Common Mistakes of Co-Governance
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. These folks are rolling out plans based on ideas like “self-management,” “flattened hierarchies,” “distributed leadership,” “co-governance,” and the like, all of which promise to make their dreams of a utopian workplace come true.
And every day, the people implementing these ideas confront struggles. The struggles often beget frustration and disappointment that the reality of these systems seems to fall so short of the wholeness, community, innovation, and effectiveness that they promise. It’s not uncommon for these experiences to even lead folks to completely disavow the whole idea of co-governance.
But we don’t need to interpret the struggles of co-governed organizations as evidence that co-governance is ineffective; it makes much more sense to interpret them as evidence that co-governance is hard.
And this difficulty should be expected. Co-governance isn’t just a new approach to business management; it's a new approach to being humans in groups. We aren’t just solving for productivity and efficiency, we are solving for the fact that past ways of organizing ourselves only solved for productivity and efficiency. We are stepping into the challenge of genuinely tending to human dignity, personal fulfillment, and well-being. We are trying to work together in ways that let us support each other to achieve common purposes while providing fulfilling personal experiences. This isn’t a small shift. It’s a fundamental re-evaluation of many of the systems, practices, and assumptions that have structured how humans have worked together for as long as there have been such things as “businesses,” “corporations,” and “nonprofits.”
If we approach this task with the mindset that we just need to implement the theory in a book, we will fail. If we think that there is a predetermined structure that will bring the outcomes we want, we will fail. If we confine our thinking to the limits of management and business thinking, we will fail. The reason is simple: reliance on theories, predetermined structures, and the history of business/management thinking are precisely the things co-governance is trying to transcend. So while co-governance may appear to be another theory, it is not. Co-governance (or non-hierarchy, democratic workplaces, etc.) is a vision that another way is possible, it is conveyed in words that remind us of potential that already lives inside all of our hearts, and it is shared along with practices that point the way to path each organization will have to uncover for themselves.
It’s not surprising that many folks who think they understand co-governance are disappointed by the results when they try to implement it. There is a long distance between understanding co-governance and embodying it. When we try to understand it, we often see it as a set of rules, structures, and processes that are designed to create certain outputs. But when we actually start to live it, we confront the fact that many of the ways we think, feel, and behave do not resonate with the way that we truly want to engage with each other. And skillfully navigating this reality is not something many of us have been trained to do.
For example: We may understand the idea of a system where every member is empowered to contribute their unique talents, but trying to live it brings us into an amount of complexity that no book or article could truly capture: We quickly realize that we each need different types of support in order to fully show up, and some of this has to do with personal history and systemic oppression; we constantly project our conditioned beliefs about what each other are capable of, and we are impacted by each others projections; we often feel threatened by folks with similar skills; we have been trained to value different skills differently; we’ve even been trained to see some people as more worthy of human dignity than others. All of these currents (and more) influence whether people will actually bring their skills into practice. Until we learn how to navigate this cultural and relational terrain, promises like “everyone will utilize their unique talents” will remain unfulfilled.
We could say co-governance doesn’t work, throw it out, and revert to [dominating] hierarchy. Or we could stay committed to a vision that creating a better system is possible and navigate this terrain with unprecedented creativity.
Converting to co-governance is like taking the training wheels off a bike. Suddenly we have to consciously and responsively balance all sorts of factors; factors that we hadn’t even realized were previously being taken care of by an apparatus that was as limiting as it was supportive.
As we wobble along, trying to make our visions real, there are a few common mistakes that folks are making. Hopefully, by naming them, we can come to understand them not as reasons to reject co-governance, but rather as the terrain of the emerging frontier in co-governance practice. And hopefully, by embracing the opportunities for growth they represent, we can help each other navigate them more skillfully.
In this series on co-governance, we explore three common mistakes organizations who wish to implement a co-governance structure make including: Letting informal hierarchies dominate, Throwing support out with structure, and, Avoiding authenticity and conflict. The final installment of the series discusses some of the tools Harmonize provides to organizations to skillfully avoid these pitfalls.
Pitfall #1: We Let Informal Hierarchies Dominate
Power is complicated. It doesn’t just reside in the people with formal roles and titles. So eliminating formal power hierarchies doesn’t actually eliminate the other forms of hierarchies that can exclude, coerce, or dominate your organization.
You might get rid of the role of CEO, but then witness a small group of people build an alliance and subvert the activities of someone they view as a threat. Or you might invite everyone to participate in the projects they feel called to, but they watch as some folks do not join projects because the people currently in the project create an unwelcoming environment.
In many circumstances, these dynamics of power and exclusion will mirror the larger social trends in our societies. This can result in folks with privileges such as wealth, formal education, maleness, able-bodiedness, whiteness, etc. wielding unwarranted power in the organization. In other circumstances, the hierarchies might occur along other lines such as social like-ability, charisma, or access to information. More often than not, it will be a combination of the two.
There is an irony that formal hierarchy, while often sanctioning and normalizing expressions of identity-based exclusion in the name of meritocracy, does provide the service of making power structures more visible so that we can at least critique and advocate. When we remove these roles, the hierarchies can continue to express in more subtle ways that call for more subtle interventions. We can’t just say “screw the boss,” we have to get a keener insight into how power and exclusion actually work so that we can create new realities. Replacing formal hierarchy with co-governance doesn’t fully transform the dynamics of hierarchy and exclusion, it just creates more opportunities for the transformation of these dynamics. It takes more than a new org chart to make the transformation real.
The basic thing to keep in mind is that if you don’t plan for the power relationships that you want, you will unconsciously reproduce the power relationships of the culture you inherited. One article criticizing a struggle co-governed organization characterized the issue perfectly:
“There is actually a hidden layer of powerful management structure in the company,” [...] which made it feel “a lot like high school”. [It became a] neo-feudal workplace culture of powerful barons who ruthlessly exercise their whims over temporary favorites, then turn on them during the next “headcount reduction” exercise.”
This group tried to create an equal playing field, but people acted exactly the way their previous social environments trained them to. Those of us socialized in the United States (and elsewhere) are exposed to lots of pressure to use dominance, coercion, and competition as our pathways to material security and personal worth. In the absence of a structure that encourages us to act to the contrary, we will continue to play out these patterns.
People don’t show up to the co-governance adventure as blank slates. We show up with the beliefs, assumptions, identities, behaviors, communication, bodies, and cultures that we inherited from our previous experiences. This previous experience trained us to exist within the very systems we are now trying to transcend. It’s not surprising that we recreate feudal dynamics, the assumptions of feudalism are still deeply embedded in our culture. It’s not surprising we act according to the developmental level of adolescents, our education system is designed to make us effective workers, not mature, holistic, self-aware adults.
The solution is to design systems that transform existing exclusionary hierarchies. This isn’t the same as designing a system that has no hierarchy in theory. The system needs to be responsive to the cultural and social hierarchies that will naturally emerge. It needs to increase participants’ awareness of these personal and interpersonal dynamics and how we all are liable to reproduce them. It needs to intentionally and transparently distribute power in ways that account for these human tendencies. It needs to help us hold each other genuinely accountable to live in a new way with each other. This isn’t easy, we don’t have models for how to fully relate to each other as equals.
