Decision making over grants was delegated from the board to the staff, and we established a whole-team ‘Executive Committee’ to make funding decisions instead.

We used practices such as Deep Democracy to try to ensure all voices were heard and that disagreement was welcomed.

Over time, though, the Executive Committee began to feel distant from the work that was underway, particularly in each of the ‘places’ and where colleagues were deeply involved in external networks. All this work had its own momentum, logic and timeframes.

It felt jarring to bring grants to Executive Committee for discussion by other colleagues who didn’t fully understand the context of the work, and weren’t necessarily able to make informed decisions.

In other words, the dynamics that had been present at the level of the trustees’ Grants Committee began to reassert themselves.

We set up ‘portfolio teams’ for decision making over funding instead. These were small groupings of team members and external people with delegated authority.

This quickly led to a matrix-like decision making structure inside the organisation, as portfolio teams were formed around most organisational functions including ‘operations’ (the last port of call for matters that couldn’t be decided by other groups).

We began to research flat structures, with an intention to move towards this (there is some reading on this in our ‘books’ section). As we did so, line management began to break down and the leadership team was disbanded, though there were still colleagues with positional authority.

We remained in this ‘in-between’ state until the transition pathway decision of 2022.

Following this, a new ‘transition leadership team’ was established and line management reinstated. Arguably, more conventional hierarchy and structure was necessary during this period of high change. However, this was experienced by some colleagues as a painful rupture with Lankelly’s previous direction of travel.

We thought that we needed to model the change we wanted to see in the world, and that this included the need to act more equitably in terms of power and decision-making inside the organisation.

We thought that hierarchy itself might be part of the problem.

The delegation of decision making to the staff unleashed members of the team to go out and energetically pursue the action inquiries, build relationships and follow leads.

The delegation to smaller portfolio teams led to an acceleration of money leaving the organisation into the field. This was because they could meet often and flexibly, so decision making was happening all the time. It was also because the members were closer to the work and understood more about what was needed, when and where. A more distant committee didn’t need to be ‘convinced’.

It was a relatively small step from internal portfolio teams with external members, to external portfolio teams in the place-based work where Lankelly staff were in the minority.

This was a step beyond participatory grant-making, as these external teams could decide the strategic direction of Lankelly’s work within each place; though we still only ever signed off annual rather than multi-year budgets, and our presence remained influential.

We quickly realised that any technical or structural attempt at flattening the hierarchy wasn’t contending with other forms of hierarchy that existed within the organisation.

As people who’ve trodden this path before us are well aware, the more you flatten the formal structure of an organisation, the more the informal hierarchies assert themselves.

Within a philanthropic organisation that is largely unaccountable, flattening the hierarchy also means flattening any remaining semblance of accountability.

There were people within the organisation who already felt confused about what accountability and effectiveness meant in the context of their work. People in the team often said they didn’t know if they were doing a good job or ‘getting better at this’, and felt that nobody seemed to be able to tell them if they were or not.

Flattening the hierarchy further left people feeling they had no one to refer to or defer to. They felt exposed as a result.

Lankelly’s restlessness and yearning for the next thing, enshrined in the idea of action inquiry, meant our core sense of what we were doing, what good looked like and who we were accountable to was continually shifting. Indeed, there was a sense that if it settled in one place that would become a problem because it would be too rigid.

The pursuit of flattened hierarchies was, in retrospect, overstepping what was possible within the constraints of the system we had, and was somewhat naïve and idealistic.

There was a need for a steadier state and a healthier working environment.

With the benefit of hindsight, the freedoms enjoyed by the staff team needed stronger guardrails around them, including greater clarity over what good performance looked like, and more consequences for whether the work was going well or not.

Attempts to introduce such guardrails were not always received positively. Arguably, that was always going to be the case while we had a white board and a white leadership team from a particular kind of educational and class background which lacked the ability to hold these processes with sufficient sensitivity.

In addition, because it was felt that Lankelly people behaved differently from other funders in the field – were more trust-based and relational, less hierarchical – we received a lot of positive feedback (largely from people funded by us). They were seeing some of the upside of our attempt to model the future we wanted to see. But what people outside couldn’t see was that internally, we didn’t have the systems and structures to support that sufficiently.

This created a sense of dissonance between how it felt internally and how it was perceived externally.