How can online communities help organizations to shift from being top-down and hierarchical cultures to become a culture of continuous collaboration, co-creation, and learning?

In the video above, I enjoyed an in-depth conversation with Sahana Chattopadhyay, a speaker, thinker, writer, and facilitator who has worked as an online community manager in a global organization. She now writes extensively about the necessity for organizations to abandon toxic myths of leadership to embrace more organic, egalitarian, porous organizational models.

In this blog recap, I will attempt to summarize a few of the big ideas Sahana shared.

Organizations are living systems

During Sahana’s career, she came to realize that organizations must abandon notions of control, efficiency, and rigidity. In order to survive and thrive, they must change their thinking about how organizations function and exchange their notions of organization as a machine that must be oiled for the idea of an organization as a natural, living system (alluding to Norman Wolfe’s book about living organizations)

Organizations that choose to remain rigid and controlled may scale up to a point, but if they are stressed too far, they will degenerate and die. Organizations built upon the notion of control become regimes of suppression and oppression in the name of efficiency and productivity.

Organizations where living systems approach takes hold become more fluid and resilient. They are characterized by:

• Porous boundaries allowing the unimpeded flow of information between an organization’s center and its fringes

• Leaders who nurture creativity and encourage points of view from those who are often unseen and unheard

• Conversations that admit to uncertainty and do not require posturing

The myths that hold back organizations and leaders

Why do organizations choose to hang onto command-and-control cultures? Sahana suggests that two mythos hold them back from evolving. These are the myth of human centrality and the myth of leadership.

The myth of human centrality posits that people can control uncertainty just so long as they can understand the variables, plan systems, and run an efficient machine. While it is seductive to think that there’s no problem humans cannot prepare for, the reality is that we cannot control all factors.

Allowing employees to act freely in an online community, setting loose voices in an organization that have previously been silent or even suppressed becomes a source of anxiety. If we cannot controls the parts in the machine, our precious control of the organization will fall to pieces. Or so the thinking goes.

Human centrality feeds the related myth of the leader as a superhuman individual. We think of the leader as someone who can “get things done” and who can “make people productive.” Leaders must be the expert in all matters so that they may lead their followers to successful annual profits and provide coveted dividends for shareholders.

Sahana notes, however, that the leadership myth’s emphasis on control, efficiency, and certainty lacks any allowance for regeneration of resources, of growth, of flexibility.

Leaders soon realize that their inauthentic pretension to expertise and scarcity-driven mindset leads to anxiety, fear and attempts to control or suppress alternative points of view. It is a destroyer of culture and organizational health—and often the personal health of the leader, too.

Only by leaving behind notions of dualism, where leader is elevated above follower and where the two roles never alter or change, can organizations become more resilient and regenerative.

Instead, Sahana counsels leaders to “be friends with uncertainty. Lead with humility.”

The new model for organizational leadership should instead focus on bringing out the hidden wholeness of each worker, learning how to steward and nudge them into personal and professional growth.

Online community as facilitator of the emergent self

How, then, can technology, specifically online communities or digital workplace platforms, help organizations to embrace a more fluid, regenerative culture? Or do they stand in the way?

Because online communities invite voluntary participation and because they create porous virtual places allowing a freer flow of communication, connection, and collaboration between the organization’s center and its edges, Sahana identifies these technologies are important facilitators of change and growth.

As much as social platforms have been decried as problematic, Sahana says they can be more more than they've been given credit for. They help the introverted and the unheard to express themselves in ways they might never be able to in physical, synchronous settings, helping to unleash the hidden wholeness of these individuals and benefitting the entire organization.

Online spaces for connection become imaginal cells that enable organizations to evolve to a next stage.

Start the pilgrim’s journey

So how does an organization that has a command-and-control culture make the transition to one that is more fluid and regenerative and resilient? Where does one begin?

The beginning, according to Sahana, is a recognition of humility. The journey to becoming a living system style of organization requires an understanding that things cannot be what they have been. They are not what they should be.

It is a pilgrim’s journey, not a hero’s journey.

Pilgrim’s journeys start in self-reflection and in a sense of humility. They are undertaken as a group and wisdom arises from the group recognizing the hidden wholeness of one another, of the group sharing with one another and reflecting upon these learnings to become better.

A pilgrim’s journey differs from the hero’s journey. The hero begins reluctantly and is often torn from the familiar forcibly. Heroes must quest because there’s no path back to the way things were without undertaking the journey. While the hero goes through a personal transformation and gains self-knowledge, that individual hero often has trouble re-assimilating to the world once the threat is ended. It does not result in integration but departure. In other words, Frodo Baggins cannot return to the Shire because he doesn’t fit there anymore.

But pilgrims return at journey’s end to their communities and make them better. They reintegrate and regenerate. It is a more effective metaphor overall.

About Building Resilient Online Communities

The pandemic brought with it a renewed interest and commitment to building online communities for work and recreation in order to allow people to connect and socialize with employees, customers, partners, stakeholders and friends while remaining physically distant. This Catalyzing the Future series invites speakers who want to speculate about how we can create better online spaces for remote work, virtual meetings, connecting with others, and getting work done.

Building Resilient Online Communities is sponsored by Clocktower Advisors.