Quick Summary

Writing from the frozen north of Sweden, I explore a common trap in the shift beyond hierarchy: the belief that we've found the answer. "Now we're doing self-managed teams, so hierarchy is gone." But the lived reality is messier—all three organising patterns (hierarchy, collaborative, and agile) are usually present simultaneously. Drawing on our experience running events at the Bjärkan Resilience Project in Sweden, where this tension surfaced directly, I propose a different approach: developing the capacity to recognise which pattern is active and choose what's the best fit for each situation, rather than defending a single model. And conclude with an invitation to four residential events in Sweden this summer to experience some of this live. Here's what's included:

From ’I’ve Got THE Answer’ to ‘What’s the Best Fit?’

In Goliath's Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse, Luke Kemp eloquently describes a recurring pattern of homo sapiens over hundreds of thousands of years that seems to be a feature of how we've outlived all other forms of human: keeping moving and adapting when conditions call for it. And, of the latest version of this pattern over the last ten thousand years since sapiens settled, he writes:

…departing an empire that is deteriorating is not necessarily a bad thing. It is, in many ways, an entirely normal and sensible adaptation.

This is somewhat comforting to me and my wife, who regularly question our decision to ‘decentralise’ our lives and move to the edge of civilisation in the wilderness—amongst the forests and lakes of northern Sweden bordering the Norwegian mountains—to set up this Resilience Project called Bjärkan. I’ll come back to this place, our decision and our questioning later...

As I write this, I'm deep in wintering, on this edge. Unplugging, slowing down, dropping into the serene stillness, deep darkness and exquisite light of the frozen north. There's space here for reflection that gets crowded out in busier seasons.

One of the things I've been reflecting on is one of my favourite topics, a very human problem: we often think we're right about things. And when others don't agree, it can cause problems.

This shows up everywhere. In our relationships. In our families. In our teams and organisations. We get into conflict. We get divided. We dig into our positions and stop listening to each other, and can get stuck.

I wrote about this back in Article #4 about my inner dictator—that part of me that's convinced I have ‘the answer’ and just needs everyone else to get on board. It's not a flattering self-portrait, but I suspect it's familiar to many of us.

We can see this dynamic playing out everywhere in our increasingly polarised world. In politics. On social media. In many public conversations where people with different views encounter each other. Especially when people are under stress or pressure this common pattern shows up: I'm right, you're wrong.

Here I am focussing on how this shows up in the work of moving beyond traditional hierarchy in the world of business and organisations.

1. One of the Ways 'I've Got THE Answer' Shows Up Beyond Hierarchy

Thanks to Ted Rau for capturing this beautifully in his recent joke about:

Three consultants walk into a forest: a management consultant, a self-management consultant and a coop consultant... 🤭

Same forest. Three different and competing realities. And probably each one convinced they're seeing it correctly, and the others are wrong.

Back in 2015, I published a series of short, animated, fun videos called Self-Organising Beyond Hierarchy, in which I identified and compared these three fundamental patterns of how groups organise themselves, as expressions of three different mindsets:

• Pattern 1: Hierarchy — Top-down authority, clear chains of command, predict and control. Someone at the top decides and delegates downward.

• Pattern 2: Collaborative/Cooperative — Flat structures, consensus or consent-based decision-making, shared values, balancing multiple perspectives. The group decides together.

• Pattern 3: Agile/Distributed — Self-managing teams with distributed authority in clearly defined roles. People sense and respond to their environment. Holacracy is one example of this approach.

The video series explores how these patterns manifest across different domains of organisational life—purpose, strategy, operations, power, decision-making, and more. I conclude each video by acknowledging that while these are useful models, they are abstract, and the lived reality in organisations is always messier. Rather, it's often a complex, dynamic mix of all three patterns operating simultaneously, shifting depending on context, task, and moment.

Even though these are 11 years old, the core insight still holds. Lisa Gill made a similar point recently, although from a slighty different angle, when she wrote that:

"The modern organisation is a mix of hierarchy and pockets of progressiveness.”

from her interview with Erik Korsvik Østergaard, talking about "teal dots in an orange world" and navigating the reality that organisations are never purely one thing.

And just to add to the complexity, I would suggest that these three patterns are driven from different domains: hierarchy is the legacy structure, human values are driving a more cooperative approach, and the environment is requiring more agile responses with more dynamic steering.

2. The Problem This Causes

The difficulty is that many of us humans (especially perhaps the male of the species), don't like mess. We like simplicity. We like to fit things into neat boxes. It feels cleaner. More manageable. More... right.

And this connects back to where I started: the conviction that I have the answer.

"This is the solution to our organisational problems. We just need to do this thing." The silver bullet syndrome. "Now we're doing cooperative management." "Now we're doing self-managed teams." "Now we're using Holacracy."

The problem with thinking you have the answer is that it often includes an implicit assumption: that the other ways of doing things are no longer present, because they've been replaced by this new approach.

"We've moved to consent-based decision-making, so we're not doing top-down anymore."

"We’ve replaced hierarchy with self-managed teams."

But this is oversimplistic and gives a false picture. It ignores the reality that all three patterns are probably still present, showing up in different domains, different moments, different relationships. And it causes real problems when we dismiss what's actually there because it doesn't fit our model of what we think should be there. Let me show you what this looks like in practice.

3. An Example from our Resilience Project

Here’s an example from our own experience of running events here at Bjärkan.

The Bjärkan Resilience Project is a place my wife, Justine Corrie and I are having a wonderful adventure developing in Jämtland, northern Sweden—a remote wilderness location where we host in-person events such as trainings, retreats and volunteer community camps, around the theme of how we can adapt to these unstable times with resilience, restoring our connections with nature, regenerative approaches and learning to rebuild community.

In most of these events, all three organising patterns are present.

• My wife and I hold hierarchical authority as stewards of the land—we legally own it, we set the baseline rules for safety and how the space is used. That's Pattern 1, and it's appropriate. Someone has to be responsible for the physical infrastructure and space.

• When participants arrive, and we become a temporary community—cooking together, sharing meals, deciding how to spend unstructured time—we operate more collaboratively. We check in as a group. We make space for different voices. That's Pattern 2.

• For some hands-on, practical work on the project that we include in these events, we often use more agile approaches, where people take initiative within their projects with some distributed authority. That's Pattern 3. And sometimes, of course, there's an element of hierarchy where we, as owners, need to make the call on how certain things go with work on the buildings and land.

• When we run structured training sessions, they can include all 3 patterns. We intentionally design them to use the pattern that best fits our training objectives.

All three. All present. All appropriate in their contexts.

But here's what happened: during one of our daily stand-up meetings, when we were organising work and project groups for the day, one participant—Marc—made an observation: "Hey, I thought we were being collaborative here, but there's still some hierarchy showing up!"

It was a good insight. And it brought up something important and sparked a fruitful conversation.

And after the event, we received feedback that felt more pointed and went something like: "All the old usual hierarchical stuff is still there. It feels like a farce because we're supposed to be cooperative and collaborative."

This is exactly the problem I'm describing. When we believe we've adopted the answer—"we're cooperative now"—and then encounter evidence that other patterns are still present, it can feel like betrayal. Like something's wrong. Like someone's not walking the talk.

But nothing was wrong. All three patterns were there. They were supposed to be there. The problem wasn't the reality—it was the expectation that reality would be simpler than it actually is.

4. A Different Approach

So what's the alternative to the "I have the answer" mindset?

Accept the mess (Not that I am saying this is THE ANSWER to those who think that they have THE ANSWER!).

Rather than trying to simplify everything into one approach, one model, one right answer, we can develop a different kind of capacity:

1. Understand those three patterns well enough to recognise them

2. Sense which pattern is showing up in any given moment—which one is being activated or enacted

3. Identify and name the pattern that's present, so you can talk about it explicitly

4. Reflect and choose which pattern is actually the best fit for what's happening right now

5. Lead or act with that pattern consciously

This requires flexibility of perspective and behaviour—the ability to shift between modes depending on what the situation calls for. This can be seen as an evolution of Situational Leadership theory, as well as what Ichak Adizes discusses in his book Managing Corporate Lifecycles: matching leadership and management styles to an organisation's developmental maturity. But it's more than a technique. It's a shift in mindset and a capacity to develop.

Instead of "I have the answer," it becomes: "I can recognise what's happening and choose an appropriate response."

Instead of forcing reality into a neat box, we develop the capacity to work with reality as it is (as Buddhists say).

Here's the thing: going "beyond hierarchy" doesn't mean getting rid of it. It means giving hierarchy its rightful place alongside the other patterns—and choosing consciously rather than defaulting unconsciously. We may never be completely beyond hierarchy in our lifetimes. But we can develop the capacity to recognise when it's serving us and when something else would be a better fit.

Perhaps the honest strapline/explainer for The Beyond Hierarchy Project should really be: "Not completely beyond just yet—but working towards it, one pattern at a time." but that's not very catchy!

5. So What Difference Does This Make?

If you can develop this capacity—if you can apply it at work—it changes what's possible.

You can show up differently. You can enact and lead with the pattern that's the best fit for any situation, rather than defaulting to one approach regardless of context.

You can open up new conversations. When you can name the patterns, you can talk explicitly about how things are working in your team. "I notice we're trying to get consensus on this, but I wonder if it would work better if someone just made the call- like the person with the accountability for this." That's pattern recognition in action. (And, if there isn’t clarity about who does ‘have accountability for this’, that’s another pattern that we deal with in our Team Clarity & Faster Decision-Making program.)

You can make sense of apparent contradictions. For example, in a business or organisation, it might be that:

• With regard to ownership and equity, there's a top-down hierarchy—the owners have certain decision rights that come with ownership. That's Pattern 1.

• In the relational space—hanging out together, showing up as colleagues and friends, tribe space—you make decisions collaboratively about how you want to work together and show up in your relationships with each other as people. That's Pattern 2.

• In your operational work—projects, roles, day-to-day execution—you might operate as self-managing teams with distributed authority in clearly defined roles. That's Pattern 3.

• And there are also likely some decisions that to be made together, which is more in Pattern 2. No problem, as long as you can be clear about what the decision-making process is.

All three patterns are there. They coexist. And when you can name them, you can stop feeling confused or betrayed when hierarchy shows up in a "self-managing" organisation, or when consent or ‘no objections’ are needed for certain operational decisions in an "agile" team.

The patterns become tools you can reach for, rather than identities you have to defend.

Knowing this intellectually is one thing. Developing the capacity to recognise patterns in real-time is another. Look out for a forthcoming article with details of an experiment you can run to test some of this out for yourself to see if/how it works… 👀

6. 🪧 SIGNPOST: Experience This Live at the Edge of Civilisation

I share these summer events with you because they are relevant to the core of this Beyond Hierarchy Project, and offer an opportunity to move from reading to experiencing some of this stuff live, deep in nature, away from the daily grind.

Beyond the learning, there's something about being here that's hard to describe until you experience it. You really are at the edge of civilisation, about 200 miles south of the Arctic Circle. The pace slows down. You eat well. You're surrounded by thoughtful people asking similar questions. The forests and lakes and mountains do something to you that a conference room never can.

Here are the four events we are running here this summer, and in three of them (not the retreat), there’s the opportunity for experiencing this stuff live in action with us.

Volunteer Community Gathering (June 30–July 11, 2026) A 12-day work exchange combining land care, building, and forestry with communal living—shared meals, sauna, lake swims, and the long light of high summer. This is hands-on kinship, not a retreat.

The Gathering: A Summer Retreat at The Wild Edge (July 17–23, 2026) A six-night retreat rooted in systemic ritual, embodiment, and nature-based connection, exploring vitality, expression, and belonging within the more-than-human world.

Meeting at The Threshold: Resilience Skills for Uncertain Times (August 19–29, 2026) A 10-day residential training combining shared learning with a three-day hands-on building project, developing inner, relational, and community capacities for navigating uncertain times.

Matrix Leadership Essentials: Building Groups & Teams as Living Systems (September 2-9, 2026) An 8-day residential training in relational leadership and collaborative team dynamics, using the Matrix Essentials™ framework to build the communication skills that transform groups into adaptive, self-organising living systems.

See more details for all events here.

Maybe see you here this summer?