Many people see conflict as destructive. But it doesn’t have to be.

Most people look at the world as it currently exists and think “we can do better than this.” Many people from many backgrounds and movements have created language to describe their vision of “better.” Harmony is ours. Read more to learn what Harmony is & how we create it together.

Being human is hard. Working together is harder. 

Many of us share a vision of the world we want to see, but the way we are working together to create it is not working. 

As we co-create the liberated world we deserve, our lives, our leadership, and our organizations are limited by habits and structures that we have learned from the very systems from which we long to be liberated. 

Many organizations are craving a new way of doing things. They feel the pressures of bureaucracy, understand the problems with hierarchy, and are ready to shift to new organizational models. This is especially true for organizations that exist for the express purpose of achieving social justice.

Most of us have learned to avoid directly communicating about our experiences and perspectives. We rarely speak about our lived and emotional experiences in a moment and we have trained ourselves not to respond to or move from our embodied feelings. We’ve learned to value ideas that are presented as universal and dismiss contributions that are transparently drawn from our personal experiences of life. 

Transitioning to co-governance is like taking the training wheels off of a bike. Those training wheels were really offering some support and stability, so taking them off will create some needs.  We can’t just take off the training wheels, make no other adjustments, and expect to stay upright.  

Every day more organizations are reimagining how they work together.  People feel the pains, inefficiencies, and contradictions of the rigidly hierarchical systems that pervaded 20th-century organizations, and they sense that there is a way to bring more passion, humanity, creativity, and fulfillment into our work.

The organizational hierarchies that pervade many nonprofit and for-profit organizations are deeply problematic both morally and tactically. Yet, our experience helping hundreds of organizations align their structure, operations, and strategy with their values, has led us to a seemingly heretical conclusion:

Hierarchy is actually an essential component of an effective organization. 

In our work with movement organizations that are caught in the current debate about hierarchy vs non-hierarchy, we have come to understand formal hierarchy not as a monolithic thing to be dismantled, but rather a system that can enable coordination around a group’s tactics, strategy, policy, livelihood, and culture.

There’s a debate about hierarchy in movement organizations. Some say hierarchy is oppressive and destructive, some say hierarchy is necessary and effective. Both are correct. The key is to have a nuanced understanding of the complexity of hierarchy so that we can intentionally employ the effective and necessary aspects of hierarchy without reproducing systems of oppression and dominance.

Hierarchy can be a tool of oppression and yet it is a necessary tool for groups to function. In this series, we address the contradictions and heresies of hierarchy and get practical and tactical about how to create liberatory hierarchies in your organization.