How to predict the success of self-management in your organisation?

How to centralize the customer, break silos and create upward team dynamics? What level of collaborative intelligence should you aim for?

These and many other questions will be answered 22nd March from 18.30h to 22.00h at Urban City, Ankerrui 9, 2000 Antwerpen where The Argonauts organise an info session on the future of work in cooperation with Participium, Vivaldis and Unizo.

You’ll learn how to predict the success of self-managament in your organisation, and how to establish feedback mechanisms for self- management: flexible planning mechanisms and dashboards.

More info and registration

 

Practical information

• Date: 22nd March 18u30-22u00
• Venue: Urban City – Ankerrui 9, 2000Antwerpen
• Speakers:
  • Patrick Vanbrabandt – CEO Carya Group
  • Raf Van Den Plas – Manager  X-Plus Software
  • Prof. Jan De Visch
• Registration: €50

We are looking for a business leader (m/f) for Funky & C°

About Funky & C°

Funky & C° is on the drawing board, and we are looking for a business leader who wants to help us design, create, and start Funky & C°, the final corner stone of our “Funky” branch of companies.

Funky & C° wants to help services-focused companies, that are now introducing new ways of organizing and structuring their operations. Funky & C° wants to develop the software tools, dashboards, and cockpits that are required to allow teams to self-steer. Todays preferred sectors for Funky & C° are engineering & architecture, ICT, consulting, legal & finance, R&D services, marketing services — but of course, while drafting the business plan, we might discover that there are better market segments.

What’s so new? This kind of self-steering support software is far away from the classic ERP systems. That’s why a lot of modern companies are now basing their internal information flows on Excel. We want to provide them with much much better tools, and gradually create our own portfolio of software products that are needed for the self-steering organizations of tomorrow.

So now, we are looking for someone who wants to take the lead from the very early stage of the creation of this company.

Could that be you?

Do you want to start from (almost) scratch? Do you have the guts, the experience, the attitude, and the skills to create and run a venture and make our joint vision come true? The business leader of Funky & C° is not standing alone. He or she reports to the investment company (Participium), and is supported by our company creator Jan Lagast to build a great services team and design a future-oriented software portfolio.

We have two products already in another company of the Funky branch, and that’s where we also have a some early-stage clients. This allows you to scale-up much faster and run positive on a shorter term, than you would be able with a start-from-totally-zero start-up. Even more, we have the network to get in touch with self-steering companies, from day one, and there is Forte, that is also addressing your potential clients with a portfolio of advisory services that urge many companies to switch to self-steering mode.

About the role of the business leader

The business leader will first help us design the business plan, check the market, and assemble the first team. After the creation of the company, he or she ensures the Funky & C° potential reaches the clients and keeps our small team focused on making the promises come true. After a while, the business leader will hire more commercial people (in more countries), grow the team, and imply more and more partners to get more and more clients motivated. But first, we want you to develop a battle plan together with us and start rolling up the sleeves.

Are you an inspiring leader or a classic manager?

Our investors at Participium are promoting self-steering organizations. So they want the company Funky & C° to be organized accordingly, and proof that self-steering brings results. That means there is no classic hierarchy, no command & control structure, no boss-to-boss-to-boss reporting. We want the individual co-worker to be a team player and understand his or her responsibility in relation to the purpose of Funky & C° – leading to all of the collaborators to love their work.

Do you have the right experience?

You’d have to feel at ease with the combination of advisory services and IT project management in a services and knowledge worker business environment. You’d better also love adopting modern technologies of the web, such as web services, blockchain, and APIs. We need a hands-on start-up mentality at first, but beware, we also need you to grow the team and the business towards financial profit on a short term.

Sounds interesting? Get in touch with paul.indekeu [at] participium.com.

My search for participation and a self-steering organizational structure

Today, prof. Jan De Visch has given me the opportunity to tell my own story. My 50 years of searching. Searching for the right company structure to make people love their work. It has not been an easy search. Today, it seems bon ton to dislike Taylor and classic company hierarchies, but that was not the case when I started my business experience.

Over the years, I have been working on many of the levels of maturity that are described by Frederic Laloux in his book “reinventing organizations”. Red — the maturity level of the medieval lord who is the dominant boss of a group of power seekers — is great when you need a high quality and a high control over a very small team. Great for fast start-up, yet weak for scaling-up. That’s when the “amber” level can be much more successful. In amber, everyone has a rank because he or she got to that rank. Great for creating large churches and armies, but not great for output-driven organizations. We tried some of that by allocating people to a rank, but soon we discovered there were more ranks than people. Orange works better for knowledge workers, since that level rewards people for their merits. This is thé level for Industry 3.0 companies in which bosses design the organization and have workers do the job that was designed for them. Not a great system for knowledge work, though. The boss cannot be everywhere controlling everyone’s work. We experimented with ‘green’, by introducing co-ownership and having people feel they own part of the business. That worked much better. We had our people take responsibilities over the client’s results and take team responsibilities over the long term. But, when times were bad or changes were needed, this level of maturity stalls the company. So, I almost went back to “red” out of frustration, until I read about the color “teal”. And that’s where I felt back on track. This is the organizational concept that we are now looking into. And that’s why the journey organized by the Argonauts is so important for us.

Self-steering looks promising, but we are not there yet. We have a lot to discover, learn, and try. But what I already learned, is that there is no text-book always-right model for company organization. I also discovered self-steering is more wrongly than rightly understood. Self-steering is about getting and taking responsibility. It has nothing to do with ‘go as you please’. Although there is no daily boss or chief in a self-steering organization, for everyone from cleaning lady to general manager, there are much more people to take into account and ask for their opinion than ever before.

Forte vision creation

Today, we have the core staff of Forte in our meeting rooms. Goal is to understand the activity and added value of each team in their relationship with the market, as well as with their colleagues. Lego-expert Marc Sonnaert helps us to visualize these abstract concepts.

We learned a lot about self-management

On November 22, Jan De Visch gave a crystal-clear explanation on self-management and other new organizational forms that will become necessary as soon as Industry 4.0 breaks through. These new organizational forms put ‘learning and sharing’ in the place of ‘commanding and controlling’. The ‘we’ becomes more important than the ‘me’. And that is exactly what we have to do at Participium.

This first intro session was particularly useful. Not only because we were able to present Participium as a purpose-centric investment company, but also because we  were present with some of our managers and got inspired by Prof. Jan De Visch and the two cases from Carglass and BNP Paribas Fortis.

Away from command & control

Jan indicated that many new organizational forms are starting to see the light of day. All these new forms are based on the same basic principle: away from command & control, but with more responsibility and engagement. Self-management is not the same as ‘doing as I like’. On the contrary. Self-management means that people have to take  responsibility, reflect on what they do and how they do it, make decisions together. This means that the top of an organisation is no longer the classic top or middle management, but a coaching framework.

At Carglass, forming that coaching framework was hard job. Getting the coaches to adapt to this new mindset of coaching, rather than managing seemed very hard.  Carglass started bottom-up and now sees its figures improve drastically. BNP Paribas Fortis is a pioneer in the Belgian banking sector. They received carte blanche from France to introduce a totally new self-management concept. According to them, that is the only way to deal with the current challenges.

Fascinating things happen nowadays. Also for Participium. We are in full learning mode and are looking to introduce these new methods into our own organizations and we want to build great companies that make it pleasant to work at other companies. Those who want to participate in that adventure are always welcome for a chat.

Download Jan’s presentations: Liquid organisations and self-management

The ideal group size is 150

When building great companies where people love their jobs, it seems we cannot cross the magic number 150. “I read an article some time ago about Goretex, where all US  offices have a maximum of 150 parking spaces. Every department with more than 150 employees has to split”, Jan Lagast says.

“I was just reading in ‘De corporate tribe’ that 150 is the magic number for a maximal natural group cohesion. Several tribes in Greenland and Australia seem to consist of 150 members. Growing furhter means splitting. There is a religious that uses the same numerus clausus.”

 

Usefull information for directors, in a book that Jan  warmly recommends!

More information on De Corporate Tribe (in Dutch)

Download an extract (in Dutch)

The tilted organization at the time of emperor Augustus

And man created God (dutch titles is En de mens schiep God) by Selina O’Grady is a very interesting book. One chapter is on the metamorphosis of Rome at the time of Emperor Augustus, who managed to unite an incredibly diverse empire by introducing an emperor cult. He was clearly not a micromanager. Some interesting fragments:

“By the end of the first century BC, the empire was a patchwork of semi-autonomous cities run by wealthy, local landlords. They were brought together loosely in provinces under Roman rule. The Roman imperial administration was in fact minimal, even towards the end of the second century after Christ. There was only one Roman governor per four hundred thousand inhabitants. ”

“Partly in order to limit the power of the senators, Augustus deliberately strengthened the equestrian class by number and status and incorporated it more and more into the government of the empire. […] Augustus now appointed many Knights, especially in posts concerning the essential task of taxation. ”

“The leasing of tax collection had been a way for the Roman aristocracy and local elites to finance the costs of public life and their own system of patronage. […] Augustus appointed knights for tax collection, with the strict instructions ‘not to claim more money than the fixed amount’. These tax collectors, and even the chivalric governors whom he appointed, were given a fixed salary for the first time. The Augustan regime could thus claim that it liberated the provinces from the worst excesses of Roman exploitation. By allowing them to benefit from their own prosperity, the pax Augusta gave the provinces an incentive to remain loyal to the central authority. ”

This is very similar to a tilted organization, giving teams and people a final responsibility to be dedicated in order to give customers a concrete added value and stimulating them to achieve strong performances within the team, by offering the opportunity to reap the benefits of their work.

This book is highly recommended. ISBN 9789059778436

New book on inspiring leadership by leader Sam Furnier

After the information session led by Jan Lagast on share#square at Forte last week, Sam Furnier handed him a small booklet with an elephant on the cover. Sam is CEO of Maes Compressoren in Deinze. He recently wrote a candid book about his personal experiences as a leader, intriguingly entitled ‘The elephant in the room’. The elephant represents important things that anyone sees, but do not dare to face. With that elephant Sam introduces leadership in the first chapter as completely dedicated to introspection.

At Participium you will find the book on the guest toilet, as you might guess from the photo (Sam, that is a gigantic honor, for real). It reads very smoothly and it encourages you to think. The chapter on introspection confirms why Participium has two foremen. That first chapter says  that you have to honestly decide for yourself who you are: “I am ….” and fill in the blank. Participium founder Jan Lagast does not fill in the dots with ‘inspirational leader’, but with ‘inspirational inventor’. Because he is a better advisor than a leader.

That’s why Jan is better at ‘inventing’ new companies than at manage big companies. And that is why there are two people leading Participium: Jan, who focuses on thinking up new companies, and Herman who realizes the growth within these new companies. They even have a name for these two phases in the companies’ life: “Creating” and “Running”. They both do what they do best.

Thank you Sam, for putting it so clearly in your book.

The elephant in the room, 7 steps to inspirational leadership, Sam Furnier, Witsand Publishers, ISBN 978 94 9201 104 6.