Unlearning Obedience
Twenty years ago self-managing organizations were a bit like a friendly tax office employee - intriguing as a concept, unlikely as a practice.
Then three things happened:
It became easier for the “crazy” people to find each other.
Entrepreneurs around the world had been quietly experimenting with more human-centric, empowering ways of working - often without a shared language or awareness of others doing the same. As the world became hyper-connected, founders with unconventional ideas could finally meet, exchange and inspire others. Scientists, storytellers, and workplace rebels joined in, amplifying the movement through books and communities.
People started making recipes.
Some practitioners distilled their trial-and-error learnings into frameworks and models: Brian Robertson coined Holacracy, Ricardo Semler built the Semco Institute, and others who showed there’s method to the madness.
These were obviously not silver bullets but they helped demystify what these funky companies were doing - and made it easier for others to try it out themselves.
The world kept spinning faster.
Hierarchical structures are not the most fulfilling, but they do work (that’s why they’ve been around for so long). The problem is, they only work under specific conditions:
a) low competition
b) slow change
c) and leaders have most of the knowledge
Needless to say, those days are gone. When expertise is distributed but power is not, progress stalls and decision making suffers. So, many companies have been forced to explore alternative ways of working not for philosophical, but for purely pragmatic reasons.
Armed with curiosity, community support and org transformation consultants, more and more founders started experimenting with radical transparency, set-your-own-salary and work-how-you-want policies. But regardless of what they were trying and how far they were taking it, they all faced one problem:
Freedom is scary
Everyone says they want freedom, but when handed the keys to the castle, many get lost.
“The lion sits in a cage. The door gets open. But the lion remains in the cage”
- this metaphor, shared by one self-managing founder, captures it perfectly. We love to talk about “empowered teams,” but empowerment isn’t something you give. It’s something people must reclaim.
You can flatten hierarchies, decentralize decisions, make everything transparent and still end up with employees waiting to be told what to do - you can’t deprogram decades of conditioning with a new org chart.
Most of us learned obedience early:
At home - do as you’re told, make parents proud.
At school - follow the rules, get rewarded.
At work - don’t question authority, keep your job.
Freedom feels dangerous when you’ve spent a lifetime being praised for compliance.
Truly embracing freedom and everything that comes with it (think ownership and responsibility) requires not only systemic changes in how a company operates but also a lot of deeply personal work on the part of every single team member.
Self-management asks leaders to stop rescuing.
And it asks employees to stop hiding.
The real revolution isn’t flat org charts. It’s people remembering they can think, decide, and lead - regardless of their title.
The hidden challenge of every progressive organization is not to find a perfect structure, but to help humans unlearn obedience.
Brightroom helps companies develop the human capabilities needed to work autonomously and collaboratively in fast-changing, ambiguous environments. In this blog we explore what works (and what doesn’t) in new-work transformations through the lens of human dynamics behind structural change.
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