3 Core Capacities for Effective Freedom

A brief story of discovery

After many years of working in the field of organizational learning and development as an instructional designer, performance consultant, and talent development “expert,” I got a shocking and unexpected taste of real developmental work. It was both profoundly disruptive and one of the most valuable experiences of my life.

At the time, I was new to Carol Sanford’s community and thought I had a pretty good grasp of things. I had read all of her books. I had a finger on the pulse in my field, up to date with all the latest trends. Frederic Laloux’s recently published Reinventing Organizations had me fired up about developing radically new ways of working, free of the coercive, manipulative, controlling, soul-sucking ways of the past.

Despite being a relative newcomer to the community, I confidently volunteered to be in a “fishbowl” with Carol, where she “resourced” me while a group of other community members observed. Resourcing, in this lineage of developmental work, is a process of re-sourcing our thinking and motivation. This begins with becoming more conscious of where our current thinking and motivation come from, which is often a shock when we realize just how unconscious we’ve been.  

Carol invited me to share my plans for a new offering I was developing. I was secretly hoping for her approval. I wanted to impress her and the others there observing, with the “cutting edge” view I was convinced I had. Spoiler: it didn’t go as planned.

“What just happened?” I asked myself after the session, reeling from the shocking disruption. For a while, I was upset. I remember driving through town, trying to convince myself that she just didn’t get it. In time, I’ve come to see that Carol gave me a gift in that moment which required far more courage and care than simple encouragement would have. She enabled me to see that my thinking was fragmented and borrowed. That it wasn’t really mine. That I was pretending and performing. This truth was painful to see, but it was also the beginning of a developmental process that continues to this day—one I have fallen deeply in love with.    

Why this work is needed now

Carol’s passing in 2024 left behind a massive hole in the field of true developmental work. However, she also left behind an incredible community of dedicated practitioners, many of whom worked with her for numerous years. This community now faces a world where this work is arguably needed more than ever.

Today, we find ourselves in a more complex and unpredictable environment than that of the past. Things are changing at an unprecedented rate. We are struggling to make sense of a transforming landscape and navigate our way through it. For many of us, there is a looming sense of overwhelm and desperation.

How does this show up for you?  

The Developmental Leadership Institute was created to support a shift in how we work together, recognizing that current approaches are failing us in this increasingly complex world. This aim in itself is not unique—many see this and are actively experimenting with new ways of working. Many have realized that the old ways, which are largely focused on predicting and controlling behavior, are now ineffective. We know they create catastrophic bottlenecks in fast-paced environments. We also know they create unhealthy cultures where people, especially younger generations, don’t want to work, and for good reason. What’s less clear is how we need to think differently about this.

Beyond the search for solutions

The tendency is to look for a “solution” to our “problem.” Most of us do this automatically. We’ve been conditioned to think in this way because that’s the world we come from. We were educated for a knowledge economy full of complicated problems, where “expertise” was the currency. So, we look to the “experts” in these new ways of working for solutions in the form of roadmaps, blueprints, or masterclasses.

All too often, this ultimately leads to a collapse back into the command-and-control ways of working we are trying so hard to avoid. Notable examples of this are Zappos and Medium, which attempted to radically transform their ways of working toward more self-managing teams by redesigning their organizational structures, only to discover that it isn’t so simple. What was missing?

The lineage of developmental work that I first learned about from Carol Sanford has a clear premise for this question, which she captures in her book The Regenerative Business:

“Our social institutions have fostered an impulse toward greater freedom but have failed to equip citizens with the corresponding capabilities to use that freedom effectively.”

In other words, the premise is that we have overfocused on redesigning structures that free us from coercion, manipulation, and control, while neglecting the need to develop our capacity for effective freedom.

Before we continue, I want to emphasize something important here. I used the word “premise” very intentionally above, as this is not a claim to be an expert authority with an answer or a solution to your problems. It is simply an invitation to consider this for yourself. You be the judge of what rings true and what is called for in your unique and changing place. I truly believe that I can’t do that for you (and also consider the premise that neither can anyone else). See how a central part of this capacity for effective freedom is the ability to think for ourselves. Nobody can tell us how to do that; they can only support us to wake up so that we can figure it out for ourselves.

As Einstein famously said, “We can’t solve our problems from the same level of thinking we used to create them.” For our purposes here, that suggests we can’t evolve the capacity for effective freedom by simply following experts with answers and best practices. What do you think?

A rich lineage of value-adding, developmental work

Before experimenting with some of the developmental technology we use, I want to be clear about where it comes from and the impact it’s had. This particular lineage has a rich history, which I’ll briefly summarize here to avoid overwhelming you with too many details. I’ll continue to expand on this in future writings for those interested in diving deeper.

My mentor, Carol Sanford, was mentored by Charles Krone, a pioneer in the field of Organizational Development who did groundbreaking work at Procter & Gamble beginning in the 1960s.

The plant in Lima, Ohio, which Krone led, was described by Art Klein in his book The Age of Heretics: Heroes, Outlaws, and the Forerunners of Corporate Change:

“In place of consensus or democracy, there was a kind of jazz-like creativity. Initiatives were carried out when someone championed them and nobody else came up with good reasons to get in the way. Real authority should be based, Krone would say, not on who had the highest rank, the best skills, or the most charisma, but on who was ready to play a solo: who cared the most about that particular initiative and could act most effectively on it.”

This describes something unique to most initiatives to build “self-managing” organizations, which are focused on implementing consensus-based or democratic structures. The results speak for themselves, as Klein goes on to describe:

“[Lima] was a wonderful place to work, and not just because wages were high (so high that P&G managers from corporate grumbled about ‘giving away the store’). Production costs were said to be half the costs of a conventional plant, and the true ratio was even lower; the Lima managers assumed that nobody would believe the real figures.”

Carol Sanford wrote of her experience working with Krone:

“According to my mentor, Charles Krone, developmental organizations use systems to engage in value-adding processes. For Krone, a value-adding process works simultaneously on improving product offerings, improving the methods of production, and improving the capabilities of everyone involved.”

Sanford built on this experience with Krone over the next 50+ years, working with organizations ranging from small startups to large multi-national corporations like DuPont, Google, Kingsford, and Colgate-Palmolive.

A key aspect of this lineage is its use of a living systems framework technology, which Krone adopted from the work of the British systems thinker and philosopher J.G. Bennett. Bennett drew heavily on his experience as a student of the philosopher G.I. Gurdjieff, along with General Systems Theory (again, more on these influences and others in future writings).

I’ll also briefly mention that another important influence for me has been the folks at the Regenesis Institute, which also has a direct tie to Krone and where I have been actively involved for several years.

For now, let’s take a look at a specific framework from this lineage that will help us explore how we can develop the capacity required for effective freedom and “jazz-like creativity” within self-managing teams and organizations.

3 Core Capacities

Before we start playing with this framework, I’ll emphasize that in our work, frameworks are presented as invitations to reflect through a specific lens. They are not models or authoritative representations of reality. To reiterate, you can decide for yourself how useful a particular framework is for your own work. You can also develop your own ways of using the frameworks through your experience. I will suggest, however, based on my own experience, that these frameworks require a lot of practice before you really start to understand them and realize their greater value. They have become inexhaustible sources of insight and value for me personally.  It may help to keep this in mind.