Quick Summary

What we have been calling so far since launching The Beyond Hierarchy Project is evolving itself — with a broader frame and new name: Beyond The Machine. "Beyond hierarchy" names one structure we need to move past. "Beyond the machine" names the entire paradigm: the mechanistic worldview that treats organisations as things to be designed, engineered, and controlled — whether from above or from within. When we let go of the machine metaphor, something else becomes possible — not a better-designed organisation, but a living system that can sense, respond, and evolve in an adaptive relationship with its environment.

In this article:

Why the name no longer fits

Over the past six months of writing these articles, conversations with peer practitioners and leaders doing this work in real organisations, and reflecting on my own thirty years of practice, something has shifted. I've been looking at what I've seen actually hold in organisations over time, and what quietly unravels. What makes transformation stick, and what turns out to have been rearranging the furniture.

One of the things that's become clearer is that hierarchy itself is more nuanced than a simple "move beyond it" framing allows. As Luke Kemp presents in Goliath's Curse, hierarchy is one of the defining characteristics of human civilisation — it has been with us for millennia, long before the Enlightenment, long before anyone thought of organisations as machines. Kemp traces it to the emergence of storable, lootable resources — the moment human groups had something worth concentrating power around. And biological systems have their own natural hierarchies or "holarchies," which frameworks like Holacracy and biomimicry draw on. Some version of hierarchy will probably always show up in how humans organise.

But there's an important distinction to make. Hierarchy as a broad organising principle is ancient. Management hierarchy — the specific form where authority flows downward through a chain of command, where the job of leadership is to predict, plan, and control, where people are treated as resources to be allocated — is a product of the mechanical worldview. It emerged alongside industrialisation, scientific management, and the application of Enlightenment engineering logic to human work.

That's the hierarchy the Beyond Hierarchy Project was always really challenging. Not hierarchy itself, but the particular form of it produced by a particular paradigm. I knew that at some level. But writing these articles, having the conversations, and reflecting on thirty years of my own practice made it impossible to ignore. The name needed to change.

And for some of us, there's a quieter sense that the opportunity reaches further still. That what we're feeling our way toward isn't just better structures to replace the management hierarchy, but new ways of being, seeing, working, and living together that go beyond the ancient dominator pattern itself. I don't want to overclaim what that looks like — most of us don't yet know. But I want to be honest that the aspiration is there, and that part of this work is creating the conditions where we can find out.

The deeper issue isn't hierarchy as a structure. It's the broader paradigm within which management hierarchy sits: a mechanistic worldview that shapes how we think about organisations at the most fundamental level.

The machine paradigm

I first encountered this idea — that we see organisations as machines — reading Gareth Morgan's Images of Organization during my MSc in Management Development in 1999. Morgan mapped the metaphors we carry without realising it: organisations as machines, as organisms, as brains, as cultures, as political systems. The machine metaphor was the one that stopped me. Not because it was wrong, but because it was so deeply embedded that most people couldn't see it operating in their own thinking. Including me, even after completing a degree in Social Philosophy.

Twenty-six years later, I'm still finding new layers to how it shapes everything — and I'm not alone. Mark Eddleston, in his New Ways of Working series, has been doing rigorous work tracing how this linear, mechanistic paradigm continues to underpin mainstream management thinking — and why organisational development efforts keep failing as a result. His argument that we need a genuine paradigm shift, not just new tools applied within the old paradigm, runs parallel to what I'm describing here.

The logic is everywhere. We talk about organisational design. We engineer processes. We look for the levers of change. When something breaks, we diagnose the faulty component and fix or replace it. This isn't a quirk of management language. It's an inheritance from the mainstream modernist worldview — the mechanical universe of the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment. This worldview gave us extraordinary things. But when we apply it to human systems, it reaches its limits in ways that most of us can feel but struggle to name.

And the metaphor runs so deep that even when we try to move beyond hierarchy, we often do it with machine logic. We design a flatter structure. We build a culture of psychological safety as though it were a feature to be installed. The architect moves from the boardroom to the workshop floor, but the paradigm doesn't change.

Then we're surprised when it doesn't hold.

That's not a failure of execution. That's the machine paradigm reaching its limits.

What opens up

So what happens when you let go of the blueprint — not just the top-down version, but the whole logic of designing and engineering organisations?

The most durable transformations come when people within a system develop the capacity to perceive and respond to what's actually happening — for themselves, not because it's been imposed or diagnosed from the outside. When a team learns to notice its own patterns — not because a consultant pointed them out, but because the people in the team have learned to see them — something fundamentally different is at work. That's not a machine being redesigned. That's a living system developing new perception.

Three dimensions carry the core of this shift. The practices of Holacracy — explicit roles, distributed authority, governance that evolves through tension processing — create structural conditions for something alive to happen. Relational infrastructure — the web of trust, honest communication, and genuine connection between people — is what makes structural clarity actually function. And developmental readiness — where people actually are in their capacity to hold complexity, share power, and work with emergence — determines whether any of these practices will land or bounce off.

When you hold all three together, you're no longer designing a machine. You're tending a living system.

Beyond The Machine

So The Beyond Hierarchy Project is becoming Beyond The Machine.

The subtitle: From Trying to Fix Organisations to Evolving Living Systems.

"Beyond hierarchy" was always going to be a starting point, not a destination. It named what we needed to leave behind. "Beyond the machine" names the deeper assumption — and points toward what becomes possible when we let go of it.

None of this is easy. There are no single answers, simple solutions, or silver-bullet frameworks. Reality is messy, and this work is fundamentally about opening up to that reality rather than trying to tidy it away. It means sitting with more uncertainty than most of us are comfortable with. It means trusting processes you can't fully control. It means being willing to be changed by the work, not just to change others through it.

But if you've been sensing that something fundamental needs to shift — that better engineering isn't the answer — then you already know this. You've probably tried it. You've probably found that it helps for a while and then the old patterns reassert themselves.

This is where the work begins.

What's coming next

We'll continue with the articles, and are introducing a new rhythm: experiments you can try in your own team, followed by monthly webinars where we share what we noticed. Yes, experiments — a word borrowed from the very paradigm we're questioning. But the human version is simpler: try something, notice what happens, talk about it together.

At Evolving Organisation and Bjärkan, we have a set of offerings that are expressions of the ideas in this article. Evolving Collective Leadership builds relational capacity online. Bjärkan provides the container where that work meets land, body, and sustained time together. And Beyond The Machine continues the weekly conversation about what all of this means in practice.

Evolving Collective Leadership — Founding Cohort (starts 14 April)

Amina Knowlan from the Matrix Leadership Institute and I have spent the past year developing a programme that addresses the relational dimension of collective leadership — the dimension that most organisational change efforts skip entirely. The founding cohort launches in April with a 33% discount for those willing to help us shape it. Seven live sessions over four months, online, focused on the practices that transform how groups actually function together.

Learn more about Evolving Collective Leadership →

Summer at Bjärkan, northern Sweden

In Jämtland, northern Sweden, my wife Justine and I run the Bjärkan Resilience Project — a place where the work of evolving living systems meets actual living systems: forest, lake, long summer light, and the challenge of building something real together. This summer we're running four events:

Volunteer Community Gathering (30 June – 11 July) — Twelve days of shared work and communal living. Land care, building, forestry, sauna, lake swims, and the experience of what community actually feels like when you're doing something real together.

The Gathering: A Summer Retreat (17–23 July) — A six-night retreat at the wild edge, rooted in systemic ritual, constellations, embodiment, and nature connection. Held by Justine.

Meeting at the Threshold (19–29 August) — A ten-day residential training in resilience skills for uncertain times. Through shared learning and a hands-on building project, we explore how to meet these times together.

Matrix Leadership Essentials (2–9 September) — Eight days of residential training in relational leadership, co-facilitated by Amina Knowlan and me. This is where the relational infrastructure work goes deep.

Explore the full summer programme at bjarkan.org →