Kate Isaacs, Deborah Ancona and Elaine Backman
“The mechanisms that enable self-management also balance freedom and control. The companies function efficiently and exploit new opportunities quickly even as they minimize bureaucratic rules. Because individuals need to be persuaded to join a project, their feedback and misgivings are incorporated early in the development process, and talent is drained away from less-promising projects. Because enabling leaders devote much time and energy to discussions about new information, nobody’s strategic mindset becomes inflexible. Because cultural values and simple rules relating to the business model are part of everyday conversations and decision processes, people don’t go off in myriad directions. The collective vetting ensures that investment decisions aren’t determined by a leader’s pet projects. And because projects begin with small bets and are reinvested in iteratively, one bad bet won’t bring down the entire operation.”
Our senior associate Kate Isaacs’ work bridges organizational research and lived practice. In this HBR article, she and her colleagues show how mature companies can stay adaptive not through top-down reform but through systems that invite everyone to lead. Gore and PARC operate through three interlocking roles: entrepreneurial leaders who sense and seize opportunities, enabling leaders who coach and connect, and architecting leaders who hold the broader frame. Each depends on cultural norms—autonomy, trust, and shared values—that keep freedom and coherence in balance.
This article echoes what we see across our fieldwork: the capacity for collective intelligence arises when power is distributed and purpose is shared. It offers a research-based affirmation of a principle we practice daily—that lasting innovation depends on dialogue, not control, and on systems designed to think and move together.
Skip Griffin reflects on how the quiet, relational work of change underpins even the most visible transformations. He draws lines between the civil-rights movement and modern organizational change: the build-up of trust, the gestation of intent, the long-haul readiness before the moment of action.
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In this article for Strategy+Business, Bill Isaacs writes from inside the practice of large-scale dialogue—moments when conversation itself becomes the turning point. Using the story of our work on the South Asia Champions for Development Program, he shows how the movement from politeness to truth-telling, from breakdown to shared inquiry, can release new intelligence in a system. Lasting change begins not with control or consensus, but with creating the conditions for people to think and see together.
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You don’t need perfect clarity to start to get unstuck—just the willingness to listen, and the courage to engage.