Simone Cicero 

Hello everybody and welcome back to the Boundaryless Conversations Podcast. This podcast explores the future of business models, organizations, markets, and society in our rapidly changing world. I’m flying solo today because my co-host, Shruthi Prakash, is not here today, but I’m so excited to welcome our guest, Tom Nixon. 

 

Tom is a long time explorer of purpose driven ventures, self-managing organizations, and an explorer of emergent leadership. Tom is also the author of a book called Work with Source, a powerful reflection on how big ideas take root and grow. he’s also the founder of Mapito.com, an open source tool to help organizations visualize and evolve their structures beyond traditional hierarchies. He’s also a coach and advisor who is working with founders that want to create participatory and impactful initiatives at the intersection of leadership, emergence, and more generally progressive organizing approaches. 

 

Tom, it’s a real pleasure to have you here with us today.

 

Tom Nixon 

Thanks so much Simone, really happy to be here with you.

 

Simone Cicero

Tom, as a starting point, I would love for you to maybe give us an overview of this topic of the source, something that many may have heard about. And I really encourage the people that are listening to the podcast today to go and explore some of the previous conversations that Tom had with other podcasters, because today we want to go deeper. We want to look into the implications of this work on organizing design and more generally at scale, like we do often at this podcast. 

 

But Tom, maybe let’s start with the basics. What is the source and what is source work more in general?

 

Tom Nixon 

Yes, so source work at its heart is about the creative process of how we make ideas happen in the world. And what I’m particularly interested in is how we make really impactful ideas that can scale and meet the challenges of the times that we’re in today. How we can make those things a reality. And the way to think about this is that it’s like a different lens, a different way of seeing.

 

Our creative initiatives, the things that we’re doing to realize visions in the world. So the way to think about what I’m sharing is that it’s like a lens, so a way of seeing, a way to look at our endeavours from companies to nonprofits to social movements, to understand why it is that some visions get realized and others seem to get stuck. And so the principles underneath this came from my great friend and teacher, Peter Koenig. 

 

And the principle central to all of this is that when you look at any process to realize an idea, again, from a dinner party to a startup company, to an activist movement, what we find is that there’s one single individual in a particular role who has a special relationship to the unfolding creative process of realizing the vision. And it’s what Peter Koenig called the role of source.

 

You know, just let that idea sit with you for a moment, particularly if like me, you’re in the world of creating more participatory, decentralized organizations. So that can be quite a triggering concept for some, that there’s one individual in this special role who alone has a special relationship to the next steps to realize the vision and to the boundary of what’s in and what’s out. 

 

And when a source starts to realize some kind of idea when they take the initiative to start making something happen, it’s a bit like they create what we call a field around them. So like a field of attraction. And you’ve probably experienced this in initiatives that either you’ve been part of or maybe that you’ve started this feel, this feeling of being drawn into something. And as that happens, some people in the field of a source will become what we call specific sources.So it means they become the creative author of one part of the whole. 

 

So for a project or an area of responsibility within the whole. And the same principles apply. They know what the boundary is to that part of the whole, and they’re the one who has the insight into what the next step is for that part of realizing the vision. 

 

And as an initiative grows and builds and more sources are recruited to realize ever more specific parts of the vision, a creative hierarchy is formed. And this is really distinct from a formally created hierarchy. So it’s not the same as a management hierarchy. And when this is working well, it’s not a power over hierarchy, but it’s just acknowledging the natural creative order, the natural position of people in the field of realizing a whole vision.

 

So those are a few principles. There’s lots more to unpack, but just to give you a sense of what the whole thing is about. That’s the starting point. But yeah, where do you want to go next Simone?

 

Simone Cicero 

So, Tom, even in these few seconds that you introduced, that you used to introduce the key tenets of the topic, I have already many, many, many threads running in my head. But the first one that I would like to catch with you is something that you mentioned towards the end of the intro, when you said the creative hierarchies are not like the traditional hierarchies we talk about.

 

I’m very fascinated by that because I have this feeling that the more we can overlap these two things inside an organization, so we’re having a real hierarchy that overlaps with the creative hierarchy, things may work better for the organization. So what is your feeling about this consideration?

 

Tom Nixon 

Yeah, absolutely. So when we start to think about, you know, ever larger groups of people working together to make something happen, we naturally start thinking about organisations. So we start thinking about what’s the org structure, what are the roles, what are the policies and procedures and working practices and all of that stuff. And that’s important to pay attention to.

 

But underneath that, we have the creative field that’s established by the source, which is something less tangible. You know, can’t just define it in written governance, but it’s a thing that we all feel. And so when I’m working with founders and groups who are trying to make something happen, the first thing that I do is try and map the creative field. 

 

So doing this in a pattern of nested circles, which which shows that creative hierarchy. So big circle represents the whole field that the global source is holding and then smaller circles within it for the more specific things and then maybe smaller circles within that. And so this is the creative structure that’s kind of like beneath and more fundamental than what we would normally call the organization. 

 

But then to make that initiative work to be able to set people free so that the idea can get realized. You are going to need to find ways to organize. So I like using the word organize as a verb, not a noun. So it’s not about creating an organization, but finding useful ways to organize. And so that might be finding ways to create good communication between teams who are working on things or to have a certain level of governance at the very least to make sure you’re compliant with any laws in the country you’re operating within. But the principle here is that whatever you do to organise should be in service of the creative initiative. 

 

So where we go wrong so often is we try to put all the focus on organisations and think that if we can just create the right way of structuring teams and of governance and of working practices, that things will come to life beautifully. And it’s very hit or miss. Whereas actually, if we reverse that and say, first and foremost, underneath all of this organisational stuff, there is a creative project. There’s an idea that’s trying to come into the world that at some point a source started to work on. If we make that our primary consideration and then look at ways of organising to help bring that to life, then we create much more harmony.

 

So it’s about doing it the right order. So map the creative field first and then look at what sort of practices and ways of organizing are going to help it rather than get in the way.

 

Simone Cicero 

I have a lot of ideas already that came out as you were speaking. So first of all, one thing that I’m thinking about is normally when I think about organizations, right, versus organizing maybe, especially from my point of view, our point of view, a Boundaryless as we promote, for example, an organization where you have a lot of P &L distribution, right? 

 

So we have this idea of micro-enterprises that we got from Haier ways of organizing that we popularized and integrated with other approaches. I mean, it’s very resonant with, if you want with more radical divisional approaches like the GM model, the general manager model, or single trader leadership, which is also something that resonates a lot with this idea of micro enterprises. Essentially, you say, you manage this, you manage the money flow, you manage the profits, you manage the losses, you manage the cost. So you are a micro entrepreneur inside a larger system, entrepreneurial system. But this doesn’t solve the hierarchy problem.

 

That’s what I’m feeling right now. So when you say autonomy and accountability, it’s like if you make bubbles in an organization and you say, you inside this, you control what’s in and you control what’s out. That’s it. But often, when you have many of these pieces in an organization, you start to have an hierarchy problem. 

 

So somebody that needs to be responsible for the coherence of the system at a higher level. So it looks like, for example, you have these kind of problems often in companies when you manage a brand and you, for example, you have multiple products, product owners, product responsibilities, micro-entrepreneurial even. And so you have all these people getting into the market and talking to customers. Right. 

 

So the problem is then how do you make it coherent in the eyes of the customer? Right. How do you avoid having a brand that reaches the market in a way that sounds very chaotic and very, I don’t know, uncoordinated. 

 

Or another problem is often, how do you maximize the opportunity to sell solutions or services to a customer without under-optimizing only for a smaller piece of the system? So the point that I want to raise here is, you can have autonomy and accountability in a system but you cannot cancel the need for hierarchy. 

The interesting point that you raised is about creative hierarchy. But I know that source work is also about money, it’s also about decision-making. So can you maybe explore this idea of hierarchy a bit more specifically? What is the role of hierarchy in working with self-managing, progressive, emergent organizations, but in general, right? What is the role of hierarchy in your experience and how you manage such a delicate topic like this in organizations?

 

Tom Nixon 

Yeah, yeah, so there are a lot of questions all packed into that, but let’s start with hierarchy and see where we go from there. So the word hierarchy gets a really bad rap at the moment, and that’s really understandable because what we’ve seen is the abuse of hierarchy. So we’ve seen very top-down power over hierarchies. 

 

We’ve seen, you know, patriarchy being incredibly hierarchical and really squashing people’s autonomy, often even their fundamental rights. And alongside that, we’ve also seen the problems of bureaucratic hierarchy, obviously where decisions have to get passed up and down long chains of command and it takes forever to get anything done and respond to what the outside world is asking from you. 

 

But that leads people down a false path to say that hierarchy as a pattern and as a concept overall is fundamentally old and wrong and bad. And so, yeah, I really worry when I see people saying, yeah, we just have to smash all hierarchy and abolish hierarchy. The only thing that’s valid is say networks or completely flat structures. 

 

But actually hierarchy is a completely natural pattern in nature. It crops up in all sorts of ways in nature. So what we have to look out for is have we got healthy hierarchy or have we got unhealthy, toxic hierarchy. 

 

And so what we’re trying to do when we’re working consciously with the principles around source is build really healthy hierarchy. And it’s not easy to do and it requires a lot of energy. So if you’re the source of a reasonably substantial initiative, such as a company, just performing the core role of holding the edge of the initiative. So sensing what’s in and what’s out, because if there’s a lot of bottom-up emergence and people say, well, I’ve got an idea for this new product or this new thing. And if it becomes all things to all people, it will completely lose all coherence. So there’s a really important job to hold the edge of what’s in and what’s out. And sometimes very simply, that means encouraging someone who wants to do something that doesn’t fit within that boundary to still do it, but find a way of doing it outside the field. And that way you don’t crush anyone’s creative autonomy, but you just keep coherence about what’s in and what’s out for in a particular context. 

 

And so what Peter Koenig often said was just the core job of sensing the edge and being clear about what’s in and what’s out, together with sensing what the next step for the whole is, for the initiative as a whole. Just those two things alone, getting clear on that and then communicating it to people.

 

That alone is practically a full-time job. that might be, know, Peter often said that would be four days a week of time. And that’s before you’ve done anything that looks really like leadership or managing or building or delivering anything at all. So it’s, yeah, it’s a very involved job to do that and often very underappreciated. 

 

So people think that leaders and founders should be super busy doing stuff. But actually, you what I experience is that sources need to spend more time away from what traditionally looks like work, for example, walking in nature to get clear or more time just in sense making conversations to look at what’s happening. And so, yeah, so that that role of curation and making sure that there is a coherent edge to it. Yeah, that’s a key part of the role of source and not to be underestimated in its in its scope.

 

Simone Cicero 

I’m wondering one thing, what is in your experience, this source role, keeping the coherence and how can we play in organizations? Is it something that can be reasonably handed over to an institution or a process or is it something that is really hard to extract from the original source. That’s another question that I had in mind.

 

Tom Nixon 

Yeah, yeah, it very much lives within a human being, one single individual who is who is the source. Yeah, absolutely. You know, it really applies up to, you know, the largest initiatives that humans have created with maybe, you know, hundreds of thousands of people involved in them. But the important thing here is they don’t have to be alone. So there’s a really interesting interplay here between an individual and a collective perspective. 

 

So again, another common misunderstanding about source is that people believe that it’s pointing at this idea of the mythical hero visionary, like this almost sort of like Steve Jobs like myth of someone who can just see the future and knows what needs to be created, who has perfect creative judgment. And it’s just a myth, you know, that’s never that’s never been true, because humans are, you know, we’re fallible, and we’re flawed, and we have biases, and we can’t see everything.

 

But the role of taking responsibility for holding the edge does naturally sit with that one person. But in order to realize that, they might need help from a lot of people. And so this is often where the role of collective intelligence comes in. So one of the most powerful things a source can do is say, “well, I have a sense of what the question is of what I’m being called to do in the world, but I don’t know what needs to happen and I’m unclear on what the edge is.” 

 

In fact, Peter often said, the chronic state of a source is doubt of not knowing what the edge is and what’s in and what’s out. So to then host collective inte lligence processes, so things like Art of hosting, Theory U and many others, where you can tap into that collective wisdom and that sense-making ability and the creative potential

 

that emerges when people come together to work on ideas. But that process still needs to be owned. So again, a common mistake that gets, that’s made is that because the creative process is so collective that people were invited in to generate and develop ideas together, that therefore it was completely non-hierarchical. But actually that creative process was still sparked by someone. Someone had the idea to create, you know, a participatory process to get the collective wisdom. But yeah, but where it works really well is you have the source, you know, really taking full responsibility and holding the process, but then saying, I don’t know, and then saying, I need others to help me hear what the world’s asking us for, to hear what the potentials are, and use that as a way for the source to get clear. 

 

And then the other advantage of these collective intelligence processes is that their natural, environments for specific sources to emerge because there will be all sorts of ideas where someone says, well, you here’s a project that we could do and then they can make that thing happen and they don’t need to be and shouldn’t be micromanaged. But providing what they’re doing really fits within the whole and it’s coherent, then they just act on their own full autonomy to make that idea a reality.

 

Simone Cicero 

My mind is mainly at the moment wrangling with two topics. So one topic is how much of the conversation we are having is on creative industries that are going in a direction of one person being able to really have a huge impact. So we are witnessing this in the last probably 10 years or so, maybe less, but essentially the last 10 years, we see that creative people can really create large businesses, like if you think about Mr. Beast, for example, right? 

 

And be really, I mean, you smile, but it is a billion-dollar business, right? So it’s really a big creative industry, right? With the creator’s economy, let’s say. But also you can think of the idea of super freelancers. I mean, I’m also myself alone somehow living through this, right? I created a platform and took it more than 10 years ago. Then the boundaries was born from it. 

 

And somehow I’m playing this role-playing game of the super freelancers with other colleagues, of course. But what I’m saying here is there is a part of this conversation that is really about creative industries where you as the creator, you really create something new. So this is one thing. The other thing is, in some other cases, is pretty much the market that creates the need. And therefore, you can have different entities, let’s say, creating comparable services. 

 

So for example, if we think about, I don’t know, car sharing, right? It doesn’t really make any difference if the creative, I mean, of course you have a component of brand, but these are cards, they need to be cheap, they need to be available. So it’s really about, least to a lesser extent impacted by the creative act. And also I think that maybe certain endavors, which are more mature in the market, may follow less of this playbook, right? It may be something that is more like a aggregating capital, organizing well, delivering a process, a product that is applicable, and competitive with the others. But let’s stay on the credit side. 

 

I’m very much battled because I lived through this. I know that this is very important, recognizing source elements. 

 

But at the other end, my system’s thinking mind is telling me – this is wrong. This is wrong, meaning that it kind of hampers the capability of the system to really evolve. So if you look at natural systems, for example, it looks like we are debating, is it a God’s creation or is it an evolution of interplay? Is it something that stems from some kind of direction or is it something that should or basically can only evolving in interplay with all the players involved in an endeavor. 

 

So what are your thoughts, especially on this second one? Maybe we get back to the former question on is it something for creating these industries or not? But first of all, let’s engage with this question. How do you manage your system thinkers and complexity mindset to coexist with this acknowledgement of intelligent creation?

 

Tom Nixon 

Yeah, thank you. Yeah, great question. So the first thing to say is that, in response to your first point, is that these principles around source, from everything that we’ve seen so far, they do seem to be completely universal to human initiatives of all kinds, from, you know, fairly sort of functional, what we might see as less creative initiatives or businesses, all the way up to the likes of Haier, who are trying to really innovate and create new things.

 

You know, and even initiatives in our personal lives. So, you know, from parties to organizing holidays and even our most intimate relationships, like, you know, there’s a source of the relationship between a person and their life partner. Putting on that pair of glasses and inquiring that way can sometimes lead to some quite interesting insights about why things are working or not, as the case may be.

 

But I think in the second part of your question, part of what you alluded to is there’s this top down and bottom up aspect to working with source. So it is very like natural systems in that the outputs or the innovation and the life is not all created top down by a God-like presence who has a master plan for the whole thing.

 

When this is working really well, most of the action is actually bottom-up. It’s been created by specific sources who have an idea to plant a seed, to grow something, to make something happen. And if we zoom out and look at the level of the whole of the biosphere that we live in, that is a completely decentralized system. I’m taking sort of a more atheist-agnostic point of view here. But there’s no one, there’s no one or there’s no entity in charge of the whole, the whole thing is decentralised. 

 

But with source principles, we’re talking, we are in the human realm. So we’re talking about when a human being has an idea to make something happen and invest themselves in that idea. And when we’re in that context, then there is this element of there being a whole and a coherent edge to it that’s ultimately held by one by one person. 

 

But I do actually have a lot of, you know, sympathy. You there are many sort of critiques of the source principle, and I think each of them, you know, has some validity to it. And actually, the one I hear a lot from people who are very steeped in complexity and systems thinking is that, you know, it almost seems too neat to say that there are these particular principles, like that there’s one global source and various other principles that I might share that actually in reality, everything’s much more soupy and messy and complex and kind of defies all models. 

 

And I have quite a lot of sympathy for that because I think, yeah, you know, the universe is, you know, infinitely complex. And so the source principles, are a model, you know, as I said at the beginning, it’s a lens, you know, a pair of glasses you can put on. And actually what it can help you do is sometimes just see through some of the complexity so that you can then actually intervene if things are not working. 

 

I do see sometimes people who are too much towards a complexity point of view, they get overwhelmed by the soup and they don’t have any firm grounds to stand on. So we do need lenses and models to look at things. But then at the same time, there is an element of holding it a little bit lightly.

 

So there was a very good reason why Peter Koenig ended up calling these principles the source principles, not the source laws, because we’re not claiming that these are irrefutable objective laws of the universe. They sometimes feel like that because they’re pretty solid and they’ve stood up to a lot of testing over many years, but we hold them lightly. If something’s not working or not useful, then it needs to be thrown out and a better lens or model needs to be adopted. So yeah, those are a few thoughts.

 

Simone Cicero 

How do you find the balance? Because you said something very interesting. said, basically the message I’m getting is this needs to coexist. You need to have both these points of view, that of steering and that of emerging, right? Top down, bottom up.

 

And you also said you made this reference to the idea of planting seeds. And before I was thinking about something that emerged for us recently when thinking about the role of leadership in distributed organizations like these. 

 

And we see that there are three types of roles. There is a typical entrepreneurial leadership, so creating something new can be the top or it can be, of course, the others that play the entrepreneur role. And then there are two major other pieces, is one is the enabling leadership. So somebody that is maybe less involved in customer-facing, but more into these kinds of care or support roles.

 

But also there is what we call an architecting leadership. So somebody that is in charge of design and the system, which sounds very much about, I mean, somebody would probably look at these architecting leadership as a good evolution of the managing leadership. So we also say, you know, we don’t manage things anymore. We do not have these, we do not use this metaphor of the factory for the organization, but rather we look into this idea of creating a garden by gardening and defining, you maybe you put the bricks over there, you put the sprinklers over there, and these are more like designing a garden rather than maybe just leaving the bush grow without any control. 

 

So my question for you would be, is there anything that’s specific that you can advise when it comes to – how you find a balance, maybe with practical things that founders should do in certain type of companies. 

 

I’m thinking mainly knowledge-related companies like services or products-related companies like startups, product startups. We heard a lot of talking about founder mode last year, for example. 

 

So is there anything that when you coach the founders you work with? Is there any particular advice or process or things that you can do as a founder to strike this balance between gardening, managing, and letting go and letting things emerge from your collaborators?

 

Tom Nixon 

Yeah, absolutely. So the first thing I’ll say is that you mentioned the topic of leadership and how there are many different sort of styles and approaches. I would make the distinction between source and leadership. So they’re certainly related concepts, but they’re not exactly the same thing. 

 

So fundamentally, source is just about creativity. It’s just about how we turn an idea into reality. Leadership is then

 

obviously more focused on other people. But it’s not, yeah, but again, it’s secondary. And quite often you see that leadership is not necessarily provided by the person who is in the role of source. Often they need specific sources who have really good leadership tendencies. You know, and this was certainly true in the first company that I had where I was the global source. 

 

And actually my business partner, Will, you know, he was much more seen as the leader by people who worked there. And that was absolutely perfect. But when it came to the deepest values and sense of purpose of what this initiative was about, that’s what I was sourcing. And it worked really well as a partnership because he then brought to bear his brilliant leadership capabilities within that. But no matter what the leadership styles that might be needed from time to time.

 

All of that stuff is still happening within some sort of boundary. So there has to be something to lead, know, in whatever style you might want to lead it. There’s some sort of wrapper around it. But for the source, yes, you’re absolutely right. 

 

There’s this key tension that sources have to sit with between being top down and bottom up. And they have to be able to wrestle with that tension. So there’s a couple of things that can really help.The first thing is just noticing your own natural bias. So depending on our background and our previous experiences, people have a natural tendency usually to be a bit more top-down, a bit more authoritarian or to be more bottom-up and participatory and say, hey, I don’t really know, know, biasing towards more of a servant leadership kind of a style. So noticing your own bias is the first step.

 

And if it’s hard to see that in yourself, then others around you can probably tell you quite easily from observing you. So noticing, what’s easier and more of a struggle. You know, most of the clients I work with tend to have more of a bottom up bias. So they want to create very decentralized, very participatory initiatives. And that’s vital for the health of the initiative to allow that sort of vibrant ecosystem-like emergence to happen. And so for them, the struggle is to embrace being more top-down. And for others, it’s the reverse. They’re all about the top down control and they have to learn to let go and trust other people to step up and make things happen themselves. 

 

And then the other part of this is this is where the creative part of working with source, which as I’ve said, is all about the creative process of making an idea happen – where that meets the inner work part of working with source. And this is work that operates on a deep level within each of us about what kind of person do I get really attached to being and what kind of person do I have a strong aversion to being. 

 

And so as this relates to the top down bottom up tension, you know, a lot of people, you know, and I had this one, for example, like I hated when I was running a company, I hated the notion of being a boss. So if I was in the pub after work and anyone who worked in the company introduced me to their partner and said, this is Tom, you know, he’s my boss. I almost had this visceral reaction because I didn’t want anyone to see me as their boss. and I certainly didn’t want anyone to be my boss. So there’s this real resistance that had come from my background, having, you know, worked with some pretty bad bosses.

 

But you can see how that relates to the top-down element. And so sometimes there’s a process of, in fact, always for sources, there’s a process of reclaiming identities that we might shy away from, or as Carl Jung would say, that are in our shadow. And so to actually reclaim like, I am a boss and it’s okay. That doesn’t mean I’m going to show up as a boss all the time, but I can just accept that there’s a part of me that’s a boss or even that’s a dictator or that’s powerful.

 

And on the reverse side, on the bottom-up side, some people have to reclaim that they’re not in control. And that can be really frightening for some people who’ve been conditioned in a particular way. So often there’s a real inner journey for sources to reclaim the parts of themselves that they might get too attached to, like being in a serving position all of the time and reclaim their top-down power. And this has two benefits. 

 

So it has it has one benefit, is that when it’s called upon for you to be more top down or to be more bottom up, that you won’t resist that, that you can just do that quite naturally. So if things are starting to lose coherence and too many things have started and we’re being all things to all people, there might need to be a top-down process to get a hold of the initiative again and to have some maybe difficult conversations to say some of these things don’t actually belong here and need to be moved out. 

 

And you don’t want to resist that happening because if you do, then the initiative is slowly going to fall apart and probably collapse anyway. So it allows you to keep moving forward, to hold the coherence and to keep moving the initiative forward. But the other advantage of it is that when these sort ways of being or these identities are buried in our shadow, they’re outside of our conscious control. And then they pop up at times when they’re really not needed, when they’re not appropriate. 

 

And an example of this is, there’s a real shadow in the movement around non-violence and non-violent communication, that there are certain people who have such a strong attachment to being non-violent, which is of course a real virtue, but they deny the violence within them, that they are a violent person as well, because all humans are capable of being violent. 

 

And so in my work, what we would want to do is for that person to reclaim and own their own violence, so they can only use it when it’s genuinely needed, which hopefully is going to be very rarely. But there is a time for violence, know, especially in the face of violence, sometimes violence is the appropriate response, like self-defense, for example. 

 

So we don’t want these things to be yeah, buried in our shadow. And we don’t want them popping up at times when they’re really not needed. And you’ve probably all seen this, you know, at times when people who really position themselves as being a very calm, very peaceful, nonviolent person, you can see that it’s there simmering under the surface. And often if that person is put under enough pressure or stress, it will really burst out.

 

And then how this relates to our initiatives, you we see people who get very attached to being very decentralized participatory servant leaders, but then eventually when they start to see their initiative falling apart and losing all coherence, they become the worst dictator of all. Whereas actually what was needed is for them to just work consciously with this top down-bottom up tension as they go along and be sensing and responding as they go.

 

So it’s not even about just finding an equilibrium between top-down and bottom-up. Sometimes you might need to be really bottom up and really get out of the way and have quite radical decentralization. And other times there are moves that I’ve seen have been needed to make when initiatives are on the verge of collapse. And actually, some very big top-down moves need to be made very consciously and with great thought and heart put into them to save things and often that yeah, means creating a big rupture. But if they’re afraid to do that and won’t step into that danger, then very often the initiative will collapse altogether and then it’s lost for everyone. How does that resonate with you? What comes up for you?

 

Simone Cicero 

Very deeply, I must say. I was thinking, you know, it would have been nice to have this conversation a few years ago. But yeah, coming back to the conversation, I’m thinking of one interesting way to look at that, that is to complement the typical layers of leadership that you have to include in a distributed, I would say adaptive organization, which are the ones that I mentioned before, the enterprising, the enabling, the architecting, because here we are recognizing some tenants, right? 

 

So enterprising leadership, you need to have it because nowadays, you really need to have a stance and a bias for doers, for people that want to create new things.

 

So that’s a leadership you need to have in the organization. Then you need to have the enabling one because you said that there are some roles in the organization that to some extent need this type of contribution. And then we mentioned the architecting one, which resonates with the system-stinking approach. So essentially, I design the constraints. Somebody in the organization designs the constraints. And then the organization can flourish through these constraints. The innovation is enabled by the constraints actually. 

 

Then you said something very interesting when you said actually source and leadership don’t go very well. And I felt like it’s actually the other way around. So normally good leaders and good sources, I don’t know, maybe it’s my experience, but they don’t go very well. 

 

So for example, I recognize I’m not a great leader in an organization while I’ve been a creative person and I’ve been creating so much over the years. So it looks like in myself, the source lives much stronger than the leader. 

 

So I was thinking maybe there is a fourth piece in the organization. So our organization needs to have the enabling, the architecting, and the enterprising leadership but also needs to have a source capability, which is essentially something that controls the creative story, the brand, the storytelling.

 

Somehow also the attraction that the organization can create over the market. So the story is actually the brand of the organization. And I’m doing this reflection, the coherence as we said before, I’m doing this reflection because maybe I want to, as we edge into the closing of the conversation, I want to have a further reflection with you with regards to the connection between the source and source work and brand which seems to be really the last man standing in the commoditization of everything we are living through. 

So with Gen.ai, for example, everybody’s talking about nodding is more, know, can resist anymore the competition and commoditization, but brand seems to be one of the last few things that can somehow resist this transformation.

 

So what is your reflection about what the role of sources and how is this connected with brand and story and the creative story that the organization speaks about and tells to the market?

 

Tom Nixon 

Yeah, so I’ll share a few thoughts that come to mind. So the first is I would see brand as an emergent phenomenon. So it’s not, although you can have, you know, brand designers who create, you know, visual, you know, and other artefacts, the brand itself is like the sum of the experience that people have with an initiative. It emerges through the action that people in the initiative take.

  

I think it’s not very controversial to say that most people would agree that what good brands really need is not just a good story, but authenticity. And so the question is, is where does that authenticity come from? And it comes from humans. So, you know, there are examples of brands. think Haagen-Dazs was one of them. They were kind of just designed in a boardroom. They don’t really have much underneath them, if anything if anything. 

 

But you think the brands that people tend to really love, you can see how they point back to source, you know, for better and for worse. You know, if you think of famous brands, like, I don’t know, like Ben and Jerry’s or, you know, Steve Jobs with Apple, you can see how the brand ultimately stems from the personality of the source. And again, you get that for better and for worse. 

 

So if you look at what’s happening with Tesla, right now based on how Elon Musk is showing up in the world. That’s probably drawing a certain clientele of people closer to Tesla. And it’s also putting off a lot of people, know, not least to even protest outside their dealerships. it really, yeah, it ultimately comes from the source. 

 

So, you know, so if we’re thinking about how to develop brands and how to talk in the world, I think retaining this deeply human connection. So looking at, “what is the source person? What are they trying to do in the world?” So, you know, another example would be Patagonia, for example, with Yvon Chouinard. You know, the whole initiative, it’s like, yes, it’s a company, but underneath it, it was his effort to do something to protect the natural environment. And that is what’s at the heart of the Patagonia brand. And he’s retained that, you know, as he even has, he’s made moves to to let go of a lot of the ownership, he’s retained that control of the brand. And it’ll be very interesting to see if there is a succession of source at some point from him to somebody else. I don’t think it’s happened yet, unless I miss something. 

 

But yeah, but it deeply comes from a human. So those are a few thoughts that kick off, but yeah, how does that resonate with you and any follow-up questions?

 

Simone Cicero

It’s interesting because when you say the brand is the result of the experience that the market, the customers have with the organization, I think that made me think about the connection. So it’s not that the source is essentially responsible of the brand as if it is something static or intentional, right? But rather, and for example, when we said before, sometimes you need somebody to keep a coherent to go to market function as part of the, you also spoke about what’s in, what’s out. 

 

So I think the result for me is that the brand is really, sorry, the source is really some somebody or something that somebody rather, as you said, that needs to keep the, to essentially keep an eye on the experience.

 

So to keep an eye on how people are experiencing the organization. I don’t know if it resonates.

 

Tom Nixon 

Yeah, yeah, no, it absolutely does. So the source, you one way to think about the source is they’re the author of the story that’s unfolding. So, you know, that’s the sort of the creative perspective rather than saying, okay, they’re the leader of an organization. Yeah. And so if you’re responsible for the story, you know, what we talk about as, as brand, you know, that is the story. 

 

And so even as an initiative scales and has many smaller initiatives within it with specific sources holding parts of the whole. You might say, yeah, but how can one person possibly be responsible for the whole thing? And I would say that actually it’s very helpful for them to accept that they are responsible for the whole. Because even if something’s happening way down in the initiative somewhere with somebody that they’ve never even met or that they didn’t recruit personally, that because that’s a creative hierarchy, the line eventually points back to the source. So somebody hired that person who’s doing something that’s like off brand or out of scope and somebody hired that person and somebody hired that person to eventually all roads point back to the source. So they are, you know, they are 100 % responsible for their initiative and 100 % accountable. And they have the power as well within their field.

 

And we can talk more about power in a moment if you like. But this is quite a big realization. I’ve had this conversation so many times with founders where you say this is ultimately all points back to you, the good stuff and the bad. And they usually go, shit, because they realize that they’re the source of the dysfunction and the conflict that’s happening in their initiative. And so there’s this moment of, gosh, that’s bad.

 

But then it becomes a very empowering realisation because they realise that if it’s ultimately their responsibility, then they can take the steps needed to sort it out. And often that needs to start with the inner work again. So if there’s a particular type of conflict that’s reoccurring, usually it will be reflecting something that’s going on for the source. And so if they work on that within themselves, then that ripples out and they’ve got a chance of ensuring that that conflict or that dysfunction gets resolved.

 

Simone Cicero 

Right, I mean, that made me think about something that a friend of mine told me last week. I was in Paris and he was telling me about an experience he had as he was traveling to London for a wedding. And his cousin, he booked a bus from BlaBlaCar and this friend of mine is in touch with BlaBlaCar since maybe 15 years, because we were, as you may remember, I was part of WeShare and we were organizing these conferences on the sharing economy many years ago and we were in touch with everybody basically. 

 

And so he went to London and his cousin was about to come back and with the family actually. as you know, going from Paris to London is very expensive with the Eurostar for example.

 

And so basically they were in London waiting for coming back to Paris and Blablacar cancelled the bus with no explanations and essentially said, you know, the bus is not there anymore. So you are on your own. Not really this way probably, but the substance was dead. And my friend told me that he got so angry about this, you know, and not just angry, you know, it was like saying, you know, looked like the company didn’t really experience what does it mean for a customer to feel himself or herself stuck into this situation. 

 

So he actually wrote to the CEO because he told to the CEO, you know, that’s what’s happening. You are accountable for that. So I think that made me resonate a lot with what you said. You know, sources are really felt as accountable for what happens, right?

 

So I think that was a great realization. And another point that I wanted to bring up, maybe as a closer reflection, and you can also look into maybe power from this perspective, looks like a good managing team or a good core team for an initiative is a team where there is a mix of all these aspects. There is a source. There is somebody that is more into leading, as you said, in the other companies, a company you had, you had this co-founder that was more into a approach than you. 

 

It’s also resonating with when you said people understand also the authenticity of this. And I think that this authenticity stems from maybe core teams that recognize each other and understand each other and accept that situation and move forward as a whole, including the role of the sources. Not that the sources are above or, you know, for having a good healthy company, you need both, you need everything, but you need to recognize these to really be authentic and communicate this to your customers, to your markets and to the story you can tell to everybody.

 

Tom Nixon

Yeah, I mean, I really agree. the way I think about this is in archetypes. So, you know, each of us have certain archetypes that we’re better at playing in a collaboration. And to bring something substantial to life, you need diversity within that. You need people who are more tuned into the human dynamics within it. You need people who very outward facing, talking to customers. You need people who are who are building, you need people who are holding space and saying slow down. And so we need all of these archetypes. 

 

The person in the role of source can be of any archetype. So there’s not sort of one, you know, unique type of person that can be a source. In fact, we’re all the source for different things in our lives. But then what we need to do is we need to invite others into our field who complement us.

 

You know, the most common, the most common dynamic we see with, with sources is often the source, if they’ve got a larger creative idea, but the main person they’re going to need is someone who’s very focused on delivering and logistics to actually make it happen. Because as we’ve said, the core job of sources is, it’s practically a full-time job. So you need someone who can then be very focused on making shit happen. 

 

So yeah, so, so understanding your own archetype and then therefore what you might be missing.

 

And increasingly another really powerful lens that I’ve been working with over the last few years comes from another great friend and colleague, Fanny Norlin, based in Stockholm. And so she’s been looking at this archetype question from the perspective of masculine and feminine energy and breaking down what’s traditionally seen as just one single polarity that we have masculine over here and feminine over here. 

 

And she’s actually identified sort of two different aspects of the masculine and three different aspects of the feminine and that you need all five of these working together. So they all need to be represented. That doesn’t necessarily mean five separate people. And in fact, on the feminine side, they’re much more integrated. So she might even say there’s just two types of masculine and then the feminine. But yeah, when you’ve got all of these working together, when they’re all present and they’re all working together, then an initiative can really come to life.

 

So this is a really good line of inquiry to have to say, you what kind of a person am I? What’s my natural strength and my role in a team and therefore who do I need to have around me? But yeah, I recommend people check out Fanny’s work around this as well because I think it’s, yeah, it has a lot to offer.

 

Simone Cicero

Thank you. We’ll be sure to connect the episode of, I’m not wrong, we have an episode on cultivating leadership with Fanny. Am I right?

 

Tom Nixon 

Yes, yes, we spoke, I think it was living room conversations, or maybe it was Teal Around the World, one of those. Yeah, maybe both.

 

Simone Cicero 

Right. Yeah, yeah, right, right, right. Yeah. And definitely we’ll put this in the notes of the podcast for people to listen to that. Tom, as we move into the closing of the conversation, I would love to hear from you if you have any further, we call it breadcrumbs for our listeners, so suggestions essentially of things that you want to share that maybe shaped your thinking.

 

Tom Nixon

Yeah, so I guess one obvious one is the book, Work with Source. So, you know, I wrote that book, you know, to scratch an itch that I had, because when I learnt about the source principles, you know, I was a confused, lost founder trying to make sense of the journey that I’d been on and the initiative that I’d started. And that was when I came across Peter’s work. And I thought, why is no one teaching us about this? There are so many books about being a founder and startups and leadership and entrepreneurship.

 

Then why is this whole layer of source not being represented? So that’s, yeah, it was quite a cathartic process to write the book that I wish I could have had. So people can obviously check that out. It’s on the website, workwithsource.com. You can find me on LinkedIn as well. So yeah, please connect and ask questions there. What’s resonating for you? What are you sort of bumping up against that we could explore further as well? 

 

So I think, yeah, those are probably the two main things.But yeah, get in touch and let’s keep the conversation going.

 

Simone Cicero

Yes, yes, really, especially if you need help, do like that. I regret not having done it profoundly as I should have had probably many years ago. So thank you so much, Tom, for your time today. I hope you also enjoyed a little bit the questions.

 

Tom Nixon 

Yeah, I really did. Yeah, thanks so much for the conversation, Simone. I’m sure it’s to be continued.

 

Simone Cicero 

Thank you so much. Thank you so much. And for our listeners, as always, please remember that you can check out our website, boundaryless.io/resources/podcast, where you will find Tom’s conversation with all the links to the resources we mentioned and the transcript. Until we speak again, remember to think Boundaryless.