How Self-Managed Companies Help People Learn on the Job

Ethan Bernstein is an assistant professor of leadership and organizational behavior at Harvard Business School. Follow him on Twitter: @ethanbernstein.

Niko Canner is the founder of Incandescent. Follow him on Twitter: @nikocanner.

Charlotte Dobbs leads the research team at Incandescent.

Of course, if experimentation is your organization’s primary path to learning, you have to brace yourself for unexpected things to happen. That’s because you’ve got people interacting with (and within) interdependent systems, and both are highly unpredictable.

It’s like chemistry. Consider this story from a biographical article about the renowned chemist Ira Remsen:

As a young scientist, having read that “nitric acid acts upon copper,” Remsen decided to see for himself what that meant. So he poured some nitric acid on a penny, and one thing lead to another. “A green-blue liquid foamed and fumed over the cent and over the table,” he said. “A great colored cloud arose. This was disagreeable and suffocating.” He’d thought, “How should I stop this?” And then he started to improvise: “I tried to get rid of the objectionable mess by picking it up and throwing it out of the window. I learned another fact. Nitric acid not only acts upon copper, but it acts upon fingers. The pain led to another unpremeditated experiment. I drew my fingers across my trousers and another fact was discovered. Nitric acid acts upon trousers.”

That’s a quite a chain of events — and it’s just one guy with one penny. Imagine the potential for volatility if you’re experimenting with a whole team of people with multiple goals and tasks.

In light of that, how do self-managed organizations make learning productive? Most actually strike a balance between traditional and newer ways of structuring and learning, which mitigates the risks and costs of trial and error. For instance, teams that prioritize reliability over adaptability (think accounting departments) may require highly stable structures — and they’re often well served by traditional training (in regulated environments, the rules are the rules, and you have to know and apply them). But in areas where adaptability is critical — say, in new product development or marketing — responsive structuring and learning can help you meet the needs of your customers, your employees, and the business.

So, even if you’re in a largely hierarchical organization, you may want to experiment with some principles of self-organizing to learn to be more adaptable in certain circumstances. We’ve outlined a few things here for you to try in DIY fashion:

Pretend everyone is a volunteer. This first one involves a temporary shift in mindset: Ask your team to imagine for a moment that everyone (including you) has suddenly become a volunteer. You have no positional authority, no carrots and no sticks. What do they do?

We’ve found in our research that when you get rid of hierarchy, something has to take its place, and nothing reorients a group more effectively than connecting with its overarching mission. In 1973, when Arthur Fry had his first Eureka moment that led to the Post-It Note, nobody in corporate gave him a performance goal, but he charted his course in a way that aligned powerfully with the company’s vision for innovation. And then, using the “15% time” that 3M set aside for self-directed work, he recruited other experts to help him solve product development challenges in the company’s volunteer economy.

Common purpose is immensely powerful at the team level. In his book Team of Teams, retired U.S. Army General Stanley McChrystal describes how Navy SEAL trainees are basically forbidden to do anything alone, even go to the dining hall. In this way, they develop a deep level of synchrony, learning to read the subtlest cues from one another in high-stress situations. Teams “fused by trust and common purpose,” in McChrystal’s words, are inherently more adaptive and nimble when faced with difficult choices in the field.

Thinking and behaving like volunteers requires no budget, no particular expertise, and no fancy tools — simply a commitment to take an imaginative exercise seriously. And it helps people move beyond the boundaries of their jobs and reporting relationships. When they’re guided by a shared vision, not just who’s in charge, they develop as collaborators and problem solvers.

Make roles more fluid. A hallmark of self-organization is autonomy in role selection, paired with a looser concept of people management. That’s actually pretty easy for the DIYer to try.

Consider Google. While the company functions as a hierarchy, there is a remarkable amount of flexibility and self-direction in its role-selection process. Team members are free to move beyond the product areas that they are hired into (maps, search, whatever they may be) if the work doesn’t appeal to them. After settling into a team for a time — typically a year to 18 months — employees can shop around for other roles where teams have open headcount. At the level of designing the work, Googlers agree within teams on group OKRs (Objectives & Key Results), which individuals raise their hands to take on, and people can add their own personal OKRs at any time. The impact on employee development is extraordinary. People are motivated to learn and grow because they have greater control over the path they take.

If you want to experiment with this type of approach, there are a number of resources available, from Google templates to workplace-focused social apps like BetterWorks that let groups self-assign tasks, track their goals, help one another, cheer themselves on as goals are completed, nudge themselves as they get delayed, and so on.

Distinguish between “working in” and “working on” the organization. In holacracy, there are two very different kinds of meetings: those that are tactical, used to discuss how to get work done within the existing structure, and those that focus on governance, used to sort out roles, processes, and other structural questions.

There’s a lesson in this for managers in more traditional settings, too: Make a clear distinction between “working in” and “working on” the organization, and be explicit about which thing you’re doing at any given time. When one of us, Ethan Bernstein, became an early member of the implementation team for the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, everyone was doing everything possible to get the bureau up and running. It was a lot like a startup. To ward off the kind of chaos that can emerge in an all-hands-on-deck environment, many members explicitly coded their meetings — in Outlook or in their agendas — as either GTD (Getting Things Done) or FSO (Figuring Stuff Out). GTD generally involved “working in” the organization. FSO could involve either directly solving a problem (“working in”) or reorienting the team so it would become better at solving, and even avoiding, that kind of problem in the future (“working on”). Just as rowers are best when they learn to synchronize, team members at the bureau sharpened their focus and increased their productivity by coding meetings this way. People came to meetings more prepared, and they became more results-oriented.

These three experiments aren’t radical ideas. That’s the point. Self-organization is just one particular expression of good management practices that can work in all kinds of settings to encourage learning. It doesn’t have to be intimidating and overwhelming. Just look at it as applying the principles where it makes sense to do so. If you experiment with one tactic in one area and it’s not useful, you can tinker with it or drop it altogether. You’ll learn as you go.