannot perform knowledge work, for example, because
AI lacks a fundamental human ability to be imaginative and cre-
ative.
Building organizations that can effectively utilize the creativ-
ity at the heart of knowledge work means following new blueprints.
Organizations designed to foster efficient manual work take a
shape familiar to all of us: logical, hierarchical, and structured
around clearly delineated career pathways. Finding your way in
them—evolving your abilities, locating new possibilities for chal-
lenge and advancement, and continuing to make yourself relevant
to them—is fairly easy to do. Just follow the organizational chart,
practice the prescribed skills, and take advantage of the training
courses neatly curated by the HR department.
In the 21st century, your ability to be truly innovative means
AI can't easily replace you. But it also means you'll be working in
an organization designed around new principles: agility, flexibility,
and ambiguity.13 Organizations built on these principles don't look
like the organizations built decades ago. They're more adaptable,
more fluid, more transparent—that is, more open. And jobs in the
knowledge economy aren't always predefined (if they're defined at
all). So how can you take responsibility for your career in environ-
ments so full of ambiguity?
How can you assume ownership of your career in an open or-
ganization?
13 See Heidi Hess von Ludewig's chapter on creativity in this volume.
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The Open Organization Leaders Manual
Know thyself
The best place to start is by becoming familiar with your own
goals, aspirations, and learning style. Then you're more likely to
find the support you need because you'll know what kind of men-
torship to seek out.
New organizational models—especially those built on open
principles—are becoming common across industries for a variety of
reasons. One is that knowledge is something that develops through
input, and an open organization provides fertile ground for copious
input. Your mentors and experiences in the workplace, from net-
working (including the late night drink with a colleague!) to failed
projects, successful initiatives, email threads, or confusing meet-
ings—all of these experiences provide your brain with useful input.
Your brain forms (and distorts) memories from this input and you
learn. Open organizations keep that input flowing.
Another reason career paths are much more flexible and
fluid in open organizations is because the organizational structures
themselves tend to be more flexible and fluid. Nowadays, you need
to carve your own path through a networked organization, not just
"move up" some predefined corporate ladder. This is where that in-
put becomes even more useful.
Reflecting upon what and how you learn in your working life
is a fundamental part of succeeding in an open organization. In or-
der to "own" your career, you have to "own" yourself—that is,
understand the inputs you're receiving and recognizing ways those
inputs can be combined and reordered to create new knowledge.
New knowledge is the currency of the knowledge economy.
So how do you think?
Are you someone who needs to have a complete picture of a
situation or process in order to perform a task, or are you the kind
of person who can focus purely on a specific area and still get the
job done? Knowing how your brain works is fundamental to career
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The Open Organization Leaders Manual
goal setting and planning. And it helps you identify the gaps in
your organization that you are uniquely suited to fill.
The more we reflect, the more clearly we can see how we'll
each need to work as we set off on our individual career paths.
Continuing our example from above: If you're a person who cannot
operate without full context, your ambitions might be best set on
leadership types of roles. But if you perform better with laser-like
focus, you might be better setting career goals in functional appli-
cations. The important thing to remember is that each of us defines
our own measure of success—but those measures only become ap-
parent when we've done the work of understanding our learning
styles.
This type of reflection will prevent you from making the
same mistake twice, which means that as you advance in your ca-
reer, you'll develop a reputation for constant improvement.
Constant improvement of your skills and active learning about
yourself are integral to success. Even with regard to functional ap-
plications, there's always a new framework or trend to explore. In
short, those who stop bettering themselves get left behind no mat-
ter where they are on the corporate ladder.
What do you want to learn? Creating a balance between un-
derstanding yourself and learning specific skills and competencies
that support your overarching career goals will help you lay out a
path that makes you happy. And your happiness in any organization
should be your top priority.
Find support
The good news is that you're a continual work in progress.
You have permission to keep exploring different options through
the various phases in your career. The bad news is that it's not al-
ways easy to figure out how to find a lucrative career path that
makes you happy, especially when career paths in open organiza-
tions aren't always well defined. Sometimes we have to chart new
territory together in the constantly changing knowledge industry.
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The Open Organization Leaders Manual
It's simple to say you should "own your career"—to use your
unique set of skills, experiences, and knowledge to solve complex
problems that excite you. But it's not always so simple to do for a
number of reasons:
• What if you're just starting out and are so exhausted
from trying to answer the question of what you want
to be when you grow up (assuming that astronaut
thing didn't work out) that you don't have any energy
left for this kind of of self-reflection?
• What if you aren't sure what you want to learn more
about?
• What if you have no idea what career possibilities
are available to you, even in your own company?
• What if your dream job hasn't even been invented
yet?
You're in luck if you find yourself with a supportive manager
who invests time in helping you navigate your professional and
personal development. But all is not lost if you're on your own.
Maybe you're an entrepreneur or freelancer working for yourself,
or maybe your manager's strengths are in areas other than people
development (like strategy). You'll just need to rely more heavily on
your network: your mentors, coaches, and advocates—the people
you look up to who can be compassionate mirrors to help you iden-
tify where you need to focus your development efforts. You'll be
surprised at the kind of insights your colleagues and peers will
have! Don't be afraid to ask people what they think.
Here's one easy, step-by-step method for starting the conver-
sation:
1. Arrange a video conference with a few people you re-
spect and trust.
2. Let them know you want to have a candid conversa-
tion about your strengths and areas of opportunity as
part of your work on your personal development
plan.
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The Open Organization Leaders Manual
3. Introduce everyone and give each person a few min-
utes to talk about their work (maybe you'll find
similarities and connections between these folks).
4. Introduce the concept of "Yes, and…"14
5. Ask each person the simple question, "What do you
think my strengths are?" (and take notes).
6. Thank everyone for their time!
There are several variations of this suggestion, depending on
your preferred communication style and comfort having these
types of conversations. For example, if you're more comfortable
talking with others one-on-one, schedule several individual meet-
ings rather than one group session. Or do it in written form; you
can ask outright in an email, or do it anonymously via surveys.
This strategy might feel uncomfortable, but your trusted col-
leagues will happily point out what you're good at, and you might
learn something you didn't realize. You can also ask questions like
"What's one thing that would make me more efficient at my job?"
and "What are my blind spots?" And then be open to the answers
you receive.
And managers: Don't be afraid to take risks (calculated
ones!) to allow your team members to experiment with different
roles that bring them joy. The creative people—the inventors—need
freedom and support so they can explore the ways they can be of
most value to your organization, which requires trust from all par-
ties involved. The most important things you can do are to clearly
articulate your vision so your team knows which direction to go
and then purposefully create a culture of feedback and continuous
improvement so your team feels safe being vulnerable with you
and each other. After all, it's difficult to grow without being vulner-
able.
14 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yes%2C_and...
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The Open Organization Leaders Manual
Here are some different techniques you can use to create a
culture of feedback and continuous improvement:
SCHEDULE A WEEKLY TEAM MEETING and include standing
agenda items that allow for retrospectives. What did we do well
last week? What was frustrating last week? What you want to learn
this week?15
HAVE CANDID ONE-ON-ONE MEETINGS with your team mem-
bers. Tell them how their work makes you feel. Showing
vulnerability will help others be vulnerable.
HAVE YOUR TEAM USE "STOPLIGHT FEEDBACK" when present-
ing ideas or plans. Ask a team member to introduce an idea, then
write "red," "yellow," "green," and "blue" on a whiteboard or in a
collaborative document. These colors mean the following:
• Red: "I disagree with this piece of the idea/plan be-
cause…"
• Yellow: "I have concerns because…"
• Green: "I love this because…"
• Blue: "This is missing!"
Next, facilitate a discussion to gather feedback. As team
members share, have them categorize the type of feedback by writ-
ing it under one of the colors. For example: "I'm not sure about
how stakeholders will react to that logo placement." Write that un-
der yellow. "The integration won't work that way because…" Put
that under red. Or, "The DIY manual you sent is great for onboard-
ing too!" That goes under green.
DEVELOP A FAIL-FORWARD MENTALITY and help your team
have one too. View mistakes as learning opportunities—because
that's exactly what they are. Making a mistake on your team
should be acceptable, as long as everyone learns from it.
VIEW MISTAKES AS A COLLECTIVE PHENOMENON. Individuals
don't set out to make mistakes; mistakes just happen. You can dis-
15 See Curtis A. Carver's chapter in this volume.
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The Open Organization Leaders Manual
sect a mistake and try to find a root cause and learn about differ-
ent perspectives. Use a "why" strategy to discover them ("Why did
the Titanic sink? Because it hit an iceberg." "Why did it hit an ice -
berg? Because it was going too fast at night." "Why was it going
too fast at night? Because the timeline to get to New York was too
short.").
TAKE TIME TO RECOGNIZE ACCOMPLISHMENTS, even the ones
that seem small in comparison to all the work that's left to be done.
LEARN CONSTANTLY. Encourage your peers and your team to
do the same. There are several ways to make learning engaging:
• Start a book club on your team and read an appropri-
ate text, then discuss it in a monthly or quarterly
meeting. Fridays can be good for book club meet-
ings.
• Ask people about their personal learning and hobbies
and check in on them ("So did you get your dry-suit
diving certification yet?").
• Invite external speakers to do Q&A sessions about
their work with your team.
• Ask another department to run a workshop for your
team.
• And ask your team for more ideas!
As you try some of these strategies with your team, don't be
afraid to have open conversations about professional and personal
skill development. And remember that the most valuable work
comes from people who are happy and in roles that allow them the
flexibility and freedom to do what they love to do.
Machines we are not
As automation becomes more prevalent and knowledge work
more ubiquitous, we have more opportunity than ever to marry our
passion and imagination in addressing problems of global scale. We
can choose what we want to learn and what we want to work on.
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The Open Organization Leaders Manual
And most incredibly, we can change our minds at any time and still
have impact in the world.
What's most important is that we take the time to reflect on
what success and happiness mean to us personally, so we can con-
fidently step into ambiguous problem spaces knowing we'll be
okay. People aren't machines. They're complex beings with an im-
mense aptitude for development and change. Creating an
environment where that kind of change is supported and cele-
brated is critical for open leaders hoping to support knowledge
workers and empower them to own their careers.
45
Setting goals transparently and collaboratively
Michael Doyle
I n any organization, everyone is ultimately working together to
realize a vision. We can often lose sight of this fact when we
get stuck in the day-to-day. Instead of working seamlessly together,
we can often create friction as we bump against each other. We
might not instantly understand how our work and the work of oth-
ers are contributing together to a unified picture.
But if we pull back for a moment and reflect on how our
work serves others in the broader context of the organization's vi-
sion, then we can begin to realize the importance of inviting others
into our personal goal-setting processes. By doing so, we help oth-
ers not only understand how our work contributes to a vision but
also see their place within it.
The Open Organization includes an entire chapter on making
inclusive decisions, and it outlines the benefits of doing so. Goal
setting is just another form of decision making, one that involves
determining where you intend to focus your energy to achieve an-
ticipated results over a defined period of time. Whether you're an
individual contributor, a manager of a team, or a director of multi-
ple teams, the benefits of setting goals transparently and
collaboratively are equally applicable.
Using the aforementioned chapter from The Open Organiza-
tion as a guide, this chapter will explore the benefits of
collaborative goal-setting, then outline some steps for taking trans-
parent and collaborative action. If you're an individual contributor,
then use this chapter to begin identifying actions you can take to
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The Open Organization Leaders Manual
be more transparent and collaborative in your goal setting. If
you're a manager of a team (or director of multiple teams), use the
information presented here to develop your teams' transparent and
collaborative goal setting practices by helping them understand
the tangible benefits of being open.
Why set goals in the open?
The Open Organization notes that inclusive decision making
"gives you a moment to look at the bigger picture and how your
role fits into the overall business plan. It allows you to step back
and look at the forest, not just the tree in front of you."
In today's always-on, constantly connected world, this oppor-
tunity for thinking is a gift—a luxury, really, because it affords us a
moment to pause and understand how our work contributes to a
greater sense of purpose beyond ourselves, our team, or our de-
partment.
With that bigger picture more firmly in our minds, we can
look around and see how other individuals, teams, or departments
can help us achieve our goals, or how they will be impacted by the
goals we decide to set.
It builds networks
As The Open Organization puts it, "The more transparent
you make the decision-making process, the more effectively you
can turn those decisions into real action that everyone will engage
in." By thinking in this way, we've just created for ourselves a mas-
sive opportunity to turn our goal setting into a networking and
relationship building exercise, which benefits both us and the orga-
nization. Sharing our goals is the perfect excuse to bolster existing
working relationships and reach out into the organization to create
new ones. We'll not only be strengthening our corporate networks
and creating potential future opportunities for ourselves, but also
be increasing our understanding of others' roles and the ways they
also connect to the company's vision—creating alignment for us
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The Open Organization Leaders Manual
and our team. It may even make the people we engage pause for a
moment to reflect on the bigger picture, so this gift we've given
ourselves by taking a moment to reflect is now paid forward to oth-
ers.
It leads to better results
When it comes to open goal setting, The Open Organization
says that, "Opening up leads to better decisions, better engage-
ment, better execution, and ultimately better results." We can't
know everything. Acknowledging that fact is a great strength, not
a weakness, because it fosters your learning mindset, opening you
up to other perspectives and ideas. It's called being resourceful,
and it's the first step towards being able to influence those around
you to help your cause. Eric Raymond's summation of Linus' Law
(in his essay and book The Cathedral and the Bazaar) applies
equally well to software development and goal setting: "Given
enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." Inviting others into the
process enables us to find the limitations and gaps in our thinking
more quickly.
It strengthens culture
By including others in our goal setting, we not only gain
their perspectives (leading to a better outcome) but also model the
behaviors of an open culture for them to experience. This modeling
of behavior is important. As The Open Organization says, "Collabo-
ration builds understanding, trust, and buy-in." But I believe that's
not the entire story; how we behave when we collaborate is what
really helps us achieve success and buy-in. People see what we are
doing (collaborating) but they experience how we are doing it
(transparently). Our behavior becomes our message.
It creates new opportunities
Transparent collaboration around setting goals has great
benefits to the organization, no doubt, but it can also be the differ-
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The Open Organization Leaders Manual
entiator that sets us apart in the organization and opens up new
opportunities for us.
We're more likely to achieve our goals when we open them
up, because others understand how they can support us in achiev-
ing them. But we're also establishing a verifiable track record of
being able to set goals and achieve them, while also demonstrating
that we are the type of person that can work with others to achieve
the company's vision.
If culture eats strategy for breakfast, then execution is set-
ting the table and cleaning up afterwards. Fortunately, taking
action to set goals transparently and collaboratively can be very
simple. As The Open Organization puts it, "The good news about
inclusive decision making is that it's easy to start. You can simply
ask a few others for their thoughts on a decision you are making."
Approaching transparent and collaborative goal setting
The Open Decision Framework16 provides a useful process
for setting goals transparently and collaboratively. Applying it to
goal setting means identifying people that will be impacted by your
goals or those who could help you make them better. Invite these
people to hear you articulate your goals, and allow them to share
their feedback on those goals with you. At the heart of the Open
Decision Framework is constant communication: The framework
guides you on what things to consider communicating, who to com-
municate them to, and when to communicate them.
Whatever goal setting methodology you choose (be it
SMART, OKRs, or something else), approach the process as its own
project in a transparent and collaborative way. In other words,
treat the goal setting process as its own project, just like you
would the work toward the goals themselves.
16 https://opensource.com/open-organization/resources/open-decision-
framework
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The Open Organization Leaders Manual
Start with where you are
Before stating your wild goals for the future, first build an
understanding of where you are now. This way you'll be able to
chart a clear path from here to your ideal future state—that is,
once you've identified your goals.
First, begin building that understanding. Look around you
and see what information and resources you already have at your
disposal: Corporate vision and mission statements, departmental
goals and objectives, team SWOT analysis, your own development
plan—these are all good examples of existing internal sources of
information that can help you build your understanding of your
current working landscape and align with others in the business.
Next, add more depth to that landscape. Look for current
topics and trends inside the organization. Look externally to your
customers' focus, then examine industry trends. This can be as
simple as taking note of what senior leaders in your organization
are talking about, what your customers are posting on their web-
sites, and what industry news feeds are promoting to get a greater
sense of what's happening around you.
This added layer of information can help you start seeing
ways you, your team, or your department could set goals that con-
tribute to serving your customers and achieving your company's
vision. This creates alignment.
Information that feeds into your understanding of the cur-
rent landscape doesn't just have to come in the form of artifacts,
however. Think about who you might speak with to add to the writ-
ten information you have: managers, peers, direct reports,
customers. In every conversation is an an opportunity to spend a
couple of minutes building a greater understanding of the environ-
ment you work in.
Articulate where you want to be
Now that you've started assessing some areas in which you,
your team, or your department could invest to begin solving a cus-
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The Open Organization Leaders Manual
tomer problem and align to the company's vision, you can identify
more specifically who you are serving and what the business need
is by creating some goals to guide that investment.
The Open Decision Framework poses some useful questions
to identify stakeholders and alignment to the business. For exam-
ple:
• Whose problem am I trying to solve?
• What are the people I serve looking for from me?
• What's the business need?
• Who will I need or want help from?
• Who could be impacted from my work?
• Who has set a similar goal before?
• Who is likely to disagree, dissent, reject, or opt out?
• Who else may care?
By answering these types of questions you'll be able to start
articulating your goals as objectives that solve a business need for
a stakeholder in alignment with the company's vision. This articula-
tion is what you can take to stakeholders to ask for their feedback;
the act of doing this underscores your transparent and collabora-
tive engagement.
Engage with your stakeholders
Now you have an understanding of where you are and you
can articulate your goals to your stakeholders. Great! Now it's time
to meet with them and gather their feedback and input.
You could use your own venues for this. Remember that as a
manager of a team or a director of multiple teams, The Open Orga-
nization says, "you have the power to create venues for bringing
people together, and you have the power to set the agenda."
In that meeting, share your problem statement, goals, and
intended approach to help your stakeholders understand your
thinking behind the goal setting process. Then leverage this oppor-
tunity to gather rich feedback by going beyond the generic, "Any
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The Open Organization Leaders Manual
questions?" and asking specific questions to elicit more useful feed-
back:
• Where do you disagree with our definition of the
problem statement?
• From your experience, what gaps do you see in our
approach?
• Given how you see our team's strengths, where could
we be bolder in our action?
• Who else do you think could help us improve our
goals?
Getting started with this could be as simple as inviting your
stakeholders to one of your regularly scheduled meetings. Or you
could get more creative: host a panel discussion, give a series of
lightning talks, or establish some other platform altogether. The
point is that it doesn't have to be difficult and it doesn't have to be
boring—just keep your focus on the end game, share your goals,
and get some feedback.
If you can't get the people to come to you, then go to where
the people are. Use existing venues such as asking for a few min-
utes to present your goals in another team's meeting. Look to the
virtual world; The Open Organization reminds us that, "By using
technology as an ally, you can reach out to far more people in the
organization than can fit in a meeting room." Look for existing
communications vehicles that you could hitch your wagon to, such
as newsletters, intranet landing pages, or local and regional office
communications.
Of course, whatever means you use to engage with your
stakeholders, as The Open Organization tells us, "When you do, be
open, honest, and frank." Acknowledging that you don't have all
the information is a great way to allow others to step in and help
fill the gaps.
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Remain transparent
Transparent and collaborative goal setting is not a one time
activity. Just as glass needs regular cleaning to avoid becoming
opaque, your goals and collaboration with stakeholders need regu-
lar review. Keeping stakeholders informed about progress in
achieving your goals is as important as informing them about the
goal setting process in the first place. Your biggest obstacle to
achieving this is your willingness to create the time and space for
it to happen. There are two ways to get around this problem, and
you can use them both:
1. GO GUERRILLA. As circumstances change with the
passage of time and people move in, out, and around
the organization use these moments as opportunities
to reconnect with your stakeholders to update them
on progress, celebrate successes, and solicit feed-
back.
2. GET PROGRAMMATIC. Dedicate a segment of your
regular All-hands meeting to reconnect your team
and stakeholders to your goals, progress, and remind
them how their roles connect to the company's vi-
sion.
Meetings and events are ephemeral, so make sure you gen-
erate artifacts from them that others can consume asynchronously.
Slide decks, video recordings, podcasts, and blogs are all good ex-
amples of content you can extract from a meeting and make
available for others to consume when they have the time. Creating
and promoting these artifacts are the perfect tasks for anyone in
your team looking to develop their communication skills.
Ongoing communication is the key to being an open organi-
zation. By communicating regularly you are establishing a habit
that builds an open culture: "Setting goals transparently and col-
laboratively? Oh that's just how we do it here."
53
Visualizing your plans and progress
Jimmy Sjölund
I n many organizations, strategic planning is the responsibility
of only a few individuals. A management team might meet in a
secluded offsite location, develop a corporate strategy or a set of
team goals, then reveal them to the rest of the company. Some-
times they distribute a presentation afterward. They might issue
updates throughout the year, but those updates come from the
same small team that put the strategy together in the first place
(and only if results meet objectives). The rest of the staff might get
an update from time to time, especially if they're below the budget
target and need to improve before the next quarter (budget targets
they have no idea how to translate to their daily work). More likely,
the plan winds up on the company intranet, where it languishes,
never to been seen again until next year—when it's replaced with
the new strategy or goals for the upcoming year. In some cases,
they might reference it when they're presenting their new plan.
Is this just a dystopian picture I'm painting? Or have you ac-
tually worked in one of these companies?
Strategic planning of any type is more effective when it's
open—that is, when leaders open their planning processes to feed-
back, and when progress toward the plan is transparent and
clearly evident. To make this work, open leaders can visualize the
plans to make them accessible to all organizational stakeholders.
But why make plans open in the first place? What are the
benefits?
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The Open Organization Leaders Manual
In short, Linus' Law17 applies to strategies as well as code:
"Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow."
Everyone benefits from an open approach to planning. If ev-
eryone knows the direction we're headed and why, we can all
continuously evaluate together whether what we're doing is con-
tributing toward this goal or whether we should stop what we're
currently doing because we realize it's not helping us on our path.
The other great benefit is that the strategy remains open to further
improvement through feedback from everyone in the company.
Over the years, I've picked up some methods for doing this
simply and easily. And in this chapter, I'll share them with you.
Spotify Rhythm
When it comes to visualizing work and working in agile ways,
many turn to Spotify. When you begin examining Spotify, you soon
end up watching a video of (or one made by) Henrik Kniberg. 18 One
of these videos cover what's called the Spotify Rhythm.19
The Spotify Rhythm visualizes strategy as a series of concen-
tric circles. In the center there are the "company beliefs,"
produced by the CEO, which typically span across the next three to
five years. The next circle in their picture represents "north star"
and "two-year goals." The CEO and top management put these
goals together. From those, then, Spotify makes "company bets,"
which are more hands-on projects or cross-organization initiatives.
While using this method, "bet boards" spread to other depart-
ments, who set up their own boards or even tribe/team boards.
The company board gets updated and synced regularly by a
strategy team, which sets the focus for the coming quarter. The
"lower level" boards, then, update at a faster pace (usually every
17 See Raymond, E., The Cathedral and the Bazaar.
18 https://agilasverige.solidtango.com/vimeo/spotify-rhythm-hur-vi-skapar-
fokus
19 https://blog.crisp.se/2016/06/08/henrikkniberg/spotify-rhythm
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The Open Organization Leaders Manual
six weeks), and the level below those update perhaps every second
week (or in two week sprints).
Spotify also uses tempo markers to indicate whether every-
thing is running smoothly, work is moving a bit slower than
expected, or something has halted or crashed completely. What the
company learned from this was to not work on too many things at
the same time, as that usually made things go slower or grind to a
halt.
This method's openness helps teams see the direction the en-
tire company is heading and align their own goals and work to
follow that path. It helps teams make their own decisions about
what to work on and where to go; they're still responsible for de-
termining how to make best use of their time. That, in turn, will
also add to their autonomy and motivation. It builds the commu-
nity: We all know where we're going, why, and how we're doing
along the way.
The Spotify Rhythm also makes visualization simple. It re-
quires only a spreadsheet (as the company was updating
continuously, it made most sense to use a simpler tool). Sometimes
it's as easy as that. Whatever tool you choose, you'll need to make
it accessible, of course, and communicate where to find it. But ulti-
mately whether you do this through something like a spreadsheet,
an intranet site, or a special tool doesn't matter. What matters is
that it is out in the open and people can find it.
A3 reports
A3 reports are the result of a work method or problem solv-
ing approach that emerged from Toyota and the Toyota Production
System, which one could say ignited the worldwide "lean" move-
ment. Toyota uses A3 reports for many purposes—from status
reports, to proposal and policy changes, to (most notably) problem
solving. The name for this method derives from the paper size it
once required: the largest possible size you could still fit into a fax
machine (today, as less is more, Toyota also promotes A4 reports!).
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The Open Organization Leaders Manual
The A3 report should contain all necessary information for
handling a specific problem or making a particular decision. The
format differ depending on whether it's an A3 for problem solving,
a proposal, a status report, or for strategic planning, but in general
it includes:
• A short description of the issue or background
• A status report of the current situation
• A description of future state or goals/targets
• An analysis of or a statement on the root cause (in
case of problem solving)
• Suggestions for alternative improvements or solu-
tions
• A recommended action, next steps or a time plan
• An analysis of the cost and value (if applicable)
• Follow up
The A3 process is based on the Deming Cycle: Plan, Do,
Study, Act. One of the advantages with an A3 report is that it
makes plans visible and easier to read quickly, but one must re-
member it's also only one step in the decision-making process.
Another piece is the nemawashi process, where the principle is to
do decision-making slowly and in consensus. Many people will cir-
culate and discuss an A3 report before it's presented to decision
makers or management. Feedback it receives along the way helps
to perfect the report so that when it's time to make a decision the
information is clear and to the point. This potentially makes deci-
sions take longer—but when everyone is on board,
implementations are much faster.
It's imperative to stress again: the A3 is not the tool. The A3
is the result of the iterative process of analyzing the situation; it's
the visualization method. In Toyota Kata, it's used in the dialogue
between the mentor and the adept. The important thing is how and
why an A3 is developed and used, not the format or the report it-
self.
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The Open Organization Leaders Manual
A strategy-focused A3 is by nature future-oriented. It gathers
the future goals and needs, and will cascade down through the or-
ganization to people's daily work. The visualization is important
and easily communicated by this one-page condensed message. In
the nemawashi process, many have already had the opportunity to
give feedback and through the visualization of the A3 everyone can
quickly be reminded of the strategy and how their work is aligned
with the goals and achievements.
Servant Manager Door
In his book Toolbox for the Agile Coach: Visualization Exam-
ples, Jimmy Janlén describes a method known as "Servant Manager
Door."20 The basic gist of this method is that a manager or leader-
ship will have a small (kanbanesque) board displayed, usually on
their door or in a common space. The board is to show what focus
that manager has on impediments that need their support outside
of the teams or department. It's an easy way to show what you're
currently focusing on—and being transparent about what you are
currently not focusing on. A simple board with three columns is
more than enough; the board only needs to include what's next,
what's currently be worked on, and what has been done. And lead-
ers can easily set this up in a simple, digital way if teams are
spread across different locations.
What this method provides is constant feedback to teams
that the leaders are involved. The transparency makes sure every-
one knows the status of different improvements, which in turn
helps to build trust within the organization.
Open, always
Planning and working in the open always has advantages:
• People and groups that come together with a shared
purpose are extremely powerful. With clear priorities
20 https://visualizationexamples.com/
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The Open Organization Leaders Manual
communicated everywhere and shared with every-
one, you'll get a much better understanding of how
your work contributes to the organizational big pic-
ture. This improves your autonomy as you can steer
your own actions toward the common goal.
• Transparency helps facilitate feedback loops. Being
able to make decisions closer to the source is benefi-
cial, of course, but transparency can also improve
collaboration and feelings of community. You never
know what inspiring or useful feedback you might re-
ceive from unexpected sources.
• Visualizing work can make the imaginary wall be-
tween management and workers disappear, and they
can encourage everyone to feel more engaged in
their everyday work.
Whether you select a team kanban board, a Servant Man-
ager Door, or the company bets, if your methods are transparent
and open for comment, you'll grow as a community and as an orga-
nization. You might even make some more money by focusing on
the right thing to do.
59
Developing a culture of experimentation on
your team
Catherine Louis
M ost companies support the idea of incorporating innova-
tion into their business strategies, as it can help increase
market share and generate additional profits through new prod-
ucts or service offerings.
But too often, these same companies fail to realize that inno-
vation doesn't occur without experimentation. To successfully
innovate, you need to conduct experiments—lots of experiments.
Some will succeed, and lots more will fail. By definition, experi-
mentation is "the process of performing a scientific procedure,
especially in a laboratory, to determine something" as well as "the
action or process of trying out new ideas, methods, or activities."
Innovative organizations don't isolate such innovation practices to
certain segments of the business; they cultivate an attitude of ex-
perimentation throughout, weaving it into the very fabric of the
entire organization.
So the question for your innovative organization becomes
"How do we create a culture that allows us to be comfortable with
trying out new ideas, methods, and activities using a scientific pro-
cedure?" Having a healthy culture of experimentation is the only
option if teams wish to innovate. And organizational leaders can
play a significant role in fostering that kind of culture.
Before teams can even begin operating in an experimenting
mode, leaders must shift their mindset to operate not like a know-
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The Open Organization Leaders Manual
it-all, but as if the world is truly a complex space, that we don't
know it all, and that we can't know something unless we try it out.
When I visit companies and hear leaders say things like the
following, I quietly take them around back for coaching:
• "Your demo failed." (This is usually accompanied by a
scolding face.)
• "You need to run everything by me before conducting
a test with the customer." Screeching brakes are
heard as innovation comes grinding to a halt.
• "Let's do a dress rehearsal showing the customer
how this operates before giving them the feature to
manipulate." No, no, no—put the software in your
customer's hands as early as possible. You'll learn
what's wrong with your user interface. You'll reduce
risk, increase quality, and build a relationship with
the customers.
• "Well, obviously they need [insert feature X that will
get me my bonus if released within the year]." Care-
fully think about how your compensation program
may hinder creating an experimentation culture.
Taking a deeper look at the first three points, fear of failure
is overwhelmingly the operating model. The last point is a desire
for monetary success over doing what's right for the customer, re-
gardless of where the idea comes from.
Instead, we want leaders involved in conversations to en-
courage experimentation. Those conversations sound like this:
• "What is the customer's problem? Have you observed
this?"
• "What is your hypothesis?"
• "What are your critical assumptions that must be
true for your idea to work?"
• "Do you need help designing an experiment to test if
your hypothesis is true or false?"
• "What can you test to (in)validate your hypothesis?"
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So how can you move from the first kind of conversation to
the second? Here's my advice: Don't wait for the perfect moment—
just start!
Here are nine pointers to help get you start experimenting
as a team:
1. Don't jump into the solution space. First, define your
problem. State it as a hypothesis.
2. List all of your assumptions.
3. On a 2x2 matrix, rank each assumption in terms of
uncertainty versus risk. Identify the highest-risk,
most uncertain assumptions before moving on to
step 4.
4. Create a simple test experiment that you can begin
to work on today. Action is key; however, think low-fi-
delity, rapid prototyping to be able to run this test. In
other words, be able to collect as much information
with as little effort as possible. The key is to run your
experiment with real people to get real results. The
free test cards from Strategyzer are wonderful to
help get teams thinking with a test mindset. Each
card begins by stating the hypothesis, then the test,
an accompanied metric, and criteria for success.
5. Gather the data and record everything: The data you
collect and record will guide you further.
6. Review results as a team. If you use the test card,
you will have thought about criteria for judging
whether your test was a good one. Ask questions!
What did you learn? Do you need to change your hy-
pothesis based on what you learned? Do you need to
do a new experiment? Do you need more data?
7. Share the results with the rest of the organization—
especially the failed experiments.
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8. Celebrate the learnings. You don't need to copy Spo-
tify's Failure Wall21, but the point is to celebrate what
you learned, and how you want to conduct the next
experiment to incorporate what you want to change.
9. Rinse and repeat.
Steps 7-9 are crucial for leaders to help make this culture
change stick. Leaders must hold the space where anyone can ex-
periment. Anyone can run a failed experiment because these failed
experiments mean we learn. You need to make it safe to take risks
and to remove impediments. Start today with your own new men-
tality that will sweep across the entire organization. Instead of "no
failure is allowed here," adopt the mindset of "We won't know until
we run an experiment." It's your only option if you wish for innova-
tion to happen.
A brief example: Dollar Shave Club
Dollar Shave Club's hypothesis was that men don't need
fancy razors with lots of fancy features, nor do they want to spend
time shopping for them. Their experiment involved creating a one-
minute video22 sharing the problem and offering a solution by invit-
ing viewers to link to a landing page where they could place an
order. Within 48 hours, they knew the experiment worked: They
had received more than 12,000 orders.23
21 See Jimmy Sjölund's chapter in this volume.
22 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUG9qYTJMsI
23 https://www.inc.com/magazine/201707/lindsay-blakely/how-i-did-it-
michael-dubin-dollar-shave-club.html
63
Planning for the future isn't what it used to be
Sam Knuth
I n May 2017, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst drew a stark conclu-
sion in his keynote presentation at the annual Red Hat Summit
event in San Francisco:24 "Planning as we know it is dead." He said
those same words again during a Red Hat planning session in Oc-
tober of 2018, when a cross-functional group of Red Hat leaders
assembled to assess the current state of the business and discuss
the roadmap for the coming year.
The technology landscape and business environment are
changing so quickly, Jim argued, that trying to conduct planning
activities in any kind of traditional way just isn't possible anymore.
For some, this is a radical idea—and a deeply uncomfortable one.
For others, the idea that we can't do traditional, long-term plan-
ning is obvious. The question (and much confusion) arises when we
start thinking about what we will do when long term planning is no
longer possible.
While we can no longer plan in the traditional, comforting
way of specifying a fixed roadmap and making steady, foreseeable
progress towards it, we can still have a strategy with goals that
help us achieve it. The big difference in approach is understanding
that the plan will evolve as we go and we need to make real-time
adjustments based on results. That means doing things in smaller
chunks, getting feedback from customers and stakeholders, and
modifying our approach accordingly.
24 https://youtu.be/8MCbJmZQM9c
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The Open Organization Leaders Manual
In this spirit, Jim suggested that we replace long-term plan-
ning with a more experimental approach, one common in open
source software development: "Try, learn, modify."25 I believe in
this approach and use it frequently in my work, but it's not without
its challenges. Misconceptions about it can steer people in wrong
directions. In this chapter, I'll walk through some of those miscon-
ceptions and offer some ways we might think differently about
iterative approaches to achieving goals in an era when planning is
dead.
1. "Agile" isn't a catch-all
The term "agile" originated with a specific meaning related
to flexible but disciplined software development. Over time, other
industries and professional domains have discovered the benefits
of rapid iteration, radical customer-centricity, continual feedback,
and cross-team collaboration.
But I've seen "agile" become a kind of catch-all phrase peo-
ple use without much reflection. I'm not an agile expert (and I
don't pretend to be), so when I hear people using "agile" outside of
its original context, I like to ask clarifying questions about intent. 26
In other words, What does being "agile" mean for your work and
what are the benefits? This might mean asking:
• How does your team prioritize its work?
• How often does your team share, or "release", its
work to get feedback?
• How does your team process the feedback, balance
contradictory feedback, or weigh feedback from dif-
ferent stakeholders?
• How easy is it for your team to adjust course based
on feedback?
25 https://opensource.com/open-organization/18/3/try-learn-modify
26 http://agilemanifesto.org/
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The Open Organization Leaders Manual
• What indicators does your team look at to under-
stand if it's moving in the right direction?
Asking questions like these can help focus the discussion and
clear up the assumptions and confusion that terms like "agile" can
create. They prompt people to clarify what (if anything) about their
processes is actually agile. I try to make it a regular practice to dig
in deeper when people cite "being agile" as a reason for not plan-
ning or prioritizing.
2. "Planning is dead" doesn't mean "we don't have goals"
Instead of saying "we're agile" as a proxy for "we don't have
a roadmap, or a plan, or even a vision," I like to talk about flexibil-
ity and the need to iterate on our approach as we move toward a
long term goal.
For example, currently my team at Red Hat (which creates
the product documentation for all Red Hat products) has a long-
term plan of making our content more flexible and customer-goal
oriented—of moving away from the traditional "product reference
book format" that we've used previously. This change is a huge
shift in how we conceive of, plan, and execute our work, and we've
taken this long-term focus as a result of customer feedback. In
making the change, we need to balance the demands of short prod-
uct release cycles, continual streams of incoming feedback, and
limited resources. Making an important change in how we ap-
proach our work is like changing a car's tire while we're still
driving it.
So we need to be creative, try different approaches, and shift
gears quickly based on real time results and experiences. We can't
set the daily demands of new content creation aside to focus on the
reformulation of the existing content, but we also can't move for-
ward without making progress towards the change. That'd be like
driving a car with a flat tire indefinitely.
The best way to move forward is to focus on small chunks. In
the case of my team, if one product has five reference manuals
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The Open Organization Leaders Manual
done in the "old style," we may continue to maintain four of them
status quo, making just incremental changes—and completely re-
write one of them in the new, modular style during a product
release cycle. We put that content out there, get feedback from
stakeholders and customers, and then adjust our approach as we
tackle another small chunk in the next release cycle.
Under the old "Waterfall" model, we may have taken years to
work on changes across all content, pausing other work, and then
releasing the new content all at once to customers. But product re-
lease cycles aren't done over the course of years any more; they
happen over the course of months. While keeping up with that
pace of can be challenging, the new cadence also gives us the con -
tinual ability to get feedback as we work—so we know if we're on
the right track and we can make adjustments quickly if needed.
As you look at your work, there are some questions you can
ask yourself, your peers, or your leadership to better understand
the long term plan if it feels like the work is haphazard:
• Do you know what the long term vision is for your
team? What do you hope your customer experience
looks like in three years? In 12 months?
• Do you understand how the long-term vision for your
team connects to the goals of the company as a
whole?
• Do you have short term goals? In other words, for
the work that you are doing right now, do you under-
stand what you (or your leadership) are hoping to
achieve with it? And how does that short term goal
contribute toward that longer term vision?
Questions like these can help you understand, or tease out,
the purpose behind the work you are doing. They can also help the
team avoid the pitfalls of using "agile" as an explanation rather
than as a method (e.g., "we're doing it this way because we're ag-
ile" versus "we're using this agile method to achieve our goal").
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3. "Constant change" doesn't mean "total chaos"
At the heart of "try, learn, modify" is a state of constant
change.27 We all know change is hard. We experience it personally
and we see it every day in our work and lives. This basic human
truth substantially complicates the reality we face: having to con-
tinuously adjust our work to suit the changing environment.
Even people who embrace "agile" can have hard a time with
change. We have a reflex to resist it, question it, avoid it, and fear
it. It makes us uncomfortable and insecure. Even people who pur-
port to love and embrace change can have a hard time with it.
I'm one of those people. As a leader of a team, I see the need
for change. But as a member of a team of leadership peers, I know
I'm uncomfortable when it's "inflicted" on me.
What I try to tell my team is that we can make change easier
by understanding that it is inevitable (indeed, it is part of the plan),
by anticipating it, and by being excited about the possibilities
rather than being afraid of the unknown. One question I've been
asking myself recently is this: Has there ever been a year in my
professional career (or my life for that matter) where I could suc-
cessfully predict what would happen during the course of the year?
The answer is a resounding "no"; something unexpected always
happens. Change is routine.
Many people have (or have developed) a comfort with
change that is truly remarkable to observe: a calm openness to try -
ing out different approaches, an unthreatened willingness to
explore possibilities, a desire to talk about how we might be more
effective if we did things differently. So my advice for improving
how we deal with change is to observe how we react to it:
• Do you feel like somebody else is being "political"?
• Do have the urge to protect "your territory"?
27 https://opensource.com/open-organization/18/10/open-leader-creativity-
guide
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• Do you find yourself explaining why we need to keep
doing things a certain way?
• Do you ask yourself why "upper management" is
making so many bad decisions or sending mixed sig-
nals?
In my experience, all of these are signs of discomfort with
change. Left unchecked, they can sew distrust of others' motiva-
tions. If you feel any of these things, explore those feelings and
discuss them with your leadership and your team.
Being open about discomfort is a great way to move past it.
And if we can get past the discomfort, it can be a lot of fun.
69
Organizational Design &
Culture Building
When open values drive open behaviors:
Defining open leadership
DeLisa Alexander
L eadership looks different at Red Hat. People don't just re-
ceive the status of "leader" when appointed to a position or
given a title. Instead, we've observed through the years that at
Red Hat leaders earn their leadership positions when they adopt a
special combination of mindsets and behaviors.
A few years ago, we embarked on a journey to identify that
unique mix of mindsets and behaviors. And we used what we dis-
covered to shape how we help people become effective in leading
in our open organization. We strive to develop leaders at all levels,
enabling them to extend their impact and strengthen the open cul-
ture that has been so critical to our success.
We found that open leaders leverage a set of mindsets and
behaviors to create an inclusive meritocracy, where everyone can
thrive by contributing at their best. Open leaders create a commu-
nity with shared purpose, where everyone harnesses their
individual strengths and talents to unlock their full potential.
After 17 years of working in our open organization, I've
learned a lot about what it means to be an open leader—often by
making mistakes along the way. As our CEO Jim Whitehurst some-
times says, when you operate at the bleeding edge, sometimes you
get cut. These are a few of my stories, some of the lessons I've
learned reflecting on what we've learned at Red Hat about the
stages of open leadership. Ultimately, our journey has helped us es-
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The Open Organization Leaders Manual
tablish a community of leaders who use open leadership to unlock
the potential of both Red Hatters and our customers.
Our open leadership roots
To understand why open leadership is such a big part of our
story, we have to look back to our founders, Marc Ewing and Bob
Young.
Marc was a software engineer with a big tech company, and
he became a true believer in the open source development model
after being frustrated with the proprietary development model.
Marc realized that he could work with his own small team to de-
velop software, and they would make incremental progress and
incremental innovations—or he could share his code with a
broader developer community, inviting those best suited to solve
problems to participate and to innovate much more quickly. He
chose the second option. That's how Red Hat's first Linux distribu-
tion was born.
Bob was Red Hat's first sales and marketing leader, and he
saw the potential in the open source way. We still had a long way to
go to develop a sustainable business model, let alone reach prof-
itability. At the time, Bob was also selling T-shirts, magazines, and
coffee mugs to boost the bottom line. But the underlying interest in
the development model, the passionate community of developers
committed to keeping the code open, and the early hires Marc and
Bob made from this community cemented the open source way as
the way that Red Hat would develop technology.
Those early hires, and the community that sprung up around
Red Hat Linux, were committed to a level of transparency that
gave all participants the same amount of insight. They chose meri-
tocracy over hierarchy to ensure the best idea wins. They viewed
collaboration as essential to success. And they took a "release
early, release often" approach to development. As Red Hat contin-
ued to hire more people from the open source community, these
expectations and norms became those of our Red Hatters.
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The Open Organization Leaders Manual
At Red Hat, those principles of open source software devel-
opment shape our approach to leadership. We found that the
people we hired from the open source community expected leaders
at Red Hat to act like community managers. Their expectations for
managers were very different from what you might find in a tradi-
tional, hierarchical company. They expected meritocracy—that
anyone could bring great ideas forward, and that best solutions
could come from anyone, anywhere. Anyone could choose to lead.
At Red Hat, we believe open leadership is a set of behaviors,
not strictly a position in an organizational chart. Driving those be-
haviors is an open mindset—a preference for working and acting
with open values and principles in mind (see Figure 1).
Figure 1: The Open Leadership Mindset
Of course, a person's behaviors and that person's position in
the organization do reinforce one another. But in an open organiza-
tion, and especially in an inclusive meritocracy, a person's role in
the organization doesn't guarantee influence; it just amplifies the
influence that person has worked to generate. Executive leaders do
benefit from greater visibility in an organization, for sure, but in
many ways that means they shoulder a larger burden to continually
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The Open Organization Leaders Manual
demonstrate (through their behaviors) their commitment to the or-
ganization and its values. Excellent leaders accrue more influence
when they use their highly visible positions to elevate the organiza-
tion and its mission. Poor leaders lose influence when others see
them behave in ways that might seem counter to that mission. The
more influence a person has accrued in an open organization, the
more visible their position in that organization will become—and
the more responsibility they bear for doing right by the organiza-
tion as a result. We've collected and codified some of this
knowledge in our Red Hat Multiplier, a tool we use to identify and
assess leadership behaviors at Red Hat (see Figure 2).
Figure 2: The Red Hat Multiplier
This open approach to leadership is key to how we grow and
scale our culture. We've learned a lot of lessons along the way as
we have matured. Back in those early days, we had no manual on
open leadership that we could refer to (which is why I'm so happy
this project exists). As we've worked to understand the nature of
open leadership, we've observed three important stages of its de-
velopment:
1. Leading personally
2. Leading through a team, and then
3. Leading exponentially by catalyzing other leader
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The Open Organization Leaders Manual
Let me explain them.
Stages of open leadership
Personal leadership
Leadership begins with every individual. Becoming a leader
is a personal choice people make when they want to contribute be-
yond their own self-interest. Leaders enrich an organization's
culture when they become an influential voice on a particular
topic, and when their actions effectively influence and engage oth-
ers. Personal leadership can be an incredibly powerful force.
I began to learn how to lead in an open organization when I
joined Red Hat as the second lawyer on a team of two. Within the
first week, I was working on several questions our legal "depart-
ment" received about how certain open source licenses should be
interpreted and applied. I studied the issue and provided my
learned opinion.
Then something happened that would never happen at a law
firm: The developers with whom I was working (my clients)
promptly informed me that they disagreed with my opinion. They
suggested using a different license.
I was simply shocked that they would debate my advice. I
was the lawyer, after all. In a law firm, if I were working as the se-
nior lawyer on a project, others would have deferred to me even if
I were wrong. After practicing law in an outside firm and moving
up the law firm ladder, my hourly billing rate meant that people lis-
tened to me. I thought things would be the same at Red Hat, with
my credentials speaking for themselves. Once inside Red Hat, how-
ever, I soon discovered that's not how open leadership works.
After I listened to the developers' reasoning, I realized they
were right. They, in fact, knew the open source licenses better than
I did. That's when I began to understand that I had to lead by be-
ing transparent about my findings and analysis. I couldn't simply
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opine on a topic. Open leaders don't rely on compliance, but on in-
fluence. Open leaders are defined by those who choose to follow.
As a leader in an open organization, I needed to be prepared
to defend my logic. I needed to know the ins and outs, the pros and
cons, the ideal and the realistic aspects of every issue I debated.
Over time, I developed my ability to lay out a common fact base, to
describe mitigating factors, and to make the business case for deci-
sions even if they weren't ideal. When I engaged my peers
transparently and early in the process, we often identified even
more risks or mitigating factors. We were forging new territory in
copyright law, and we were able to approach problems in a new,
more productive way. By adopting this approach, we felt confident
that we made the best decisions for Red Hat. Working collabora-
tively and inclusively—such that job titles and business cards were
less important—I was able to provide much more value to the com-
pany.
In short, I learned what personal leadership was all about.
Team leadership
When an individual needs to lead a team of people, directly
or indirectly, that leader must learn how to tap into, combine, and
align the individual strengths of every member of a group to bring
about a shared vision. While this certainly happens with managers
and their direct reports, and with project and program managers,
members of organized groups and communities can also exercise
team leadership by aligning the strengths and interests of their
stakeholders and collaborators.
Before I was selected to lead our human resources team, I
was the primary legal partner to my predecessor. I had provided le-
gal advice to her team and been a customer of their programs. By
working with her on some critical projects, I had developed deep
expertise in executive and equity compensation (very important ca-
pabilities for the HR VP), but I had limited exposure to other
critical talent capabilities. So when I stepped in to manage the Peo-
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The Open Organization Leaders Manual
ple team, I needed to learn a great deal more about all of the other
areas including employee relations, talent acquisition, benefits ad-
ministration, training and development, performance and
development, and talent management. This was a daunting chal-
lenge. The people who populated my small team were all subject
matter experts deeply knowledgeable in their areas, and often they
were the only person at Red Hat responsible for it.
Importantly, I did have a deep knowledge of and experience
in Red Hat's culture and grounding in our open leadership con-
cepts. My perspective coming into this management position was
that there were many opportunities to provide even more value to
Red Hat if we grew into being business partners in addition to HR
policy protectors.
HR policy protectors are often in the position of trying to
prevent their internal clients from doing the wrong thing. This is
clearly an important function, and HR organizations tend to ap-
proach policy adherence from a command and control position.
This is what the team was hired and chartered to do at the time.
But if we could shift our mindsets and move to being business part-
ners with our internal customers, we could provide more value and
help solve business problems.
At the time, our sales general managers said that our biggest
business risk was an inability to grow by attracting the best new
talent. I wanted our team to be in the room to ask probing ques-
tions and to collaborate by providing data and insights, so that our
partners could make better talent decisions. This required a total
shift in mindset and growing our capabilities, but it was what our
People team needed to do to provide more value, and more impor-
tantly, to put us in a better position to grow and scale our open
organization.
I will be blunt. Stepping into this new role was one of the
hardest things I've ever done. I was taking on a new position where
I was managing people who were once my peers. They had the spe-
cialized HR knowledge that I needed to learn, and I was asking
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them to make a major strategic shift. Just as in my previous role, I
had to make the case for why we needed to move in a new direc-
tion. And I had to up my game, doing deep dives on our core
functions so that I could be fully conversant in the areas where our
team worked. I had to navigate moments to push for change when
I thought there was a more effective way to provide business value,
and moments to let their knowledge and expertise carry the day.
Sometimes we had to "let the sparks fly." I made mistakes, but I
worked hard to set context for our work by articulating a clear vi-
sion of better business partnership that would allow Red Hat to
accelerate while maintaining solid policy practices.
Gradually, the team began to support the vision of helping
Red Hat achieve our business objectives. Our subject matter ex-
perts began to leverage their expertise and grow their capabilities
as business partners, and I stepped out of the way, empowering
them to determine how to accomplish the specific tasks needed to
reach our goals.
If I could time travel and talk to myself on my first day as the
People team's leader, I would tell myself not to expect buy-in from
everyone immediately. While people have their own perspectives
and experiences, you can do many things to accelerate the support
for your vision. Open leaders need to have the mindset that their
role is about inspiring people by understanding their values and
goals, how they connect their work to your organization's purpose,
and your organization's higher-level goals. Successful open team
leaders extend trust and bring their people's expertise to the table,
get their perspectives, make adjustments, and then let the experts
decide how to best contribute to a shared vision.
Exponential leadership
Exponential leadership occurs when an individual's impact
gets multiplied. Exponential leaders compound and integrate the
strengths of teams (groups of people) to create new organizational
capabilities. They create new leaders and catalyze vibrant ecosys-
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tems of teams that channel their passion and energy toward a
shared organizational purpose to deliver rapid results. Their lead-
ership contributions have a powerful effect, with the potential to
profoundly influence an organization's culture.
Fast forward 17 years after I joined Red Hat. We'd been ex-
periencing exponential growth in our business, and we'd hired
many, many new Red Hatters. Those were great achievements, but
by now our founders had been gone for a long time. We often as-
sumed that all Red Hatters could state Red Hat's purpose and
would use that purpose as a north star for making decisions, but
I'd started seeing some indications that was not the case. Some
Red Hatters saw their purpose as contributing to open source com-
munities; others saw it as driving business results, or delivering
value for stockholders.
At that point, I was lucky to have the chance to meet Simon
Sinek, author of Start With Why. After learning more about his
work, it was interesting to realize that while we have a mission, vi -
sion, and values, we did not have a purpose statement. I felt that
we needed an aligned way of articulating our purpose to reduce in-
consistencies and risks to our culture for the future.
Simon and the consultants we engaged suggested working
with our senior management team and executives to develop our
why, then doing change management for our associates. But we
were not trying to change anything. What we needed was an open
organization approach, a companywide conversation where we en-
gaged all associates as collaborators.
We began by inviting all Red Hatters—more than 10,000 peo-
ple—to share their personal why stories by describing a moment
when they felt especially proud to work at Red Hat. More than one
out of every five did! These were some of the most incredible, in-
spiring stories I've ever read. Some Red Hatters even posted their
stories to our company-wide mailing list and intranet, for all to
read.
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We were overwhelmed with so many stories; in fact, we sim-
ply didn't know how we were going to pull the data out of the
stories. We had some ideas and were transparent with the entire
organization about the fact that we were going to take the time to
build some technology to help, but stressed that people should an-
ticipate this would take us a while. We ultimately created an
analytics tool for identifying key narrative themes using open
source natural language processing technology. Pairing this tool
with human intelligence allowed us to identify key themes, shared
beliefs, and cultural concepts.
As we moved through the project, again and again we en-
listed Red Hatters to push us along. When we shared a few gaps in
our data collection and surveys, a number of our people helped us
reach associates who were underrepresented. And when we asked
for input on our rollout plans, in addition to sharing creative ideas,
many Red Hatters took up the baton and blogged, tweeted, or
spoke about our why statement of their own accord.
To make the "Rediscovering Red Hat's Why" project happen,
I had to practice my best exponential leadership skills and get out
of the way. We brought together a community of incredibly brilliant
Red Hatters, and my role was to resource and transparently pro-
vide context for their work.28 Some of these associates were people
you would expect to find in a room leading up such an ambitious
project. Others were stretched by the experience and emerged as
new leaders who have gone on to excel in our organization.
For me, this project reinforced the notion that when you give
Red Hatters the ability to create something brilliant they will
wildly exceed your expectations. To help them succeed, you have to
create the right environment to multiply their individual strengths
and talents. The process may sometimes be messy, or chaotic, but
you have to have faith in the power of participation. Our project
28 See Jim Whitehurst's chapter in this volume.
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team thought through the details, developed intricate project plans
to engage all Red Hatters, conducted data gathering, and analyzed
the results. I influenced their work more as a collaborator, not as a
hierarchical senior manager.
In a brainstorming session with Red Hatters from many dif-
ferent levels and departments, Chief Technology Officer Chris
Wright suggested the phrase we ultimately adopted as our Why
statement. When he made his suggestion, heads began to nod, we
knew intuitively he had articulated the central theme that many
Red Hatters had expressed as our purpose: "Open Unlocks the
World's Potential."
What's next
At Red Hat, we strive to be open by default in our collabora -
tion with associates, communities, customers, partners, and other
stakeholders. We believe that open unlocks the world's potential.
Bringing this to life requires open leadership at all levels.
Open leaders are especially adept at applying open principles to
their work, inspiring, guiding, and assisting others. In fact, they
prefer this manner of working and leading to any other. They are
transparent about both their goals and constraints, sharing data
and resources as widely and thoroughly as possible. They create
inclusive environments by drawing diverse and disparate groups of
stakeholders into productive conversations and establishing the
conditions for pointed yet respectful dialogue. Rather than simply
issue commands, they take great care to provide teammates with
both sufficient context for the challenges they face and the latitude
to make innovative decisions. And they constantly seek the best
ways to align their teams' actions and behaviors with an organiza-
tion's mission and goals.
Looking back, I can see how my own leadership journey has
impacted how I view the concept of open leadership. Open mind-
sets and behaviors help open leaders succeed during the phases of
their leadership journey. Individuals exercising personal leadership
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must engage transparently and rely on influence to lead others.
Team leaders have to set the context for others, connecting their
work to the organization's goals and creating an environment that
aligns strengths and embraces inclusive meritocracy. Exponential
leaders catalyze not just one team, but many teams in an open, col -
laborative environment, and they work to ensure new leaders
emerge to address the challenges an organization will confront in
the future.
Now, we are seeing the need to articulate the manager's
unique role in an open organization. Our next frontier to explore is
the concept of open management. We think we know open manage-
ment when we see it at Red Hat. Open managers are leaders given
resources and accountability to create value through and with
other people. They know that the best way to do this is to help peo-
ple lead in order to unlock potential. Now, we need to deepen our
understanding of the role of open managers, measure their impact,
and put systems in place to help open managers and the people
they manage thrive. We will look at what great management looks
like elsewhere and what it looks like at Red Hat. Managers create
context and connection, and they are important guardians of our
unique culture. We know that the mindsets and behaviors that set
our open managers apart are going to be incredibly important at
this stage of our growth.
With the values and leadership principles firmly rooted in the
world of open source, we have a strong foundation to build upon.
84
Stop hiring for culture fit
Jen Kelchner
T alent leaders should hire for "culture fit"—at least, that's
what we've heard.
Today, however, conventional wisdom is coming under scru-
tiny. And in light of today's accelerated pace of innovation, I would
argue that hiring for culture fit is no longer advisable—nor is it a
method for achieving sustainable growth. It's just not the best way
to grow or sustain engagement and productivity in teams or orga-
nizations.
If you're hiring for culture fit, you're doing it wrong. To build,
scale, and sustain your workforce to meet the demands of Industry
4.0, you'll need to take four crucial actions when seeking external
talent or building internal teams. In this chapter, I'll explore them.
1. Align talent to these four cultural identities (or
environments)
"Culture" is a broad term, and it can mean many different
things to different people. Some groups will define it as something
like "a core set of values and practices." Others view it more like
"their style" (think nap rooms and beer on tap in the break room).
But, what does the term "culture" truly encompass?
According to the Business Dictionary, "organizational cul-
ture" is "the values and behaviors that contribute to the unique
social and psychological environment of an organization." 29 It's the
29 http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/organizational-
culture.html
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ethos, values, and frameworks for how a company conducts itself
internally and externally. In other words, an organization's culture
includes its core values, its expectations for behavior, its decision
making frameworks, how it conducts itself with others, how its in-
formation flow operates, its power structures—even how one is
allowed to express oneself within the organization. This cultural
identity is crucial, as it affects productivity, performance, employee
engagement, and customer relations.
When thinking about culture, we should be thinking about
alignment rather than fit.
"Fit" implies that your organization seeks to indoctrinate
new members into its specific way of life—to clone its vision of the
ideal member in everyone who joins it. When we talk about "fit" we
create the potential for exclusion. It prompts us to seek someone
who already embodies the values and principles we think are best
(then seek to "fit" them into a pre-existing spot in our organiza-
tions), and ignore others.
Achieving "alignment," however, is different. Alignment in-
volves embracing diversity of thought and building inclusive,
innovative, community-driven teams that are all oriented toward
shared goals, even if they look and think differently from one an-
other.
The necessity of thinking about "alignment" rather than "cul-
ture fit" becomes even more apparent when we examine the
complexity of organizational culture. Every organization has four
separate cultures (yes, you read that correctly!). Aligning talent
"with culture" means aligning it with: your main culture, the sub-
culture of the department, the team culture, and your geographic
culture. Visualize the engine that runs your organization. You'll see
gears that move you along. Then visualize small gears for your peo-
ple, team, departments, verticals, and your main organization.
Each of these gears contributes to the next in order to meet goals
and propel the business forward. When we have well-oiled ma-
chines (that is, when everyone is doing something better together),
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we are able to propel our mission and realize our organizational vi-
sion.
Let me explain them in more detail.
The main culture
This is your overarching company ethos, your "way of doing
things." It's the primary "gear" that's moving you externally in the
market. It's what others recognize as "you" and, ultimately, is why
clients come to you. It is the "who you are" part of your culture.
When seeking alignment, look for:
• General characteristics and behaviors that agree
with who you are
• Brand fit and representation that aligns
• Passion or purpose that flows into organizational
mission
The subculture
Verticals or departments bring their own values to the orga-
nization's cultural mix. Operationally, each behaves differently and
pursues different goals, all of which feed into the main culture. For
example, engineers building solutions think in very different ways
than marketing creatives do. The goals of solution builders are
very different than those of creatives. Be aware of the mix. While
remaining open and inclusive in your hiring practices, don't over-
look the dynamics of a subculture. In this relationship look for:
• Ability to cross-collaborate
• Open communication practices
• Big-picture thinking
• General energy and personality fit
• Thinking styles
The team culture
The greatest alignment you seek is right here. Team culture
determines the team's manner of working together, day-to-day, to
solve problems. Team culture drives efficiency, productivity, inno-
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vation, engagement, and results. This is what allows you to build,
scale, and sustain. When thinking about alignment, look for:
• How a person responds to new information and then
contributes to the process—you'll want a well bal-
anced team to drive all aspects of change, not just
natural innovators
• Communication styles
• Personality styles
• Behaviors and thought practices
• Alignment to open values
• Individual "magic" (see below) and potential for (and
desire for) for growth
The geographic culture
Think of geographic culture not as an engine gear itself, but
rather the "grease" that aids in frictionless movement. This cul-
tural filter might not directly contribute to meeting goals of an
organization, department or team. It does, however, contribute to
reducing conflict, eliminating misunderstanding, and communica-
tion delays. You'll be looking to align with local geographical norms
and global views. Considering this angle of potential alignment,
look for:
• An understanding of the geographical culture
• A willingness to learn and integrate geographical
norms
• An awareness and intelligence of the practices,
norms or variances from one's own
2. Look for the magic
If you're seeking people to just "fill a job," then you're doing
it wrong.
If you think about the people you bring into your organiza-
tion as partners instead of employees, you'll have a better rate of
return on your relationships. This mindset of employing partners,
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co-creators, and collaborators to solve problems for your clients
provides a more inclusive, open approach. We use technology to
"do things." But when you take the time to find the magic within
people, they will not only be engaged and perform better, but also
build careers alongside you.
When assessing specific competencies, be sure to:
• Push beyond a resume, CV, or formal degree
• Look beyond what someone has been "paid to do"
(life experience and volunteer roles actually yield
amazing competencies in people)
• Look beyond a role or title someone has held previ-
ously
• Look for people who are not happy staying in their
lanes (the potential lies in someone who seeks oppor-
tunities for growth and challenges to stretch
themselves)
Remember, of course, that the demands of Industry 4.0 will
require:
• Ability and capacity to engage with fast cycles of
change
• Interpersonal skills like communication, collabora-
tion and emotional intelligence
• Leadership skills for running projects, teams and or-
ganizations
• Open behaviors and values
• Capacity to navigate open process and decision mak-
ing models
And when interviewing for talent that aligns with your orga-
nizational culture, consider asking:
• What are you passionate about?
• Where or how do you want to get involved from a
technical perspective?
• What do you want to learn?
• What is one challenge you would like to overcome?
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• What perspective on teaming do you have?
• How do you see yourself as a leader?
3. Be open in your sourcing
Becoming a dynamic, inclusive organization requires an or-
ganizational culture built on open values. Only true diversity of
thought can produce innovations at the level required to thrive to-
day.
We've been working to break down barriers to diversity in
the workplace for decades, and we still have a tremendous way to
go in our effort to close gaps. "Diversity" goes beyond religion,
gender orientation, ethnicity, and so on. We must stop focusing on
the labels society has assigned others so we "know where they fit."
That is a fear-based model of control.
Building our teams based on "fit" can actually create exclu-
sive tribalism rather than what we actually intend: a sense of
belonging. For example, employing hiring practices that seek tal-
ent from one primary background or educational institution will
end up with exclusive environments that lack diversity of thought
(even though they might represent good "culture fits!").
We want to have people from different walks of life, with dif-
ferent backgrounds, and with different mindsets, so that we can
collaborate and create unique solutions. Your organization should
have no place for a "them versus us" mentality, which already
seeds a broken system. Doing better together takes a variety of
perspectives and experiences.
After a nine-month field study eventually published in the
American Sociological Review, Lauren Rivera, associate professor
at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, con-
cluded that when hiring managers talk about "fit," they focus on
things like hobbies and biographies. Have you ever heard of the
airport test, the question of "would you enjoy sitting next to this
person on a long flight?" Rivera stated in her report, "In many re-
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spects, [hiring managers] hired in a manner more closely resem-
bling the choice of friends or romantic partners."30
The tech world has become obsessed with hiring for culture
31
fit, and has done itself (and the entire organizational ecosystem)
a disservice as it has fed a growing diversity problem. For open
ecosystems—communities and other organizations—to stay true to
their values, building heterogeneous teams can boost performance,
new ideas, and gain advantage.32
4. Build (talent), don't buy
Last year I interviewed Aaron Atkins of Slalom about a more
open approach to talent acquisition. 33 Aaron heads up acquisition
in Southern California for this open organization. He shared that
Slalom doesn't seek out the "A-Players" but rather seeks people
with potential for aligning creatively with the organization's goals.
Once candidates are a part of the team, Slalom begins to build tal -
ent and create utility players. Atkins had this to say about a new
way forward:
It is how we are educating and training our new folks
to move towards culture change. This all comes back
to a build versus buy mentality. So some organizations
are large enough that they can go in and buy. They can
go and acquire a new company, or they can go hire a
bunch of people in the sense that we're going to buy
these folks.
30 http://www.asanet.org/journals/ASR/Dec12ASRFeature.pdf
31 https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/careers/
leadership-lab/techs-obsession-with-cultural-fit-feeds-its-diversity-
problem/article37684343/
32 https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/
better_decisions_through_diversity
33 https://ldr21.com/ep7-build-dont-buy-talent-trends/
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Slalom is much more of the build mentality of—how do
we identify the right people, with the right capabili-
ties, and train them to have the right skill sets. So it's
moving more towards training and development of
building our next level of talent.
Slalom realized they had clients seeking specific technical
talents and there was an open space that needed serving. Recog-
nizing they were losing money because they didn't have the "right
number of folks" was not okay with them. Instead, they set about
internally building competencies within their existing talent pool.
Now, whenever someone is on the bench and not at a client site,
they're trained in the new skills to serve clients needs. Slalom cre-
ates utility players that can be cross-functional across a wide
variety of solutions and services, which only increases their value
from a market perspective.
Your challenge, then, is to take a hard look at your organiza-
tion's hiring practices and methodologies. Transforming your
organizational culture—your way of doing things, including the
way you work—will require taking new approaches to build truly
open organizations. Open organizations, at their core, must stand
on all five principles to function and produce results (see Appen-
dix). Begin by building inclusive practices as you seek out potential
in either your existing talent pool or those you are looking to hire.
92
Innovation through community
Alessio Fattorini
I n The Open Organization, Jim Whitehurst defines an open or-
ganization as one that "engages participative communities
both inside and out." For Whitehurst, the success of future organi-
zations depends on their ability to successfully interact with, learn
from, and support the broader communities surrounding their
work and their products.
But working this way doesn't come naturally to all leaders. In
this chapter, I'll not only explain the important role community
plays in an open organization's existence but also explore why an
organization would want to build a community in the first place. I'll
share with open leaders the lessons I've learned leading my own
open organization for several years, because I really do believe it's
the best way to generate new innovations today.
The crazy idea
When we launched Nethesis in 2003, we were just system in-
tegrators. We only used existing open source projects. Our
business model was clear: Add multiple forms of value to those
projects: know-how, documentation for the Italian market, extra
modules, professional support, and training courses. We gave back
to upstream projects as well, through upstream code contributions
and by participating in their communities.
Times were different then. We couldn't use the term "open
source" too loudly. People associated it with words like: "nerdy,"
"no value" and, worst of all, "free." Not too good for a business.
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On a Saturday in 2010, with pasties and espresso in hand,
the Nethesis staff were discussing how to move things forward
(hey, we like to eat and drink while we innovate!). In spite of the
momentum working against us, we decided not to change course.
In fact, we decided to push harder—to make open source, and an
open way of working, a successful model for running a business.
Over the years, we've proven that model's potential. And one
thing has been key to our success: community.
Together with the Nethesis guys, we decided to build our
own open source project: our own operating system, built on top of
CentOS (because we didn't want to reinvent the wheel). We as-
sumed that we had the experience, know-how, and workforce to
achieve it. We felt brave.
And we very much wanted to build an operating system
called NethServer with one mission: making a sysadmin's life eas-
ier with open source. We knew we could create a Linux distribution
for a server that would be more accessible, easier to adopt, and
simpler to understand than anything currently offered.
Above all, though, we decided to create a real, 100% open
project with three primary rules:
• completely free to download
• openly developed, and
• community-driven
That last one is important. We were a company; we were
able to develop it by ourselves. We would have been more effective
(and made quicker decisions) if we'd done the work in-house. It
would be so simple, like any other company in Italy.
But we were so deeply into open source culture that we
chose a different path.
We really wanted as many people as possible around us,
around the product, and around the company. We wanted as many
perspectives on the work as possible. We realized: Alone, you can
go fast—but if you want to go far, you need to go together.
So we decided to build a community instead.
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The Open Organization Leaders Manual
We realized that creating a community has so many benefits.
For example, if the people who use your product are really involved
in the project, they will provide feedback and use cases, write doc-
umentation, catch bugs, compare with other products, suggest
features, and contribute to development. All of this generates inno-
vations, attracts contributors and customers, and expands a
product's user base.
But quickly the question arose: How can we build a commu-
nity?
We didn't know how to achieve that. We'd participated in
many communities, but we'd never built one.
We were good at code—not with people. And we were a com-
pany, an organization with very specific priorities. So how were we
going to build a community and foster good relationships between
the company and the community itself?
We did the first thing one must do: study. We learned from
experts, blogs, and lots of books. We experimented. We failed many
times, collected data from the outcomes, and tested them again.
Eventually we learned the golden rule of the community
management: There is no golden rule of community management
People are too complex and communities are too different to have
one rule "to rule them all."
One thing I can say, however, is that an healthy relationship
between a community and a company is always a process of give
and take. In the rest of this chapter, I'll explain what that means.
Giving
When we launched the NethServer community, we realized
early that to play the open source game we needed to follow the
open source rules. No shortcuts. We realized we had to convert the
company into an open organization and start working in the open.
We are aware that for many companies, introducing open in-
novation involves a significant cultural shift. We at Nethesis are
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always struggling with that, even if being open is our mission. But I
have to be honest: It's not at all easy.
If your company expects to benefit from a relationship with a
strong community, it has to give first in order to build a solid rela-
tionships based on reciprocal trust and transparency.
And giving code is not enough. Releasing an entire open
source project isn't enough.
The truth is that you have to invest in people. You have to
put people first, and put people before code. As a company, you
have to devote your time to building relationships—and giving first.
Building community is not an efficient short-term strategy.
And even if it gets you some quick returns in three to six months,
those returns will be a very small representation of the full poten-
tial value you could be reaping. It's a long journey and it takes
time. Results can take months or years of work.
But it pays off! Trust me. If you're a leader hoping to lever-
age the power of community, remember the following.
A community isn't strictly a marketing channel
It's an entirely different animal. Your community doesn't ex-
ist for you to engage in direct sales (I keep my community at a safe
distance from my salespeople). You can't even use the same types
of communication; in marketing, the message is from the company
to the audience. In the community, the communication is primarily
member to member, and you exist to make that easier.
Clarify the relationship as soon as possible
Why has the organization decided to build a community and
support the project? What does it hope to gain? Conversely, what
will the community gain? A company should understand a commu-
nity's needs and expectations in order to earn its trust. You can't
ask people to devote their time if they think that you're making
money from their volunteer efforts. Don't leave space for grey ar-
eas here. In our case, we stated that NethServer is a community
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effort, founded and sponsored by a company (Nethesis). Nethesis'
business model is to sell software, professional support, and ser-
vices to other companies, customers, and resellers. We use a
portion of our revenue to fund the development of NethServer (offi-
cial site hosting, community initiatives, sponsoring, and so on).
Community and company have the same target: making Neth-
Server better and more successful. And NethServer benefits
enormously from the resources that the company invests into it.
The company pays NethServer coders to write features that the
customers and users need and works with the community to make
NethServer a better product. Because the company works in the
open and as part of the community, and because the code is re-
leased under the GPLv3, NethServer itself will continue to be free.
That's a virtuous circle—everyone wins.
Community managers aren't solely responsible for the community
Great leaders ensure that the entire company is responsible
for working with the community. Community-centric companies in-
volve participation from as many employees as possible, so they
involve other staff members in community discussions and initia-
tives. Yes, you should hire a community manager if you're serious
about building community. It should be a full-time role—someone
in charge of facilitating the relationships between these entities,
especially in the early stages. But the entire organization needs to
support the community and its mission. For example, I personally
am both the voice of the community inside the company and the
voice of the company inside the community. Actually, to succeed at
the job, I must participate at a level that can appear to be disloyal
to my employer and in favor of the community; I'm a kind of diplo-
mat and translator between the community and the company. I'm
really the middleman.
Next, let's discuss what your organization should expect to
give if it wants to cultivate community. I'll explore five key require-
ments.
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1. Be welcoming
You should be aware that someone's first experience of and
in the community is critical, so be sure people feel acknowledged
when they encounter you. They have to know what to do first after
they've joined you. Follow their first posts or activities with a
prompt response. Receiving a response after a few days is a bad
welcome for newcomers.
In my community, for example, I create a welcoming post, in
which I offer my warm welcome to the new people and ask them to
feel safe and to introduce themselves: What are you working on?
Why are you here?34
You would be amazed at how these simple sentences unleash
positive behaviors from newcomers. You show not only that you've
have noticed they're here, but also that you care about them, their
lives, and their aims. Suddenly, they feel at home and compelled to
participate, if only to give back and thank you for the attention.
You can't set the proper cultural tone alone. Creating an am-
bassador group might help. 35 This group should be the
community's engine, a group that's able to set a high bar, nurture a
culture, and share your community vision, mission, and values. 36
Our Ambassadors have a set of social norms and rules that they un-
dertake to respect: lead by example, be humble, be inclusive, be
full of gratitude, show your passion, be playful.
The don't just live those rules; they live them every single
day.
34 https://community.nethserver.org/t/weekly-welcome-to-new-members-
25-jul-16/3999
35 https://community.nethserver.org/t/nethserver-ambassadors-group/
4782
36 https://community.nethserver.org/t/thoughts-about-nethserver-mission-
vision-and-values/4080
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2. Be inclusive
You have to create an environment in which people feel safe.
It doesn't matter how fun and amazing your project is. If people
don't feel safe, then they won't contribute. That's a big problem in
many technical communities.
You can avoid this by creating rules that help structure a
safe environment and help people lead by example. Writing your
rules somewhere is not enough to create a welcoming and inclu-
sive culture in a technical community—you have to live these rules.
In our NethServer community,for instance, we have a simple
rule and invitation for new people: "Don't be afraid to ask stupid
questions. Someone else will learn from every stupid question that
you ask."37 It's a very powerful rule, and it helps us achieve an im-
portant goal: being inclusive.
Here's another (related) rule: The phrase "RTFM" is banned.
"Read the F****** Manual" is not an answer. It's not inclusive. It ac-
tually excludes people, and doesn't help people feel like they can
safely ask questions. Instead we point newcomers to documenta-
tion for simple solutions and give them links to specific
information. Sure, that takes more time—but it is much friendlier.
3. Listen to your community first, then speak
This is very difficult. Truly listening is hard. You will be
tempted to steer the discussion too much and not listen. Don't do
this. Be open-minded and be ready to change your mind. Be ready
to have genuine discussions and make sure your community lead-
ers are ready to do the same.
Listening alone is not enough. You should teach your commu-
nity how to successfully hold discussions and how to effectively
explain their needs to one another. Show them that you're inclined
to listen if they are ready to discuss everything.
37 https://community.nethserver.org/faq
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For instance, members should be aware that suggesting a
new feature is not enough to get that feature implemented. They
have to convince the whole community that such a feature is essen-
tial for the project. They have to fight for that. Then, you have to
be ready to chime in the discussion, actively listen, and distill good
ideas.
As a reminder of what it means to truly listen, I always re-
turn to this quote from Simon Sinek:
When we're close to ideas, what we hear is criticism.
When we're open to criticism what we get is advice.38
Remember that every time you need to reply to someone.
4. Be transparent
You'll be tempted to keep your discussions private. You
should tell anyone accustomed to working in secret to stop doing
that and to become more transparent. Otherwise, no contributors
can actually understand what is going on, and no one will feel like
they can get involved.
Put another way: Try to work out loud. Show what you are
working on, and keep people updated on your last achievements.
Ask all community members to do the same.
Here's a concrete way to practice transparency. I could give
some common pieces of advice, like:
• Have all your bugs completely public and visible to
everybody
• Have all features requested exposed
• Maintain a public development planning document
and a clear roadmap
• Make sure all code changes are done in the form of
pull request
38 https://twitter.com/simonsinek/status/199260848663969793
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. . . and all of them would be perfectly applicable. But they're
not enough.
Traditionally, much of the development that occurs in open
source space happens in code repositories and bug trackers, and
those are not places that users of the software tend to hang out.
This separation between developers and users means users don't
really see development discussions happening, and contributors
may not always get feedback or well-deserved acknowledgments
from users.
We use our community platform on Discourse for everything:
support requests, bugs, testing processes, development discus-
sions, community organization—really everything!39 We use GitHub
just to keep track of issues, code changes, pull requests, and tech-
nical stuff. This means developers can help people with support
questions, for example, or they can help with the community dis-
cussions. They could be pretty involved everywhere.
Everything is public. Everything is clear. We have a unique
place to congregate as we bring everyone together.
5. Lead the support, at least at the beginning
As a company, you must take over the support requests,
since asking a question and waiting for an answer for days is a
frustrating feeling. That's a bad first experience for new contribu-
tors and customers alike.
But answering all the support questions is not enough, and it
doesn't scale. Train your community to answer instead. It's way
more sustainable in the long run.
You can't be always the only one who helps. Involving others
in this process becomes essential. Here's a simple tip: Call upon
specific people to help other specific people. Doing that, you'll ob-
tain three outcomes:
39 https://community.nethserver.org/categories
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• Called into question, people will be more inclined to
participate and lend a hand
• People feel like experts in the field, and that helps
them realize their own strengths
• Newcomers will feel like they've truly helped, and
they'll often be thanked for their efforts, which is
very satisfying
So far, we've seen that open organizations can benefit from
relationships with strong communities only if they're ready to give
first. And giving code is not enough.
Open organizations (and open leaders) have to provide what
communities really need: a genuine and transparent relationship
with the organization and other members. Put people first and you
won't regret it.
Taking
As I've already mentioned, our product wouldn't be what it is
today without the vibrant community that surrounds and supports
it. So let's discuss how that happened by exploring what your orga-
nization should expect to receive from its investment in people.
You'll be able to see the kinds of benefits that will take your busi -
ness to the next level—and beyond.
Let's review six benefits.
1. Innovation
"Open innovation" occurs when a company sharing informa-
tion also listens to the feedback and suggestions from outside the
company. As a company, we don't just look at the crowd for ideas.
We innovate in, with, and through communities.
You may know that "the best way to have a good idea is to
have a lot of ideas."40 You can't always expect to have the right idea
on your own, so having different point of views on your product is
40 https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/52938.Linus_Pauling
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essential. How many truly disruptive ideas can a small company
(like Nethesis) create? We're all young, caucasian, and European—
while in our community, we can pick up a set of inspirations from a
variety of people, with different genders, backgrounds, skills, and
ethnicities.
So the ability to invite the entire world to continuously im-
prove the product is no longer a dream; it's happening before our
eyes. Your community could be the idea factory for innovation.
With the community, you can really leverage the power of the col-
lective.
2. Research
A community can be your strongest source of valuable prod-
uct research.
First, it can help you avoid "ivory tower development." As
Stack Exchange co-founder Jeff Atwood has said, creating an envi-
ronment where developers have no idea who the users are is
dangerous. Isolated developers, who have worked for years in their
high towers, often encounter bad results because they don't have
any clue about how users actually use their software. Developing
in an ivory tower keeps you away from your users and can only
lead to bad decisions. A community brings developers back to real-
ity and helps them stay grounded. Gone are the days of developers
working in isolation with limited resources. In this day and age,
thanks to the advent of open source communities, research depart-
ments are opening up to the entire world.
No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for
someone else. And community is the way to reach those smart peo-
ple and work with them.
Second, a community can be an obvious source of product
feedback—always necessary as you're researching potential paths
forward. If someone gives you feedback, it means that person cares
about you. It's a big gift. The community is a good place to acquire
such invaluable feedback. Receiving early feedback is super impor-
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tant, because it reduces the cost of developing something that
doesn't work in your target market. You can safely fail early, fail
fast, and fail often.
And third, communities help you generate comparisons with
other projects. You can't know all the features, pros, and cons of
your competitors' offerings. The community, however, can. 41 Ask
your community.
3. Perspective
Communities enable companies to look at themselves and
their products from the outside,42 letting them catch strengths and
weaknesses, and mostly realize who their products' audiences re-
ally are.
Let me offer an example. When we launched the NethServer,
we chose a catchy tagline for it. We were all convinced the follow-
ing sentence was perfect:
NethServer is an operating system for Linux enthusi-
asts, designed for small offices and medium
enterprises.
Two years have passed since then. And we've learned that
sentence was an epic fail.
We failed to realize who our audience was. Now we know:
NethServer is not just for Linux enthusiasts; actually, Windows
users are the majority. It's not just for small offices and medium en-
terprises; actually, several home users install NethServer for
personal use. Our community helps us to fully understand our
product and look at it from our users' eyes.
41 https://community.nethserver.org/tags/comparison
42 https://community.nethserver.org/t/improve-our-communication/2569
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4. Development
In open source communities especially, communities can be a
welcome source of product development.
They can, first of all, provide testing and bug reporting. In
fact, if I ask my developers about the most important community
benefit, they'd answer "testing and bug reporting." Definitely. But
because your code is freely available to the whole world, practi-
cally anyone with a good working knowledge of it (even hobbyists
and other companies) has the opportunity to play with it, tweak it,
and constantly improve it (even develop additional modules, as in
our case). People can do more than just report bugs; they can fix
those bugs, too, if they have the time and knowledge.
But the community doesn't just create code. It can also gen-
erate resources like how-to guides, 43 FAQs, support documents,
and case studies. How much would it cost to fully translate your
product in seven different languages? At NethServer, we got that
for free—thanks to our community members.
5. Marketing
Communities can help your company go global. Our small
Italian company, for example, wasn't prepared for a global market.
The community got us prepared. For example, we needed to study
and improve our English so we could read and write correctly or
speak in public without looking foolish for an audience. The com-
munity gently forced us to organize our first NethServer
Conference, too—only in English.44
A strong community can also help your organization attain
the holy grail of marketers everywhere: word of mouth marketing
(or what Seth Godin calls "tribal marketing").45
43 https://community.nethserver.org/c/howto
44 https://community.nethserver.org/t/nethserver-conference-in-italy-sept-
29-30-2017/6404
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Communities ensure that your company's messaging travels
not only from company to tribe but also "sideways," from tribe
member to potential tribe member. The community will become
your street team, spreading word of your organization and its
projects to anyone who will listen.
In addition, communities help organizations satisfy one of
the most fundamental members needs: the desire to belong, to be
involved in something bigger than themselves, and to change the
world together.
6. Loyalty
Attracting new users costs a business five times as much as
keeping an existing one. So loyalty can have a huge impact on your
bottom line.
Quite simply, community helps us build brand loyalty. It's
much more difficult to leave a group of people you're connected to
than a faceless product or company. In a community, you're build-
ing connections with people, which is way more powerful than
features or money (trust me!).
Conclusion
Open leaders should never forget that working with commu-
nities is always a matter of giving and taking—striking a delicate
balance between the company and the community.
And I wouldn't be honest with you if I didn't admit that the
approach has some drawbacks. Doing everything in the open
means moderating, evaluating, and processing of all the data
you're receiving. Supporting your members and leading the discus-
sions definitely takes time and resources. But, if you look at what a
community enables, you'll see that all this is totally worth the ef-
fort.
45 https://www.ted.com/talks/seth_godin_on_the_tribes_we_lead
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As my friend and mentor David Spinks keeps saying over and
over again, "Companies fail their communities when when they
treat community as a tactic instead of making it a core part of their
business philosophy."46 And as I've said: Communities aren't simply
extensions of your marketing teams; "community" isn't an efficient
short-term strategy.47 When community is a core part of your busi-
ness philosophy, it can do so much more than give you short-term
returns.
At Nethesis we experience that every single day. As a small
company, we could never have achieved the results we have with-
out our community. Never.
Community can completely set your business apart from ev-
ery other company in the field. It can redefine markets. It can
inspire millions of people, give them a sense of belonging, and
make them feel an incredible bond with your company.
And it can make you a whole lot of money.
Community-driven companies will always win. Remember
that.
46 http://cmxhub.com/article/community-business-philosophy-tactic/
47 https://opensource.com/open-organization/18/2/why-build-community-2
107
What it means to be an open leader
Jim Whitehurst
B eing an open leader means creating the context others need
to do their best work.
That's a relatively short sentence, but for anyone wishing to
lead a group in the 21st century, its implications are enormous.
And if you're hoping to be one of those people—if you're hoping to
have a career leading an open organization—then you must not
only understand what it means, but also recognize ways you can
put it into practice, so you can build a culture that creates a strate-
gic, competitive advantage for your organization.
Context shapes culture
Culture is something management gurus are increasingly
taking more seriously. "Culture eats strategy for breakfast 48," I've
heard people say. But I'm not sure that all of those folks truly un-
derstand why this is the case.
Despite depictions in popular media, a great company cul-
ture isn't simply the result of workplace perks and ping pong
tables. Culture is the result of sufficient context—a shared set of
values, a shared purpose, and shared meanings.
Being a leader in an open organization, then, means making
connections: It involves doing the work of linking people both to
each other and to some larger, shared picture. It's helping people
48 http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/12/culture-eats-strategy-for-breakfast/
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understand how they can contribute to a collective effort in mean-
ingful ways.
As a leader, you create context when you help everyone in
the organization understand its whole mission: the vision, the val-
ues—all the elements that define your very reason for existing. An
open leader also helps people recognize the vast sum of interac-
tions taking place that make an organization what it is—the aims,
goals, and passions that push individuals to work together.
So when we talk about "creating context," we're really talk-
ing about bringing these two facets of organizational life together
in exciting and productive ways. An open leader aligns passion
with purpose, action with vision. And that creates a culture where
people feel inspired, motivated, and empowered to do their very
best work.
Shaping that culture begins with an emphasis on sharing.
Learn to share
In conventional organizations, "knowledge is power." But in
open organizations, that well-worn adage can be a destructive and
downright disastrous guiding principle.
Some leaders believe that extending trust and operating
transparently will somehow diminish their power. In reality, how-
ever, leaders should be sharing as much as they can with their
organizations. Sharing information is how leaders begin to build
the context that people in an organization need to forge connec-
tions between their passions and the organization's mission. Open
leaders are honest about the problems they face, the worries they
carry, and the limits they possess—because, in the end, the prob-
lems leaders face are the problems everyone faces. Shared
knowledge is power.
The problems leaders hear about from customers—the things
that keep them up at night—that's the information we need to
share with our entire organization. Because when we provide that
context and share those problems, we inspire and empower people
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to help us overcome them. In The Open Organization, for instance,
I describe how sharing my priority of making Red Hat more cus-
tomer-focused—and thereby inviting others to help me achieve it—
generated unique, creative, and valuable insights from people
across the organization.
I've met people who believe "sharing more" actually means
"delegating more." But that's not necessarily the case. In the tradi-
tional sense, "delegation" involves sharing responsibility for
implementing a solution the leader has already dreamed up and
settled on. What I'm talking about is different: sharing the work of
actually developing those solutions, so associates have genuine in-
fluence over both the course their work will take and the purpose it
will serve.
If this sounds hard, that's because it is. At Red Hat, we put a
lot of effort behind hiring for and developing these kinds of leader-
ship capabilities.49 We take the time to explain them to people, to
coach people on what it takes to connect, to be transparent, and to
extend trust.
We even talk about what overuse and underuse of these ca-
pabilities looks like. For example, we've found that it's important to
explain that transparency isn't an excuse for rude behavior, nor
does it mean you disclose confidential information about associates
or our business. Trust doesn't mean you give people assignments
without any direction or context, or that you fail to verify that work
they've completed.
Develop your EQ
In an open organization, leaders must be sensitive to nu-
ances—knowing how to share and how to invite collaboration in
ways that keep an organization from dissolving into chaos. A
leader's mandate to help people do their best work involves not
just an understanding of leadership capabilities like connection,
49 See DeLisa Alexander's chapter in this volume.
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trust, and transparency, but also a certain familiarity with—and
sensitivity to—the feelings, emotions, and passions of the people
that leader is trying to help.
In The Open Organization, for example, I discuss the need
for leaders to share half-baked ideas with their organizations, to
bring plans or concepts to the table before they're fully developed,
in order to receive productive feedback sooner. The best leaders
can pinpoint precisely when to present a half-baked idea—not so
early as to distract people with an idea that may not play out, but
not so late as to preclude any opportunity for productive discus-
sion.
Spotting those opportune moments—really sensing them—
requires leaders to be in tune with their organizations' emotional
atmospheres.
Think about it this way: Great leaders give people enough
structure to know they're marching up the right hill, but those
leaders don't want to prescribe a single road north, because they
need the people making the journey to feel empowered to control
that journey. This way, they don't exhaust themselves trying to
climb over a massive rock in their way, and instead devise a
smarter method for getting around it.
The trick for leaders is providing enough clarity of purpose—
enough context—that people are able to help an organization ac-
complish its goals, but not so much that they're impeded from
exercising their creativity and initiative in the process.
Information overload doesn't create context. Distraction
doesn't create context. Strong emotional intelligence helps leaders
avoid both.
Be a catalyst, not a commander
Deciding to share (and determining how to share) drives
open leaders to an important conclusion: a group is always going
to produce a better solution than an individual.
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Leaders of conventional organizations are commanders.
They dictate and prescribe both means and ends, then monitor
people to make sure they use the former to achieve the latter.
Leaders of open organizations are catalysts.
Chemistry tells us that a catalyst is an agent that, when
added to a mixture, sparks a productive change. This is precisely
the role leaders play in open organizations. They create context
that invites people into relationships with new (even surprising) re-
sults. And they do this because they believe, truly and deeply, that
the groups they help form will develop better solutions than the
leader could alone.
I won't deny it: Being a leader means constantly being
tempted to step in, to force decisions, to command. Commanders
generally consider collaborative dialogue a grueling waste of time
("I just need to tell people what to do," they say). Sure, they may
go so far as to hold meetings about, invite comments on, and ask
for feedback regarding their ideas. But in the end, those are empty
gestures, because they've already decided that they know what's
best.
Catalysts, on the other hand, believe that if they get the right
conversations going—if they spark the right kinds of collaboration
—then their organizations will realize better results. Leaders can
only become catalysts when they let go of the assumption that, cat-
egorically, they know best.
Without a doubt, being a catalyst is actually more difficult
than being a commander. Since open organizations tend to be mer-
itocracies, in which reputation and a long history of concrete
contributions trump job titles as markers of organizational power
and influence, leaders must be constantly balancing the skills, per-
sonalities, and cultural capital they see in their colleagues. Far
from dictating, they need to master the art of making appropriate
connections—producing the proper combinations—that ignite the
most influential innovations.
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Yet being a catalyst is also more rewarding than being a
commander. Parents, consider this: Did you feel more proud when
you graduated from college, or when your kids graduated from col-
lege? If you're like me, the answer is: your kids. Catalysts
experience that same sense of pride parents do when they watch
those they've helped succeed.
A checklist
So here's a checklist for those hoping to make a career lead-
ing an open organization. Being an open leader requires:
• WILLINGNESS to extend trust and share information
• APPRECIATION for transparency and collaboration
whenever possible
• SENSITIVITY to the moods, emotions, and passions of
the people that make up an organization
• KNOWLEDGE of not only what to share, but how to
share it
• BELIEF that groups will consistently outperform indi-
viduals working in isolation
• TRUST in those groups to drive necessary change
Master all this, and you're well on your way to creating the
most important thing a leader can provide: the context for people
to do their best work.
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An open leader's guide to better meetings
Angela Robertson
S everal years ago I heard an anecdote about meetings I'll
never forget. A company once kept a scoreboard calculating
the cost of a meeting by multiplying the number of people in the
meeting by the number of minutes in the room—then displayedthe
result. The question everyone needed to consider: Was the impact
of the meeting worth the cost?
Often branded as unnecessary, poorly led meetings can be a
tax on time and distract from core priorities. For that (and many
other) reasons, meetings are controversial.
Nevertheless, developing relationships with employees,
peers, stakeholders, customers, senior leaders, and others has
tremendous value. And we develop these relationships through
meaningful interactions. Led well, meetings force us to develop
these critical relationships and serve as accountability tools.
So what's the difference between an unnecessary meeting
and a valuable one? In this chapter, I'll explain how we can we
leverage open principles to experience more of the latter and
fewer of the former.
Successful meeting basics
Hosting and leading meetings is a skill. I forget that regu-
larly, usually expecting everyone to be effective at hosting
meetings. So let's start with the basics for effective meetings.
Meetings need a clear goal. You can identify a meeting's goal
by answering a simple question: Why are we meeting?
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After you've articulated the goal of a meeting, you'll need to
identify who needs to attend the meeting. Invite those people to at-
tend at a time that fits their schedules. If you're meeting when
people are distracted (for example, asking people to call in for a
meeting at 7:30 a.m. when they are driving to work), then pick an-
other time. You want attendees engaged because you need people
to have a sense of accountability for meeting outcomes and next
steps.
Along these same lines, keep a record (minutes) for meet-
ings, so you have a log of what everyone at the meeting discussed,
decisions you still need to make, etc.
Again, the first step to leading a successful meeting is decid-
ing the goal of the meeting. In general, meetings fall into one of
the following categories: administrative, tactical, strategic, devel-
opmental, and personnel. But the specific type of meeting you host
depends on the goal of the meeting. In this chapter, I'll briefly dis-
cuss each of these meeting types:
• Daily stand-up (administrative)
• Team meeting (tactical)
• Decision-making (strategic)
• Learning (developmental)
• Brainstorming (strategic)
• One-on-ones (tactical)
• Delegations (tactical)
• Performance reviews (personnel)
• Skip level (strategic)
• Off-site (developmental)
• All-hands (administrative)
Articulating a meeting goal helps you determine your meet-
ing type. Determining your meeting type in turn helps you
determine the meetings mechanics (how you'll run it, where you'll
run it, who you'll invite, and so on). Some meetings also combine
some of these types into a single event. For example, team meet-
ings can combine learning, brainstorming, and decision-making.
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After you've identified the type of meeting you're leading, set
the agenda, and send it in the meeting invitation. Also state your
expectations for participation. If you're hosting a meeting online,
for instance, do attendees know if video is required? Will the meet-
ing be recorded? Make sure these expectations are clearly stated
in the invitation.
At the end of the meeting, recap the action items people
have taken and the time frame (or date for a date) for following up
on them. Share expectations both verbally and in writing.
As a leader, you can infuse open principles into every type of
meeting you'd like to hold. Let's examine how.
Daily stand-ups
Daily stand-ups are familiar to anyone practicing the Agile
development model. They're brief meetings where everyone collab-
orating on a project reports three facts:
1. Work completed since last stand-up
2. Work in the queue
3. Risks/blockers
The group can also opt to add a post-meeting discussion.
Given this meeting's tight scope, the post-meeting discussion is
time devoted to questions and answers sparked during the stand-
up. For example, in the stand-up, a team member might identify
work completed and work in the queue (items 1 and 2) as bugs (de-
fects). Likewise, the risk (item 3) might also be bug-related. The
person speaking can request a post-meeting discussion to review
the risk and not exceed the scope of the stand-up.
The stand-up meeting is an excellent example of a meeting
done well: tightly scoped and reliably brief with accountability for
all involved. These meetings truly drive accountability. With just 10
minutes every day, project leads quickly assemble the team to hear
three things from each attendee.
If you're a project lead, these meetings are an indispensable
tool for you. They afford a degree of transparency that allows leads
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to know exactly where team members are spending their time. Ev-
eryone is invited to contribute in the same way, so it's an inclusive
gathering that gives equal opportunity to contribute and listen. I
find that listening leads to collaboration, too, as I can build on the
work others outline in a stand-up. I've led stand-ups, and I love
that the short meeting focuses the team on achieving the sprint
goals so we have impactful work to share in the end-of-sprint
demo.
Team meetings
Daily stand-ups are often run by leads. Team meetings are
hosted by managers. Managers use team meetings to keep their
teams (that is, the people reporting to them) focused on core prior-
ities.
In open organizations, teams need to be committed to shared
priorities. Team meetings are opportunities to reinforce that com-
mitment. They offer regular checkpoints for accountability.
Managers with lingering questions or concerns about a team's abil-
ity to understand or achieve core priorities after one-on-one
meetings can raise those concerns during team meetings.
Team meetings (like all meetings) can be transparent. Unless
there's some risk to an employee's privacy or some other legal con-
cern, managers should consider sharing the meeting agenda,
meeting minutes, and resultant action items. New team members
can learn from these records. Absent team members can catch up
quickly. And you'll have the benefit of the written record available
when your memory doesn't recall all of the details.
Decision-making
The most important thing you need to do in a decision-mak-
ing meeting is to ask for a decision. I state that fact first because
it's easy to hold a meeting like this and not ask for a decision.
Decision-making meetings occur in time set aside to share
updates on an assignment, and you should always begin the meet-
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ing by stating that you wish to arrive at a decision by the end of
the meeting. For example, if you've been asked to lead a vendor
program, then (beginning with your proposal for work) set aside
time for an update and include the fact that you expect a "proceed
or pause" decision at the end of the meeting. In advance of the
meeting, summarize why a vendor program is necessary, what suc-
cess looks like, and what you need to proceed. Share this
information in a written document, and allow time for a review of
the material at the start of the meeting. Always grant enough time
for questions and propose that you have enough information to
proceed with the task. Then ask if anyone has objections.
If no one objects to your proposals, state your next steps and
timeline. Then follow up after the meeting with a written statement
of how you'll proceed. You should also be clear about whether a
project isn't going to proceed. I share that observation to remind
you that you don't need to be dogmatic in favor of any particular
meeting outcome.
In these meetings, be transparent about your point of view
and be passionate. If you learn that the organization is not ready to
go in a particular direction, let it go. You're leading a community of
people. You don't need consensus, but you do need the team moti-
vated to go in the direction you're leaning with the decision.
Adapting so you don't force a change on a group of people when
you lack adequate support is wise in situations where you can take
what you've learned and assess the best way to move forward.
Learning
The idea behind the learning meeting is simple: Someone
has information that you want shared with a group of people, so
you hold a meeting to facilitate that sharing. People like to hold
them over lunch, which is why you'll often hear them called
"brown-bag" meetings.
Always begin these meetings by stressing the fact that you
don't need a decision to result from the meeting. If you work in an
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organization with a cultural bias for action, then setting aside time
to just learn can be challenge. One way to counter this need to act
is to give everyone a reason to act before the meeting.
For example, if you want to focus on why a specific support
issue occurred, then ask every team to prepare for a root-cause
analysis of their biggest support issue in the past week. Explain
that at the start of the meeting you'll randomly select a team to
share their analysis. The other teams in attendance can learn from
the selected team's experience. That way, in preparation for the
learning-focused meeting, every team has acted to prepare.
When structuring these meetings, think carefully. "Brown
bag" meetings are often optional meetings. If you want attendance
to be mandatory, use something like "A deep dive into topic name."
In the description for the meeting, explain that a presenter will be
sharing information for the purposes of learning and that questions
are welcomed. You want attendees to learn more about the topic so
you're taking the time to organize the session. The meeting leader
should introduce the speaker, facilitate the discussion, and ensure
someone attending the meeting handles the minutes.
Learning meetings are a great time for people to voice con-
flicting viewpoints and ask probing questions. If your organization
tends to be conflict avoidant, you can ask people who you know
have different points of view to share their perspectives. You want
to draw out different ideas so your team can be more creative.
These meetings can also function as morale boosters for a team.
When a leader sets aside time for a team to learn, employees see
an investment in their base of knowledge.
Depending on the discussion that occurs during the learning
meeting, follow-up work varies. Often several team members find
the material something worth pursuing further, as it relates to core
priorities, and they take action items. If the discussion yields learn-
ing, but additional work is not helpful in meeting core priorities,
then team members have the information for future reference.
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Whenever possible, record and share all information with the
larger organization. Transparency develops trust and allows open
organizations to grow.
Brainstorming
Sometimes you have a problem to work through, and you
need time to catalog options for solutions. Set aside time for a
working meeting to review ideas with co-workers.
Ideally, you'll have everyone physically present in the same
room when brainstorming. But even if everyone cannot be in the
same room, I find that you can still have an effective brainstorming
session as long as the team understands the rules for communica-
tion. As a leader, you should be clear about questions like:
• Who is leading and facilitating the discussion?
• Who is taking notes?
• How is the team going to share the ideas sketched
during the discussion?
Brainstorming meetings require some prework to ensure the
meeting time focuses on the work. You can ask people to come pre-
pared with specific prework completed. Depending on the
challenge and the time available, you might have people come with
specific examples ready to share to get the brainstorming session
started. You can limit prework to reading a problem statement.
In most cases, you'll want people to complete some kind of
prework to ensure that your attendees are the best group of people
to have in the meeting. Encourage questions so everyone has clar-
ity around why the brainstorming session is necessary. When
people have clarity, they feel motivated to act, and you want your
team to come ready to engage transparently, leaving ego at the
door in the service of developing the best ideas.
At the start of the meeting, the lead kicks off the brainstorm-
ing session and facilitates the discussion. The lead is responsible
for getting all team members involved in the discussion. Remem-
ber that people's personalities vary. Extroverts are going to talk;
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you need to make sure the quieter meeting attendees are invited to
participate in a meaningful way. You don't want people thinking,
"I'll talk to check the ‘I participated' box." You want everyone to en-
gage for the best outcome in the brainstorming session. Diversity
of thoughts and ideas leads to the best outcomes.
Depending on the deadlines associated with the project, af-
ter the brainstorming session you can plan next steps. Again, share
a summary of the meeting and include who took what action item.
Your team will need specific deadlines if it can continue making
progress.
One-on-ones
One-on-one meetings help open leaders drive strategy, and
allow them to receive and deliver candid feedback at quicker inter-
vals—crucial for teams that are always working in "release early,
release often" mode. Employees are always making decisions that
impact people who use whatever they're working to deliver. So the
one-on-one meeting naturally covers the priorities they're setting,
a discussion of the impacts those priorities have, and the risks as-
sociated with those priorities. These meetings tend to be tactical,
lasting about 30 minutes and occurring roughly once per week.
To ensure transparency during one-on-ones, open leaders
ask plenty of questions for clarity. Explain that what helps a man-
ager become a better manager is knowing what's blocking a team's
work or what questions are most pressing for them. By asking
questions and giving transparent answers as a manager, you're
finding space to learn more about your team members—things like:
• What are they working on beyond the work as-
signed?
• What problems are they solving?
• How are they deciding what work not to do?
• What do they need to have unblocked in order to
make faster progress?
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In the end, however, in one-on-one meetings leaders should
listen more than they talk.
Everyone handles one-on-one meetings differently. But in
general, successful one-on-one meetings should address items that
fall into two categories:
• PRIORITIES AND RISKS. For managers and team mem-
bers, it's easy to think that things are going well, but
there are often challenges. People want to give off an
"I've got it all together" vibe to insulate themselves
from risk. The thing is: Work is risky. Most jobs in-
volve work that's ambiguous and uncertain. So make
sure you don't forget to discuss risks.
• ROADBLOCKS AND LEARNING. Often, certain things
prevent us from moving our work forward. Managers
need to know about those things in a precise and
candid way. And even if they did, we can't always
wait until we have everything we think we need in
order to proceed with a project. We can work with a
growth mindset so we, as a collaborative team, can
share what we learn from mistakes and new informa-
tion.
The more trust and credibility a manager has earned with a
team, the quicker team members can adapt to changes that are
necessary for the business. For example, while a manager might
not be able to answer every question that arises in a meeting, she
can encourage curiosity. When dealing with ambiguity, identify
people who want to answer similar questions and connect them. As
you see people who don't know what success looks like, use the
meeting to bring clarity to goals as much as you possibly can.
Delegations
Delegation meetings occur when leaders need help meeting
all their strategic priorities. But open leaders understand some-
thing additional: Delegation is also a way to empower those around
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you—to build, in other words, a culture of shared responsibility.50
Through our adaptability, delegation becomes all the more possible
—indeed, almost inherently essential—for the organization to
thrive and grow. And the challenge that often makes delegation
difficult is trust. If you cannot think of anything to delegate, per-
haps you believe that you cannot trust your team members to
share your responsibilities.
When delegating work, you'll be helping team members
make decisions regarding their priorities and understand how they
might delegate work or stop work on a task altogether. When you
approach a prioritization discussion with someone on your team,
talk about the work the employee doesn't want to stop doing. You
want to begin here, because you need to know what your team-
mate has difficulty letting go of as change occurs during the
delegation.
As a leader, you motivate people to change. If you need the
employee to stop doing the very thing that he or she loves doing
(and finds great value in delivering), you need to speak to this con-
cern. With some discussion, the team member adapts and sees the
strategy behind what's motivating you to push for change. You
might use these six steps to structure this prioritization exercise:
1. State the work being delegating and seek confirma-
tion that the delegation has been accepted.
2. Inventory the work that the employee is tasked to
complete.
3. Ask the employee to give each work item a priority
and deadline.
4. Using your knowledge of the business strategy and
customer commitments, collaborate to establish pri-
orities.
50 https://opensource.com/open-organization/18/7/guide-to-delegation
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5. Put the priorities in writing, identify quality stan-
dards, and set deadlines.
6. Set expectations regarding status updates, and con-
firm you both understand how the employee's
current workload adapts with the new work and
deadlines.
Always understand that your goal in these meetings is em-
powering another person to do the work. With any act of
delegation, you're letting go. In that act of letting go, you have
space to pick up whatever work requires your attention.
Performance reviews
Most organizations have a regular cadence for performance
reviews. Ideally, managers leading openly are communicating per-
formance feedback as micro-feedback and these meetings contain
no surprises.
If performance is poor and an employee is in the wrong role,
employees often do not hear the constructive feedback they re-
quire to start acting in a way that improves their performance. The
performance review (which often includes a discussion of compen-
sation) is a time when employees who have been in denial about
poor performance finally hear the "things need to change" mes-
sage.
Performance reviews are communicated in writing, so a per-
formance review meeting is a discussion about the written
feedback. Before the meeting, give employees time to read your
written comments. Explain that after the meeting you intend to
submit the comments as part of the employee's record so you need
the meeting to be a productive discussion. If there's any dispute,
the dispute needs to be surfaced succinctly so action can be taken.
Employees need not agree with the performance review
feedback (given that the manager is responsible for assessing the
employee's performance). But if there's a disagreement about the
assessment, use fact-based written documentation to work through
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the issues. The written documentation makes the exchange more
transparent and everyone has the opportunity to provide input.
Skip level
Skip level meetings occur when an employee meets a man-
ager's manager. In these cases, the more senior manager does not
drive the conversation. Time allotted for the meeting is time for the
organization's leader to listen and learn. Employees receive clarity
as the senior leader provides context and asks questions to gain
perspective.
As an employee meeting with a senior leader, come prepared
with some questions or topics for discussion. Send these topics in
advance to give the senior leader some idea of what you want to
discuss. If you send topics via email in advance, don't assume any-
one read them. Everyone has unplanned events that steal time
away from planned activities (like preparing for a meeting). Senior
leaders can also come prepared with questions.
What type of questions do senior leaders want to hear? First,
ask them how you can help them be more successful. Senior lead-
ers are expected to execute on a strategy. Your help is essential for
implementing that strategy. Anything you can do to assist with that
is valuable, and your curiosity about ways you can help is guaran-
teed to be impactful.
One final note about skip level meetings: Senior leaders are
often curious about "what's really going on" in their organization.
If you're concerned that a senior leader needs to know something
that they seem unaware of, bring up the topic. If the leader is lis -
tening, she'll ask for your candor. Some people have told me that
nothing is "off the record." I argue that this really depends on the
leader. Personally, I respect off-the-record disclaimers and appreci-
ate the transparency people are willing to bring to a skip-level-type
meeting.
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Off-site
Teams benefit when they plan some time "off-site" to identify
core priorities. They often occur on a quarterly basis "Off-site" is a
term that needn't literally mean "off the premises." For example, if
you have a distributed team, meeting "off-site" does not automati-
cally mean traveling. Don't let location issues deter you. Set an
agenda and hold the meeting.
The goal of the off-site is to get a fresh perspective on what's
really important for your business to succeed and grow. You want
to refresh your view of core priorities as the customer's needs and
the broader organization's business priorities are likely changing.
It's cliché but it's true. We're always learning. Take what you and
your team have learned over the previous three months, and agree
on the core priorities for the next three months.
The goal of an off-site meeting is not consensus. You are not
going to get every person to agree on the same set of priorities.
You want the team to collaborate on a set of core priorities that
they verbally commit to work toward. Verbal commitment on core
priorities is essential.
As an open leader, you need to know that your team is going
to support the strategy. If you hear any hesitation or doubt when
you ask for a verbal commitment, ask for clarification. Your goal is
not to force commitment. Your goal is to get people to the point
where they commit to the team's statement of core priorities, leave
the meeting to explain the priorities, and start implementation
work.
Off-site meetings are successful when attendees are vulnera-
ble with each other about their concerns and engage in conflict-
heavy discussions. A team might not share all details as transpar-
ently as they share details from other types of meetings. But I
encourage transparency here, because it gives the larger team per-
spective about the thought and candor that went into the
discussion. That said, however, airing dirty laundry isn't helpful
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when you want the larger team focused on asking clarifying ques-
tions about the strategy and working out tactical details for
implementation.
All-hands
All-hands meetings are an opportunity for the organization's
leader to gather other leaders in conversation. It's also a perfect
opportunity to practice transparency.
If you're the leader planning the meeting, talk with people in
the organization to find out what questions are at the top of every-
one's minds. Think about other topics senior leaders in the
organization have shared and how you can add detail that helps
people understand why the team needs to act on behalf of what-
ever strategy the team is being implemented.
Open leaders bring others into the conversation. Get a range
of people involved. Invite people who are in the organization to
speak and ask partners of the organization to speak on relevant
topics. Facilitate a question-and-answer session after each main
topic.
Also take time to recognize great work by individuals and
small teams. Ask the larger organization to nominate people on the
team who are delivering high caliber work on behalf of customers.
When you receive submissions, if one part of the organization
seems heavily weighted, seek balance. Perhaps the imbalance
comes from one team feeling unengaged or overwhelmed. The
leader can ask why one part of the team is well represented while
other parts of the team seem non-existent.
After you have a representative sample of the great work the
team is recognizing, decide what is the best example to highlight.
Again, seek to balance representation in the public recognition.
You want the team to understand that they have something to learn
from each other.
As you're used to reading by now, record and share.
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Conclusion
Some people are going to push back against meetings, call-
ing them "time sucks" (or worse). Ignore these assertions and
prove the worth of the meeting by making it useful for the atten-
dees. If you don't find the meeting to be a good use of time, cancel
it and evaluate how you can restart the effort to reach your desired
outcome. You'll find people appreciate your willingness to execute
on the strategy despite challenges.
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Making cultural transformation manageable
Heidi Hess von Ludewig
I n a scene from Game of Thrones (the third episode of the sev-
enth season, to be precise), Tyrion Lannister is talking to the
King of the North, Jon Snow, about the army of zombies approach-
ing from the North, beyond the Wall. Tyrion's evil sister is sitting
as Queen of the Seven Kingdoms and John is wondering why peo-
ple don't listen to his warnings. "People's minds aren't made for
problems that large," Tyrion says. "White walkers, the Night King,
army of the dead—it's almost a relief to confront a comfortable, fa-
miliar monster like my sister." Sometimes, the best way to succeed
is not to confront the entirety of the issue.51
The same is true about creating change in an organization.
Because change is difficult, it can feel insurmountable in any orga-
nization (especially a mature or large one). Both problems and
solutions can feel too big or broad for us to address. We don't often
know which steps to take for a number of reasons, and we might
feel a lack of support, fear of failure, or uncertainty about where to
start.
But change doesn't have to be big. And if we're trying to
change without the context of an urgent situation, then I would as-
sert that change shouldn't be big: Change just needs to be
effective, because we can build on every effective change, one at a
time. Rather than try to tackle change at an intimidating scale, we
51 For more open leadership lessons from Game of Thrones, see:
https://opensource.com/open-organization/18/7/open-innovation-
lessons-game-of-thrones
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must learn to spark change at a level much smaller, more modest,
and more manageable—like with individual projects.
This chapter describes ways that we can create cultural
change one project at a time—rather than "boiling the ocean" to
warm our organizations for culture change. When we use our
projects to spark change and start to succeed, others can emulate
us and transform how they work too. In fact, that is how grassroots
movements start: through showcasing the ability to change and
demonstrating how change works at the small scale. There's no
difference between grassroots movements inside and outside the
workplace; the mechanisms are the same, as I will explain.
Culture is the "how"
The first thing to do is differentiate between the "how" of
change and "what" of change. Business systems have similar defi-
nitions of "what" needs do be done—manage work, make profit,
sell products or services, pay people, provide benefits, etc. "How"
those things are done is the difference between open and conven-
tional organizations.
Open organization values showcase how organizations oper-
ate—the principles that influence how they run to increase
participation, help information flow easier, and generate innova-
tions. Transparency, for example, describes how open
organizations communicate (if they aim for authenticity). Inclusiv-
ity describes how open organizations promote participation among
members. The values and beliefs are part of the foundation that
makes a culture—yet they are not, themselves, culture.
Culture is a set of values and beliefs enacted through behav-
iors and actions. We "know" what a particular culture values
because of how people living in the culture do things. For example,
how do people discuss things (or how don't they discuss things)?
What is salient or available as a topic of conversation? How do they
celebrate traditions, with whom, and how frequently? In the case
of workplace cultures, these questions transform into ones like
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"How are meetings run?" and "Who's included?" and "What hap-
pens when someone expresses a dissenting opinion?"
Our answers to those questions help us infer the values and
principles that motivate observable behaviors, because the enact-
ment of beliefs and values in the form of behaviors is how cultural
values get instantiated. If we want to better understand a culture,
we can assess social behaviors and infer values from them in order
to more fully understand a culture's beliefs. We can in other words,
reverse-engineer our understanding, starting from behavior and
ending at values. However, if we want to change a culture, then we
need to use forward-engineering to figure out ways to change
those behaviors and actions in order to change beliefs. 52 That
means we need to look for simple but concrete ways to enact open
organization values in our everyday work, and one way to do that
is by focusing on specific projects.
Project management is the "what"
Project management is a "what"—what to do to organize and
perform the work—and, if done well, it has the ability to connect
the "what" of behaviors with the "how" of beliefs and values that
form open organization culture. As a sanctioned methodology,
project management is likely already something that an organiza-
tion and its actors value as a way to work, so it provides a ready
framework for adopting the "how" of desirable cultural values.
The choice of project management methodologies certainly
matters; each has its drawbacks and benefits. But what matters
most is how activity gets accomplished. The Open Organization
Definition (see Appendix) describes the principles (how something
might be done) that can inform all kinds of work at different levels
of an organization, regardless of whatever particular techniques or
behaviors an organization enacts (what they choose to do).
52 Yes, I said that correctly; you change behaviors first.
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For example, Agile is often aligned with open organizational
thinking because these schools of thought share similar principles.
We might consider them corresponding "cultural artifacts." Agile
(just like its dramatic foil, Waterfall) is a project management
method—a set of concrete behaviors and techniques. Those behav-
iors and techniques both reflect and perpetuate a set of values that
underpins them (see Figure 1), which, by and large, are open val-
ues. In many organizations, a variety of methodologies co-exist,
because over time different teams have adopted different styles of
working; intra-organizational groups have differing abilities to
adapt to particular methods (not every team can iterate or use
project management tools), and each methodology has drawbacks
(e.g., the "technical" debt of Agile).
Although Agile naturally supports open values, multiple
project management methods can and often co-exist and are bene-
ficial when the same set of values defines and drives them.
Figure 1
Relationships between open organization values and Agile principles
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Stages
Each stage of a project management method encomapsses
activities that leaders can use to promote the "how" of open organi-
zational culture. There are generic stages (meaning you'll find
them in just about any methodology) but their specific enactment
will depend on the methodology you've chosen (e.g., Agile's short
cycles will manifest differently than Waterfall's longer cycles).
Those general stages are:
• Initiation
• Planning
• Executing and Controlling
• Closing
Let's examine each one.
Initiation
In the initiation stage of any project, people seek to outline
information about the launch of a project. This is the phase in
which people address questions about the benefit of the project. It
usually includes activities like stakeholder analysis, benefits analy-
sis, deliverable identification, and risk identification. This is
typically a more "internal" part of the project methodology, mean-
ing that project sponsors and key leaders are engaged in this work.
The initiation phase of a project is a stage in which leaders
can increase transparency, inclusivity, and collaboration by commu-
nicating early about project details and team membership, and by
sharing prior knowledge and information to cultivate an early
project community. For instance, leaders sometimes wait until
projects are clearly defined before talking about them, delaying
presentations in order to provide answers to any questions that as-
sociates might have—but that can mean that no one really knows
about the project and that the project is defined to a point at which
it's not inclusive of feedback. So sharing project details often and
early during the initiation stage means leaders might take some
questions for which they don't have answers, but they benefit both
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from having ideas and feedback circulate, and from building asso-
ciates' commitment by including them early.
Planning
In the planning stage, project details become more defined
and clear. It's a great moment to forward-engineer an open culture,
because decisions about what and how most often occur during
planning. Using the planning stage as a platform for change in-
creases buy-in, because it helps provide early context for team
members, effectively "bringing them along" on your vision (rather
than having to explain it and convince them later).
This stage focuses on determining: project requirements,
constraints, and assumptions; project schedule, scope, and re-
sources; roles and responsibilities among and between the various
teams and members; communications plan; quality management
plan; and change management plan. It also includes review and
signoff of plans and documents and a project team kickoff.
The exciting part of this stage is the ability to discuss and
compromise that it affords. Leaders shouldn't be afraid to let team
discussions take them to new places. This is where "the road gets
paved." How you enact the process (the values that will guide what
you do) get sedimented here. Be inclusive and collaborative by sup-
porting fluid role definitions. Make communication plans broad and
transparent. Focus on (and encourage) interlock and the develop-
ment of a broader sense of community between organizational
teams is a focus and encouraged.
The Open Decision Framework is a resource you can use to
help define how open values will manifest in the ways a project
team will make decisions.53 It's not a prescriptive mechanism that
teams must aggressively follow; it's something project managers
and teams can adapt to their own situations and different types of
53 https://opensource.com/open-organization/resources/open-decision-
framework
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decisions (i.e., teams might manage short-term technical decisions
differently than strategic technical decisions, or might have differ-
ent guidelines about decisions that involve change or risk
mitigation).
Executing and controlling
Plans laid in the prior stage get performed, evaluated, and
continuously improved in this stage. Task execution, plan enact-
ment, performance measurement, implementation of changes and
corrective actions, risk monitoring, quality measurement, and rela-
tionship maintenance (between team, stakeholder, sponsor) are
key.
Changes and corrective actions can provide opportunities for
promoting adaptability. Increasing transparency in reporting and
communication can increase community-building and engagement
between project groups. And including external groups in a consul-
tatory way during change management and decision making can
lead to greater inclusivity and knowledge sharing, ultimately aid-
ing problem solving and solution building.
Closing
Closing can apply to an entire project, a phase, or an itera-
tion. It includes performance measurement, project review, and
transition planning. Providing archives in a public way helps to
make the success and learning outcomes of the project more trans-
parent. Feedback techniques such as retrospectives could include
all project groups including customers and sponsors. And, by all
means, when closing a project record yourself as the leader so as-
sociates can connect with you with questions they have about the
work you did.
Culture change one project at a time
Projects are a unique opportunity to begin transforming to
an open organization culture one step—one activity—at a time.
Project management methodologies describe the activities that a
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team performs in order to organize and manage complex cross-
team and cross-organizational work. By defining "how" those activ-
ities are performed, we can begin to infuse our work with open
values, no matter the kind of organization we find ourselves in.
Defining "how" is not the only task, of course: Accountability
for enacting the values that a project team has defined is the re-
sponsibility of everyone on the project, and needs to be a focus in
every moment that the team performs its work. Without the team
engaged in working toward an open organization, culture change
won't be possible.
Starting small, aligning how with what, is a manageable way
to start making those changes.
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To survive Industry 4.0, leaders should think
beyond the digital
Jen Kelchner
T he 2017 Red Hat Culture Survey 54 found that digital transfor-
mation is changing business inside and out.
respondents (91%) agreed that technological developments are al-
Most
tering the way organizations in their industries must operate in
order to succeed.
That's going to require those organizations to take a hard
look at the frameworks that guide their work, the values they ad-
here to, the mission that aligns them, and the operational
processes that drive the engine of change—in other words, their
organizational cultures.55 It's clear that (due to the various types of
transformation going on) we must address not only operational
needs but also the way we think about doing work itself.
Yes, our frameworks—our systems of organizational gover-
nance, our standard processes for decision-making, etc.—will need
to change, because the rules of engagement have changed. But if
we've only implemented new processes and frameworks and still
haven't developed agile people and empowered them with the
skills they need to adapt to change, our change efforts will con-
tinue to fail. Currently, the focus of so many change efforts has
been on the digital aspects fueling innovation sprints—without ad-
54 https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/red-hat-releases-2017-open-source-
culture-survey-results
55 https://hbr.org/2013/05/what-is-organizational-culture
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dressing the key needs to be evaluated in advance of implementa-
tion and changes.
But at the heart of what we call "digital transformation" isn't
just technology. It's people, too. When we forget that, we put our
organizations in danger.
So in this chapter, I'll explain how those traditional rules of
change management are shifting, then explain how your teams and
organization can succeed with their transformations by thinking
beyond the digital.
New rules of engagement
It's time to step beyond the digital in order to succeed in the
rapid state of innovation we're all experiencing. It's time, that is, to
change the way we think about the value of the people in our orga-
nizational ecosystems by empowering them to rapidly respond to
this change, and by providing the necessary skills and tools for be-
coming fluent in the critical task of engaging with change.
Last November, when interviewed on CNBC's Squawk box, 56
Red Hat president and CEO Jim Whitehurst said, "We found that
when projects typically fail, it is usually not the technology, but has
much more to do with the way companies operate." Jim went on to
say that companies looking to transform the ways they work must
examine their cultures, processes, and systems.
In response to Jim's assertion, host Joe Kernen replied:
Does every company need to hire millenials? Who else
knows how to operate in the current environment? It
seems there needs to be a mass transformation that
must happen to change the way people think to get to
open source, digital, and embrace new technology.
56 https://www.cnbc.com/video/2017/11/27/red-hat-ceo-projects-fail-
because-of-how-companies-operate-not-technology.html
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Kernen's position sounds familiar. The 2018 Deloitte Millen-
nial Survey offers the subtitle "millennials are disappointed in
business and are unprepared for Industry 4.0"—before even
launching into the study.57 The survey's finding lead to a staggering
awareness that organizational and people team leaders have not
taken millennial workforce development seriously. These leaders
are underprepared for the speed of innovation and lack basic team-
ing skills.
According to 2017 statistics:58
• 56 million millennials currently are in the workforce,
making it the largest group.
• Gen Z began entering the workforce in 2016 and
now comprise 5% of the workforce.
• Millennials will be 75% of our workforce by 2025. 59
But are the millennials in your organization really pushing all
the change typically tied to digital transformation? Or is it the case
that your entire business hasn't really upgraded its operating pro-
cedures? While millennials are the trending scapegoat, let's be
honest: millennials are not who or what is prompting the need for
change in your organization. And while it isn't about millennials or
even digital transformation, Kernen was right about one thing: For
transformation to happen, people need to change the way they
think.
As the composition of technologies inside our organizations
changes, so does the composition of people. And that means the
composition of expectations is changing, too. If you expect your
company to not only succeed but thrive in the 21st Century, you'll
57 https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/global/Documents/
About-Deloitte/gx-2018-millennial-survey-report.pdf
58 http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/04/11/millennials-largest-
generation-us-labor-force/
59 https://www.forbes.com/sites/workday/2016/05/05/workforce-2020-
what-you-need-to-know-now/#9d39c722d632
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need to make an immediate investment in interpersonal and man-
agerial competency training.
The speed of innovation
We live in an age of innovation featuring rapid cycles of
change. Futurist Gerd Leonhardt estimates we will see more
change between 2015 and 2035 than in the prior 300 years of mod-
ern history.60 And the cycles of innovation will not be slowing down.
(In fact, they will be speeding up.) To effectively understand this
change, we need to step back and see the large scale impact of this
age.
The source of this change is far more than "digital transfor-
mation" or "emerging technologies." We are a connected and
aware generation that consumes information in mass volumes in
real time through handheld devices. 61 Policy and regulation are
changing. Political upheaval is occurring. New business models are
emerging. New markets are appearing. We are part of a global
marketplace and a much larger ecosystem, and as with all ecosys-
tems, the slightest shift in a single part can cause radical changes
throughout the whole.
In previous decades, engaging in change has generally fallen
into two initiatives: change readiness and change management.
Change readiness involves processes focused on controlling the
change, but does not allow for what happens outside of that con-
trolled space. Change management consists of building and
executing the roadmap to roll out changes, but has been failing at
a rate of about 70% for many decades. Organizations have been
able to navigate change solely by using change readiness princi-
ples, which are based on internal control of change and
predictability during a process. We can no longer expect to do busi-
60 https://www.futuristgerd.com/future-thinker/
61 https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/09/the-american-diet-34-
gigabytes-a-day/
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ness according to operations and rules for sailing while navigating
a lake full of speedboats.
The current speed of innovation in the market, the move to
open organizational models, and the shift to more agile and
project-focused working groups have caused us to throw out our
playbooks for "normal" business operation. Truth be told, whether
your organization is open, closed, or somewhere in between, you
must begin to acknowledge the new playing field we're on and em-
brace the skills needed to thrive in it. In order to thrive (and not
just survive), people and organizations alike must begin thinking
beyond processes and tools. We need to begin focusing on people's
capabilities for responding to change.
Change readiness focuses on the value of the people; their
contributions, and the insights they glean from working together,
will address the challenges for both the disruptors and the dis-
rupted. Since the speed of innovation and change is only
increasing, we must become change-ready. We must have the skills
to become rapidly responding, agile humans who can ride the wave
of change rather than allowing the chaos to control us, our teams,
and our business.
Transformation beyond the digital requires a new approach
to the way we build agile, open organizations, and it will need to
start with how we empower our people to engage continuous cy-
cles of change. With the advent of Industry 4.0, we need
empowered, engaged change agents more than ever.62
Humans drive change. Humans sustain change. And failing
to invest in people as they grapple with change could be problem-
atic for your business.
This means a new way of thinking and doing. Our efforts to
make technology work for humans require applying human dynam-
ics to solutions rather than just technologies.
62 https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2016/04/05/why-everyone-
must-get-ready-for-4th-industrial-revolution/#166d57113f90
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An inclusive, holistic approach
Transformation needed for our workforce, business models,
and organizational ecosystems must go beyond "digital transforma-
tion" alone. However, our approach to building applications,
systems, and new technologies cannot be the same one we use to
train, engage, and prepare people. Digital transformation, policy
and regulation changes, new business models—all are tools, vehi-
cles aiding the achievement of new ends or goals. But they're not
driving the change.
The change engine itself is fueled by people. That means
change is personal and response varies by context.63
For example, you've probably worked on projects with some-
one who seemed resistant to the initiative. They may have asked
1,000 questions. Or they wanted to continue to reiterate, over and
over, the legacy of what had already been built. As an innovator,
your likely assumption was that they were being "wet blankets" to
the team and initiative and thus had no place on an innovation
team. (Am I right?!)
Or maybe this was the case: As a detail-oriented risk mitiga-
tor, you might have been given a project full of creatives you don't
understand. It is frustrating. The need to move fast, without details
or a risk assessment? It boggles your mind. You're thinking, "Vision
is great and all, but let's talk about the potential pitfalls along the
way." It has raised all of your red flags, and your assumption is
they aren't in touch with reality (and might not even be that good
at business).
Each of these (too common) scenarios depicts a mismatch of
attitudes toward change. In our work at LDR21, we've discovered
that people engage change across a spectrum of filters. The output
of the change engagement—a "change language," if you will—re-
veals a person's positive contribution to either drive change (and
63 https://opensource.com/open-organization/18/5/navigating-disruption-2
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aid in adaptability) or to optimize and sustain the change. When
combined with interpersonal competency development, this aware-
ness of positive contribution allows each person in an organization
or on a team to understand how to navigate change by leveraging
their strengths. For instance, if a team understands that Joe is ask-
ing so many questions because his change skill is detail and risk
mitigation, they're better able to understand Joe's value in building
a solid plan that can be effective and efficient. And if Allison's
change skill is recognized as gaining buy-in from others as she
seeks to hear from underrepresented voices, the team can under-
stand her particular approach to change management. A team
employing it's change skills effectively is a balanced, well-running
change engine.
This awareness also helps people avoid feeling displaced or
underutilized—like they're not contributing value to a process or
project. It provides them with a vocabulary that aids in their being
understood. Taken together, this increases engagement and fulfill-
ment in joint work, as everyone is operating from a more natural
and comfortable position.
When a leader leverages this information to build a well-bal-
anced, high-performing team, they're providing the entire
organizational ecosystem with an engine of change that can now
"surf the wave" of innovation rather than be caught in the under-
tow.
Each person in your ecosystem has the capacity for positive
contribution and value to either drive, adapt to, optimize for, or
sustain change. Everyone has the capacity to be a valuable contrib-
utor, to channel the way they engage with change, and to make it
work for everyone. This understanding combined with interper-
sonal competency training is what will drive the engine of change.
To become a truly open organization, the shift to people de-
velopment with interpersonal and change competency
development must be a top priority for anyone looking to sustain
growth.
143
Creativity is risky (and other truths open
leaders need to hear)
Heidi Hess von Ludewig
L eaders are all too aware of the importance of invention and
innovation. Today, the health and wealth of their businesses
have become increasingly dependent on the creation of new prod-
ucts and processes. In the digital age especially, competition is
more fierce than ever as global markets open and expand. Just
keeping pace with change requires a focus on constant improve-
ment and consistent learning. And that says nothing about building
for tomorrow.
Organizational leaders know that fostering creativity and in-
novation is important, but they don't often take time to understand
how specific workplace contexts—concrete processes and elements
—fit together to make creativity and innovation possible. This
chapter offers a birds-eye view (and, let's face it, a short treatise)
on the nature of creativity and explains how it functions in an open
organization.
What creativity is—and isn't
Researchers often define creativity as a product or a process
that is novel and useful. This definition is a broad one that winds
up leaving a lot of room for interpretation: What is new, and to
whom? What is useful, and to whom? Creativity can involve the
production of something never built (an idea) or something instan-
tiated or materialized (a technical or artistic innovation). In fact,
the word "innovation" is a business term used to indicate an instan-
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tiation of creativity (not just an idea) that's intended for sale or
benefit in the market.
Despite the stories we tell ourselves—the one-man myths
about lone-wolf inventors working diligently and logically to have a
Eureka moment—creativity is messy, social, and full of risk. Cre-
ativity can be individualized, but it often opens possibilities for
social intersections. Traditionally, research on creativity has fo-
cused on the individual as the sole site of creative activity, but,
over time, social and collaborative practices (such as ideation)
have become more important objects of analysis. No one creates in
a vacuum. Take, for example, one typically overlooked concept in
studies of organizational creativity: social evaluation, or the pro-
cesses and practices colleagues use to judge the creative work we
produce. In the case of innovation more broadly, social evaluation
might include judgment of a product by a market (especially if
we're talking about adoption of a product): What is this? What
need does it fill? What does it do well/not well? Do we like it?
Would we buy it or use it? In both cases, we see a kind of social
force "pushing back" on our lone genius creator, shaping her ideas
and influencing the creative process.
In fact, the characteristic of "novelty" implies a conversa-
tional or dialogic aspect of the creative process itself: problem
identification. If things are going great—if there's nothing wrong—
then why make anything? Why create? Something motivates cre-
ative practices; they don't simply happen. At the heart of
"creativity" is a desire for some kind of improvement, or a desire to
alleviate something.
Creative people want to change something, and with that
change comes risk. Creativity and innovation are essentially con-
versational and negotiated. They involve asking (overtly or
implicitly) questions like: Do you want to change and is the change
worth the risk? "Risk" in this case is a general concept: risk to us-
ing or doing something new when the outcome is uncertain. Most
of the time, risk seems fairly low (for example, How risky is it to
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buy and use a new smartphone?). Everyone has a different sense
for risk this size; some people will find the risk low and some will
find it higher. But an uncertain outcome is the greatest risk to cre-
ativity—and and it's inseparable from the creative work we do.
The ability to manage the risk of creativity (individually and
socially) is key to being creative and doing creative work.
Two approaches to risk
Researchers consider three areas of creativity: individual, so-
cial, environmental. (In this chapter, I use "social" to mean the
team or group with which the individual works, and environmental
includes organizational factors, such as culture, seen from a
macro-social perspective.) All of these influence and are influenced
by the other.
In conventional organizations, especially those created by
the mid-20th century, the overarching impulse is control. Top-down
governance functions as a way for large organizations to coordi-
nate activity across thousands of employees. Information flow is
more controlled, because too much information access (or an in-
correct amount of information conveyed) contribute to loss of
control and coordination. Expertise is critical, but experts are
those who have the required experience and knowledge to make
decisions in the control environment and, as such, have special ac-
cess to decision makers and information. For conventional
organizations, then, control is about risk reduction; risk tolerance
in these environments is lower than other organizations.
Open organizations, some of which were created in the latter
quarter of the 20th century, focus much more on contribution. In
these contexts, everyone is encouraged to contribute, not just the
experts, and more employees have access to information and deci-
sion makers. The underlying hierarchical formation might be top-
down (the basic structure), but the accountability hierarchy is bot-
tom-up and side-to-side (sometimes making it feel like a house of
cards!). Control of information is not as tight, and sharing is based
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on factors other than "need to know" (that is to say, a culture suf-
fused with transparency means that when you ask, you generally
receive). More information, more people contributing, and more
access means more risk, generally speaking; an organization that
is accustomed to increased risk in its day-to-day operation will nat-
urally have a higher risk tolerance, thereby increasing the
likelihood of creativity and innovation.
Modify, try, learn
Creativity and innovation has a repeatable (albeit messy) and
asynchronous process that roughly starts with problem identifica-
tion, and continues with ideation, solution implementation, and
evaluation. The cycle is iterative, overlapping, and stops and starts
during any one of those activities—identifying problems in the solu-
tion, brainstorming in the evaluation stage, evaluating as part of
problem identification, and so on.
Jim Whitehurst describes a cycle of innovation in his article
about the "death" of long-term planning. 64 Jim proposes a new way
to think about organizational planning: not plan, prescribe, exe-
cute, but try, learn, modify. This, he says, has multiple implications
for organizational process design: shorter activity cycles, higher
tolerance for failure, and adaptable structures, etc. In some ways,
however, starting a description of that iterative cycle with "try" as-
sumes the cycle of creativity is already in motion; the initial
"modify" (problem identification) that started the creative process
is presupposed. For creativity researchers, "modify, try, learn" has
an alternative meaning and can be aligned with specific phases of
the creative process. In short, everything we "try" is always al-
ready a "modification" of something else—another attempt,
process, or idea that precedes us. So we will start at the beginning:
64 See Jim Whitehurst's book, Organize for Innovation, and
https://opensource.com/open-organization/18/3/try-learn-modify
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Where does creativity come from and how? It starts with the indi-
vidual, or a group of individuals, who have a problem to solve.
Modify (problem identification)
The "modify" phase of Jim's cycle of agility is akin to "prob-
lem identification" in the creative process. Something needs to
change (needs to modify) in a new and useful way. I call this a
"contradiction" in the system—the system of work or behavior is
broken in some way—and the system needs to be modified to ac-
commodate a solution to the problem.65
In this phase, associate empowerment and motivation, risk
tolerance, access to resources, "permission," and information are
integral to believing in and using one's ability to initiate change
and search for a solution. In an open organization, these variables
are better aligned with the values of the organization than in top-
down conventional organizations. One benefit of having an organi-
zation based on open values (along with leaders who embody
them) is that the organization's focus on inclusivity and its support
for a diverse set of skills, experiences, and passions creates a base
of employees empowered and motivated to address problems. The
ability to access resources in an egalitarian way is important here.
"Resources" includes other people—like leaders—who are an im-
portant resource because of the ways information and various
skills can be shared among and between associates. In this way,
the tools and ability to connect with others in the organization is
foundational to empowerment and information flow.
As open organizations are more associate-centric than
leader-centric,66 permission needn't come "from the top" as much
as it does in conventional organizations, where work and workers
65 See Hess von Ludewig, 2014, p. 81, from
https://catalog.lib.ncsu.edu/record/NCSU3105906
66 https://opensource.com/open-organization/18/6/building-professional-
social-networks-openly
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are more closely managed. "Open organizational" seems frequently
to imply permission to engage associates in organizational-chang-
ing, product-changing, business-changing activities. 67 Because of
their reliance on transparency, information is increased—almost to
points where prioritization and organization of information be-
comes its own skill.
An organization's degree of risk tolerance is critical. Risk tol-
erance impacts both motivation—the ways employees think about
problem solving and what's at stake for their livelihoods and ca-
reers in the event that ideas fail. Controlling risk means controlling
creativity, because creativity is risk. So the less risk-averse an or-
ganization is, the more tolerant it is of creativity and innovation.
Try (solution implementation and experimentation)
The "try" phase of creative work is the one in which a solu-
tion is designed, implemented, and tested. Again, we can see
where the values of the open organization are aligned closely with
what is needed to support creativity in this stage.
The characteristic of "usefulness" implies that the proposed
solution has social elements (i.e., to whom will it be useful?). If cre-
ative individuals have not consistently engaged their communities
and connected with others, this is another phase in which they
might do so because the complexity of problems and solutions re-
quires a collaborative effort.
Social evaluation of the solution and community support for
experimentation and tolerance of risk is integral here, as is the
ability to access associates at any level in the social network and
equanimity in accessing resources and information. Once a solu-
tion develops, the ability to share with others, get broader
feedback on it, and be adaptable to its outcome is desirable.
67 https://opensource.com/open-organization/15/8/request-for-comments-
in-the-open-organization
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By pointing out a phase called "try," Jim is suggesting that
we leap into the unknown of implementing—of moving from identi-
fying the problem to a new, different place. We often hear the
mantra "fail early, fail often," but a more positive approach to this
same concept would be "try early, try often." Why would we try
early? Because creativity and innovation take time. Why would we
try often? Because the first solution is often neither the best nor
the only one, and if the first solution is merely a messy first at-
tempt, then many attempts might be needed and the tolerance for
risk. Being messy is important to "trying often."
Learn (evaluation and takeaway)
Although Jim points out that "learn" is a phase in his innova-
tion cycle, it is really a context, the foundation of innovation and
creativity.
Learning is not separate from any phase, but is present and
continuous. When need and motivation dictate but new informa-
tion, ideas, or connections are sparse, how can we create
something novel? If you have an organization whose focus is per-
fection, then you don't have a learning organization, nor do you
have an organization that tolerates risk, adaptability, or inclusivity.
Learning is messy, and open (divergent and organized across multi-
ple matrices of thought connecting together in sometimes
unexpected ways). We learn by reading, doing, playing, and talking
to others in our communities. Transparent feedback from commu-
nities and social networks contributes to our learning as well.
Learning is "made ok" by the idea that perfection is not re-
quired and failure isn't final but is, instead, a part of the creative
process—a mere indication of something that needs to be
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changed.68 Learning means we can modify and try again, re-initiat-
ing the cycle.
Acknowledging negative influences
Open organizations often provide contextual influences that
foster creativity and innovation but "influences" aren't automati-
cally positive forces. As with anything, there are influences that
actually hinder processes too. For instance, in an associate-centric
network, promoting adoptions of new innovations can be difficult,
because associates can't lean on leaders to help them when leaders
are trying to "guide and ask" rather than "manage and tell." This
means that the threshold for adoption might be higher and is the
responsibility of the associate making it more difficult to achieve.
Because open organizations place a premium on adaptability,
they occasionally encourage a culture of "learning as you go." In
theory, this sounds helpful because it's based continuously improv-
ing our knowledge and, generally it is, but creativity studies show
that a minimum amount of knowledge is necessary for innovative
thinking69—and that having little or no understanding of an area of
knowledge can be as detrimental as having too much (whereby sig-
nificant expertise without the openness of continual challenging
knowledge can, likewise, create patterns of problem solving that
no longer apply).70 So leaders shouldn't seek to hire people who
are just "good learners" but who have a base of knowledge in an
68 Incidentally, a great example of this philosophical view of failure is in
the children's book Rosie Revere, Engineer by Andrea Beaty. Rosie's
experiences a "flop," yet her attempt is celebrated for the helpful
information it contains about the problem and the solution's next step.)
69 See Batey, M., & Furnham, A. (2006). Creativity, intelligence, and
personality: A Critical review of the scattered literature, in Genetic,
Social, and General Psychology Monographs 132(4):
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18341234
70 See Mumford, M. D., & Gustafson, S. B. (1988). Creativity syndrome:
Integration, application, and innovation, in Psychological Bulletin
103(1): http://psycnet.apa.org/buy/1988-10128-001
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area or that can be extended in an area in order to provide that
solid, foundational understanding creativity needs.
Ultimately, this exploration of creativity emphasizes a crucial
difference between creativity and innovation. As we've seen, cre-
ativity can involve ideas never shared or implemented; innovations,
on the other hand are ideas materially instantiated. Processes de-
signed to foster ideas in an organization are not always the same
processes designed to foster innovations—and applying the wrong
techniques in the wrong situation can often lead to frustration and
confusion.
Execution, for instance, is a focus of our example above (par-
ticularly in the "try" phase of the "innovation cycle" we've
described). Open organizations can find themselves in situations
where they lack the decisiveness and leadership required to make
headway on implementing solutions, sometimes with the fear (and
excuse) that "things are always changing." Execution requires
some planning and coordination of resources and personnel. While
things change, they hardly move at the speed of light (the way that
industry experts can sometimes suggest).
Planning isn't dead. But it is comprised of some short cycles
(product innovations) and some longer cycles (for social/cultural
innovation), depending on your objectives and key results.
Try, learn, modify: A final word
The "Try, Learn, Modify" cycle of innovation Jim Whitehurst
advances shares similarities with commonly studied phases of cre-
ative processes, and leaders can adopt those processes to improve
innovation in their organizations. While the "Try, Learn, Modify"
activities are process-centric, the influences surrounding them—
like the mindset and culture of the organization, and individual as-
sociates' creative abilities—are significant contributors to the
specific implementation of the "Try, Learn, Modify" initiative (as
well as its outcomes). There is no "one-size-fits-all" solution to the
problem of "having a more creative organization" or of "being more
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creative"; different organizations and individuals will have different
experiences based on a variety of influences. Risk tolerance and
open organization values are just a few of the influences that could
positively benefit creative individuals and the way they engage
with their work—but they are among the most critical.
153
Becoming a leader with inclusive awareness
Irupé Niveyro
P icture yourself as an artist. Imagine your creative process.
You begin with a blank piece of paper before you. You visual-
ize your work, then set out to materialize it in colors.
In the mist of your enthusiastic activity, artists walk into your
studio and add to the process. They've come to collaborate, to add
to your work in a constructive way. They add some strokes, some
colors. They might even modify the essence of what you had
started with.
How would that make you feel?
Close your eyes and be honest. What you are feeling might
approximate your natural or learned tendency for inclusivity and
collaboration.
If you were the artist arriving unexpectedly to collaborate on
someone else's work, how would that make you feel? And would
you take that into account during the collaboration?
This is an observation exercise I undertook some years ago,
and it was enlightening for me. I became clearly conscious of the
fact that I was not receptive of contributions that did not align with
an image or plan I had in mind.
And I was surprised to find people and groups next to me
that were happy with the unexpected results! They'd actually en-
joyed the different contributions and had the capacity to welcome
the differences and build on them with deeply open attitude—with
curiosity and eyes filled with wonder.
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Their joy was inspiring. Could I develop that capacity too?
Could anyone do it? Who would want to do it?
That insight and the questions it sparked burned in me—and
opened many more questions and paths. After this experience, I
felt an important twist in my approach to work, life, processes, and
relationships. It helped me develop a concept I've been elaborating
and would like to share in this chapter: inclusive awareness.
An ability to be open
As individuals, as teams, as organizations, and as a society,
we face challenges that cannot be understood much less solved by
any one particular actor working at any level. We're seeing situa-
tions that most of us don't want—situations that definitely don't
work. And yet there they are. You name it: climate change, terror-
ism, violence, poverty, depression. Tackling these issues in our
everyday work requires help from others.
But most of us have been raised and live in a way that em-
phasizes individual effort and results over collective action. When
we do appeal to concepts like "team" and "teamwork," we think of
them as something external, something subsequent to individual
actions. Individuals with different, competing ideas "agree on" a
course of action and "add to" each other's ideas, abilities,
strengths, etc. We rarely think about beginning with the collective.
We think in terms of individual emotions, wills, and intentions, and
when we try to shift our thinking . . . well, it gets a bit fuzzy.
Luckily, organizations and communities are starting to open
up, looking at situations in a more collaborative way. As a result,
they're developing inclusive awareness.
"Inclusive awareness" refers to the capability that surprised
me so much: the ability to be open to different contributions and to
differences in thought, emotion, or action from the people in one's
environment. Applied to leadership, it refers to a leader's ability to
creates spaces in which exploration is safe and worthwhile, where
different views and perspectives can intersect, where a common
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purpose is clear, and where collaborative solutions for significant
challenges can be built.
It requires not only an open mind, but also an open heart and
an open will.
Mind—heart—will
Let's try to clarify a bit.
Generally, we relate to one another at a logical, rational level
—the realm of thought and mind. We can be relating with either an
"I know that already" prejudice, or from an open attitude of curios-
ity: "Wow, look at that! I want to know more about it." The second
approach is what I'd call having an open mind.
Our feelings and emotions are also part of the way in which
we relate. We might have an attitude of fear or anger related to
what we are sharing with someone. Or we might experience a
great deal of compassion towards someone or something: "I con-
nect to what you feel. I am OK with it. Thank you for sharing." The
second approach is what I'd call having an open heart.
Every once in a while, we reach a state of communion, a
place where the relationship stands connected with something
larger than us—larger than "me" and larger than "you." We might
let that relationship transform us, transform the conversation, and
transform the motivations we bring to a project, idea, or work. Of-
ten this state and attitude reflect on who we're interacting with,
and it in turn transforms them. The results of the interaction are
completely innovative and unexpected. 71 The courage to let that
communion transform us is what I'd call an open will.
These three shifts in attitude are key to developing inclusive
awareness, which enables others to bring their entire selves—their
thoughts, their emotions, and their intentions—into a situation.
71 http://www.dailygood.org/story/450/uncovering-the-blind-spot-of-
leadership-c-otto-scharmer
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And it is the quality we need to develop in open leaders if we wish
to inspire and convene the talent we need in our teams.
Opening up
So, as a leader (or an artist), why would you adopt inclusive
awareness?
If you've experienced the joy of the creating something in an
open way, this might be a reason powerful enough to develop inclu-
sive awareness. This was my case after seeing it in others. In fact,
open values such as collaboration, adaptability, or community can-
not exist without this base value of inclusivity (see Appendix)
Additionally, though, inclusive awareness can have an enor-
mous impact on the way a team operates, the commitments the
team members have, and the outputs the team produces.
Team members that have achieved inclusive awareness are
involved deeply in what they do and the organizations they collabo-
rate with; they can express and develop their full potential. This is
a differentiator organizations and leaders need to work on as they
seek to attract and retain the talent necessary for evolving and sur-
viving these days.
And what about the nature of the work itself? If the success
of your project depends on the profound combination of talents
committed to its purpose, if the expectations are high, if you don't
have a clear path forward or way to solve multiple issues and chal-
lenges arising, if you're facing volatility and uncertainty and
complexity and ambiguity, then you and your team members will
need this capability. Building teams that are more and more agile
is becoming necessary for specific projects, and adopting inclusive
awareness will enable you to build teams that have a clarity of pur-
pose and the talents needed for that project.
The good news is that, once initiated, inclusive awareness re-
inforces creative relationships that invite others to develop this
same ability. And a team working on this level of deep collabora-
tion, built on inclusivity as described, will be able to face
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challenges and find solutions that would otherwise be unimagin-
able.
Inner condition
Inclusive awareness starts with self-awareness—awareness
of who we are, of the projects we choose to lead or join, of our pur-
poses and the talents we possess, and of our needs and our own
limits. In other words, awareness of our inner condition as it
evolves.
Our inner condition, the internal dimension from which we
operate, normally goes unnoticed. Nevertheless, it determines the
quality and effectiveness of what we do. If we are to develop inclu-
sive awareness, then we need to identify and observe this inner
condition from which we operate, individually and in our teams.
Once identified and observed, we can influence and develop it.
Of course, there needs to be an interest, a conviction, or a
need for the change (as with any change!). We need discipline, and
feedback from the team might be helpful. But primarily we need
constant observation of our own self, our thoughts, emotions and
reactions.
Listening
One method for observing our inner condition lies in the way
we listen. We practice listening about 16 hours every day. Try and
observe at what level you are listening during this time:
1. SUPERFICIAL LISTENING: paying attention to what
you already know and re-confirming it
2. FACTUAL LISTENING: noticing new data that's differ-
ent from what you expect to see; looking with an
"open mind"
3. EMPATHIC LISTENING: connecting with the percep-
tion of another person, with an emotional connection
(an "open heart"); a shift occurs in the inner condi-
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tion and we are able to see form the another person's
eyes
4. GENERATIVE LISTENING: connecting with our capacity
to let go of our original intention and to welcome the
best of future possibilities (from who we are and who
we want to be), with an "open will"; a new, deep shift
occurs in our inner condition and our "self-aware-
ness" becomes more inclusive and can be
transformed by what is emerging
Start with an initial assessment of your level of listening dur-
ing a day and register shifts upward or downward. What attitude
or which level of listening are you in most of the time? How do they
distribute during your day? Extend your observation over a week.
Which level of listening do you need to operate from, given who
you are, who you want to be, your purpose, and your current chal-
lenges?
Once you start observing the way you listen (your inner con-
dition), you might notice that shifts from one level to another
modify your mental state, your present emotions, and what you feel
in your body.
Developed and sustained over time, this feeling becomes an
inclusive awareness that creates a different environment for your
team and enables deep collaboration and successful innovation.
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Motivation & Engagement
Let engagement lead the way
Chad Sansing
W hen we talk about internet health—or a healthy internet—
we're talking about several interrelated issues: privacy
and security, openness, digital inclusion, web literacy, decentraliza-
tion, and how to leverage these issues for good on behalf of the
internet and its users. The internet is like an ecosystem that needs
all of us pulling together to maintain its health and sustainability.
And that ecosystem needs leaders. More specifically, a
healthy internet needs open leaders.
Open leaders design and build projects that empower others
to collaborate within inclusive communities.
That's the core belief of the Open Leadership and Events
(OLE) team at the Mozilla Foundation. In our work to spread the
principles, practices, and skills of open leadership, we aim to de-
sign and build programs that empower participants to take the
lead on open projects about data, internet health, 72 and the impact
those things have on both their local and distributed communities.
We serve leaders from around the world and across a wide range
of open, for-profit and non-profit, and technical and non-technical
projects.
Participants in OLE programs come from all over the open
ecosystem; they include people working on open data, open educa-
tional resources (OER), open government, open hardware, open
science, open software (F/OSS), privacy and security for open prac-
72 https://internethealthreport.org/
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titioners, and more. For example, in 2018, Mozilla's Global Sprint
(a 2-day marathon of contribution to open projects) included
projects and communities like these:
• Rust
• P5js
• Reading for Gender Bias
• Mission: Information
• Wikipathways
As we support a diverse set of open leaders like these—and
collaborate with them to increase the breadth and depth of open's
impact on the world—we're especially concerned with engagement
and understanding the life-cycles of our participants' relationships
with Mozilla and openness in general. We believe that one way to
improve our work and better align it with participants' wants and
needs is to follow their lead. Where do they begin their relation-
ships with us? Why do they participate and what do they want from
their participation? What are their typical next steps after a first
engagement? In what kinds of participation do they engage over
time, and do those engagements always deepen? Do people con-
tribute more or less to us as we invest more in them? What are our
returns on both high-touch and light-touch programs, and are
those returns equitable for participants? What do they get from us
in the value exchanges that underlay our community interactions?
Do they consistently "graduate," so to speak, to run their own
projects or programs after event X or training Y?
To put it another way: How can following our participants'
patterns of engagement lead us to better understand and improve
our work in supporting them?
To answer that question, we started building a participation
index (PI) called the "Mountain of Engagement" (MoE). The MoE is
meant to be both a methodology and measurement tool for defining
and tracking meaningful interactions with our team so that we can
follow individuals and groups of participants and surface patterns
in their engagement with OLE programming. Those patterns help
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us identify our most and least successful programs. From there, we
can make decisions about how to improve our work.
We want to help open leaders find helpful pathways to pro-
fessional development and success in their own organizations,
projects, and communities. We also want to improve our programs
to make sure we are meeting community members' needs.
This is the story of how we developed the MoE to help us do
those things. It's also the story of what we've learned so far and
what we might do next. We hope that by following a similar
methodology, you can develop a participation index unique to your
organization that helps you strengthen its engagement with open
leaders in your community.
Project DNA
Our MoE drew inspiration from the Total Engagement Index
(TEI). In 2017, the advocacy team at the Mozilla Foundation devel-
oped the TEI and its dashboard in order to track how people on our
mailing list interacted with emails and other campaign channels.
Vojtech Sedlak and Brett Gaylor led the work at Mozilla in consul-
tation with Harmony Labs. The MoE is also an extension of the
well-known pyramid of engagement developed by Groundwire. 73
The TEI grouped engagements into different bands or cate-
gories of action by depth of involvement. Each engagement in a
particular band added a certain number of points to the TEI, and
the advocacy team tracked the total engagement points it earned
each month on an internal dashboard.
The TEI used these bands to group different kinds of engage-
ments:
1. OWNING: Actions taken by allied individuals and or-
ganizations to promote internet health, like
73 To get a sense of similar methodologies, visit Groundwire's
Engagement 101 Series:
http://groundwire.org/labs/engagement_101_series/index.html
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launching their own internet health campaign or
project
2. LEADING: Actions taken to partner with Mozilla on in-
ternet health issues, like partnering on a campaign
or event
3. CONTRIBUTING: Actions taken to support Mozilla's in-
ternet health work, like donations, project
contributions, and amplifying Mozilla content on so-
cial media
4. ENDORSING: Actions taken to spread Mozilla's inter-
net health work, like signing petitions and liking and
sharing updates on social media
5. OBSERVING: Actions taken to learn about Mozilla's
internet health work, like visiting a campaign web-
site or opening a campaign email.
An OBSERVING engagement might have earned the team a
fraction of a point, while each LEADING or OWNING might be worth
a full point on its own. By totaling the scores of every engagement
in a given month, the advocacy team could track an aggregate
score representing its impact.
The TEI is no longer a primary inspiration for the foundation,
but it gave the OLE team a framework for examining our own work
and identifying the key forms of participation and engagement we
want to track across our year-long cycle of leadership trainings
and events from our Open Leaders program through the Global
Sprint and MozFest. Our work also draws on research from
Mozilla's Open Innovation team, which explores being "open by de-
sign" and fostering community interactions and value exchanges in
open projects.74 Other key elements of the MoE come from team
members' experiences with open science initiatives, working open
workshops, web literacy trainings, research done for the Open
74 https://medium.com/mozilla-open-innovation/
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Leadership Framework,75 and Mozilla's work to champion open-
ness as an internet health issue.76
Developing a Mountain of Engagement
What follows is a description of the steps we took to develop
our MoE. This is an intentional, mindful methodology we developed
especially for smaller projects and communities that need to track
engagement differently than a traditional, technical analytics team
does. We hope that by following a similar process, you can identify
the types of engagement that matter most to you and your partici-
pants. Once you know which engagements matter most, you can
work to improve them and better scaffold pathways between them.
To begin developing our MoE, first we asked: What do we
do? We wanted to synthesize and capture a holistic view of our
work taken from each team member's perspective to minimize the
chance we'd overlook something important that we do, albeit infre-
quently or implicitly. We identified major programs like Open
Leaders,77 the Global Sprint,78 open science mini-grants,79 and
MozFest,80 as well as less visible pieces of work like developing
curriculum, maintaining a social media presence, researching open
leadership practices, and speaking at conferences.
Then we asked: How do people engage with us? Looking at
all we do, we listed the different types of engagements people
could have with each area of work. For example, someone might be
an attendee, facilitator (presenter), or wrangler (organizer) at
75 https://mzl.la/olf
76 https://internethealthreport.org/2018/category/openness/
77 http://mzl.la/openleaders/
78 https://mzl.la/global-sprint
79 https://science.mozilla.org/blog/2018-mini-grant-rfp
80 http://mzl.la/mozfest
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MozFest. Someone else might follow one of our social media ac-
counts, retweet or share a post, or clap for a blog.
Next, we asked: How might we band, group, or sort these
types of engagements? We decided to use these tiers and descrip-
tors:
1. LEADING: A high-touch relationship; we maintain re-
lationships and co-branded events and trainings with
alumni and allies to increase the impact, prestige,
and reach of both parties' work.
2. COLLABORATING: A high-touch relationship; we offer
professional development through our own events in
return for co-creation, localization, and spread.
3. PARTICIPATING: A high-touch relationship; we offer
community management and professional develop-
ment through our own trainings and events in return
for soliciting ideas and learning through use.
4. ENDORSING: A low-touch relationship; we share in-
formation with people who gain social capital by
spreading it and networking with others who share
common interests.
5. LEARNING: A low-touch relationship; we gift re-
sources like open curriculum and get back aggregate
data (like downloads, registrations, and views) show-
ing people use our resources and pay attention to us.
After that, we asked: What does our Mountain of Engage-
ment look like? Figure 1 shows the graphic we made to illustrate
our MoE.
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Figure 1
The OLE team's MoE, CC BY 4.0 by Mozilla
Once we had our visualization of the MoE, we asked: How
can we operationalize this or make this more useful? In response,
we developed a summary document (Figure 2) that helped us con-
nect each band to examples, scores, and the types of community
interactions and value exchanges that might show up within each
level of engagement.
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Figure 2
Summary chart of the draft OLE MoE, CC BY 4.0 by Mozilla
In the same document, we experimented with multipliers
that aligned with our team and foundation's goals. For example, if
were especially interested in engagements from particular places
or groups of people, we might double their scores to draw our at-
tention to their engagements and the pathways they took between
them.
We wanted to know:
• What works and what doesn't work for different groups of
participants.
• How participants move from one engagement to another or
get stuck between them.
• How we might systematize the ways we recognize partici-
pants and invite them to deeper levels of engagement with
us over the lifetime of our relationship with them.
With those prompts in mind, we asked ourselves: Where
should we focus our attention? Given our capacities, goals, and in-
terests, we decided to focus on engagements at the PARTICIPATING,
COLLABORATING, and LEADING levels of the MoE. While we blog
and tweet and send newsletters, most of our time is spent design-
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ing, implementing, and improving high-touch open leadership pro-
grams like Open Leaders, the Global Sprint, and MozFest. We
worried that tracking tweets and retweets and likes and opens
would distract us from supporting those programs and their partic-
ipants, especially since we were piloting and testing this approach
before importing it in to a customer relationship management
(CRM) tool. Although we're curious about how our participants
reach the PARTICIPATING level in the first place, we think we can
ask them about their journeys as they move up the MoE; we don't
need to follow them from the first time they visit our website.
Furthermore, we don't compile an aggregate score like the
TEI did; instead, we follow individuals' scores and reach out with
specific communications and invitations to people and groups that
cross different thresholds of engagement with us. For example, we
might send an invitation to get involved with a program or event at
the COLLABORATING level to anyone who earns 5 or more points at
the PARTICIPATING level.
By giving them most of our attention and support, we can
empower them to co-create programming with us and then launch
their own communities, organizations, and projects in support of
internet health.
And that is where we are today.
We're listening to people who participate in programs like
Open Leaders, the Global Sprint, open science mini-grants, and
MozFest so we can improve those offerings, clarify the pathways
between them, and empower alumni to launch and sustain their
own open internet health projects in the future. Our ongoing ques-
tion is: What do we do with the data we collect?
While you and your community, organization, and project
might be more concerned with another part of the open ecosystem
—such as data, government, or software—we hope that this
process (and the questions it raises) will help you understand
when, where, and how to empower your participants to broaden
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and deepen their engagement with you and the interests you
share.
To summarize, here are the questions we asked ourselves
while developing the MoE:
• What do we do?
• How do people engage with us?
• How might we band, group, or sort these types of en-
gagements?
• What does our Mountain of Engagement (MoE) look
like?
• How might we operationalize this or make it more
useful?
• Where should we focus our attention?
• What do we do with the data we collect?
Early experiments
First, a quick note on data: you should follow all the laws,
policies, and rules that cover data collection, retention, and use for
you and your participants. We always encourage people to adopt
data privacy policies that are as strong as Mozilla's. 81
Let's take a look at some early data analysis we've done of
participants' engagements with OLE programs during the first half
(H1) of 2018. We want to share these observations to suggest how
a MoE might help lead our team—and yours—answer new ques-
tions and develop new pathways and programs to support
participants.
In looking at the 1,954 participants who completed an en-
gagement with us between January and June, 2018, we found that:
• 65% came from outside the United States (US) and a
"virtual" participant group (for which we have not
geographic data).
81 https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/websites/
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• 61% completed an engagement at the Participating
level of our MoE.
• 61% participated in the 2018 Global Sprint.
• 6% participated in cohort 5 of our Open Leaders pro-
gram.
• 5% participated in our open science mini-grant appli-
cation process.
Engagement data like this can lead us towards:
• Confirming or correcting our ratio of participants
from the US and from outside the US so we can sus-
tain or develop inclusive, global participation from
diverse communities in our programming. We can
also shift strategic focus to look at engagement from
groups within the US whom we have not yet effec-
tively or sufficiently invited and welcomed into these
programs.
• Confirming or correcting our ratio of PARTICIPATING
engagements and engagements at other levels of the
MoE to establish a baseline or benchmark for growth
in COLLABORATING and LEADING engagements.
• Examining the similarities and differences between
audiences and opportunities across programs to ap-
ply best practices, as well as audience-specific
invitations, to all of our trainings and events.
• Investigating why discrete projects—like developing
the Open Leadership Framework— engage far fewer
participants than on-going programs do.
We also looked at participation and scores from all partici-
pants who completed 2 or more engagements with us during the
same time period. We found these outcomes:
• 6% of total participants engaged with 2 or more OLE
programs at the PARTICIPATING level or higher in H1
of 2018.
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• 71% of these participants came from outside the US.
• 76% participated in the 2018 Global Sprint.
• 53% participated in cohort 5 of our Open Leaders
program.
• 17% participated in our open science mini-grant ap-
plication process.
• 4% participated in all 3 programs.
• 54% participated in the Global Sprint and Open
Leaders.
• 7% participated in the Global Sprint and open sci-
ence mini-grant application process.
• 1% participated in Open Leaders and the open sci-
ence mini-grant application process.
Here we might ask ourselves how participants move between
programs and how to encourage more consistent engagement
across multiple programs. Is there a way to connect the open sci-
ence mini-grant application to another program or sequence of
programs? Are there pieces of our invitation to the Global Sprint
and pieces of support for participants that we can adapt for other
programs? What motivates participants to engage in multiple OLE
programs? What makes the combination of Global Sprint and Open
Leaders so popular with repeat participants?
With MozFest 2018 and the 2019 Global Sprint coming up
later this year and early next, we can return to these questions
with new data and a larger sample of participants and engage-
ments to help us answer questions like these.
A story of engagement
Looking back at the last few years of engagement data we
have for our Open Leaders program, we found a drop off in how
many past participants returned as mentors for new participants in
the next cohort. Between rounds 1 and 3, that conversion rate
went from 70% down to 55%. The number of open leaders willing
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to stick with us and to move from the participating band of our
MoE to the collaborating band dropped by double digits.
However, by paying attention to that pathway of engagement
in OLE programming between PARTICIPATING (being a mentee) and
COLLABORATING (becoming a mentor) on the MoE, we were able to
identify this problem quickly and work to keep more participants
engaged between rounds 3 and 4. By adding additional mentor
training as a form of professional development and support for re-
turning participants, we brought the percentage of past
participants willing to stay on as collaborators back up to 72%.
However, as we continued to develop and grow the program, that
number dropped back down to 50% when we looked at participants
from cohort 5 who returned as mentors for cohort 6.
Something is happening as we scale up the number of partic-
ipants in the Open Leaders program. By using our MoE to focus
our attention on key results like the pathway and conversion rate
from participant to mentor, we can respond to issues like these and
calibrate our work to fit our leaders' needs. We can also see how
many participants submit a proposal to MozFest or return to the
next Global Sprint and ask whether or not these opportunities take
the place of continued engagement with Open Leaders for some
participants.
Maybe becoming a mentor isn't the best fit for continued en-
gagement after participating in Open Leaders. Or maybe becoming
a mentor is the best fit for continued engagement after participat-
ing in a different offering. The MoE gives us the opportunity to
consider such possibilities and to look for successes and challenges
across our programs.
As we iterate on that mentor training further, our goal after
cohort 6 is a 90% conversion rate. By refining our programs, we
can make each one better at graduating participants to the next
level of our MoE and then, ideally, out into the internet health
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movement as the leads of their own communities, organizations,
and projects.
Next steps
Paying attention to how people engage with us helps us im-
prove our programs, clarify the pathways between them, and
refine invitations we share to participate in them
You might use your own Mountain of Engagement—and the
data you collect through it—to set similar goals for your commu-
nity, organization, or project.
In pursuit of a world-class open leadership program, we let
engagement lead the way. We want to empower participants to
shape our work according to their needs and in support of a
healthy internet for all.
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When empowering employee decision-
making, intent is everything
Ron McFarland
I n Japanese business discussions, one term appears again and
again: "gemba." Over many years living and working for Japa-
nese companies, I've probably heard the phrase "gemba de
kimeru" a million times. Basically, it means that issues must be
solved and decided on the front-line, where the problems and/or
opportunities are. Popular thinking holds that people can work
with their peers to solve problems. In Japan, however, problems
with this thinking can develop.
Here, top managers often don't want to "stick out." They
don't want to assume too much responsibility. So they pass deci-
sion-making "down" to front-line people, essentially removing
themselves from the decision-making picture. They don't grant
front-line employees decision-making power in order to empower
them. They do it to avoid responsibility for failures.
As Jim Whitehurst says in The Open Organization, granting
front-line employees more autonomy is a way of driving innovation
—not avoiding culpability. Jim describes the ways Western man-
agers struggle with the issue of autonomy (they fear letting their
staff make decisions, as they think that by doing so they'll lose or-
ganizational power), but they miss this critical intercultural
difference. (Interestingly, if managers stay involved in supporting
roles and believe that front-line people can make decisions on their
own, they can actually become more powerful. But that's another
article.)
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Managers should stay involved in critical decision-making,
even as they grant their front-line employees a bigger voice in de-
cisions. But their role needs to change. As Whitehurst says in The
Open Organization, they need to facilitate, not delegate. That's a
critical distinction that my time in Japan has taught me.
It's also shown me one source of this problem—as well as a
few paths to fixing it.
In need of meritocracy
When managers ask their staff to make decisions, then divest
completely from the decision-making process, they can actually re-
veal their own weaknesses. I've seen engineers transferred to high
level, personnel-related department positions, for example. These
transfers were not based on ability or experience, but simply on ti-
tle and the number of years of experience they had in the company.
Promoted candidates unfortunately tend to lack managerial skills
and sensibilities (after all, they were trained as engineers). So to
make sure the department is functional, these newly-minted man-
agers have to rely heavily on their staff. We in the department were
shocked by this, and prayed that incoming managers wouldn't
weaken our departments too greatly.
Interestingly, however, I've seen some success in this uncom-
fortable working environment. Quite simply, the manager
announced he didn't feel he was fully qualified for the position, and
that he would need all the staff's support to be successful, particu -
larly from those who have been in the department for many years.
Admitting one's limits actually helps build engagement.
Peer projects can begin at parties
Japanese company parties always feature an emcee, who an-
nounces the start of the party. Imagine a party to welcome the
unqualified boss I mentioned above. Typically, people are sitting
around a large table, and initially there is only one discussion go-
ing on (one the emcee controls). The emcee welcomes everyone
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and asks someone to give a toast ("kanpai") to begin the boss's wel-
come party. From that point on, people start eating and drinking.
Then the emcee asks everyone to introduce themselves, both to the
whole group and to the boss, and to mention some of the things
they're working on. After all participants have introduced them-
selves, the new boss speaks.
In my experience, the unsuccessful inexperienced bosses an-
nounce how they'd like to improve the department. The best
unqualified managers simply present their career highlights, then
mention that they're looking forward to getting to know and work-
ing with everyone. When general conversation resumes, the new
manager actually moves around the room, pouring beer in each as-
sociate's glass, offering an individual greeting. At that time, the
manager asks about each member's most urgent concerns with the
intent of finding a way to genuinely understand them. Armed with
what they've learned at these parties, these inexperienced (but
smart) managers begin finding ways they can be helpful. Rather
than just announce a plan to make changes, they spend time trying
to understand what their employees need to have changed.
With the right introductions, questioning, and ideation, criti-
cal peer projects can begin during those parties, whether through
the boss's introductions or close colleagues just kicking ideas
around. These type of parties are not just for new employees (or
new bosses). Many Japanese companies have these parties with
subsidiaries, vendors, and customers with the same goal. They re-
ally generate front-line projects to explore partnerships as well.
Meetings in the bars at night
But occasionally official company parties are not the best en-
vironments for speaking freely and openly, particularly regarding
uncomfortable issues. On some delicate subjects, I have been more
successful holding peer-to-peer, open discussions after those par-
ties.
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I ask a few attendees to grab a beer or two at a yakitori
restaurant after the party. The people I select for these meetings
usually demonstrate the desire to make improvements (as opposed
to those wanting to maintain the status quo). I also select people
that take pride in their work, will be accountable for performance,
and have proven they've got the skills to introduce important
changes. With that environment and small group size, those discus-
sions have been very successful for me, and I think that
environment is the best venue for creative open discussions
throughout Japan.
Finding a balance
Whether you're putting together peers at a formal business
meeting, at an official boss's welcome party, or in a bar, I can't
stress enough the importance of balancing the four criteria White-
hurst explains in The Open Organization:
1. Encouraging members to speak freely and honestly
2. Encouraging members be courageous enough to be
different
3. Selecting members committed to achievement
4. Selecting members with the willingness to be ac-
countable for whatever is decided
This is how to catalyze front-line engagement—by staying in-
volved in decision-making, not by skirting it.
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The Tao of project management
Allison Matlack
T he Tao Te Ching,82 believed to have been written 83 by the
sage Lao Tzu84 in the 6th century BCE, is among the most
widely translated texts in existence. It has inspired everything from
religions to funny movies about dating, and authors have used it as
a metaphor to explain all kinds of things (even programming).
This text is what immediately comes to my mind when think-
ing about project management in open organizations.
That might sound strange. But to understand where I'm com-
ing from, you should start by reading The Open Organization, Red
Hat president and CEO Jim Whitehurst's manifesto on corporate
culture and the new leadership paradigm. In this book, Jim (with a
little help from other Red Hatters) explains the difference between
conventional organizations (a "top-down" approach, with decisions
coming down from central command to employees motivated by
promotion and pay) and open organizations (a bottom-up approach,
with leaders focused on inspiring purpose and passion so employ-
ees are empowered to be and do their best).
This concept—that employees in open organizations are mo-
tivated by passion, purpose, and engagement—plays directly into
where I think project managers should focus.
And to explain, I'll return to the Tao Te Ching.
82 http://acc6.its.brooklyn.cuny.edu/%7Ephalsall/texts/taote-v3.html
83 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tao_Te_Ching
84 http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/laozi/
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Don't let your job title define you
The tao that can be told
is not the eternal Tao
The name that can be named
is not the eternal Name.
The unnameable is the eternally real.
Naming is the origin
of all particular things.85
What exactly is project management? And what does a
project manager do?
As you might expect, part of being a project manager is man-
aging projects: gathering requirements, managing stakeholder
communication, setting priority, scheduling tasks, helping the team
resolve blockers. Many institutions can teach you how to manage
projects very well, and these are good skills to have. 86
However, literally managing projects is only part of what
project managers in open organizations do. These organizations re-
quire something more: Courage. If you're good at managing
projects (or if you're good at any job, really), then you can start to
feel safe in your routine. That's when you know you need to find
the courage to take a risk.
Do you have the courage to step outside of your comfort
zone? The courage to ask important people challenging questions
that might raise eyebrows, but that might also uncover a better
way forward? The courage to identify the next thing that needs to
be done—then the courage to go and do it? The courage to call out
85 http://acc6.its.brooklyn.cuny.edu/%7Ephalsall/texts/taote-v3.html#1
86 http://www.pmi.org/certification/project-management-professional-
pmp.aspx
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communication gaps and take initiative to fix them? The courage to
try things? The courage to fail?
The opening passage of the Tao Te Ching (which I cited
above) suggests that words, labels, and names are limiting. That
includes job titles. In open organizations, project managers don't
just perform the rote tasks required to manage projects. They help
teams accomplish the organization's mission, however defined.
Connect the right people
We join spokes together in a wheel,
but it is the center hole
that makes the wagon move.87
One of the most difficult lessons I had to learn as I transi-
tioned into project management was that not having all the
answers was perfectly acceptable, even expected. That was new
for me. I like having all the answers. But as a project manager, my
role is more about connecting people—so the ones who do have the
answers can collaborate efficiently.
This does not mean dodging responsibility or ownership.
This means being comfortable saying, "I don't know, but I will find
out for you," and closing that loop as quickly as possible.
Picture a wagon wheel. Without the stability and direction
provided by the center hole, the spokes would fall and the wheel
collapse in on itself. Project managers in an open organization can
help a team maintain forward momentum by bringing the right
people together and cultivating the right discussions.
Trust your team
When the Master governs, the people
are hardly aware that he exists.
Next best is a leader who is loved.
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Next, one who is feared.
The worst is one who is despised.
If you don't trust the people,
you make them untrustworthy.
The Master doesn't talk, he acts.
When his work is done,
the people say, "Amazing:
we did it, all by ourselves!"88
Rebecca Fernandez once told me that what differentiates
leaders in open organizations is not the trust people have in them,
but the trust they have in other people.89
Open organizations do a great job hiring smart people who
are passionate about what their companies are doing. In order for
them to do their best work, we have to give them what they need
and then get out of their way.
Here, I think the above passage from the Tao Te Ching
speaks for itself.
Be effortless
The Master does nothing
yet he leaves nothing undone.
The ordinary man is always doing things,
yet many more are left to be done.90
Do you know the type of person who is always extremely
busy? The one who seems frazzled and stressed with too many
things to do?
88 http://acc6.its.brooklyn.cuny.edu/%7Ephalsall/texts/taote-v3.html#17
89 https://opensource.com/users/rebecca
90 http://acc6.its.brooklyn.cuny.edu/%7Ephalsall/texts/taote-v3.html#38
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Don't be that person.
I know that's easier said than done. The thing that most
helps me keep from being that person is remembering that we are
all extremely busy. I don't have a single co-worker who is bored.
But someone needs to be the calm in the middle of the
storm. Someone needs to be the person who reassures the team
that everything is going to be okay, that we'll find a way to get
things done within the parameters dictated by reality and the num-
ber of business hours in a day (because that's the truth, and we
have to).
Be that person.
What this passage of the Tao Te Ching says to me is that the
person who's always talking about what she or he is doing has no
time to actually do those things. If you can make your job seem ef-
fortless to those around you, then you're doing your job right.
Be a culture coach
When a superior man hears of the Tao,
he immediately begins to embody it.
When an average man hears of the Tao,
he half believes it, half doubts it.
When a foolish man hears of the Tao,
he laughs out loud.
If he didn't laugh,
it wouldn't be the Tao.91
Last fall, I enrolled an MBA business ethics class with a
bunch of federal employees. When I started describing my com-
pany's culture, values, and ethics framework, I got the direct
impression that both my classmates and my professor thought I
was a naive young lady with a lot of lovely daydreams 92 about how
91 http://acc6.its.brooklyn.cuny.edu/%7Ephalsall/texts/taote-v3.html#41
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companies should run. They told me things couldn't possibly be as
they seemed. They said I should investigate further.
So I did.
And here's what I found: Things are exactly as they seem.
In open organizations, culture matters. Maintaining that cul-
ture as an organization grows makes it possible to wake up and
look forward to going to work in the morning. I (and other mem-
bers of open organizations) don't want to "work to live," as my
classmates described it. I need to feel a passion and purpose, to
understand how the work I do on a daily basis directly contributes
to something I believe in.
As a project manager, you might think that your job has noth-
ing to do with cultivating your company's culture on your team.
However, it's your job to embody it.
Kaizen
In pursuit of knowledge,
every day something is added.
In the practice of the Tao,
every day something is dropped.
Less and less do you need to force things,
until finally you arrive at non-action. When nothing is
done,
nothing is left undone.93
The general field of project management is too focused on
the latest and greatest tools. But the answer to the question of
which tool you should use is always the same: "the simplest."
For example, I keep my running to-do list in a text file on my
desktop because it serves its purpose without unnecessary distrac-
92 https://opensource.com/open-organization/15/9/reflections-open-
organization-starry-eyed-dreamer
93 http://acc6.its.brooklyn.cuny.edu/%7Ephalsall/texts/taote-v3.html#48
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tions. Whatever tools, processes, and procedures you introduce to
a team should increase efficiency and remove obstacles, not intro-
duce additional complexity. So instead of focusing on the tools,
focus on the problem(s) you're using those tools to solve.
My favorite part of being a project manager in an Agile
world is having the freedom to throw out what doesn't work. This
is related to the concept of kaizen, 94 or "continuous improvement."
Don't be afraid to try and fail. Failing is the label we've put on the
process of learning what works and what doesn't. But it's the only
way to improve.
The best processes arise organically. As a project manager,
you can help your team by supporting them and not trying to force
them into anything.
Practice
Some say that my teaching is nonsense.
Others call it lofty but impractical.
But to those who have looked inside themselves,
this nonsense makes perfect sense.
And to those who put it into practice,
this loftiness has roots that go deep.95
I believe in what open organizations are doing. What open
organizations are doing for the field of management is almost as
important as the actual products and services they offer. We have
an opportunity to lead by example, to inspire passion and purpose
in others, to create working environments that inspire and em-
power.
I encourage you to find ways to incorporate some of these
ideas into your own projects and teams to see what happens. Learn
about your organization's mission and how your projects contribute
94 https://www.kaizen.com/about-us/definition-of-kaizen.html
95 http://acc6.its.brooklyn.cuny.edu/%7Ephalsall/texts/taote-v3.html#67
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to it. Have courage, expect to try some things that won't work, and
don't forget to share the lessons you learn with our community so
we can continue to improve.
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Leading through the power of "thank you"
Curtis A. Carver
A simple "thank you" can go a long way. Most of all, an expres-
sion of gratitude and the recognition of a job well done can
reinforce an organizational culture of collaboration and trans-
parency in an organization.
That kind of culture doesn't just emerge automatically. It re-
quires conscious and deliberate behaviors aimed at making sure
people know how much they're valued. On IT teams where I've
served in a leadership role, I've developed a simple system for
making sure accolades get amplified, resulting in organizational
communities built on respect and thankfulness.
In this chapter, I'll explain what it involves because I believe
any team or organization could implement it overnight.
Praise and progress in public
We call it Praise and Progress.
At its heart is the Praise and Progress meeting, which we
hold once every month. In that meeting, each team in my organiza-
tion receives two minutes of everyone's attention. They can use
that time use to explain something important they recently accom-
plished; that's the "Progress" part. Then they can publicly thank
someone who made a difference to their work. That's the "Praise"
part—and it's the most important.
During this portion of the meeting, employees often take
time to personally thank—in front of their peers—individuals who
helped them and made an impact on their work. Sometimes, partic-
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ipants will thank people who aren't at the meeting: People on other
teams or in other departments. When that happens, I send those
folks emails to let them know our team has recognized them, and I
add my own personal thanks to the note. I also send a copy to their
managers.
Occasionally, people will simply thank co-workers who are
making a difference in their professional lives. And that kind of
gratitude can be extraordinarily powerful. For example, when I ini-
tiated Praise and Progress at the University of Alabama in
Birmingham, someone came forward to express gratitude for the
mentorship he continues to receive from someone who isn't even in
his department—a former, exemplary boss who continues to take
an interest in his life and wants to help him navigate his career.
And as I always do, I contacted that manager to let him know his
former employee had thanked him publicly at our meeting and con-
tinued to speak so warmly about him. The response I received
taught me so much about a new member of my own team.
Overall, the benefits of this monthly community tradition
have been amazing. For example:
• Praise and Progress builds a culture of innovation.
Every month, we're talking together about our suc-
cesses and new projects, and that fosters both a
sense of forward movement and a spirit of accom-
plishment.
• The meetings build a culture of gratitude and team-
work within the company. As everyone becomes more
comfortable with the Praise and Progress ritual, they
open up more—and that culture of gratitude gets
even more deeply entrenched.
• As a leader in the organization, I find Praise and
Progress meetings extraordinarily educational be-
cause I not only hear teammates' perceptions of the
projects they're working on but also often learn
things I never even knew my organization was doing!
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• Discussing our work publicly is a great way to foster
transparency across the organization. Since we're
sharing our successes and the stories of the chal-
lenges that led to them, we can often help one
another and lend immediate guidance.
But even more surprising to me was the effect that Praise
and Progress had on my organization's relationships with external
teams and stakeholders. These simple gestures engage an entire
community around an IT project, which helps build communities of
practice throughout and across organizations. And that leads to
true cultural change. But apart from helping everyone feel appreci-
ated for their hard work, Praise and Progress also helps build
"mini-champions" for the IT organization among all the campuses
and departments we serve. The tradition leads to situations in
which people are talking about all the good things they hear the IT
organization is doing. It builds tremendous goodwill, allowing me
to kill poisoned seeds before they ever sprout.
Not about you
When you're trying to change an organization, make sure
the organization itself remains your priority. Any change you initi-
ate should be about the organization; it's not about you. It's about
the customers you're serving (students, in my case) and what
you're equipping them to do (again, in my case, changing how they
think about the world).
Doing that can be difficult. But for open leaders, the best
way to do it is to get a community of dedicated professionals in-
volved and, one-by-one, convince them that they can be an agent of
innovation. Engage them in building the relationships and provide
the scaffolding so that they can openly collaborate on building the
next generation of leaders, and you will.
Constructing a culture of gratitude is a great first step in do-
ing that. It's amazing what a simple "thank-you" can help you do.
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Transformation and leadership in a hybrid
world
Jos Groen
A leader's personal transformation to a more open and sus-
tainable leadership style can parallel an organization's
transformation a similarly sustainable open model. In this chapter,
I'll outline a few ways you can shape your leadership during trans-
formation to an open organization.
I use the word "sustainable" with good reason here. Many or-
ganizations aspire not merely to success but to sustainable
success. And by "sustainable," I mean an organization that main-
tains balance between focus on people and focus on business, one
that balances short and long term goals with stable financial per-
formance, and one with a clear value-based footprint in the market
and which (along with its executives) is transforming to an open or-
ganization.
However, in order to achieve their visions of success, many
leaders in the upper echelons of these organizations still compul-
sively cling to the closed-off, short-term-driven patterns they've
gotten comfortable with. Today, the question is: Are these practices
—and their accompanying leadership styles—really sustainable for
an organization in the longer term?
Knowing what this kind of transformation requires of leaders
(courage and perseverance, for starters), I hope to provide some
encouragement and support. And I also want to offer employees in
organizations undergoing open transformation some insights into
what they can expect from their leaders in such an organization (in
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the hope that they'll encourage their organization's leaders to be-
gin the transformation).
Living through disruption
The world is in the grips of multiple disruptive forces. These
forces assert themselves both economically and socially and it's
nearly impossible to estimate—certainly to underestimate—their
consequences.
As part of these shifts, people are beginning to resist conven-
tional thinking, exclusivity, and authoritarian systems prevalent in
their organizations and with their accompanying leaders—espe-
cially when those leaders prioritize their own images, status,
preservation of power, and short-term economic interests over the
success of others. Regardless of the type of organization (be it a
national government, a sports association, or a for-profit company)
perceived egoism, misguidedness, and lust for power are becoming
less acceptable.
Leaders who abide by those antiquated principles represent
the past; their lack of transparency, trust, inclusion, and integrity
makes people (in)visibly rebel against them.
Opting in or out
If this is the trend, then what is the message for organiza-
tions and leaders who focus exclusively on financial gain through
formal authority and excessive hierarchy?
These are outdated ways of thinking, leading, and organizing
—and unsustainable at that. Many organizations are becoming in-
creasingly aware of the need for a better balance between the
their organizations' human dimension, their people's emotional in-
telligence, and the company's social innovation model on the one
hand and shareholder interests on the other.
This awareness, often prompting an organizational transfor-
mation, has been growing for some time. And as an organizational
leader, you have the choice to opt into or out of this kind of trans-
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formation. If you want to remain relevant as a leader, then you'll
recognize the necessity for change and adjust your own behavior
and approach. You'll then be able to ride the energy of the ongoing
transformation and utilize this momentum in the transition to a
more sustainable organization model. The open organization is an
example of one such sustainable model—one that fits well with
both current and new generations of employees, and one that
proves new forms of leadership can increase both sustainable orga-
nizational success and shareholder value [see Appendix].
Or, alternatively, you can stick your head in the sand and re-
sist both this new era and the potential energy that transformation
could infuse in your organization. That option will only cost you—
and its chances of helping your organization survive are question-
able.
A hybrid period
Expecting an organization to one day end all its conventional
thinking and practices and begin the next day a completely trans-
formed organization is unrealistic. Beginning a transformation will
inevitably cause a kind of "hybrid" situation in which elements
from both worlds are at play simultaneously.
What I mean by a "conventional" organizational model is a
closed organization, one in which the balance between the focus on
people and the focus on the business leans strongly towards the
latter. This traditional organizational model is characterized by
short-term thinking and an authoritarian, hierarchical, top-down
approach to decision-making aimed almost exclusively at increas-
ing shareholder value. Open organizations focus on inclusivity,
collaboration among networks of individuals, and collective deci-
sion-making that prioritizes organizational sustainability and
innovation.
Chances are, if you're an organizational leader, then you're
already embracing, building, and leading an open organization.
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People farther up the organizational chart are likely still using the
conventional approach. Hence the hybrid situation.
Moreover, you can assume people (and potential leaders)
within your ranks already have an increased awareness of the need
for transformation and the benefits of a more open organization.
Open leadership in a hybrid organization therefore demands a lot
from you as a leader—guts, courage, and perseverance, as well as
the skills to engage in a substantive discussion with anyone and ev-
eryone, and especially with those who are not yet aware of the
transformation and don't see the need to change themselves.
Leaders versus authorities
One of a leader's primary roles is to train new leaders. A
good leader creates a safe environment for an organization's mem-
bers so they'll feel free to actively participate. Only then can they
add value to the organization from a place of intrinsic motivation.
Leaders who've adopted this open way of working are generally
the ones we love to follow. And we do so because we want to, not
because we have to. This is an essential consideration you must
make if you want to achieve sustainable success.
I know many executives and managers in senior positions
who can't be called "true" leaders, at least not in the sense of lead-
ership as defined above. They may be in high organizational
positions and exercise authority through that position, but that
doesn't necessarily mean that we trust them and will actually want
to follow them. A traditionally trained director cannot train some-
one to be a leader; he or she trains people to be lead through
formal authority, making the traditional model a self-perpetuating
phenomenon. However, a company that doesn't train new leaders
is risking its survival and is therefore unsustainable.
I understand that the boardroom offers little space for reflec-
tion on a more open and modern organizational structure, due to
the pressures of shareholder value and the pursuit of short-term
results. But that's a missed opportunity.
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Breaking the pattern
If you're interested in breaking this pattern, it's time to act.
Have a real look at leadership and how people are connecting, di-
recting, organizing, and working together. Realize you're dealing
with a change of conditioned behavior, beliefs that have been a
part of how we lead and direct organizations for years. Entire gen-
erations have been trained in this. It takes courage from you as a
director with roots in the traditional model to see that you are part
of the problem. But with that realization you are also part of the
solution.
So what are you waiting for?
It starts with you
You are the key to breaking the pattern. In order to be able
to lead in our current and future global situation, you will have to
act. We can certainly find examples of traditional leaders who
would rather go under than be willing to change. That's their right,
but it's not very effective or sustainable.
However, if you are open to transformation, then it's time for
some reflection.
Ask yourself, for example:
• Are you sufficiently aware of your behavior and its
effects on others?
• Are you open to discovering the real value you're
adding to an organization and really questioning
whether you're relevant to the organizatin's future?
• Are you willing to examine whether your beliefs, as-
sumptions, worldview and ideas still correspond with
both current realities and the requirements the fu-
ture demands?
• How authentic are you? How inquisitive are you?
And are you open to learning?
If you're ready to begin the work of becoming a more open
leader, then I suggest the following initial steps.
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1. Rebalance your head and heart
We often approach things rationally, with our head, and we
rely on logical thinking to reach decisions. We also prefer to solve
problems immediately; that behavior is conditioned. We don't take
time to delve into underlying causes of problems, even though re-
moving the cause is actually the only sustainable solution to the
problem we face.
We rarely consider our feelings, what our heart tells us, even
though our intuition and social intelligence are in fact formed by
the connection between our head and heart. Being aware of this
and incorporating this strength into your leadership style and be-
havior will increase your effectiveness in an open organization.
Are you willing to listen to your feelings and share them with
your colleagues? Do you trust what your heart tells you?
If you open yourself up to your intuition and social intelli-
gence, your self-awareness and authenticity will grow—which is
exactly what you need as a leader. Allow unlimited curiosity about
what's going on and reflect on what you will need in order to deal
with an issue.
2. Allow transformational leaders to emerge
In addition to taking on your own transformation, you'll be
taking a big step by admitting transformational leaders to the ta-
ble. And trust me, these leaders won't bite; they'll help you. They
may think and act differently than what you're used to, but they'll
also strive for the highest possible results.
In fact, I suspect there are people among the members of
your organization who already have an increased awareness of
(and talent for!) the leadership style necessary for this kind of or-
ganizational transformation. You can recognize them by the
informal way in which they make a difference in your organization
—though not always in terms of performance and result (the do-
mains of the traditionalists).
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I'm talking about the innovators, cross-thinkers, and cre-
atives in your organization, the people who create connections
connectedness, who seek a deeper understanding of the context
for problems They effectively balance people and business, acting
on both long-term and short-term interests. These people stand out
because of the blind faith customers and colleagues alike place in
them.
I often notice a certain fear of admitting these leaders to the
boardroom or management track. Are tradntional leaders afraid of
losing control? I think they are.
This fear is conditioned. It is an unconscious roadblock to be-
ing open and willing to learn, to allowing dissidents to enter the
organization's "inner circle." Be mindful of this impulse, because
sticking to the traditional model and staying in your comfort zone
will be a missed opportunity.
Let's face it: The worst that can happen is that you might
learn something from the experience.
3. Safeguard progress
If you've already displayed the courage and willingness to
change yourself in service of the transformation, and to allow
transformational leaders into your inner circle, then you'll find that
organizational transformation can feel inspiring and empowering.
And if you're a more conventional leader, then you should know
that your knowledge, experience, and skills are extremely impor-
tant for a successful transformation.
These transformations require a balance between conven-
tional and innovative processes and practices (remember, you'll be
in a "hybrid period" for a while). What's more, your personal trans-
formation can happily coincide with the transformation of the
organization. Qualities you've developed through conventional
leadership will also come in handy during the hybrid period. For
example, you already know how to focus on business and short
term results, so if you make a shift and begin to emphasize focus
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on human interests and and the long term, you'll explore how to
find a balance from your new perspective. This is about discovering
what an increased focus on openness openness does to the energy
within your organization, its people, and its business. Just be open
and add the lessons, results, and new experiences you glean from
this approach to your existing set of managerial skills.
Transformational leaders will contribute to the organiza-
tion's collective learning and ensure that you maintain progress
when you're at risk of falling back into former behaviors and old
patterns. Here, your greatest strength as a leader is your ability to
admit you don't have all the answers—that answers to transforma-
tional challenges will only emerge through collaboration with the
team—and that you don't have everything "under control." It is pre-
cisely this modesty and cooperation that ensure trust and a safe
environment for transformation.
4. Rethink success
More traditional models of leadership tend to recognize suc-
cess through individual performance, not collective success. Work
becomes a matter of individual achievement, bonuses, organiza-
tional status, and power.
In open organization, "good" leadership is about the extent
to which a person can contribute to a team with honesty, integrity,
courage, resilience, persistence, judgment, and decisiveness. Suc-
cessful leaders are willing to listen to their feelings, demosntrate
vulnerability, and trust their intuition. All this makes sustainable
success more likely than failure.
During your organization's transition to an open model, com-
municating about the ways your organization's indicators of
success are changing will be critical. If organizational leaders still
act with conventional images of success in mind, transformation
will be more difficult.
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5. Distribute responsibility
In traditional organizations, a manager is a de facto respon-
sible party—held solely to account for results. This makes
conventional organizations breeding grounds egocentric leadership
approaches.
After all, if you're responsible, you'll want to be in control of
all facets of business operations leave nothing to anyone else.
You'll want to be involved in every decision, from granting em-
ployee leave to approving project margins to the purchase of coffee
beans for the break room. This only impedes your team's strength
and independence, and it fuels mutual distrust.
In open organizations, leaders aren't responsible for results
as much as they are responsible for the people responsible for the
results. The best way to enhance organizational performance is to
create an atmosphere in which team members share information
transparently, are open about their mistakes, and help and support
each other—in short, an open working environment in which peo-
ple feel safe and comfortable. As an open leader, you'll need to
communicate that increased ability to assert organizational influ-
ence comes with increased responsibility for organizational
outcomes.
Our transformation
I am often asked about the results of my most recent organi-
zational transformation according to open organizational
principles. Let me start by saying that it's a team effort, and we're
not done yet. Looking at the three year period between 2017 and
2019, we can see that our culture and cultural values were trans-
formed from "worrying" to "perfectly healthy." This is based on
independent research at the start and end of this period. Besides
that, we achieved a significant increase in profitability, with only a
slight increase in turnover. Here are some of the most important
lessons we've learned along our journey.
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• People deserve an open working environment that fa-
cilitates their growth and prosperity in a high-
performance organization. Throughout a transforma-
tion, the organization must remain linked to the
potential that wants to unfold. To tap this potential,
leaders must create a clear vision, direction, and
identity. This goes hand-in-hand with optimizing the
organization for its new context. By organizing this
balance between people and business, we can give
the organization back to its members.
• Good leadership isn't about exercising formal author-
ity, status, or bonuses (though these will certainly
play a role in your work). It's about the extent to
which you can enable others to contribute to the
whole organization from the standpoint of their in-
trinsic motivation. A leader is someone who's able to
inspire confidence, someone who acts based on
knowledge, experience, and intuition, someone
whose head and heart are connected. Leadership in
an open organization is more about whether you're
willing to serve than about what you're able to de-
mand. It's about putting collective purpose before
your own interests. People will first determine
whether you're sincere and trustworthy before
choosing whether or not to follow you. The more au-
thentic you are, the better off you'll be.
• Transformation isn't just something to be "managed"
or "created." It's something you need to experience.
This means you'll require a higher degree of aware-
ness of the personal transformation(s) you'll need to
undertake as you prepare to lead an organizational
transformation. You must fully understand that trans-
formative mindset in order to live it. And you must be
able to live it in order to be able to lead it.
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• You need to understand that transformation is about
energy—both "brain energy" and "heart energy." If
you notice the energy is great then just stimulate it,
keep it flowing and growing. And if you sense it's not
the right kind of energy, then just try to find the
cause of the negativity and remove it so energy will
start flowing in the right direction again. You need to
transform the organization's energy first—and with
that, the people, the business, and your organization.
Not the other way around.
Early on in my career, I came to the realization that the be-
haviors and attitudesassociated with what I now call "traditional
management" don't suit me. It's too far from who I am. At first,
when I was still fighting for organizational recognition, this was a
source of frustration for me. It was a drain on my energy, and I felt
like I could never "win." Ultimately, this approach proved ineffec-
tive and unsustainable.
Only after I discovered who I really am as a leader, what my
talents are, and how I can be authetic was I able to take back con -
trol and focus on adding value to an organization.
And believe me, it meant having to break many patterns and
really confronting myself in order to get there. But the transforma-
tion is possible. And I wish the same for you.
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More engaging meetings begin with trustful
relationships
MaryJo Burchard
P eople tend to focus on the technical elements of meeting
prep: setting the objective(s), making the agenda, choosing a
place and duration, selecting stakeholders, articulating a timeline,
and so on.96 But if you want people to come to a meeting ready to
fully engage, building trust is mission-critical, too. If you need peo-
ple to engage in your meetings, then you're likely expecting people
to come ready to share their creativity, problem-solving, and inno-
vation ideas.
All these things require taking risks—and risks force people
to be vulnerable. Trust is therefore fundamental to getting anyone
to engage meaningfully in meetings. But trust is not unilateral. If
you think people either "trust you or they don't," you're missing im-
portant opportunities to help people feel free to bring everything
they have to engage in your meetings.
Let's look at seven questions open leaders can ask them-
selves as they get ready to gauge and build trust levels in advance
of their meetings. The extent to which you're able to do this can
make or break constructive engagement in meetings.
1. Are you for real?
Engagement begins with people's need for confidence. First
and foremost, they're going to want to know that the meeting they
96 See Angela Robertson's chapter in this volume.
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are walking into will be exactly what you told them they'd be walk-
ing into. They want to be able to rely on and accept the accuracy of
your stated reason for the meeting, its objectives, etc., at face
value, knowing that you are not intentionally attempting to deceive
or trap anyone, nor are you withholding crucial information from
them.
When people can trust your authenticity and they know
you've shared exactly what they're getting into, they can prepare
themselves accordingly. Blindsided people may be reticent to par-
ticipate at the same depth.
2. Are you safe?
Few things are more daunting than the fear of walking into
an ambush. When people wonder if their input will cause someone
to be thrown under the bus—or worse, when people fear that prob-
lem-solving or brainstorming sessions will turn into a dogpile or
blame-fest—you can bet that the only people who will be excited to
engage are the people who enjoy being abusive, calling it "collabo-
ration." Contrary to what some in the open source community
seem to believe, intentional use of caustic, demeaning expressions
for "feedback" will not produce the highest quality outputs.
What the team will end up with instead is an unwritten rule
that the most oppressive voices always win; other brilliant ideas
will be stifled when the people who have them do not feel person-
ally safe to share them. With the exception of people who enjoy the
cathartic rush of harsh exchanges, openness to genuine feedback
occurs when people do not fear that they will be personally at-
tacked or publicly humiliated in the process. For the strongest
possible engagement in meetings, set clear group expectations
that balance candor and transparency with enforced communica-
tion and behavioral norms that promote confidence rather than
intimidation.
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When people can trust you to model and reinforce threat-re-
ducing behaviors during collaboration and idea sharing, you make
room for a true meritocracy of ideas to emerge.
3. Are you consistent?
One of the greatest gifts a leader or decision-maker can give
to stakeholders is a clear sense of consistency. Consistency enables
people to obtain some level of clarity regarding the range of possi-
bilities for any given meeting—and it helps them plan accordingly.
Even if people are not fond of your predictable behavior, they
can learn to navigate their own responsibilities around what they
know you will say or do. As an added bonus, in your absence your
consistent behavior will still enable them to engage in making deci-
sions about which they can confidently predict your general
thoughts and responses.
When people can trust your words and actions to have clear,
reliable patterns, they can gain a clearer sense of their role in the
engagement process.
4. Can they depend on you?
Somewhat related to consistency is your reputation for being
a person of your word. I have facilitated countless decision-making
meetings in organizations that began with the question, "Is this go-
ing to be another one of those meetings where we do all the hard
work and come up with a workable solution, and then the powers
that be are going to just do whatever they want anyway?" Past fail-
ures to follow through can destroy people's motivation to attempt
to engage again. If a history of undependable follow-through and
unkept commitments exists (whether or not you were at the heart
of them), acknowledge the failure to the people in advance and dis-
cuss with them the measures you will take to keep the current
commitments related to this new meeting.
When people can trust your word to follow through on com-
mitments related to their investment in the meeting, they can often
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give the process another chance, even if others failed to follow
through in the past.
5. Do you know your stuff?
Having the skill and expertise to conduct the meeting and
discuss responsibilities isn't enough. You need to know your peo-
ple. A meeting in which the leader is unfamiliar with the group's
history, trigger words, social cues, behavioral norms, and shared
values will make it very difficult to make sure you (and others!) are
engaging in alignment with cultural expectations. Perceived incom-
petence by the person leading a meeting can be an immediate
engagement-killer.
If you are new to the group, before the meeting (or as an
opening session), let the people help you catch up with discovery
discussions (individually or in small groups), and ask them for help
in understanding the shared story, values, history, norms, etc. in
addition to any nuanced skills or knowledge you'll need to grasp to
facilitate effective discussions.
When people can trust that you know what you are doing,
they can relax and focus on their own responsibilities in the meet-
ing.
6. Does the buck stop with you?
With complex or wide-scale projects, it's easy for things to
fall through the cracks. People you work with are likely heavy hit-
ters who already want to do a good job—but someone has to
assume ultimate responsibility for the success of the entire team.
I'm not talking about ultimate "fault" or "blame" in case something
goes wrong (we want solutions, not human targets). I'm talking
about ownership. Someone needs to assume personal responsibil-
ity to help set up the task/project/team for success, and own any
initiative that needs to be assumed if it begins to flounder. If you
assume ownership, you embrace the responsibility to engage with
the stakeholders holistically and proactively. Your words and ac-
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tions will hold you and everyone else to the highest possible stan-
dards.
When people can trust that you assume personal responsibil-
ity and ownership of helping them succeed, the mental and
emotional energy they'd commit to self-protection "just in case you
drop the ball" can be redirected to bolstering their own contribu-
tions.
7. Do people believe that your intent is to help?
This is the linchpin of trust.
People can handle a lot of things—inconsistent or erratic be-
haviors, stupid verbal responses, lack of follow-through, even lack
of knowledge or ownership—if they can sense that you are really
trying to do right by them. It is worth the time to connect with peo-
ple beyond what you need from them, to take a genuine interest in
who they are as people and what's going on in their lives. Beyond
being good interpersonal protocol, it's good business.
When people are inclined to believe what you say and do is
intended to help and not harm them, they will be more likely to in-
terpret and respond to your failings to have the best possible
motives, which often means they'll engage with you to help work
through the kinks even if they are frustrated or even angry with
your behavior.
Bottom line
Trust is where engagement begins, in meetings and in life.
Understanding the multiple dimensions of trust gives us the oppor-
tunity to have conversations that can help us build it up wherever
it is lacking—before we need it in the meeting.
For example, when we allow someone to tell us, "I trust that
you mean well, but I do not yet trust your competence in this skill,"
or "I trust your expertise and I know you intend to do what you say,
but I find that your optimism about what can be done in an hour
exceeds reality, so despite your good heart, I cannot currently trust
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your dependability," we have a chance to pinpoint what areas we
need to foster their trust. Responding to statements like these with
questions like, "What do you need from me in order to grow in your
trust of me in this area?" and then following up to track your
progress can also add to others' perception of your intent to do
them good.
Stay with it! Over time, both trust—and with it, engagement
—will grow.
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Open leadership lessons from a galaxy far, far
away
Jim Hall
N o matter where you are in an organization, you can benefit
from observing others and learning from them. We can all
learn lessons from someone else.
I like to look for leadership lessons wherever I go. Some-
times I learn a few tips on public speaking by watching a skilled
presenter. Or I'll learn how to improve my meeting management
style by reflecting on meetings that go well.
But I also like to find leadership lessons from unlikely places.
Several years ago, I started reflecting on the leadership lessons we
can learn from certain television shows or movies. Specifically, I
found myself thinking about the role and power of leadership dur-
ing periods of great transition—following the events in Return of
the Jedi.
I imagined myself as an outside observer at the film's conclu-
sion. What would I think upon hearing that the Emperor had died
during the Battle of Endor? And what advice would I give the next
person to assume the mantle of supreme leader?
I began by considering the obvious next leader: Darth Vader,
Lord of the Sith. Vader's leadership style is essentially the same as
Emperor Palpatine's. Both prefer a top-down leadership approach,
and neither are very inclined to make major changes to the way
the Galactic Empire is structured or run. To them, what worked for
the last twenty years would probably continue to work in the fu-
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ture. The only changes would be "bigger and better," such as build-
ing even larger Star Destroyers.
So as Vader presumably transitioned into his new leadership
role, what advice would I give him?
Since Vader's leadership style is very similar to that of his
predecessor, I would recommend that Vader meet with his manage-
ment teams and communicate that everyone should "stay the
course," and that nothing would change. By doing this, Vader sets
an expectation with those below him that everyone can under-
stand. In this first meeting, Vader would likely also set his
expectations for the Empire, and identify any areas that might
change from his predecessor. I expect that the rest of the Empire
would get behind Vader as the new leader and generally support
him in his transition.
But in the movie, Vader didn't become the new leader.
Spoiler alert to those who haven't seen the film: the Rebellion wins
the day. As a result, I think it's safe to assume that, if the film had
continued, Princess Leia would have become the new supreme
leader (and if you've seen the new sequels, you know that was
pretty much the case).
I imagine Leia would also want to take the organization in a
new direction. But Leia's leadership style is demonstrably quite
different from that of Emperor Palpatine or Darth Vader. Rather
than leveraging a top-down directed-leadership approach, Leia typ-
ically sets the context for people to do their best and collaborate.
You might say that Leia prefers an open organization model.
With such a contrasting style, what advice would I offer Leia
as she makes her leadership transition?
My advice would be for Leia to embrace the open organiza-
tion culture. As we've seen in the various Star Wars films, while the
organizational structure of the Rebellion was quasi-military, it was
also rather open. Members shared information freely, and they
worked toward a shared, clearly-defined vision—sometimes ignor-
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ing typical organizational norms as people from different parts of
the organization came together to meet common goals.
Stepping into the leadership role of an open organization,
Leia should meet with the senior leaders as early as possible and
explain her vision. In this meeting, she would define her goals and
work collaboratively with that team to establish priorities to drive
the first one hundred days. Most importantly, Leia should discuss
any broad themes for major changes. By communicating early and
often as she takes on the new leadership role, Leia sets and rein-
forces expectations with those around her. As a result, I expect
that her transition would be ultimately successful.
Compare the two leadership transitions: My advice for Darth
Vader's top-down transition is to communicate broadly and share
goals. Similarly, my leadership advice for Princess Leia's open or-
ganization transition is to communicate frequently and set goals.
Despite very different leadership styles, my recommendations for
effective leadership transition are basically the same; the results,
of each approach, however, might be dramatically different.
Apply this leadership lesson to your next transition. No mat-
ter where you are in the organization, and no matter your
leadership style, your leadership transition remains the same.
Communicate with those around you, set goals, and clarify priori-
ties. Identify any planned changes as early as possible in your
transition, share updates frequently, and the Force will be with
you.
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About the contributors
DELISA ALEXANDER is Executive Vice President and Chief
People Officer at Red Hat.
BRYAN BEHRENSHAUSEN is a community architect in the
Open Source Program Office at Red Hat. He assists the Open Orga-
nization project and community, manages the Open Organization
section of Opensource.com, and edits the Open Organization book
series.
MARYJO BURCHARD (Concord Solutions) helps leaders in
nonprofits, education, business, and public sector develop open be-
haviors and interactions to measurably raise the bar of humane
engagement in the workplace. She has a PhD in Organizational
Leadership from Regent University and conducts training and in-
ternal organizational development consulting for the City of
Virginia Beach, where she lives with her husband Kenny, their son
Victor, and their chihuahua-pug, Stanley.
CURTIS A. CARVER JR., Ph.D., is the Vice President and Chief
Information Officer for the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
Previously, he was the vice chancellor and chief information officer
for the Board of Regents of University System of Georgia.
MICHAEL DOYLE supports growth in others through execu-
tive coaching and leadership development—inspiring them to turn
knowledge into action one step at a time by openly sharing his de -
velopment journey.
ALESSIO FATTORINI is a certified community strategist fo-
cused on product-based communities. He works closely with
developers and users leveraging his strong technical background
as Linux sysadmin and support specialist. For more than 10 years,
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The Open Organization Leaders Manual
he has been Communications and Community Manager at Nethe-
sis.
DR. PHILIP A. FOSTER is the author of The Open Organiza-
tion: A New Era of Leadership and Organizational Development.
He is a business consultant, international speaker, and the host of
Maximum Change TV.
JOS GROEN is a transformational leader and coach, passion-
ate about the open approach to building open organizational
cultures. He has built an open and high-performance organization
in a global enterprise IT organization. Currently, he is helping or-
ganizations across the globe to succeed in their digital
transformation journey by helping them understand the power of
an open approach.
JIM HALL is an open source software developer and advo-
cate, probably best known as the founder and project coordinator
for FreeDOS. Jim is also very active in the usability of open source
software, as a mentor for usability testing in GNOME Outreachy,
and as an occasional adjunct professor teaching a course on the
Usability of Open Source Software. From 2016 to 2017, Jim served
as a director on the GNOME Foundation Board of Directors. At
work, Jim is Chief Information Officer in local government.
HEIDI HESS VON LUDEWIG researches networked workplace
creativity from the systems perspective, which means that she ex-
amines the relationships of multiple elements within the workplace
that influence how individuals and groups perform innovative and
creative work. She spent over fifteen years in the software industry
performing a variety of roles, from developer to analyst, for For-
tune 500 companies before receiving her PhD from North Carolina
State University in 2014. Her research informs the work she does
day-to-day, and she is happy to report she recently started a new
role at Red Hat, interlocking teams across the Customer Experi-
ence and Engagement organization.
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LAURA HILLIGER is a writer, educator and technologist. She's
a multimedia designer and developer, a technical liaison, a project
manager, an open web advocate who is happiest in collaborative
environments. She's a co-founder of the We Are Open Co-op, an
Ambassador for Opensource.com, is working to help open up
Greenpeace, and a Mozilla alum.
JEN KELCHNER is the Founder of LDR21, a firm focused on
building agile, open people and organizations who are able to meet
the demands of continuous cycles of change. She advises organiza-
tional leaders on open leadership, cultures of trust, and engaging
change based on open org principles.
SAM KNUTH leads the Customer Content Services team at
Red Hat, a team that produces all of the documentation the com-
pany provides for its customers. He is an Open Organization
Ambassador.
CATHERINE LOUIS is a Certified Scrum Trainer, independent
Agile coach, founder of CLL-Group.com, PoDojo.com, and founding
member of Tech Ladies®.
ALLISON MATLACK is a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer
turned Principal Product Communications Strategist at Red Hat
who is known for her enthusiastic speaking style and passion for
helping leaders inspire their teams. She's an experienced Agile
practitioner and coach of software engineering teams in various
stages of maturity, as well as a communications specialist with a
change-management style steeped in the tradition of the Open De-
cision Framework.
RON MCFARLAND has been working in Japan for 40 years,
and he's spent more than 30 of them in international sales, sales
management training, and expanding sales worldwide. He's
worked in or been to more than 80 countries. Over the past 14
years, Ron has established distributors in the United States and
throughout Europe for a Tokyo-headquartered, Japanese hardware
cutting tool manufacturer.
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IRUPÉ NIVEYRO enjoys helping others tune into their pur-
poses and develop them. After a successful 20 years in IT and
consulting, she transformed her mediation and negotiation skills
into a facilitating and development firm, I+D, which helps organi-
zations and teams achieve their results in an effective and
harmonious manner.
ANGELA ROBERTSON leads and manages the development
and publication of technical guidance for many of the Microsoft
Azure products and technologies. A member of the Azure Platform
Experiences and Evangelism team, she works with cloud advo-
cates, the team that develops docs.microsoft.com, and product
groups throughout the company to publish content on our open
platform.
CHAD SANSING is the Practice Lead for Open Culture and
Curriculum at the Mozilla foundation and has been helping to de-
velop his team's Mountain of Engagement since early 2018. Prior
to working on the Open Leadership and Events team, he developed
Web Literacy curriculum for the foundation. He joined Mozilla after
teaching middle school English, social studies, and technology for
14 years. He is passionate about internet health, facilitation,
games, and helping non-technical audiences understand the advan-
tages of working open and practicing open leadership, especially in
libraries, schools, and other community learning spaces.
JIMMY SJÖLUND is a senior IT service manager and innova-
tion coach at Telia Company, focusing on organizational
transformation and exploring agile and lean workflows. He is a vi-
sualization enthusiast and an Open Organization Ambassador.
JIM WHITEHURST is President of IBM. He was formerly Presi-
dent and CEO of Red Hat, the world's leading provider of open
source enterprise IT products and services. He is author of The
Open Organization: Igniting Passion and Performance (Harvard
Business Review Press).
216
Appendix
The Open Organization Definition
The Open Organization Ambassadors
Preamble
Openness is becoming increasingly central to the ways
groups and teams of all sizes are working together to achieve
shared goals. And today, the most forward-thinking organizations—
whatever their missions—are embracing openness as a necessary
orientation toward success. They've seen that openness can lead
to:
• GREATER AGILITY, as members are more capable of
working toward goals in unison and with shared vi-
sion;
• FASTER INNOVATION, as ideas from both inside and
outside the organization receive more equitable con-
sideration and rapid experimentation, and;
• INCREASED ENGAGEMENT, as members clearly see
connections between their particular activities and
an organization's overarching values, mission, and
spirit.
But openness is fluid. Openness is multifaceted. Openness is
contested.
While every organization is different—and therefore every
example of an open organization is unique—we believe these five
characteristics serve as the basic conditions for openness in most
contexts:
• Transparency
• Inclusivity
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• Adaptability
• Collaboration
• Community
Characteristics of an open organization
Open organizations take many shapes. Their sizes, composi-
tions, and missions vary. But the following five characteristics are
the hallmarks of any open organization.
In practice, every open organization likely exemplifies each
one of these characteristics differently, and to a greater or lesser
extent. Moreover, some organizations that don't consider them-
selves open organizations might nevertheless embrace a few of
them. But truly open organizations embody them all—and they con-
nect them in powerful and productive ways.
That fact makes explaining any one of the characteristics
difficult without reference to the others.
Transparency
In open organizations, transparency reigns. As much as pos-
sible (and advisable) under applicable laws, open organizations
work to make their data and other materials easily accessible to
both internal and external participants; they are open for any
member to review them when necessary (see also inclusivity). De-
cisions are transparent to the extent that everyone affected by
them understands the processes and arguments that led to them;
they are open to assessment (see also collaboration). Work is trans-
parent to the extent that anyone can monitor and assess a project's
progress throughout its development; it is open to observation and
potential revision if necessary (see also adaptability). In open orga-
nizations, transparency looks like:
• Everyone working on a project or initiative has ac-
cess to all pertinent materials by default.
• People willingly disclose their work, invite participa-
tion on projects before those projects are complete
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and/or "final," and respond positively to request for
additional details.
• People affected by decisions can access and review
the processes and arguments that lead to those deci-
sions, and they can comment on and respond to
them.
• Leaders encourage others to tell stories about both
their failures and their successes without fear of
repercussion; associates are forthcoming about both.
• People value both success and failures for the
lessons they provide.
• Goals are public and explicit, and people working on
projects clearly indicate roles and responsibilities to
enhance accountability.
Inclusivity
Open organizations are inclusive. They not only welcome di-
verse points of view but also implement specific mechanisms for
inviting multiple perspectives into dialog wherever and whenever
possible. Interested parties and newcomers can begin assisting the
organization without seeking express permission from each of its
stakeholders (see also collaboration). Rules and protocols for par-
ticipation are clear (see also transparency) and operate according
to vetted and common standards. In open organizations, inclusivity
looks like:
• Technical channels and social norms for encouraging
diverse points of view are well-established and obvi-
ous.
• Protocols and procedures for participation are clear,
widely available, and acknowledged, allowing for
constructive inclusion of diverse perspectives.
• The organization features multiple channels and/or
methods for receiving feedback in order to accommo-
date people's preferences.
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• Leaders regularly assess and respond to feedback
they receive, and cultivate a culture that encourages
frequent dialog regarding this feedback.
• Leaders are conscious of voices not present in dialog
and actively seek to include or incorporate them.
• People feel a duty to voice opinions on issues rele-
vant to their work or about which they are
passionate.
• People work transparently and share materials via
common standards and/or agreed-upon platforms
that do not prevent others from accessing or modify-
ing them.
Adaptability
Open organizations are flexible and resilient organizations.
Organizational policies and technical apparatuses ensure that both
positive and negative feedback loops have a genuine and material
effect on organizational operation; participants can control and po-
tentially alter the conditions under which they work. They report
frequently and thoroughly on the outcomes of their endeavors (see
also transparency) and suggest adjustments to collective action
based on assessments of these outcomes. In this way, open organi-
zations are fundamentally oriented toward continuous engagement
and learning.
In open organizations, adaptability looks like:
• Feedback mechanisms are accessible both to mem-
bers of the organization and to outside members,
who can offer suggestions.
• Feedback mechanisms allow and encourage peers to
assist one another without managerial oversight, if
necessary.
• Leaders work to ensure that feedback loops gen-
uinely and materially impact the ways people in the
organization operate.
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The Open Organization Leaders Manual
• Processes for collective problem solving, collabora-
tive decision making, and continuous learning are in
place, and the organization rewards both personal
and team learning to reinforce a growth mindset.
• People tend to understand the context for the
changes they're making or experiencing.
• People are not afraid to make mistakes, yet projects
and teams are comfortable adapting their pre-exist-
ing work to project-specific contexts in order to avoid
repeated failures.
Collaboration
Work in an open organization involves multiple parties by de-
fault. Participants believe that joint work produces better (more
effective, more sustainable) outcomes, and specifically seek to in-
volve others in their efforts (see also inclusivity). Products of work
in open organizations afford additional enhancement and revision,
even by those not affiliated with the organization (see also adapt-
ability).
• People tend to believe that working together pro-
duces better results.
• People tend to begin work collaboratively, rather
than "add collaboration" after they've each com-
pleted individual components of work.
• People tend to engage partners outside their immedi-
ate teams when undertaking new projects.
• Work produced collaboratively is easily available in-
ternally for others to build upon.
• Work produced collaboratively is available externally
for creators outside the organization to use in poten-
tially unforeseen ways.
• People can discover, provide feedback on, and join
work in progress easily—and are welcomed to do so.
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The Open Organization Leaders Manual
Community
Open organizations are communal. Shared values and pur-
pose guide participation in open organizations, and these values—
more so than arbitrary geographical locations or hierarchical posi-
tions—help determine the organization's boundaries and conditions
of participation. Core values are clear, but also subject to continual
revision and critique, and are instrumental in defining conditions
for an organization's success or failure (see also adaptability). In
open organizations, community looks like:
• Shared values and principles that inform decision-
making and assessment processes are clear and obvi-
ous to members.
• People feel equipped and empowered to make mean-
ingful contributions to collaborative work.
• Leaders mentor others and demonstrate strong ac-
countability to the group by modeling shared values
and principles.
• People have a common language and work together
to ensure that ideas do not get "lost in translation,"
and they are comfortable sharing their knowledge
and stories to further the group's work.
Version 2.0
April 2017
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Learn More
The Open Organization Leaders Manual
Additional resources
Continue the series
Continue reading about the future of work, management,
and leadership in the Open Organization book series. Get started
at theopenorganization.org/books.
Read the latest
The Open Organization community publishes regularly at
Opensource.com. Visit opensource.com/open-organization to read
the latest.
Join the community
Are you passionate about using open source ideas to en-
hance organizational life? Share your knowledge and your
experience. Join the conversation at theopenorganization.commu-
nity.
Improve something
We've licensed this book with a Creative Commons license,
so you're free to share a copy with anyone who might benefit from
learning more about the ways open source values are changing or-
ganizations today. You're also free to help us improve it. Spot an
error? Want to add your own chapter? Visit github.com/open-orga-
nization-ambassadors and let us know.
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