Last week, a friend sent me a McKinsey Quarterly article titled “A new operating model for a new world.” She leads a very rare and special doctoral program in transpersonal leadership and business at Sofia University, and she has been reading my book, Organizing for Impact. Her message to me, with the article included, contained a simple observation: “You’re ahead of your time.”
The McKinsey report includes survey data from 757 organizations about their operating structures. At the very top of their chart, in the “Emerging” category, sits “Decentralized network” at 1% of respondents. One percent. These are organizations built around highly autonomous teams, where leaders have the freedom to set goals and deliver projects they consider most important.
My friend asked me, “What is the bridge?” In other words, how do we bridge to that emerging model, and potentially beyond to the more deeply transformative and transpersonal paradigm we are both aligned with, from today’s conventional business models?
That’s the question I want to tackle this week, particularly for mission-driven organizations that don’t have the luxury of slow, incremental change. What the McKinsey study shows me is the infrastructure gap that keeps most organizations stuck.
The Infrastructure Problem
Traditional hierarchical organizations have generations of supporting infrastructure. Most business schools exclusively teach hierarchical management. Consulting firms specialize in optimizing it. Software platforms assume it. HR systems codify it. The entire business ecosystem reinforces command-and-control and predict-and-control structures.
Self-managing organizations have been building their own systems from scratch, often in isolation, but that’s slowly changing. The McKinsey data shows 5% in the “Enterprise agile” category and 17% working with “Products and tech platforms” that distribute some decision-making. Progress exists, and the infrastructure for alternatives is growing.
I wrote Organizing for Impact to contribute to that infrastructure. I developed CoActOS as software specifically designed for self-managing teams. The blog, the Organizing for Impact Community, and the coaching and consulting work all aim to create the foundational support that distributed, collaborative organizations need to thrive.
That’s my part. You need yours too.
The Bridge: Practical Steps Toward Distributed Power
Moving toward decentralized networks doesn’t require abandoning your current structure overnight. These aren’t binary choices. You can start building the bridge from wherever your organization stands right now.
Here’s what that bridge looks like in practice:
Leadership development for everyone. Traditional organizations concentrate leadership training at the top. Decentralized networks need everyone to develop horizontal leadership skills, or the capacity to lead with and alongside others rather than over them. This includes empathy, communication, and adaptability, as well as influencing without authority, collaborative decision-making, active listening, giving and receiving feedback, and navigating uncertainty together. When entire teams practice horizontal leadership within a hierarchical structure, they’re already learning to lead from roles rather than positions. They’re building the muscle for leading together. The transition to self-management becomes less of a leap and more of a natural next step.
Role descriptions instead of job descriptions. Job descriptions list responsibilities but rarely grant the authority to act on them. People are assigned work but must seek manager approval for decisions and budget impacts. Role descriptions change that equation. They outline the responsibilities, along with the accountability, decision-making authority, and budget constraints that accompany them. The person holding the role gets the power to act, not just the work to do.
This is a fundamental shift from hierarchical structures where managers retain authority even when they delegate tasks. People can hold multiple roles, including short-term project roles alongside functional ones. This flexibility lets people contribute skills and interests that their job descriptions leave untapped. Start experimenting with roles in one or two teams. People can keep their titles if they want—resumes and cultural expectations aren’t going anywhere—but roles create space to lead and contribute beyond narrow job definitions. As teams experience the clarity and autonomy roles provide, broader adoption across the organization becomes the logical path forward.
Push decision-making closer to the work. Pushing decisions to the people doing the work produces faster, more relevant, and more customer-focused outcomes. Staff who interact directly with clients understand needs and constraints that executives three levels up simply cannot see. When those staff members have the authority to make decisions, customers get responses immediately instead of waiting for approvals to travel up and down the hierarchy. Organizations become more responsive. Innovation accelerates because people can gather feedback, test solutions, and iterate without bureaucratic delays. Staff engagement rises when people have genuine authority matched to their accountability. This doesn’t mean abandoning all coordination or oversight, which is a common fear among managers and executives when they’re challenged to distribute power. What it means is trusting the people you hired to exercise judgment in their domains, with clear boundaries on when to consult others or escalate decisions that affect multiple teams.
Consent-based decision-making. In traditional hierarchies, decisions get made at the top and handed down. People affected by those decisions have little input and even less power to shape outcomes. Consent-based decision-making flips this dynamic by inviting all relevant stakeholders into the process. Everyone who will be affected gets a voice. The process asks “Are there any objections to this proposal?” rather than demanding consensus or perfect agreement. People raise objections to surface concerns, identify risks, and smooth out issues before moving forward. Once objections are integrated, the group can agree that the decision is safe enough to try. This approach ensures decisions benefit from collective wisdom while still moving work forward. People support decisions they helped shape, even when those decisions aren’t their first choice. The practice builds trust and shared ownership across teams.
Information transparency. Distributed decision-making requires distributed information. When people lack access to the context, data, and knowledge they need, they cannot make well-informed choices. Traditional hierarchies often gate information at management levels, creating asymmetries that breed politics, turf protection, and agenda-driven behavior. Information becomes a tool for manipulation rather than a resource for good decisions. Transparency levels the playing field.
Financial transparency is particularly critical because financial decisions affect everything an organization does. Share budget details, revenue challenges, spending priorities, and the financial trade-offs behind strategic choices. When people understand the financial realities, they can align their decisions with what the organization can actually sustain. They can spot opportunities and constraints that isolated information would hide. Transparency builds trust, reduces political maneuvering, and enables better decisions at every level.
Safe-to-fail experiments. Traditional planning tries to predict the future and commit to long-term plans despite shifting complexities and mounting uncertainties. When conditions change—and they always do—organizations face a choice: stick to the plan and risk irrelevance, or scramble to adapt without any systematic approach.
Safe-to-fail experiments offer a different path. They create structured opportunities to try new approaches in both product development and organizational culture with clearly bounded risk. Run an experiment, learn what actually happens rather than what you predicted would happen, and iterate based on real-world feedback. This builds organizational capacity to respond to change rather than fear and resist it. Innovation thrives when people have permission to test ideas that might not work. The key is making experiments genuinely safe to fail, which means small enough in scope and duration that if they don’t work out, the organization learns without catastrophic consequences.
Purpose-driven strategy. Mission statements describe desired outcomes—the what of organizational work. Purpose goes deeper, providing the why that motivates people to pursue those outcomes. When purpose gets co-created and genuinely aligned across staff, it creates a shared drive to make a meaningful impact. People connect their daily work to something larger than tasks and deliverables. Purpose becomes the central rubric for decision-making at every level. Does this choice move us toward our purpose or away from it? Does this project embody what we’re trying to create in the world?
When purpose permeates a team or organization, people can make aligned decisions without constant top-down direction. They have the compass. Major decisions get examined under the light of shared purpose, ensuring strategic choices reflect collective values and aspirations rather than just financial metrics or hierarchical preferences. This doesn’t mean purpose replaces practical considerations; budget constraints and operational realities still matter. Purpose provides the framework for weighing trade-offs and choosing among viable options.
Long-term vision, short-term planning. Nobody can predict the future, so detailed work plans beyond three to six months become exercises in fiction. Sure, organizations need to know their destination—the long-term vision that orients everyone toward shared goals 10 to 30 years out—but the path to get there must stay flexible. Working in quarterly cycles is itself a strategic choice. Short planning windows create space for what emerges. They allow organizations to respond to new information, shifting conditions, and unexpected opportunities without abandoning long-term direction.
Quarterly cycles also build in regular retrospectives, structured moments to examine what’s working, what isn’t, and how to adjust the path forward. This rhythm keeps organizations anchored in purpose and vision while maintaining the agility to navigate uncertainty. The vision holds steady. The route adapts. This combination prevents both aimless drift and rigid adherence to plans that no longer match reality.
These practices work together. You don’t need all of them in place before seeing results. Pick one. Experiment. Learn. Add another. The bridge builds gradually, but it builds.
Why This Matters Now
Earlier this week, I came across another article titled”Reimagining the Operating Model,” which discusses the McKinsey research specifically in the context of mission-driven organizations like universities, nonprofits, and social enterprises, essentially organizations where the mission drives everything.
For mission-driven organizations, the case for distributed power goes beyond operational efficiency. When your purpose is creating positive change in the world, concentrating power in hierarchical structures actively undermines that mission. You can’t build collaborative, justice-oriented, community-centered change while maintaining authoritarian internal structures. The contradiction shows.
Decentralized organizations align structure with values. They distribute power. They build the muscle for navigating uncertainty. They create space for people to bring their full selves to work that matters.
The 1% of emerging decentralized organizations on the McKinsey chart are doing the trailblazing work of building new infrastructure, trying new approaches, and learning what works. They’re creating the pathways that other organizations will eventually follow.
You’re Building the Bridge Too
I’m not ahead of my time. I think I’m right on time. I’m part of a movement that’s been building for decades, in which people are working to create alternatives to hierarchical power structures and to prove that collaborative, adaptive, self-managing organizations can thrive.
Every organization that experiments with distributed decision-making contributes to this infrastructure. Every leader who chooses transparency over control adds to our collective knowledge. Every team that learns to work adaptively without waiting for permission demonstrates what’s possible.
The bridge gets built from both sides. I’ll keep creating resources, tools, frameworks, and community support for self-managing organizations. You keep experimenting, learning, sharing what works and what doesn’t. That 1% will grow, the infrastructure will deepen, and the bridge will become wide and strong enough to hold the movement that will inevitably migrate across.
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