I wrote this in November 2015 while I was at Wise (formerly TransferWise). I wrote it after being completely captured by a book I read called ‘Reinventing Organisations.’ It was such a good book, and it applied so closely to Wise that I couldn’t not write it.
I was so inspired by the book an Wise that I wrote this long essay (6000+ words), hosted a long lunch interview on the topic with Wise co-founder Kristo, and got probably 100 Wisers (of 500 at the time) to read the book.
Looking back, my work on this topic is one of the things I’m most proud of. And it was definitely one of my most important contribution to Wise’s success.
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Now, back to Nov 2015
A lot of our success is due to our culture built on a foundation of self-management principles. But self-management has it's challenges: for the 100+ Wisers onboarding each quarter, for all Wisers whose role changes every 6 months, and for everyone who struggles with cross-team collaboration. I have three things I want to achieve by writing this down:
Language: It should give us a language to speak about how we organize the way we do
Why Wise is special: It should help us understand why Wise feels different than most other employers we’ve worked for. It should resolve some of the concerns people have, especially around scaling our culture. It should also help us clarify to candidates and new joiners why we work the way we do
A path forward: If you’re convinced that self management is good for Wise, it should start to shape a path forward to further evolve our culture
To do that, I’ve split it into three sections.
Part 1 - A history of how organizations have evolved [8 min read]
Part 2 - Resolving the myths about self-leadership [5 min read]
Part 3 - How Wise uses self-leadership principles [15 min read]
Excited?! Let’s get started!
But first, three notes:
This post builds upon the framework and research described in this excellent book: Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness by Frederic Laloux. All of the quotes you see here are from this book. I hope this piques your interest to read the whole thing. It’s an intense and academic book, but there’s also a shorter, illustrated version for those so inclined. You can also check out a long Youtube video of Frederic talking about the ideas in the book.
I’ll use “self leadership”, “self-management” “evolutionary-teal” and “teal” phrases interchangeably. “Self-management” is a sub-component of what this author calls “evolutionary-teal” organizations. I prefer the team “self-leadership” over “self-management” so I try to use that except when it’s in a direct quote from the book.
The book describes the organizational types with colours & an adjective (eg “evolutionary teal”) as a shorthand to help aid recall. Part 1 will help you familiarise with those names.