A journey of a self-managing organization: Behind Greaterthan's work with Centrifuge

‍Pulling back the veil of what it’s like to partner with Greaterthan in a journey to self-organizing

Greaterthan partners with forward-thinking organizations to support their creation of or transition to self-organizing systems and cultures. This journey (and the experience of it) is never the same for any two organizations, however there is a set of principles, patterns and support structures that remain consistent across contexts.

Related reading: 
→ How we organize changes everything
→ Where Do Why Be? Creating the guide to Greaterthan’s practice

The self-management, Teal Org, non-hierarchical org design space is full of theory and philosophy, and jargon can get in the way of understanding what actually happens in the work! With this article, we seek to bring to life when these principles meet a specific organizational context in a way that supports its ambitions and maximises potential.

This case study focuses on Greaterthan’s work with the decentralized finance startup Centrifuge (now Centrifuge DAO). From 2019 to 2022, we accompanied the organization through many chapters of its growth and development, and iterations and expressions of its self-management.  It is a snapshot of where the organization was at in 2022. Since organizations and their macro environment never stop changing, the Centrifuge of today may look quite different to what it was at the time of writing this case study. Regardless, we see it as a valuable story to share and a great example of the organizational development journeys we support.

This case study is based on interviews conducted in mid-2022 with Susan Basterfield and David Weingartner, partners at Greaterthan, and Martin Quensel and Alina Sinelnikova from Centrifuge. Martin is one of four co-founders along with Lucas Vogelsang. Alina is a lead Engineer who has been with Centrifuge since 2019 and has had an active part in many Centrifuge’s organizational development chapters. 

Context 

Centrifuge is a blockchain/decentralized finance (DeFi) FinTech organization whose mission is to “unlock economic opportunity for all by connecting people to borrow and lend money transparently and cost effectively”.  It was founded by Lucas Vogelsang, Markus Ament, Martin Quensel, Philip Stehlik in 2017, a team that had worked closely over many years,  launching & growing several ventures. Both have experience scaling more traditional startups and were very familiar with the pitfalls and downsides that arise in those contexts. With Centrifuge, they knew they wanted to do something differently. 

When Centrifuge was a small team they operated the way most startups do, with everyone doing everything, but as they scaled from 5 to 18 in just over a year, they became aware that they needed (and wanted) to intentionally distribute accountability.  At this juncture, co-founders Markus Ament and Philip Stehlik departed, and this transition proved an auspicious time to intentionally work on the organization. 

Through Greaterthan’s work with another organization in the blockchain space, Martin & Lucas sought our support. When we asked Martin why he chose Greaterthan as their partner, he said it was because “you eat your own dog food!” Knowing that Greaterthan practices as an SMO (self-managing organization) itself, he felt confident that we’d have the capacity to guide Centrifuge in its own unique process of growing as one as well. 

He also noted Greaterthan’s unique approach of evolving their approach as the client and the relationship evolves. 

“Greaterthan was built as a self-managed organization from the ground up, so you’ve fought the same challenges as your clients. Your own decisions are not made by a management team or delegated upwards into a hierarchy. This makes you a better partner.“  - Martin Quensel, Centrifuge Co-Founder

How we worked together 

How is this work different from regular consulting? 
It’s change management, right? 
What does it look like – what do you actually do!? 

Traditional consulting companies are paid to provide ‘best practice’ solutions, yet this outsourcing often weakens an organization’s internal capacity to create and enact strategy, innovate their ways of working or adapt and respond to ever-changing conditions.

Together with Centrifuge, we co-created and enacted (at least!) 15 distinct interaction patterns. We chose 3 to share here as an illustration of the variety and distinctiveness of our engagement:

Coaching 

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Coaching offers a protected space to work through felt tensions via powerful inquiry and reflection. Greaterthan co-developed a flexible, adaptable offering for Centrifuge members to access coaching for various needs. 

For example, Tom Nixon, who specializes in coaching founder teams (see Source Theory) was heavily involved in the formative months of the engagement, then switched to an on-demand model as the organization shifted gears. 

Greaterthan provided coaching to specific teams, people, and on-demand 1-1 coaching sessions available for anyone to book as needed

“ You cannot generalize everything (about self-management). Whenever I  needed a concrete solution that was too specific to discuss with the entire Organizational Development circle, I would always reach out to Susan or to Fran to help me solve the problem 1:1.” – Alina 

Onboarding and building organizational coherence

Assessing a candidate’s fit to work in a self-managed context is a critical part of Centrifuge’s hiring process. It’s an art & a science: they continue to learn through trial & error, and iterate how it’s incorporated into the interview process, but it’s not foolproof:

“I’ve been wrong so many times. What I now know is that passion is important. Passion about self-management, about the mission of the product and the team – and to be proud of it. But only time will tell.”  - Martin

The most effective initiative to date to support and enhance the onboarding and integration of new team members, is Centrifuge’s “SMO Academy”, a four-week program for new hires to learn the principles & processes of self-management. 

Greaterthan ran five cohorts of Academy, bringing in years of experience and content from our online Academy. Our interview with Alina brought to life the impact of the SMO Academy and how it enhanced the organization’s ability to integrate new members into its way of working & form a shared understanding of what it means to be an SMO.

“Now when people join they go through the SMO Academy. They learn all the principles and how we’re working right from the start. This is great because then everyone starts off on the same page. It’s a bonding experience, and gives people a peer group to stay in touch with.” - Alina

“...the biggest signal [of Centrifuge’s progress in becoming an SMO] is that we are now almost 50 people and nobody is questioning that we are an SMO. People are joining and they are integrating and it's clear.” - Alina

"For the design of the internal academy we leaned on the onboarding experience that a new employee to a remote & self organized company will have: learning what a self managed organization is about, how this is reflected in this specific company and how to interact and provide value in this system" - David Weingartner, Partner Greaterthan

Guiding questions for the design: 

Week 1: Basics of SMO “I'm new here, how does Centrifuge work and what is self-management?“
Week 2: Roles & Accountabilities “How do I know what to do & what others are doing?”
Week 3: Decision making & value creation “I found a great way to provide value, do I need permission to start?”
Week 4: Feedback & learning “This seems to be running well! Or does it not? How do I know?”

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Capacity building for Organizational Development 

Hosting circles, designing roles and building muscles of experimentation. 

Greaterthan supported the development of two core parts of their Organization Development work: Circles, and the practice of role articulation & iteration.

A Circle is a group of team members who have opted-in to work on a specific stream of work or develop a capacity. They meet regularly to sense-make tensions or blocks in the system, and to make progress on initiatives.  One of the circles formed was the “Org Dev circle”.

The Org Dev Circle comprised “Team Gardeners” who come from across teams in the organization (Engineering, Finance, Sales, etc). Alina, for example, was the Team Gardener for the Engineering team. This role worked as a bridge that is responsible for sensing the dynamics of the team and balancing Org Dev initiatives and their team’s priorities. 

“Having external support is important because I currently see Org Dev as a “knowledge hierarchy”… Greaterthan guides the Org Dev circle, and the Org Dev circle spreads the information throughout the organization. It’s good for the circle to have Greaterthan as someone external who can take a step back and see our specific situations with fresh eyes.” - Alina

“What I really like is that people bring the tensions and issues that they observe to the Org Dev circle, and they’re able to figure things out themselves because the other members help change their perspective to be more objective. Greaterthan also brings in things they learned in 1-1 conversations, anonymized of course.“ - Martin 

In the fast-paced and changing world of work that we operate in, the necessity for clarifying and reworking roles is extremely important for an individual’s and organization’s success. This is especially true for SMO’s, as the dynamism of the systems means roles and role requirements will be shifting, and the responsibility is on you to sense this. While this may sound like extra and unnecessary work,  it’s ultimately rewarding: people get to work on what excites and expands them, and teammates learn how to work with you.

“Replacing static job descriptions with granular roles and accountabilities is key for distributing power and decision making. Although laborious, this process often brings to the surface areas of confusion or tension that need clarifying, and helps teams take ownership of their work domain. “ - Francesca Pick, Partner Greaterthan

“Being self organized, self managed, decentralized, requires more processes and more structure. In the beginning, you had some people complaining because obviously it comes with some extra work, right. But now our team can see that it pays off, myself included. I was not always motivated to clearly define roles for example, write it down, maintain it. But now, when we scale we can actually see how it pays off.” -Alina

For the first few years of Centrifuge, there were no dedicated roles for organizational development, but rather it was a responsibility shared by the Org Dev Circle. What the team discovered was that Organizational Development work can be labor intensive (emotional labor included),  and at the time of our interviews, a new dedicated hire had been made to steward the Org Development work, a milestone that brings to life this comment from Greaterthan Partner, David:  “we try to make ourselves obsolete in the long term.” 

What underlies all of Greaterthan’s orientation towards Org Development is being a muscle of experimentation and adaptability. Experiments are a low risk and high reward way to innovate. Nothing can ever be set in stone, it’s a  dance between structure, process and iteration. It’s less about finding the solution, and more about developing the capacity as a group to sense what's working and what isn’t, and make new choices from there. Experiments are run to try new ways of doing things: if it goes well, they may choose to integrate the process more fully into the organization, and if it proves to not be successful, then they learn from that and try something new! 

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Reflections 

“You cannot create an org that pleases everyone.”  - Alina

Becoming more self-organized is making a long-term bet on your organization’s mission and people to adapt and respond more effectively to changing market conditions. It is an ongoing commitment and inquiry into the question: how do we be, work & create together in the times that we live and work in?

Learning new ways of working is real transformation work, which takes time and commitment to a worldview larger than just the success of our organizations. 

The short-term rewards that traditional ways of running organizations can more clearly “guarantee” can be trickier to achieve at times. In other words, taking on this bold and rewarding work can bring up short-term challenges to running and growing a business. 

For Martin, the great challenge of being a tech start-up and self-managed organization simultaneously is the “innovator’s dilemma”. 

“How can such a distributed, pure self-managed organization still be innovative, and have the speed to make decisions, to make hard bets on the future? This is what I see as the biggest question moving forward.” 

Martin’s characterization of this dilemma resonates with us at Greaterthan, as we seek to find a sweet spot between our own aspirations and sense of urgency for change while working “within capacity” and recognizing that a much bigger rewiring of our reflexes is needed. 

And in regards to accompanying our clients – 

From day one, we are planning our exit. Everything we do, we do it with the organizations we support, so we can build capacity, share tools and transfer experience as we go. 

While the journey is unique for everyone, there are key places organizations need to go; foundations and internal capacities that enable you to adapt and thrive. 

In an emergent sector like FinTech, nothing is straightforward - market conditions change daily and bears and bulls feel almost interchangeable.  For Centrifuge, like so many others, this has manifested in broader organizational change to meet the market.  However, Centrifuge has absolutely built its internal capacity to create what the organization is calling on them to do and be.

And this is a cycle.  Greaterthan has continued to support Centrifuge through coaching and in discrete projects through  2024 - and we can’t wait to see what happens next.

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Written by Tomomi Sasaki, Stephanie Soussloff and Susan Basterfield 

With support from David Weingartner, Francesca Pick and Marguerite Grandjean 

And big thanks to Martin Quensel, Alina Sinelnikova and the Centrifuge team 

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