Self-Organizing Organizations (For Real)

The article explains how /ut7 turned itself into a worker-owned co-operative and built its company life around self-organization. It uses Open Space, the Law of Two Feet, pair work, public meetings, and open accounting so people can decide by participating, stay aligned with the company’s finances, and handle short-term work without a manager.

Reading notes

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• /ut7 presents self-organization as a company-level practice with no managers, coordinators, or benevolent seniors telling people what to do.
• Meetings and work are public, and anyone may attend, observe, or participate.
• Critical tasks may remain undone if nobody is motivated to do them, and the group treats that as a signal about whether it should pursue that path.
• The company works in pairs for administrative work and client work, rotating pairs regularly when possible.
• Once a week it holds a formal Open Space to discuss what needs discussion and to share current work and interests.
• The Law of Two Feet is central: if someone is where they are and doing what they do, they are either learning or contributing.
• The company does not try to control slackers; it relies on trust, communication, and expectations that people will act for the company’s good.
• Long-term orientations are decided collectively and unanimously.
• Short-term decisions belong to the people who do the work, who decide what they will do, how, when, for how long, and for how much.
• The company uses open accounting books, so everyone can see what it has earned, spent, and expects to spend and earn.
• The author says shared vision and common goals are overrated and that forced shared-vision exercises lower morale.
• The group found it more useful to focus on positive outcomes for people and to address situations where someone suffers negative outcomes.
• Self-organizing structures are said to need their own practices, adapted to their context, rather than a single correct method.
• The company grew from three to thirteen employees and later shrank back to four, which showed how hard self-organization can be.
• Disagreements are difficult because there is no manager to settle them, and people can become frustrated by what others do.
• Some members felt they did not get enough room for their own endeavors, and the company linked that to spending more time at client sites or working from home.
• Since then, it allocates at least one day a week for face-to-face communication.
• Weekly Temperature Reading is one of the tools used to surface appreciations, angers, worries, puzzles, new facts, rumors, hopes, and wishes.
• The company filed for the French equivalent of Chapter 11 about six months after buying itself back, because it had mostly run out of money.
• The article frames self-organization as a way to live and work according to values such as freedom, responsibility, solidarity, and self-improvement.
• It closes by saying self-organization becomes a way of working and living, with mess, uncertainty, and frustration as part of the practice.