Liquid Organization
Description
Stelio Verzera:
"We manage Cocoon with an open governance framework that we have called LiquidO, which stands for Liquid Organization. Nobody is anybody else’s boss, meaning nobody can give orders to anybody and, beyond that, we don’t use job titles, only roles. Basically you can’t trace a meaningful org chart of our company, unless you’re willing to make a very detailed one to explain the context of the roles in any given scope and moment, and then update it every week. Decisional power in our company is gained proportionally to the contribution made in the governance, through a continuous flow of small activities, in which all of us interact freely and continuously with different people on different topics. This contribution is evaluated by the other participants to each activity through an adaptive organizational dynamic that we call contribution accounting. It is not a peer-based performance assessment as it is in no way related to any business result or metric. Instead, it is a continuous flow of feedback that each of us receives any time we decide to engage ourselves in a governance activity, a feedback on how much the others have perceived value created by us. In this way, each of us can dynamically find a unique personal growth path in and through the governance of Cocoon Projects, in an iterative journey of both value creation and learning.
...
Part of LiquidO is a decision making toolbox that, way beyond a democratic headcount-based voting, allows us to choose how each decision is best taken. We range from single-person decision making to fully cocreational multi-step processes (and tools). We tend to use the “smallest” possible decision making effort for each decision, following a good-enough approach that prefers having feedback from reality as soon as possible over using massive energy up-front, whenever reiterating a decision making cycle based on this feedback is a viable option. Every 6 months we all gather to cocreate our focuses for the next 6 months, sharing and considering what each of us knows about our identity, context and trajectory. And then we get back to work, aligned on where to look first and to put more energy on. Every month we host a catch-up distributed meeting where to talk about how things are going in the governance, what’s happening or not happening, who’s in what, how reality is evolving. These meetings, like all of our other governance rituals, are not mandatory. You show up if you want, you contribute if you care to. You build your operational reputation in Cocoon freely and in your unique way.
...
All this freedom in our company is made possible by an adaptive organization design that has proven to be truly self-regulating in every aspect. LiquidO is an amazing framework for open-governance, allowing to really experiment the beauty of collective intelligence, collective intuition and collective creativity. I’ve been surprised time and again by the ability of Cocoon to choose her direction with a will that I can only define as an emergent property of our shared governance. Even when I thought Cocoon was going in the wrong direction and we could hit a wall, she proved me wrong every single time, deeply performing instead, in ways that no one of us alone could have imagined, let alone decided. In the scope of customer-projects, which are the iterative journeys of value-creation with our customers in all of our service areas, a cellular structure of independent and self-organized teams has proven its effectiveness and antifragility. Each team has two main facilitating roles, and self-organizes in any way deemed useful in everything from the customer relationship to the tools used. All the teams share two main performance indicators: customer satisfaction and marginality. All the teams share the same very flexible intervention framework, that we call Evolution Flow. All the teams have a deep connection with our shared identity and know-how through the presence in the team of at least one person that in that moment is playing the role of member in the governance. Last, but definitely not least, our Labs are beautiful and playful experimentation contexts for evolving our know-how, improving our tool-box, and crafting the value proposition that we’ll be able to put in action tomorrow. Participation to the Labs is voluntary, and anybody can propose a new Lab, which will be activated if the proposer is backed by at least one other person in starting the Lab. Every Lab has to produce some kind of sharable value every six months or it gets deactivated."
(https://medium.com/mozaic-stories/a-story-you-need-to-know-299a72d63f5)
Characteristics
Stelio Verzera:
No Job Interviews
"We don’t do job interviews at Cocoon Projects. We have found them to be mainly a waste of time and energy. Instead we let people into the company through its very brain: the governance. So let’s say you want to work with us, you have an idea of what we do and how it is to work with us, and contact us in any way you like. The next step is an interview, yes, but one in which you are the interviewer and a member of our governance will answer all of your questions, and make sure you get a very good idea of what you are about to enter. After that, if you are convinced that you want to try, we just let you in. We grant you access to everything we are doing, have done and are working to do. We make sure you have a person of reference to support your initial efforts with answers and suggestions. We also make sure it is crystal clear to you that you will never have to ask for permission, including in talking or working with anybody in Cocoon. We do our best to help you understand if you want to stay, for all the time you want. In the meanwhile, Cocoon is designed so that you can’t break anything, so relax, do your best, and enjoy the ride. And if and when you decide to leave, we hope you’ll keep this experience in your heart. I’ve seen more than 100 people enter Cocoon in these 7 years. Some have disappeared almost immediately. Some have stayed with us for very long or are still here. Many have been in Cocoon for many months or a couple of years before leaving. I’ve seen very very different people, with a lot of different backgrounds, intentions, seniority. With most of the people that have shared part of the journey with us there is still a caring relationship, respect and pleasure to meet and hug each other around the world. This flow of people, experiences, cultures, stories, is a huge enriching blessing." (https://medium.com/mozaic-stories/a-story-you-need-to-know-299a72d63f5)
Transparency
"“I see, but with anybody able to enter your governance in this way, how do you protect your knowledge and competitive advantage?!” Transparency is radical at Cocoon Projects. In order to restrict access to any information we need to have a good reason. And by “good” we normally mean that it is for our customers’ needs. Normally, you can access any info, or simply ask any question, and you’ll get what you’re looking for. Even though we have not “selected” you, we trust you just as we trust any other human being that has not given us reasons for not doing so. We care about trust at Cocoon, we truly do. Of course we’ve seen many people entering out of curiosity, some even for “stealing” what we do or how we do it. Well, we are convinced that what matters can’t be “stolen”, it can only be shared. And by sharing it, it multiplies. We work in a market in which competition is a weak force, definitely way weaker than collaboration. Thus, we can afford not to worry at all about “protecting” our knowledge or know-how. On the contrary we want it to be shared, challenged, tested, evolved as much as possible."
No Budgets
"“And when it comes to money? Who decides on budgeting and resources allocation? That can’t be done in ‘open governance’, I guess!” We do not do budgets at Cocoon Projects. In fact, we believe that also budgeting is a wasteful activity in terms of time and energy. But, even worse, it hinders your ability to effectively interpret the emergent opportunities that will come, while you are intent on trying to have reality stick to your plan. Instead of creating budgets, we focus on dynamic resources allocation, which means that we use the available economic resources by real-time prioritization and decision making. Of course this is possible because of how our governance works in leveraging our collective ability to navigate complexity thanks to LiquidO. Moreover, it is made financially possible by design thanks to a flexible costs structure with a strict limit on non-billable fixed costs and an adaptive organizational dynamic dedicated to making financial management info available to the governance in real time and in the simplest form we can devise. Within this way of managing our money, we have of course also created some separated allocations, but they are dynamic. We call them “pools”, they are little stocks of money that get continuously replenished each by a different fraction of our earnings. One pool, for example, is for compensating the governance activities. Another one is for our personal growth, and each of us can use as much as it is needed for her growth activities from it. Be it a training, a travel or anything else, you can pay it using this pool without asking for permission, just declaring in a shared ledger how much you are taking and for what. You know that money is limited, and that what you take for yourself you’re taking from all the other people. At the same time, you know that if you grow thanks to that money, it will also benefit all the other people. And you decide. As I said, we trust people. And, by the way, it works beautifully."
No Contracts
"When we work with our customers, we do it iteratively with a commitment to deliver actionable value at every iteration. Like most of the practices I’ve described here, we’ve done this since the very beginning. We do not do project quotations, we do not have contracts to sign. The way we mean the word “project” is a journey with a purpose. We would never trick our customers into believing that we know how that journey will go and that we are thus able to define its duration and pricing. That would be a lie, and anybody doing that is lying. The evolution of human systems is emergent. Unknown unknowns are our daily job, and humility is crucial to observe and understand identity, trajectory and context in each unique organization. Therefore, while our quotation is only for the next 1 to 3 iterations, depending on the situation, our assessment capability grows with the path already walked in each project, and after a very first iteration together we can already tell our customers how the journey looks like in terms of timing and resources needed. As for the contracts, well we believe that “no code is faster than no code”. We don’t have contracts. If a customer believes that our work is not worth paying us, we won’t ever sue them, we take the feedback, lose that money and move on. This has never happened so far, by the way. On the other hand, if your company needs us to sign your contracts to work with you, no problem in signing whatever paper your lawyers have imposed you to impose us. And this is because we trust you and our relationship with you: once again, we trust people."
Scaling for Maximum Impact, not Size
"A couple of years ago the time had come to ask ourselves what scaling-up means for us, what growth means for us. We’ve been talking about it for almost 2 years. I’ve learnt a lot about and from the people in Cocoon in those two years. Our final answer was simple and powerful: we want an organic growth and we want to scale-up mastery to the size of maximum impact. What this size is, we do not know. We know that in complex systems impact is not in a linear relationships with any of our “dimension” variables. We know that our mastery in finding leverage points and dancing with them counts way more than our “size”. We know we still have so much to learn about our journey. But for sure we are not in a hurry. We like to think of Cocoon as Bo Burlingham has once defined her: a Small Giant. We are growing organically. We are definitely scaling-up mastery in what we do, both in terms of depth and of breadth. We have just had the courage to open a brand new strategic quantum leap of evolution devoted to ecosystemic work. We are preparing ourselves for a major structural evolution in 2019, towards our size for maximum impact." (https://medium.com/mozaic-stories/a-story-you-need-to-know-299a72d63f5)