Light Leadership
The Challenge
While most entrepreneurs and start up teams focus their effort on external goals like securing and maintaining funding, systematizing sales and marketing, and carving out market share, all too often it’s the internal people struggles that end up proving to be their biggest barrier to success.
The new venture that started with passion, excitement and energy turns into a source of emotional tensions, relationship breakdowns and suffocating stress. Even progressive leaders of the world’s most innovative start-ups are still hitting up against the same age-old road blocks of internal power struggles, clashing personalities, communication breakdowns and emotional eruptions, which ultimately erodes the passion and commitment needed to fuel the teams’ guiding vision.
Whether its infighting amongst the founding team, or the dilution of culture that happens through scaling, few start ups avoid the typical organizational fractures and conflicts that lead to structural failure. The beauty of the vision that originally nourished their efforts devolves into resentful participation, degraded creativity, disruption of team synergy and ultimately dilutes the actualization of the vision and the joy of the work.
The Opportunity
Whilst the current best practices designed to evolve corporate DNA such as B Corp and Holacracy have sought to address some of the deeper issues companies face by moving companies beyond the pure profit motive and beginning to distribute leadership and power across the people within the organization, they still heavily rely on mechanistic principles, measuring and categorizing. Until now, none have approached the problem with the simple yet game-changing goal of committing to inspiring, capturing, and productively and powerfully developing, the magic of all that makes us human. The Transformation Agency has one mission: to evolve business to actualize the highest individual and collective human potential. They know that a properly designed company structure with self-reinforcing cultural norms that operationalize shared values has the power to transform the experience of work and the impact of business.
Imagine becoming a more in-tune, self-expressed, actualized version of yourself through your contribution and participation in your team, as you navigate through the pressures and intensity that naturally come with a business growing from the start-up phase through to the full expression of the vision. Imagine being professionally supported in navigating the full spectrum of human experiences from challenging and daunting to joyful and creative, all within the normal structure of the work space and work week. It would take a special company with everything thought through from how to harmonize work styles, to how to democratically make decisions and distribute profits, to how to resolve conflict such that individuals and teams grow stronger. This is Transformation Agency thinking.
The Transformative Journey
The Transformation Agency DNA Values
Beyond a step-by-step framework or a ‘cut and paste’ operating agreement, The Transformation Agency curates a highly transformative journey where every participant and the company as a whole evolves. You’ll hone your intentions and ensure your team, culture and operations are aligned now and into the future to activate your greatest asset: your individual energy/passion and collective spirit.
Light Leadership Phase I: The DNA
The Transformation Agency will introduce you to their unique lens on the corporate organism and help you translate the niche heart and soul of what your company stands for, its values DNA. This will serve as the blueprint for your organizational structure, culture, business model, operations and outcomes.
Light Leadership Phase II: The Skeleton
This DNA provides the roadmap for the relational structure that serves as the bones of your cultural organism. The prioritization of understanding and evolving this relational lattice is the heart of what sets Light Leadership apart. The exploration begins with understanding how individuals relate to themselves and others. Each team member will be supported in articulating their unique contributions, duties and perspectives. This becomes the declaration of their perspective lens, simple called lens going forward. They also are guided to experience and understand how their lens currently relates to other’s lenses and opportunities to optimize naturally emerge.
By focusing on lenses instead of roles, worth and identity are separated from job particulars allowing smoother relating as well as more rapid evolution of perspectives. The lens for each team member then maps onto the specialized facets of a geometry that the Transformation Agency is positioning as the new gold standard in corporate governance.
Instead of a hierarchy, or even a flat org chart approach, this is a 3D crystalline configuration that ensure no one is positioned above or below others. Rather, all are interconnected such that anyone can rise to leadership or easily cluster around a shared purpose as needed to operationalize the collective vision. The result is fluid, distributed power across the organization that maintains enough structure for efficiency and collaboration. The fractal nature allows the organization to fluidly scale all the while propagating the DNA at all levels. This is the essence of the Light Leadership model.
Traditional Org Chart
Roles turn into Lenses
Lenses rearrange out of the hierarchy
lenses rearrange into sphere formation
people shine their perspectives into the sphere through the lenses
Light Leadership Phase III: The Living Organism
Since the individual and the collective are in a constant dialectic expression of the DNA, this phase interweaves with Phase II. Simultaneous to the articulation and configuration of the relational lattice is the exploration of operations, governance and policies that brings the corporate organism to life. These are collectively called the Constitution and can function as a highly evolved Operating Agreement that captures the shared understanding of the agreed upon rules of engagement that ultimately express the company DNA at all levels.
Here are some samples of the types of innovative elements developed by the Agency:
○ Duty of Prioritization (meritocracy)
○ Lens Firing
○ Expansion Thresholds
○ Authority to Act
○ Rip-Cord Process
○ Meetings – flip classroom pedegogy
○ Container Decision Making
○ Dynamic Payment - Base pay to eliminate scarcity, peer review for incentive pay
○ Powerless President
○ Sweat Lodge Meetings
○ Ratchetting
The Result: A Better You, A Better Company, A Better World
If you’ve ever played a fun and addictive board game like Settlers of Catan, you’ll know that reading the manual can’t even touch the magic of playing. Similarly, beyond this discussion of structure lies the magic of unlocking individual and collective human potential.
Light Leadership:
• Focuses on relational energetics cultivating transparency, personal ownership, and constructive conflict resolution to harmonize human dynamics.
• Spreads responsibility, risk, and rewards over a wider surface area creating greater organizational stability and more individual freedom.
• Eliminates hierarchy including having a boss, having to be a boss, promotion processes, etc.
• Introduces social systems naturally aligned to help individuals participate with their whole selves without having to leave parts of their lives behind.
• Fosters adaptive self-organization around shared purpose and values that remain encoded through scaling.
• Allows rapid responsiveness to changing inner and external circumstances.
• Replaces current employment and entrepreneurial models with agile, evolutionary and responsive ownership models that foster engagement and opportunities for all participants.
• Removes structural confinements so humans can evolve to higher and higher degrees of expression, innovation, fulfillment and consciousness.
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