🔻 Is The Beyond Hierarchy Project for You? 🫵

If you feel like you are trying to rebuild your boat, whilst sailing in it, in the middle of a storm, when your navigation equipment is broken.

The Beyond Hierarchy Project is for people who want to make changes to how we work together, live, and navigate the increasingly rapid changes in this world. This means in some kind of collective of humans, whether it be a group/ team/ organisation/ institution/ community/ family or any other collection. This article helps you identify which stage you and your ‘collective of humans’ are at in your journey beyond hierarchy, and what this project will provide for you, at whatever stage you are at. For the sake of simplicity, I’ll just refer to them as team/organisation, but the same applies to all the other contexts too.

Shifting any collection of humans beyond hierarchy is a multi-layered adventure, a deep journey which cannot be done overnight. It’s especially challenging because you need to make these changes whilst getting on with the day job. Transformation is needed in the following domains:

• Assumptions, beliefs, stories, and mindsets about who we are and how we work together.

• Habits and behaviours about how we communicate, engage with, and interact with each other.

• The unspoken norms and shared beliefs that make up our culture of ‘this is how things are done around here’.

• Formal explicit structures, systems, and processes for how things work in our team/organisation.

There’s no single program, intervention or methodology that can do all of these things. I have not found a single answer or silver bullet in over 30 years of working in this field. Beware of people peddling ‘The Answer’. I should know, I tried it for years, thinking I had the answer. But however good any particular tool or method, it can’t do the whole job. Just like you can’t have a single tool to do everything to build a house. It is a transformational journey that takes time, with many different stages and milestones along the way. Below, I lay out one way of describing that journey.

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The Beyond Hierarchy Project has an ambitious mission to provide insights,resources, and signposts to support people and teams at every stage. Do you recognise where you or your team/organisation are? Are you:

1. Just Curious: you sense there’s something wrong with the way things are working and that a better way must be possible, and you are open to finding out and trying new ways. This project will reassure you that you are not alone and that what you are experiencing is common, help you understand more about what’s going on in your team and give simple instructions on things you can start testing.

2. Experimenting: you’ve started testing new ways of working, some things are working well, others not; and you realise it’s not as easy as you thought, and you need help. This project will provide guidance on running and evaluating your experiments, help you determine if you are ready to proceed, and assist in getting your team on board, offering a roadmap of the possible journeys ahead.

3. Ready to Start a Learning Journey: you believe that new ways of working can add value to your team/organisation, recognise that it needs an investment of time/effort/money, and so are ready to commit to a learning journey to introduce them into your team. This project will help you determine the best way to embark on a journey that suits your current situation and that of your team or organisation.

4. Needing to Embed New Practices: you have started implementing new ways of working in your team, but they are not sticking, and people are reverting to their old, familiar ways of doing things. This project will provide tips, resources and signposts for support to help you make this stuff stick.

5. Wanting to Deepen your Practices: you have implemented new ways of working, and they are sticking. However, it seems superficial, and you feel that your team is not fully realising the potential of what’s possible. This project will help you deepen the transformations beyond superficial behaviours with more advanced tips, resources and signposts for support.

6. Ready to Expand & Mature your Practice: you have implemented new ways of working, they are sticking, and you feel you are using them fully in the areas where you have implemented them- and now you need to expand into other areas of your work, like HR, Compensation, Performance Reviews, Budgeting processes and other legacy functions which have not yet changed. This project will provide tips, resources, and signposts for support in expanding these new ways of working into other areas that have not yet been transformed.

7. Or are you a coach, consultant, or trainer supporting others, either within your own organisation or externally across multiple organisations? This project will… well… support your professional practice by providing insights and examples on all of the above.

What’s missing? Fill in this form to tell us what stage you are at, what’s missing from the stages, or what you need.

Right, so that’s it for my short intro info about The Beyond Hierarchy Project. Next up, in a few days, we'll get going with the first proper article.