Organising #BeyondtheRules at Dark Matter Labs 3/4

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Dark Matter Laboratories

17 min readSep 24, 2021

Distributed Agency, Distributed Care

This piece was authored by a member of the Dark Matter Labs team based in the UK as part of the #BeyondtheRules project and, as such, is written in British English and has particular references to contexts in the UK.

This blog was written in September 2021 and reflects our learning at that time.

Our Context

In a context of climate breakdown and technological disruption, Dark Matter Labs works to accelerate societal transition towards collective care, shared agency, long-termism and interconnectedness. We focus on the dark matter — the invisible structures responsible for producing the majority of the world around us, from policy and regulation to finance and data, governance and democratic participation, organisational culture and identity. What we seek to build in the wider world we look to create at a smaller scale in how we organise together.

Our context as an organisation, and from which the learning that we share here is anchored, is largely defined by being:

A platform for shared missions
Focused on discovery and learning
International with a planetary view
Primarily virtual
Evolving constantly

See blog 1 in this series for more information on our context and current structure.

A distribution of agency is a defining feature of how we organise and this blog aims to explore that in detail. When I use the term ‘agency’ here I mean the distribution of power and of autonomy and also the correlating responsibility, accountability and risk-holding that sit alongside them (for a deeper exploration on these elements and how they sit alongside each other see this blog). We will cover:

Our system of self-management
Legal and financial risk holding
Accountability
Decision-making and community organising
The relevance of pay

We have found that a system of distributed agency unchecked can also have a propensity to compound existing inequalities in a system (and/or create potential harm), and we look to counteract this with a platform of deep care, security and safety that underpins our work together. We will explore what this looks like in the areas of:

Care as a foundation for our work
Self-management of time and minimum rest
Distributed acts of care
Training and Structural support
Clean feedback

Self-management

DML as a self-managed organism. For us this means that each of us takes responsibility for our agency in the system — our agency is not predetermined by a position or ‘rank’.

When it comes to our roles and responsibilities, these are not our job ‘title’ but more like a hand of cards that we hold at any time and that regularly may change (see more on this in blog 2 to this series). We can choose to change these, whilst we ensure that the responsibilities are handed over to someone who is also happy to take them on.

The scope of each of our work varies per person — some may be focusing on the scope of a project, some on a series of projects, some at the scope of a mission and some at the scope of the whole organism of DM. As such, we do not consider that there is no hierarchy, but rather a dynamic hierarchy that is dependent on what makes sense for individuals and the wider system at any given time.

We each have the autonomy to decide how a piece of work that we hold/steward is done (whatever its scope) within the parameters of the shared mission that we have, the agreements that we make to each other and any contractual terms. We all hold/steward different pieces of work with a range of scope and negotiate with each other how they fit together.

Some hold clearer roles to drive forward improvements to how our shared operational system works and are more likely to lead this, although anyone can craft and propose changes/directions into our shared system (and shift into these roles).

High autonomy and high choice are balanced with the responsibility that each of us hold for what we propose and accountability for our work. This means — among many things — taking on workload, exposing our reputations, showing up when things go wrong, explaining our decisions, accepting failures. Genuinely stepping into this agency requires each of us to show up and face reality head-on, and that can be emotionally difficult and mentally demanding, compared to having a bounded responsibility within a system where blame can be passed up the chain. We notice that this way can also be much more effective, rewarding and liberating.

Our bandwidth to take on the emotionally and/or mentally demanding aspects of high agency is naturally influenced by the situations that we are each in at that time and the structural conditions that affect them. We have learned that choice alone as a system to determine personal agency is one that readily compounds existing structural and personal inequalities and privileges.

At an organisational level, we cannot redress the structural impact of a socioeconomic system. We can, however, aim to embed our shared platform within a culture of deep care, which nourishes people to step into their full agency (whatever that means to them, including the boundaries they put to that) and seeks to counteract underlying imbalances.

Legal and financial risk holding

A system cannot thrive where power and autonomy are distributed but risk-holding is concentrated. And yet, when it comes to legal and financial risk-holding, our methods to distribute this are heavily constrained by the external rules of the systems that we sit in, such as:

The legal companies through which we operate require Directors who take on the legal responsibilities of company records and accounts, with the risk of being fined, prosecuted or disqualified if not completed fully or correctly.
Some banking systems will only allow banking access for companies with Persons of Significant Control
Loans may require signatories to agree to take on the financial liabilities of the lending

In traditional hierarchies, the people holding these risks normally also have the decision-making power to control the company, and they are both responsible and accountable for the company risks.

We seek to fully comply with the rules of the system whilst also being true to the principles of how we organise. We currently organise around this as follows:

Directorships are held by ‘legal stewards’ who hold the official risks of a DM company (or companies, when more than one) as one of their roles. They have the minimum powers that they need to fulfil their legal duties as Directors, such as to veto any large decision that might expose them personally to significant risk as Directors or contradict their duties (we have not yet faced such a scenario but might one day), without playing a control function for the company.
Day-to-day decision-making is held by people across the ecosystem, and de facto risk holding is shared as much as possible to not create unnecessary risk liabilities on the legal stewards.

Let’s take the example of financial cash flow risk to illustrate what this looks like in practice. Normally in a small not-for-profit the executive team might make a plan in the case of cash flow risk, and it’s not uncommon for them to temporarily forfeit payments if it were needed during a cash flow crisis to ensure that others are paid. Distributed risk management at DM means that in a cash flow risk scenario:

an approach and decisions for cash flow management are made by a finance group who can decide on behalf of the whole following sense-making with the full team
The shouldering of financial implications is distributed more widely across the system among those who nominate themselves to hold more risk

For example, when we recently faced an issue following a large receivable falling overdue — impacting our payments for a number of weeks — the Finance Holder at DM called an (optional to attend) All-Hands meeting to lay-out the situation and our options to the whole team, and to invite shared approaches. On that occasion, a proposal was made, evolved live and collectively agreed upon, whereby an absolutely no pressure invitation was made to anyone who would be happy to provide a 0% interest loan for a short fixed period of time. By the end of the day, 6 loans were made for 3 weeks which brought all of our outgoing payments back on track. There was a lot of care in the specific details of how this was structured and communicated — including the emphasis on only offering where someone was comfortable to do so; the non-glorification of loan-making; the details of the loans and loan-makers kept anonymous. These loans were all fully repaid on banking the overdue receivable invoice and the feedback from the teams across DM around this process was notably positive.

Accountability

As explored by Ebrahim and Weisband in Global Accountabilities: Participation, Pluralism, and Public Ethics (2007), in a ‘principal-agent’ view of accountability, accountability involves individuals or groups reporting to a recognised authority(ies) to justify their behaviour, be scrutinised, and the possibility for a penalty to be imposed. Its core components include transparency, justification, compliance and sanctions, with the capacity for sanctions being an important part of retributive justice. This approach requires there to be an agreed relationship between power-wielders and those holding them accountable, and a shared understanding of the standards of behaviour that they are accountable to.

Without a hierarchical vertical structure of power in a system, the embedded binaries of power-wielder and accountability-holder make less sense. When our work is based on relationships of care, the capacity for punitive retribution becomes much less of a concern.

We are starting to put together a draft thesis on what accountability means for us, although we still have much more work to do on this. So far, we recognise that our accountability sits at various layers:

Accountability to ourselves (what we choose to commit our time to, our families, needs, passions)
Accountability to each other (in caring for each other and distributing governance fairly between us and following up on things that we committed to)
Accountability to our shared missions (to whether the way we set our intention and spend our time brings us collectively towards the missions that we share)
Accountability to the living world (to the choices that we make and how these affect the human and non-human world that we are in balance with)
Accountability to future generations (to the human and non-human populations of the future who are impacted by the choices that we make now)

These show up in many different ways:

Part of the embedded training for the team is around setting your personal boundaries and learning to hold them, holding yourself accountable to your needs. People at DM have manifested this in various ways such as personal and self-declared time tracking followed by an analysis of time spent which is declared to the team.
Our clean feedback processes allow us to raise issues of accountability to each other directly, with care.
We are each accountable for our decisions and approaches, and Working Out Loud (see blog 2 on this) helps to make that transparent
Where there are ongoing issues with accountability from someone in the team that is beyond a 1:1 relationship, a team can be invited to support a process of more structured wider feedback to explore together where a misalignment lies.
Our projects have project-holders, contract holders and budget holders who are considering deadlines, taking care that we meet terms and keeping on track financially. These are roles that people hold (for now), not their identity or their rank. They can hand these responsibilities over or evolve them, according to what makes the most sense for them and the system. They hold any accountability needs of partners, funders and others with whom we work around our shared performance and compliance, where needed.
Our legal stewards hold accountability for the overall progress of each respective company.

Being self-managed does not mean ignoring accountability or risk in a system. Rather, accountabilities and risks align to the scope of responsibility, power and autonomy in our roles (with higher or lower degrees in different roles); and that these roles are cards that we hold at any given time, and can change.

We still have a lot of work to reimagine what accountability means for us in detail, and to embed more deeply into our work. We hope to bring in place intentional structures and processes for this in the coming 6 months.

Decision-making & community organising

Making decisions in a self-managed organism might sound like one of the trickier areas to get right, and in some ways it is (particularly when this way of working is less familiar), and in other ways it can also be very natural.

It’s a bit like making decisions within a family setting wherein the person who — say — handles the cleaning wouldn’t ask for advice or permission each time they clean a surface, although they might check for objections before they throw paperwork in the bin, and if they wanted to hire a cleaner there would be a discussion together before going ahead, weighing up the options and finding the best approach. These options of advice, consent, co-sensing & consensus play out organisationally in similar ways. Most day-to-day decisions (clean a surface) with relatively minor implications are taken by the people closest to the questions — that might mean one person takes a decision, or that they take advice from others close to the question and then make a decision. They would declare these decisions if they are significant, and others would have the chance to object if they expressly disagree. Feedback can also be given through the clean feedback method so that issues or disagreements can be discussed directly.

Decisions with a medium level of impact would start involving more of a community organising approach.

For example, the decision of setting up a new international payroll system affects many people and affects our shared finances. We start by researching the options, speaking to providers, finding out services that they do, don’t provide, costs, ease of use, process etc. This allows us to gather an overview of the options available and their potential impacts. We then speak to the people that those options might impact (those holding responsibility for parts of the delivery, or responsible for finances who would need to factor in costs) and gather their insights. We then find out how many people it would impact and in what ways — reaching out to those individuals (via a survey, or directly, as appropriate). We gather all of this information together and work out options in terms of an approach — we would weigh these up against the kind of world that we want to bring into being. We would then invite all of those affected/all interested or the whole team and present all of the findings. At this point, depending on the specifics, we might use one of a few approaches:

Propose an approach using a process such as Percolab’s Generative Decision-Making, if there were a clear favourable option on the table, or
Ask for opinions across a sliding spectrum, with comments, if there is not an obvious best approach. We would ask people about their fields of tolerance to find where the least contested option is.

This would either give us a way forward (in the former) or a shared direction (in the latter) that the responsibility-holder can take forward to implement.

Decisions that are more complex and affect us all more deeply normally involve a co-sensing approach. This might involve facilitated discussions from space holders to explore the topic in detail, wherein we can get a better feeling of the question by listening to different perspectives to it, hearing how different people experience it, and exploring all its connections together so that we can get a shared sense of the interconnectivity of the question. At that point we may be able to progress with a process of consent rather than consensus — rarely do we feel that we need to all agree on what the best decision is, as long as it is within all of our realms of tolerance. However, in some cases where people would be deeply affected (a change in purpose, say) we would agree by consensus.

Making these methods clear and legible to assist people to navigate DM is work that we still need to execute.

The relevance of pay

Our pay formula — decoupled from rank or role (see more on this in blog 1 to this series) — is an important foundation for our system of self-management, distributed decision-making and moving roles. It means that people can genuinely choose and agree upon their roles, projects and responsibilities in any given scenario based on what makes the most sense, without it having an impact on their pay. This also invites them to step back (and, sometimes, get out the way of others) in decisions and situations when they might not be closest to the problem, without it creating a perceived negative implication to pay, prospects, roles etc. It frees all of us to take up less space as much as it does more.

Despite various flaws in its current form, it inherently incentivises us to collaborate, care and be effective rather than to compete for positions or resources and thus is an important foundation for this way of working.

A platform of care

When we recognise that people are creative, caring beings who want to commit their time to things they care about and do so in a way that improves our shared conditions, our preoccupation comes not with how we can control them but how we can care for them in a way that enables them to do this.

This might mean:

Structurally creating space for the other commitments that are important to each of us (see e.g. self-management of time)
Inviting each other to improve and grow, particularly where we might have habits or behaviours that can cause harm (see e.g. clean feedback)
Recognising that each of us has barriers, traumas, enablers in our routes to this, and may need care as we work through them (see e.g. training and structural support)
‘Seeing’ each other and the labour and care that we put into this (See e.g. clean feedback)

Our work at DM is uncertain and complex and invites us to think daily about some of the existential questions that we face. It invites us to inspect what influences how we show up, such as what triggers us in our work relationships and where those triggers might stem from.

This might be coupled with challenging situations in other areas of our lives, and not forgetting the last 20 months amid a pandemic, which for many of us has had huge implications including on mental health.

If there is anything important in how we show up together, it’s the care, understanding, mutual support and realness with how we do it.

Self-management of time and minimum rest

The ability for each of us to manage our own time — including our working schedules and also our time off — is a foundation part of this.

Our holiday policy is currently structured with a minimum holiday per year and no maximum. It invites each of us to take the rest that we need and to structure it in ways that work for us
Each of us is able to set our working schedule according to what we need to be effective (there are no ‘core mandatory hours’, for example, and people might fluctuate between 9–5, ‘oxford hours’ with a long afternoon break, a mix of day and night working, or indeed whatever hours work for them, ensuring it is viable for their work and teams)

This invites us to create a balance in our lives that enables our creativity and ensures that we have rest. It also fundamentally recognises that we are all caring and decent adults who know best what we need and who want to do well by each other.

This is certainly evident from how this policy works in practice, Despite an unlimited holiday policy, our main collective challenge is in people take the minimum amount of time off to properly rest.

Since autonomy is also deeply linked to responsibility, for many people at DM their commitment and care to the missions mean that taking time off can seem to be at the cost of not doing work to the quality that we want to, or leaving colleagues with high workloads. Cultural norms also play a role in the rest we take, where some cultures embrace long periods rest and others revere ongoing work.

Active peer encouragement helps but we have found is not enough to create equity in rest, and we are currently exploring measures to ensure that enough rest can be a genuine option for everyone at DM, such as by bringing in two periods (in summer and winter) a year where we actively discourage work to be scheduled so that the team can more easily plan holidays, and rewording of the policy so that the invitation to take holiday particularly speaks to people who have not been accustomed to this as a norm.

Distributed acts of care

As a group of people who generally recognise the importance of care for each other, people who are struggling are likely to be spotted and supported by those who interact most with them. This support might mean helping them to take time off, sending thoughtful gifts or offering to talk through matters or distribute workloads. We recently decided collectively to create a common pool care pot of funds, which everyone can access to use to spend on other team members whenever they spot someone needing support.

These acts are valuable and important, although alone do not address the deeper care and structural support that we may need.

Training and Structural support

A year ago we brought on a specialist coach and trainer who provides a range of training and group coaching around some of the key capabilities for self-management and agile teams. This includes:

Clean language and clean feedback
Learning from emotions
Creating and holding boundaries/limits
Time management
Choosing and noticing attention

This training has been fundamental in helping us as a group of individuals to practice some of the behaviours and habits that come with a self-managed and agile way of working, particularly among many of us who may have worked in very different structures.

We have noticed that our shared spaces of reflection (weekly optional meetings for shared reflection) quite often hold space where people surface some of the deeper personal experiences or organisational dynamics they see and/or are sat with. Yet, we are currently lacking the triage and follow up support to link what people experience to group process work, coaching, therapy, practical needs or funding for the above for them to directly access this. We are currently putting an approach in place to this, and in August we signed off together a budget that will fund some of this provision. We welcome examples of how others have found ways to approach this as we work out how to structure this well.

Clean Feedback

Without managers, we still need processes for feedback and recognition. Providing clean feedback to each other — particularly after a potential misunderstanding or misalignment — becomes of the most caring acts that we can do.

Following Caitlin Walker’s conception of clean feedback in her book “From Contempt to Curiosity”, the biggest difference between regular and clean feedback is that the latter is designed/ prompted in a way that helps separate out what actually happened from what you are making up about that event and from the impact it is having. It also enables you to be specific in your feedback and put the growth of the receiver first.

This is made possible through a very simple structure for your feedback: 1. Evidence — what you saw or heard 2. Inference — the meaning you made of what you saw or heard 3. Impact — the effect it had on a situation or on you

We follow Brene Brown’s (from Dare to Lead) 10 signs of being in the right headspace to give feedback to know when the time is right.

Alongside the training courses that are run to help us to learn how to use this technique:

We have a Clean Feedback page that details the intention, process and tools for it
There is a group of people who are available to help pairs or groups to use this technique with each other if they need additional support

The act of sitting with a colleague in a space of respect and inviting them to improve is truly powerful, and can also be emotionally demanding. Clean feedback allows us to make time to recognise and truly see each other, our intentions, our labour and effort, even when the reason for the conversation may have been conflict. We are all learning, at a different pace and progress, how to use these techniques well to improve the quality of our relationships, and we all make mistakes along the way.

In blog 4, we will look at how we organise as a team to build organisational infrastructure and the impact that our way of organising has on our ability to do our work. We will look at how it feels to work in this way.

If you would like to receive updates (every few weeks/months) about the #BeyondtheRules project you can do so via this short form. Previous blogs in this series include:

This blog was authored by Annette Dhami with support from Himanshu Rohilla and Olaf Lewitz and refers to work done by many team members across Dark Matter Labs.