Building Infrastructure for Self-Managing Organizations

I’ll be honest, I’m spread thin right now.

Building infrastructure for self-managing organizations across multiple channels and services centered around my recent book, Organizing for Impact, is definitely a lot. Some days it feels like too much, like I’m trying to gain visibility and traction with seven different things at once, and doing none of them as well as I could if I just focused on one.

Here’s what I keep coming back to, though: traditional hierarchical management didn’t become the default because of one book or one brilliant consultant. It became the default because an entire ecosystem grew up around it.

Business schools teach it. Management consulting firms operationalize it. HR software automates it. Leadership development programs reinforce it. Performance management systems enforce it. Every company handbook, every org chart template, every piece of management literature assumes it as the starting point.

If you want to run a traditional command-and-control organization, you have infrastructure. You have pathways. You have support systems at every level.

If you want to create a people-positive, self-managing organization? You’re mostly on your own.

The Problem Isn’t Lack of Interest

I talk to leaders all the time who are hungry for something different. They’re exhausted by the dehumanizing language, the performance theater, and the way traditional management treats people as resources to be optimized rather than humans to be respected and supported. They want collaborative leadership. They want adaptive teams. They want distributed decision-making and purpose-driven work.

The problem isn’t desire. The problem is infrastructure.

Where do you learn how to actually do this work? Not in theory, but in practice. Where do you find other leaders navigating the same challenges so you’re not figuring it out alone? Where are the tools designed to support self-management rather than fight against it? Where’s the ongoing support when you hit the inevitable obstacles that come with transforming how organizations work?

The infrastructure doesn’t exist. Or rather, it’s been fragmented, scattered, accessible only to those with resources to cobble together expensive consultants, custom solutions, and trial-and-error learning.

Building What’s Missing

So that’s what I’m building. I don’t look at it as seven separate things, but as an ecosystem.

The book provides the conceptual foundation: the frameworks, models, and practical guidance for what collaborative leadership and adaptive teaming actually look like in practice.

The Organizing for Impact Community creates the space for ongoing learning and peer support, where leaders can ask questions, share challenges, and learn from each other’s experiences.

The blog and Substack offer regular thought leadership and practical insights, keeping these ideas alive and accessible beyond a single read.

The coaching practice provides personalized support for leaders navigating their own transformation journeys, meeting people where they are.

The consulting practice provides guidance and change management support for teams and organizations looking to adopt adaptive teaming, distributed decision-making, or fully self-managing governance and operating systems. 

ErikaAI extends that coaching support, making guidance more accessible when you need quick input or want to explore ideas before your next coaching session.

CoActOS, short for Collaborative Activity Operating System, provides the operational infrastructure software, including tools designed from the ground up to support distributed decision-making, collaborative work, adaptive planning, and a full suite of governance components for self-managing organizations.

Each piece serves a different need and meets people at a different entry point. Together, they begin to build the kind of infrastructure that has always existed for traditional management but has been missing for self-managing, people-positive alternatives.

Why It Matters

I could focus on just one thing, like building just the coaching practice, or just the software, or just the community. It would certainly be simpler and easier to explain at networking events!

Workplace transformation isn’t a single-tool problem, however. It’s a systems problem. The reason traditional hierarchy is so entrenched isn’t that it’s better but rather because it has systems–and mindsets–supporting it at every level.

If we want people-positive, self-managing organizations to become viable alternatives rather than fringe experiments, we need comparable infrastructure. This is not to replicate hierarchy’s approach, but to provide the learning, community, tools, and ongoing support that make transformation accessible and sustainable.

That’s worth being spread thin for, because every leader who wants to create a more humane workplace shouldn’t have to reinvent everything from scratch. They shouldn’t have to fight their tools, cobble together makeshift solutions, or navigate transformation in isolation.

They deserve infrastructure, too.

The Path Ahead

I’m building this infrastructure piece by piece, sometimes feeling like I’m doing many things poorly instead of one thing well, but I’m also starting to see how the pieces connect. How someone might discover the work through the blog, use the book as their guide, work with me as their coach, rely on ErikaAI for daily support, join the community to learn more and participate in the conversation, and eventually run their organization on software designed for how they actually want to work.

That’s the vision: an infrastructure for self-managing organizations in the form of an ecosystem that makes workplace transformation accessible, sustainable, and supported.

It’s maybe too ambitious for one person and a handful of collaborators, but the alternative—continuing to send leaders into transformation work without adequate support—feels worse.

So I’m building, piece by piece, the infrastructure for the workplaces we need.

If you’re building toward self-managing work, whether as a leader, consultant, coach, or tool-builder, I’d love to hear what infrastructure you wish existed. What’s missing? What would make this work more accessible and sustainable?

Let’s build this together!