Episode 14: Going Horizontal with Samantha Slade
Marti & Todd welcome guest Samantha Slade. As the co-founder of Percolab, Sam has been bringing new ways of working, learning, and governing to organizations for two decades.
Marti, Todd, and Sam discuss practices and principles that help drive participation, democracy, and shared leadership in organizations. The title of this episode is derived from Samantha’s book, Going Horizontal: Creating a Non-Hierarchical Organization One Practice at a Time.
From the Edge: Honoring Esko Kilpi (Todd)
Conscious Rant: Igniting Negotiability (Marti)
Guest: Samantha Slade
Samantha is a collective entrepreneur, collaboration strategist, and feminist co-founder of the Percolab Coop.
She is the author of Going Horizontal: Creating a Non-hierarchical Organization, One Practice at a Time (2018), Samantha believes that organizations can and should be a microcosm of the world we want to live in. As a social innovator, Samantha supports teams, organizations and ecosystems to work with complexity and grow a conscious innovation mindset, from the European commission to bold start ups.
Samantha co-founded two businesses. Percolab, an international self-governing network of for-more-than-profit codesign firms and Ecto one of the first coworking cooperatives in Canada. With a background in anthropology, Samantha has been growing collaborative practices for two decades, be it between national administrations of the European Union, between private developers with citizens or between business teams. Based in Montreal, Samantha is engaged in the living lab, fabcity and the commons movements. The Future is in Business as Commons, is the theme of Samantha’s TedX talk. Samantha connects the social practices and parameters we give ourselves to conscious governance and ownership for a more equitable world.
Timeline
1:10 Marti’s opening thoughts
1:49 Working with tensions
2:52 Patterns of connection in hierarchies
3:48 Introduction of Samantha Slade
5:45 What it means to “go horizontal”
8:11 Social practices of togetherness
10:03 Working with difference
11:07 “Checking in” with purpose
12:47 Micro level purpose
14:33 Trickle-down purpose doesn’t work
16:41 Connecting levels of purpose
19:38 Reviving the dreaded monthly team meeting
22:04 Four categories for meetings
23:24 Principle of clarity
25:51 Choosing where to start going horizontal
28:53 Seven domains of practice as starting framework
30:14 Is emotional intelligence necessary?
33:27 Emotions at work
37:39 “Vertical” assumptions
41:49 Relationships + Consent based decision making
44:23 Running a co-created meeting
48:03 Practices spread with the energy
49:38 Working slowly where there is desire for change
51:29 From the Edge: Honoring Esko Kilpi (Todd)
53:47 Conscious Rant: Igniting Negotiability (Marti)
Quotes
“A framework or a group's organizational structure will both determine and is determined by the overall consciousness of the group.” — Marti Spiegelman
“Differences are something that we want to encourage and embrace and honor and respect — bring forth and bring out. Those differences need to find their pathway together in service.” — Samantha Slade
“With shared intention, purpose becomes a leader rather than an individual.” — Samantha Slade
“One of the core practices of functioning in this other way of being together is to have a practice about checking in with purpose. ‘I am seeing this purpose that's guiding me right now. Are you working with the same purpose?’” — Samantha Slade
“When we've lost our connection to purpose — that's usually when things get a bit chaotic.” — Samantha Slade
“When people start getting grumpy about things not being in flow, my first question to myself is, ‘Did we just like lose track of the purpose?’” — Samantha Slade
“Functioning in this more horizontal way together is a different way of structuring things that actually honors flow and life and movement, our honor and our collective intelligence and wisdom.” — Samantha Slade
“You need complementarities as well as similarities in a well functioning organization.” — Marti Spiegelman
“The principle of clarity means that we do need to form agreements with one another — having that shared language and purpose and how we communicate.” — Todd Hoskins
“Being able to speak something and not have everybody comment and debate is a critical skillset.” — Samantha Slade
“When one human is trying to hide something, they're feeling the next human will know that something's being hidden. This starts a ripple effect of a lack of trust.” — Marti Spiegelman
“If we really want to develop agency in the human beings — in our work environments — asking them that what they would wish for in the next hour is a very simple way of doing it.” — Samantha Slade
“There gets to be so many assumptions about things that I can't be doing and that I don't have permission for, when in fact, there's probably more permissions that you have than you realize.” — Samantha Slade
“There's nothing like a good consent based decision making protocol to reveal how much maneuvering each of us has gotten caught up in.” — Samantha Slade
“[Horizontal] Leaders stop being the go-to for everything and start seeing their job more as structuring flows.” — Samantha Slade
“There can be no change without changes in the patterns of communication.” — Esko Kilpi
“When we don’t change our idea of the world — when we insist it is structured one way, that it works just one way, that some things are possible and others not — then the wisdom we carry in our deep consciousness and in our DNA remains unavailable to us.” — Marti Spiegelman
“This is what we’re working with at Leading from Being – developing negotiability to change our idea of leadership. To facilitate this capacity, we are helping people change their idea of the world itself.” — Marti Spiegelman
“But we get rigid about these things – we turn the negotiable into the non-negotiable – we declare ideas, structures, kinds of power, even types of relationship to be non-negotiable when they are actually relative and quite negotiable, and in doing so we literally pop ourselves out of what IS negotiable and end up in the land of absolutes. In that instant we lose our capacity to grow.” — Marti Spiegelman
“Any unmoving attachment to what has worked, insisting that something negotiable is absolute, can bring growth to a jolting halt.” — Marti Spiegelman
“Most of life is negotiable – how a business is structured, how a community creates wellbeing, how a leader creates and stewards her role. What is non-negotiable is that the product of our engagements, the ways we participate and create and relate to one another, must all be in service to the system of life as a whole. What is absolute and non-negotiable is that we are a required part of that system. And this is the biggest change we must make in our idea of the world we serve.” — Marti Spiegelman
Links
Credits
Theme music courtesy of Cloud Cult