What are Liberated
- Liberated Company is a name for a model to constantly evolve companies.
- We believe that the best way to do this is by focusing on improving the way people work together.
- The Liberated Company Model provides a map and a compass in this organizational journey.
- It is applicable for companies of any size, for units within companies, and for teams.
Hearts, Hands and Minds
What Liberated Organizations Do
They Engage More – the Heart
The 2001 Agile Manfesto has been an early call to end the mindless rigidity of work places:
- Individuals over processes
- Results over form
- Customer value over exploitation
- Responding to change over following a plan
By now, the need for psychological safety (the willingess to speak up), for mindfulness, and more wholesome reflection inside work places is well recognized in academic circles and progrssive companies – but not widely practiced in most business. Liberate companies seek to change that.
They make companies more deliberate – the Head:
Companies are complex and there are no easy answers. No approach ever works best for everyone. However, what can be done is to raise the right questions that sends companies on a journey of discovery to ever better solutions. We call this set of questions the “11 Principles of Liberated Companies”. Each of these eleven principles questions your beliefs.
- Technology – a tool or a co-worker?
- Power – are there better ways than hierachical power arragements for us?
- Performance – all it takes is good people? Or good, even self-managing teams?
- Purpose – is it enough to be let by financial incentives? Can purpose play a role?
- Customer – is it just about good products ormore about serving communities?
- Freedom – rules bring order but may stifle people – what make up a good order?
- Information – all you need to know or all there is to know?
- Learning- deficit oriented or growth oriented?
- Exploration – how to align stabilizing plans and disruptive experiments?
- Discipline – coercion, motivation, self-motivation – what works for us?
- Leading – should authority be bestowed or earned time and again?
They invite experience into organizations – the Hand:
Liberated Companies use an innovative mix of traditinal and more progressive practices. An sheer unlimited number of
adaptable work designs that can be organized into nine categories for better orientation and guidance in a tool we call the “Liberated Company Map”.
- Organizing
- Decision Making
- Meetings
- Directing
- People Mgmt
- Transparency
- Projects
- Learning
- Reflection
Underlying this model is the thinking that companies can be evolved, work design by work design. This can be done in small steps via this or that work hack.
But it can also be done in revolutionary ways. Whatever works best at the point of time you and your company, unit or team are in.
Examples
Which Companies
are liberated?
The progressive companies we studied in most detail are Haier, Bridgewater, and Buurtzorg. We base our empirical work on many other companies – a good deal of those can be viewed on the Corporate Rebels Bucket List.
Often technology companies are at the forefront of liberated management practices. We researched their work designs, too.
liberated company’s
Some Background
The term Liberated Company has been made popular by Issak Geetz and Brian Carney in their 2016 book “Freedom Inc.” The concept has much in common with Frederic Laloux’s 2014 book “Reinventing Organizations”.
There is no such thing as the Liberated Company. To become a Liberated Company is to develop in certain directions which allow the individual to contribute more for mutual personal and organizational benefit.
The merit of the term Liberated Company is that subsumes all the great social management inventions of practitioners (Agile Software Development, the Self-Management Scene, the Lean Start-up) and modern academic research by organizational psychologists, sociologists, and the odd empirically driven management researcher.
