Going Horizontal: Indigenous Wisdom, Listening & the Future of Work
About
Samantha Slade, author of Going Horizontal and co-founder of Percolab, shares her journey from education and anthropology into pioneering participatory leadership and practical ways to work together.
Slade reflects on how early life experiences—from teaching in remote Canadian communities to witnessing a revolution in Central America—shaped her views on power, courage, and the need for authenticity in the workplace. Samantha discusses how horizontal practices can transform organizations, why listening is the foundation of collaboration, and how Indigenous traditions influence her approach to leadership and organizational design.
Together, we explore:
- Rethinking Hierarchy – Why organizations don’t need to be monarchies to be effective.
- The Power of Listening – How listening culture creates psychological safety and shared responsibility.
- Indigenous Wisdom – Lessons from Indigenous practices on stewardship, spirit, and complexity.
- Abundance Mindset – Power and knowledge as renewable and expansive resources.
- Care & Productivity – How relational well-being directly fuels organizational outcomes.
Listen on: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Pocket Casts | RSS Feed
Themes
- Horizontal Leadership – Moving from command-and-control to collaborative structures.
- Courage & Authenticity – Bringing full humanity, including difficult emotions, into the workplace.
- Indigenous Practices – Integrating stewardship, reciprocity, and spirit into modern organizations.
- Listening as a Practice – Developing cultures of deep listening to build trust and effectiveness.
- Abundance & Power – Reframing power as limitless and collective rather than scarce.
- Care & Productivity – Understanding care not as a distraction but as the driver of engagement.
Timestamps
Beginnings & Inspirations
00:00 — Welcome & Introduction of Samantha Slade
00:39 — From education to questioning hierarchy
02:48 — Founding Percolab as an applied research lab
Early Life & Formative Experiences
05:45 — Teaching in a fly-in community in Northern Canada
07:56 — Witnessing revolution and resilience in Nicaragua
09:40 — Surviving a human trafficking attempt and finding courage
13:24 — Reconnecting authenticity and emotions in workspaces
Workplace Dynamics & Horizontal Practices
16:19 — Why workplaces are monarchies, not democracies
17:56 — Gallup research on global employee disengagement
19:09 — Small shifts that transform organizational culture
21:01 — Talking circles and conflict resolution in practice
Abundance, Reciprocity & Indigenous Wisdom
22:50 — Open-sourcing practices & shifting from scarcity to abundance
24:30 — Standing on the shoulders of cultural traditions
26:20 — Why Going Horizontal is an action, not a destination
29:10 — Scaling collaboration: from small groups to large organizations
Trust, Structure & Leadership
35:36 — Building conditions for trust in organizations
37:00 — Horizontal systems are structured, not structureless
39:56 — Key diagnostic: listening culture as a first step
42:28 — “Listen For” – a game to cultivate listening practices
Care, Power & Decolonization
43:46 — Why care and productivity belong together
47:32 — Navigating crises collectively, not alone
50:25 — Power as abundant rather than scarce
54:09 — Decolonizing organizational practices
59:18 — Stewardship and the “Keeper of Spirit” role
Success Stories & Closing Reflections
01:06:58 — Revitalizing Inuit language and agency through strategic planning
01:12:56 — Shifting from performative to well-being indicators
01:16:05 — Closing gratitude & reflections
References
📖 Going Horizontal: Creating a Non-Hierarchical Organization, One Practice at a Time – Samantha Slade
📚 Tyson Yunkaporta – Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World
📚 David Snowden – Work on complexity and sense-making
📖 Wade Davis – The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World
Transcript
Lucas Tauil (00:02.044)
Today we welcome Samantha Slade, author of Going Horizontal, creating a non-hierarchical organization, one practice at a time. Samantha Slade is the co-founder of the Percolab, where she pioneers culture-driven practices and operational tools to grow participatory leadership. Sam, such an honor to have you here. Welcome.
Samantha Slade (00:28.066)
Thank you so much. I'm delighted to be here.
Lucas Tauil (00:31.325)
Could you start by sharing a bit about your journey and what first drew you into working with horizontal organizations?
Samantha Slade (00:39.98)
Hmm. Where to start? How far back should I go? So I mean, I can start with a professional worker, Samantha. My first career was in the realm of education and I was very successful in it and went up the ladder. And as I went up, I just kept feeling stranger and stranger inside my belly that something was amiss, that this wasn't how
the world was supposed to work. This wasn't how I was designed to function. And until after 16 years, I let go of it all and started Percolab as a conscious place to function as an applied research lab to lean into how might we want to be together in the work world. And so...
It really, this is a journey that comes from a life work journey of being tuned into the subtleties of how we organize and structure ourselves at work.
And that if we take it to the layer before, my background is in cultural anthropology. So I have also been on a life journey of really looking about the worldviews that underpin how we set ourselves up in the process and structures and practices we give each other are all coming from a certain belief system underneath. And I've spent a lot of my time sort of looking.
at different ways and belief systems that exist in the world and those that exist in our... it's like for some... I'll just call it this, like this... for some reason historically our world figured itself out to get organized the way it is and it's based on a paradigm of more one over the other in hierarchical...
Samantha Slade (02:48.331)
means which involves
people telling other people what to do versus everybody uplifting each other to be in their collective strengths. It's just all of that journey. So both the anthropological journey, which took me on personal life into many different places, and then the professional journey, which gave me the hands-on experience to eventually create Percolab Co-op as this applied research lab, which is now coming on 20 years.
Yeah, and every, every week, every day.
I continue to see that we are designed as human beings to function together in ways that are mutually caring, mutually respectful and honoring our strengths and gifts. And there are ways to function effectively, productively in that spirit. We've just been struggling to find examples, but we have them. We have the research, we have the examples. It's possible we can go there. So yeah, that's that's one.
way we can talk about work there's the other deeper story but we can get to that after but that's that's the first level in
Lucas Tauil (04:05.264)
Yeah, I love to hear that your background is education. It's always been a fascination of mine. When my first daughter was born, my wife and I were living in a tiny village in Brazil that didn't have proper schools. It had an elite school for the rich and the poor had a very precarious school. And we found that both were not suitable. We tried, but...
Samantha Slade (04:33.771)
Mmm.
Lucas Tauil (04:33.852)
our daughter that was super extrovert and happy all of the sudden became very contracted and fearful. So we got a bunch of parents together and we co-founded a communitarian school. And ever since I've been fascinated, my wife and I sailed a couple of years and home-schooled our children.
And in New Zealand, where we live today, I learned that the Maori people have this concept of the word that they use for education does not distinguish in between teacher and student. Learning or teaching is the same word. So there's this embedded concept of reciprocity in their native culture that I just find it...
Samantha Slade (05:19.597)
Mm-hmm.
Lucas Tauil (05:31.792)
beautiful, you know, because it's like there's no hierarchical structure in the process of learning together and it's like gosh it's such strong observation.
Samantha Slade (05:45.11)
And you know.
If I just like we back to my education experience. So during those 16 years, I was in all different places in education. But of course, like most people, I started out as a teacher and I was blessed because my very first job when I first came out of university was in the north of Canada. You had to fly. It's what we call a fly in community. There's no roads to it. So you fly in, you get dropped off the plane and you integrate into a community where there's in the place where I was, there was
classrooms and so I had the classroom where kids were age 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 and I had all subjects with all those ages and it was my first year teaching.
I couldn't do anything other than self-manage, self-govern, self-directed, self-organized learning. It was like, just immersed me in that instantly. I was like, how do you do this? Other than giving everybody tools and structure and processes to be able to go, this is what I'm working on right now. This is how much I've practiced it. This is how I know I'm advancing and progressing. This is how I'm going to be celebrating it. This is how I'm going to ask for help.
and for coaching and doing all of that like inter-age all over. I loved it. It was a great creative complex constraint challenge for me that I probably cut my teeth in a lot of the things that I do today and like all you know much more serious spaces but those children were really my first teachers.
Lucas Tauil (07:26.268)
Yeah, the interaction in between children in different age groups is just fascinating. The school we had was also a 2-7 in the beginning. It was a kindergarten. And the interaction between the children is just so fascinating. But, how did your early experiences in Nicaragua shape your perspective on organizational structure?
Samantha Slade (07:30.103)
Hmm.
Samantha Slade (07:56.174)
So I was studying at McGill University in Montreal, Canada and in a political science course, you know, we were talking about revolution and reading books on it and doing all the theory on it. And it was just sitting with me that while we were in the midst of doing it, there was a revolution going on.
in Central America that was alive. And I was just like, oh, you know, reading about stuff and then being in it, that's two different things. And so I took a year off and I was like, I'm just going to pause the education and I'm going to go and experience what a revolution could be firsthand, which is, I don't know, it was there in me. And off I went down to Central America and had experience in a few countries. It was, you know, the 1980s, it was a very
time, but what I did get to see was how, you know, the government could create new systems for literacy and for organizing things that just seemed like wild and not possible. But yes, they were, they were happening right there. And then you could make new policies and roll them out. And the same time I was, to be fair, a young woman on my own traveling in a very, you know, complex places and
not in Nicaragua but in a neighboring country. had a difficult experience that has turned into a real gift for me but it was one day I got, when I was just trying to rent my room for hotel, I was caught in a human trafficking organized crime trap and
I was taken hostage and put on a market to be sold and people came in to try and put a price on me. There were negotiations and it was a whole thing. It was really like it showed me the underbelly of a world where we don't talk about these things happening that your life and freedom can be taken away from you in just a moment like that. And so I was locked in a room.
Samantha Slade (10:11.405)
I didn't see any way out but this young boy who was maybe 10 or 11, we're back to children, children as teachers, he was very aware it was happening. He was the muchacho who was supposed to do run all the errands and his job in the end was to, he had something to do, put in the room and then leave and he was supposed to lock the door but he looked at me, he looked at my backpack, he looked at the door handle and he looked back at me and I understood that he was intentionally not locking the
door and I had a one-minute window to get to freedom and which I managed to take and be here where I am today with you.
And in the end, he's become, I guess, my model when I think of leadership. I often come up with the word courage because that young lad, he mustered his courage and risked his own consequences, which I'll never know what they really were, to make sure that I had my freedom. So yeah, that's put fire in my belly for...
For a lot of the work we do, it took me a long time to make the link to it, but there's something about that. There's something about me using my freedom to do meaningful work. That's very, very clear. And the other is about what is the world we want to live in and what really is leadership. Yeah.
Lucas Tauil (11:43.44)
him hearing the story of violence in...
your liberty and body under risk is just like, know, there's so much there. Before we started recording, we were speaking about managing anger, and you're speaking of the fire in your belly, you know? There's this whole realm of deep emotions in threatening experiences that...
Samantha Slade (12:08.363)
Hmm.
Lucas Tauil (12:20.784)
that we go through in... that is usually kept away or washed, right, from the professional experiences, from the workspaces, like where we tend to leave things out the door. And there's a maiming, a curtailing when we do that, right? If I come to work,
Samantha Slade (12:26.654)
Mm-hmm.
Lucas Tauil (12:50.64)
but a huge part of myself is left out. Something is amiss, something can't fully create, there's a loss there. In hearing of your experience, I go like, yeah, very early on, you encountered this in a way that could be traumatic, that could have...
blocked you in fear, but it gave you fire in your belly. In a way a blessing from a scary situation.
Samantha Slade (13:24.493)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, I did.
Samantha Slade (13:33.646)
And I like the way you link it back to authenticity at the workplace, like showing up real. And real doesn't mean just happy and smiling. Real means real with all the colors of real. mean, we talk about it.
I use a framework for six emotions that are basically when we look at the way we feel things, it's you're either joyful, you're either sad, you're angry, you're surprised, or you're disgusted. I'm missing one. No, anyways, it'll come.
Lucas Tauil (14:10.588)
Curious?
Samantha Slade (14:15.317)
the interesting one is that we, all of those are healthy and natural. fearful. Isn't that fear and anger right up there in disgust? Like those are three of the six, emotion categories and we don't really talk about them very much or even get,
I don't want to say trained, but get initiated in to have healthy expressions of them. I know for myself, like this is an interesting one, you use this one, repression of anger is like a classic. And so this story was repressed for many years. And as I was coming into shifting the ways we do workplaces to show up fully as ourselves and being in our strengths and our authenticity and all of that, this story came back to the surface.
had repressed it until I was wow in my 40s before I shared it out. Yeah, late 40s even I think. Yeah and that's true so much. So I mean often when people think that
they can be authentic at the workplace. It's because they have affinities, friendship affinities with the people they work, but workplace isn't always about being with your friends. So how do you be with people who are different with you in a place where you have things to get done, deliverables to do, stuff to happen, decisions to make?
when people are completely different than you and this will cause well we could talk about emotions we can talk about tensions we can talk all the way up to conflict and the way we currently manage it in our mainstream systems is I'm going to go talk to my supervisor who will manage it for me like
Samantha Slade (16:19.573)
What is that other than as entire society getting better at this and being able to manage our difficult moments together respectfully, but not just like, I'll figure it out in our workplaces we have structures and processes and protocols for things. can have structures, processes and protocols for this too. In fact, we do, and there are tons. You know what I mean?
Lucas Tauil (16:46.35)
Yeah, we are going through for political movement. Let me do that again. Yeah, we're going through for political moment where we feel democracy under threat, right? There's extreme right movements emerging throughout the planet. And we are all speaking up about it and people are taking to the streets.
But I find it fascinating that the workplace is not democratic at all. The workplace is an old-school monarchy, right? Like, whoever owns it sets the rules and the systems and the processes. And people who are trying something different are actually finding that it works better, that you have better results. I think I remember you mentioning the
the Gallup researchers on work engagement and it's just like scary, right? Could you remind me of that?
Samantha Slade (17:56.568)
Catastrophic. the numbers, they're just so catastrophic. I've even put them aside because I can only imagine them in some places getting worse. But the level of disengagement of employees is beyond what anybody can think. I'd have to stop and go back and get the numbers. They're in the book. But you remember?
Lucas Tauil (18:17.274)
I do remember, I think that if you compare the number of workers with an eight-seat rowing boat, two people are rowing forward, so they are engaged. Two people are rowing backwards, so they are intentionally disengaged. And four people are flapping their oars.
Samantha Slade (18:41.685)
I love the boating metaphor, so the boat's not going anywhere. It's a very good metaphor to put in it. Yeah, and yet we continue with it. We continue building the boats. We continue trying to make them move like that, which is the whole system goes until at one point we just stop and take a breath and say, do I like, how am I contributing to this? Do I want to continue contributing to this?
Lucas Tauil (18:45.18)
Exactly.
Samantha Slade (19:09.645)
What could I do? I mean, there's a whole bunch of people who just go, I don't want to be in the workplace because they intuitively sense some of the dysfunctionality. That is a problem in and of itself and probably adds to, you know.
the anxiety of youth amongst all the other issues going on in the world, right? Is finding their place where they feel valued and well-being in a workplace is not as easy as they would like it to be. And so they just, some people just disengage. And it is possible. this is, mean, I think this is why I decided to write a book. It's the reason why I decided.
to engage fully in the workplace as a place of change and a leverage for co-creating the futures we dream of.
because it's actually easier than you think in a workplace. mean, yeah, you got to pull up your sleeves, but the pathways are known. It's not, you like you can work from a fractal way of functioning, change your meeting culture, and you change the way you're showing up together. There's like so many low risk places where you can, you can transform the way we're doing things based on other assumptions and other belief systems around
you know, human beings, art could be together. And what that does is it creates everybody feels more valued, more acknowledged, more recognized, more seen, more able to contribute in their ideas, their strengths. It's like it creates flow. It doesn't mean it's squeaky clean and everybody's all happy and da da da da. And that's we get back to the emotion piece. There's like there's still the tricky emotions that you have to navigate. At one point you have to deal with that.
Samantha Slade (21:01.941)
It's why I say, I've come to say over the years that for any endeavor to really succeed in transforming the way we do things together, going back to the practice of talking circles is necessary because that's what it's like a tool we can lean on.
that can take us through those real crunchy difficult moments where you're like, I could never be here. I have to go join another team. I have to leave this place. If you actually have in your body and your reflexes and in your know how some protocols and practices of being together that can take you through, then you can lean on them and they will carry you through.
Lucas Tauil (21:58.139)
Sam, we worked together a couple of years ago and I remember how all your materials at the Percolab are open source. So the practices are there. Anyone can come and learn from them and use them. There is a background of abundance in it, right? Hey, here's all the work I created.
Samantha Slade (22:03.467)
Yes.
Lucas Tauil (22:27.836)
you can use in reciprocity. There's a huge shift when we do that, right? There's a trust that this will work. How was the experience of shifting from a scarcity mindset to one of abundance?
Samantha Slade (22:50.903)
Hmm. So what I want to say first off is it's not me or Percolab or a team that's been developing any of the practices that we're developing. We are standing on the shoulders of many there and I'm going to get back to you. You're going to hear me come back to the cultural anthropologist a lot.
peoples across our planet have been practicing social practices of togetherness for time immemorial, right? And have figured out good ways to...
And I say ways because we do need rituals and structures and processes that help us be our better selves, that help us be better listeners, that help us deal with difficult moments and situations. So the practices that we actually, I would say, we like fine tune and get to the baseline.
essential of step one, two, three, four with a couple of principles and that you can just put in a single page and that can travel well and stick well and be picked up by people very easy and accessible.
they're not coming from me directly, they're coming through me from all of this what's behind me and I'm just putting my little or we are just putting our little contribution into them to reconnect the modern work world to these practices and that's why I can't I mean
Samantha Slade (24:30.645)
When I first put the book going horizontal out, I had some people give me pushback because they were like, but Samantha, I thought you always said these practices don't belong to anybody. They belong to the world. And I'm like, yes, absolutely. And I just wrote a book with a publisher and an editor. this has a price on it and it will be distributed in bookstores and around the world and translated and whatnot. And those two things can coexist. And yeah.
Lucas Tauil (24:56.444)
I've been living in New Zealand for 12 years and I'm totally fascinated by the Maori local culture and they have this concept of Manakitanga where you come to my home and I'm gonna host you like a queen because you deserve it. But when you leave my home you're going to brag to the forewings that I'm the best host ever. So there's this
acknowledgement of reciprocity, acknowledgement of lineage that is embedded in the protocols of the culture.
Samantha Slade (25:25.984)
Mm-hmm.
Yes, yes.
Lucas Tauil (25:34.983)
time-tested practices are really important, And as you say, they exist in the modern present time. They float with our needs for livelihood and encounter in workplaces. So it's the...
Samantha Slade (25:57.794)
They flow together, yeah.
Lucas Tauil (26:00.57)
the experience of being adults in a real world that makes it more important. You were speaking of your book, Going Horizontal, and there's a particular choice in that name, right?
Samantha Slade (26:20.109)
100%. So the title for me had to be a verb because it's an action, not an arrival. It's a doing. It's like the spirit of, I am...
I'm in my awareness and my consciousness that we are at a period of time in the world where I have within me from the mainstream dominant world, the outside system, very, a lot of hierarchical elements that are inside me and
I have also all of these kind of circular collective caring interconnected relational reciprocity shared responsibility and I'm standing between them.
I am, you are, we all are, most of us are, right? And we're navigating between that with one foot in this way that we've been conditioned and one foot that speaks maybe more to our values. And yeah, and any day we're trying to just work with
that reality. So it's a going. It's, you know, we're in it. So I want us to be kind with ourselves on that journey, right? It's not like, I failed or I got there and people said to me, Samantha, we would like to do something, but you know, we're not going to go all the way. I'm like, just be in the awareness of what we've inherited from the dominant systems that are around us of what's considered normal. And what for you
Samantha Slade (27:57.596)
makes more sense based on your values and and the shifts going on in our world. Just be just be aware of that and more conscious of it and be in the going and getting better and the practice and that's enough. And the horizontal was there because it doesn't it like sometimes people confuse horizontal with flat. Horizontal is basically a provocation to say you know it doesn't have to be as hierarchical as
people are assuming it needs to be. And so look at that.
question it, think about it, play with it, right? And so also the going horizontal is of course a provocation that my editor loved in herself, but in the work I've been doing with a lot of different Indigenous communities, because we don't have one here in Canada, we have lots of First Nation and Inuit communities, it's very natural to put a verb instead of a noun because the action is there's an acceptance.
there and an invitation.
Lucas Tauil (29:04.38)
Yeah, I love the idea of movement, of something in progress rather than something frozen. Yeah, that's super powerful.
Samantha Slade (29:10.217)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Lucas Tauil (29:16.504)
Sam, there's a lot of theories and discussions of why we chose hierarchical structures in the past, the idea that scale requires hierarchical processes. We have very good examples of non-hierarchical structures, right? On a jazz band.
No one is leading, no one is telling you how to play, where to go, right? On an improv theatre play, it is the flow, it's the playfulness of the actors that drives the possibilities. And we have this figured out for small groups. It is on the bigger groups that we struggle. How does...
going horizontal happens when you are in the bigger groups. How does collective intelligence finds safe spaces and healthy interactions in bigger groups?
Samantha Slade (30:36.213)
It's interesting, there's so many assumptions in your question, right? Because, and people say this to me all the time, they're like, we're a big organization, we can't go horizontal. And I mean, to be fair, I've worked up from the federal government to wherever, we're a group of people in a team trying to work together in a way that feels both,
can feed both our well-being, our feeling of belonging, and all the stuff that means that I'm going to be engaged and motivated and show up in my best self and all the productivity things. So doing that can happen at any scale and we have examples of businesses that do it, but I feel that if you come from hierarchy, you're always seeing like a head director at the top. that's like you think as you go up, you can't. It's almost like a
hierarchically biased question. You see what I'm saying? Because if you look at nature, it's self-organizing. There isn't a director.
Lucas Tauil (31:35.962)
you.
Samantha Slade (31:46.035)
The world works like this.
And somehow we've gotten lulled into thinking if that there isn't a boss on the top, how would people know what to do? How does the tree know where to grow? How does the bee know where to buzz? I mean, we, this is the way we're designed, right? And so,
There is also, so this is the, that's the one thing that I'm saying, there's a little bit of a bias in it. And the other is that there are so many forms and shapes and possibilities of how we can do things within that other worldview, within all that other worldview that integrates.
the subtleties of showing up fully and giving space for this and that and making decisions together and inviting everybody. When you assume, if you come from hierarchical bias, you'll go, well, we can't do collective decision making. I would love to invite everybody, but then it would be a disaster. We don't have time for it. And I'm like, right, because from your hierarchical space, you have not yet watched
like a hierarchically directed decisions with lots of people that are efficient, of course, because that's where you've been. But if you go into a place that's working with a more horizontal or whatever you want to call it, collaborative, healthy collaborative spirit, and doing that well in an egalitarian and holistic way, then people could be inviting everybody and they know what the minimum diversity is and people know that
Samantha Slade (33:33.632)
that, what are the criteria for making that decision? I don't need to be involved. And that whole thing is managing itself out with way more wisdom, way more wisdom than what the hierarchical bias could even imagine. And it's one of the difficulties with this. And this is why I feel like it's hard to imagine something that you haven't experienced. And here at Percolab, we open our team meetings for guests, like every week, three spots.
And we've been doing this for, I don't know, eight, 10 years. I'm not quite sure. It's just like for us, it's normal. And we open it to people, sure, some people who are interested in being interns or joining the team, but we open it to researchers or organizations that are on their own journey. And they just want to come and have an immersive experience of like, is it really possible? How does that look and feel? And...
to get it out of a book and a cognitive place and put it into your body space and watch people actually who have who think and feel that this is normal because they've been living with it for years and watch it function as a well-oiled system and witness its productivity and witness its care. It's yeah, I feel it's one of the really important things we do is keeping that door open for our team meetings.
Lucas Tauil (34:54.938)
Yeah, there's something you describe adult-to-adult relationships, relationships of trust and integrity. There's something tremendous that happens when you encounter lack of trust. If from the get-go there's no trust, there's no incentive to be an adult, right? If someone is treating you like a child,
Samantha Slade (35:02.113)
Yeah.
Lucas Tauil (35:20.998)
This creates dysfunctional relationships. It invites people to play childishly and to respond as adults in relationships and in integrity. You're about to say?
Samantha Slade (35:30.188)
Yes.
Samantha Slade (35:36.654)
Absolutely. Yeah, I was gonna say it takes two forms that does because it depends where your experience is. You might have experienced it as people stopping you from doing things or telling you to do things like micromanaging you or the other form is the very, you know, I'll do it for you form because I'm gonna save you from it. And they're both equally dysfunctional, but one might feel caring or think it's caring.
but it's still not allowing another person to be in their full agency, strength, discovery, expertise of themselves. And yeah, so I'm fully with you. Trust, how do we create, it's not even, we create conditions for trust to grow and be cultivated. And it's really the conditions for that.
Lucas Tauil (36:36.826)
And it's not free for all, right? It's within the context or the container of agreements that we make together. It's not that you do whatever you want. We'll hold agreements together and we'll review them. There's a container for it. It's not free for all.
Samantha Slade (37:00.297)
So the assumption that working in more egalitarian, collaborative, horizontal ways is is structureless. We know that this is
in the it makes no sense right it's it's a myth and a misperception and in my experience of course it's a different structure but because you've never seen it or witnessed it you you you can't imagine it and that structure is so well thought out i i think of it as like banks of a river so that the water flows
And if you don't have banks on a river, just like, huh, it becomes very marshy. But if you have that sweet spot structure, that water is flowing. And when I think of the structures of horizontal systems, the water's flowing. Just before I came into this call here, we were running.
workshop with it was a launch of a training and collaborative leadership in a corporate context and it's so interesting because it was so structured on like we knew we were going to be going into breakouts and not going into great breakouts we knew that we were going to be putting things in the chat so that everybody could be seeing like all of those details but what was really interesting was that at no point we were presenting to the group we were like
This is the purpose and you're going to have time.
Samantha Slade (38:37.099)
You go and figure it out and you're going to be with a couple of people and you figure it out. And if you come back, you have some clarifying questions. We're here for you. But that's how the trust was created at the very beginning. Instead of doing, I'm going to speak to you because I'm the expert and I know, and you're going to quietly listen. So straight away flipping that around and creating trust by like, here's what's going on. Here's a two page document. You guys go figure it out together, figure out what you love in it.
figure out what makes you uncomfortable, figure out the questions that are still alive in you, see if you can answer them together and if you can't, we'll come back and we'll listen in. Now...
That doesn't sound complicated at all, but it took a structure. The structure was we are going to have 15 minutes and we're going to explain that. We're going to do breakout groups, dah, dah, dah, dah. It's a different structure than me, which I almost think is a non-structure standing there explaining it to you while everybody passively listens. And if we think that's structured, I don't know. That's our default structure that we go to, right?
Lucas Tauil (39:44.452)
Yeah, Sam, what are the key factors for successfully transitioning organizations to horizontal structures?
Samantha Slade (39:56.076)
Well, I can tell you what I listen in for first when I'm almost doing like my quiet little diagnostic on the side is the quality of the listening culture. That's the first element because there's so much...
inefficiencies in system set up while people are cutting each other off and explaining and justifying and trying to commiserate or argue against or debate like all of that is just like so much noise on a surface that you can't go to the deep level of of what I talked about those emotions that could be more complicated and they almost saves us from it right so
for a shift into functioning together, taking responsibility for shared purpose. Yes, we need to have the shared purpose and we need to be aligned on it. So that's something having the practice of surfacing purpose and aligning with it and having a basic listening culture so that you could put something in the center.
and each person could speak without being interrupted and could be witnessed. I'm almost coming back to the talking circle bit, right? And it's not just about I'm listening to you to judge you or to get my words ready to tell you what I think to prepare my counter argument. It's like, are we able to stop and see this other human being?
and receive their perspective and their experience and their words they choose to have and their ideas and their thoughts. It's very simple, but
Samantha Slade (41:43.338)
We don't get taught that necessarily in school and we don't get brought into that necessarily in the workplace and systemically we're exhausting ourselves and unable to actually start being in our healthy collaboration until we begin listening together. That's why we developed a game Listen For because after years of seeing it it's like my
We need some tools to help us get to that place of listening to each other. That's the baseline for it. It's, it's, I mean, be you horizontal or hierarchical, if you've got good listening, you're going to be doing better work.
Lucas Tauil (42:23.292)
where people can experience the game.
Samantha Slade (42:28.476)
It's offered online in both the America's time zone and the Pacific time zone, Asia Pacific time zone. I don't know, like I'm not sure I'm not the one takes care of it, but once or twice, once a month or once every couple of months. And you can get the game. exists in a couple of languages and you can just get it online at percolab.com.
Yeah, it's just a really simple card game that helps people share stories in a way that creates psychological safety and then to be listened to with a little protocol around that and some really lovely cards that shift your listening bias to a specific listening lens. There's really simple research and science around this and
it works and the game fast tracks it so very fast you can have a quality listening experience and receive stories of what's going on every day in a workplace and actually learn from your everyday in a workplace together.
Lucas Tauil (43:38.94)
How do you observe the relationship between productivity and care?
Samantha Slade (43:46.51)
So we're back to the I feel that the mainstream world puts those in opposition as separate things. It's like, I'm going to stop the productivity and have a little well-being moment. You know, we think that care is counter to productivity. I feel a lot of people make that assumption. I know spaces that do. And we haven't quite figured out.
how to just do work in a way that is caring and the more it's caring it is actually more productive. But and I'm just going to loop it back to the because there's so many things we could say about this but to loop it back to the first level of caring you could have is to be listened to to be acknowledged to be seen to be heard and
There are so many spaces that are well intended and would like to have the voice of everybody. Wouldn't that be great? But because you're just letting everything pop around and we haven't developed this capacity of witnessing each other without reacting or speaking up. Yeah. So once you do that good listening, you're also doing good caring and you're getting,
wiser perspective on all that's going on. You're seeing each other and so you can actually start getting more systemic understanding of things so you can the the the caring way can lead you to the wiser way of doing things as well. Yeah, it's a real unraveling to do that and I'm back to it's hard to understand it without living the experiences of it. But mostly everybody you know,
And this is the cultural anthropologist. We do all of this. Everybody knows what caring feels like in our lives. And then somehow we get confused in the workspace. It's like this productivity assumption means, that would be great, but we just don't have time.
Lucas Tauil (45:55.838)
Sam, how does the idea of adult to adult interactions shifts the culture within an organization?
Samantha Slade (46:07.543)
So tell me what specifically you're thinking around about.
Lucas Tauil (46:15.664)
So when we get rid of maternal or...
Lucas Tauil (46:25.468)
Let me get back to this. So when we think of paternalistic or maternal lenses in relationships or childish behaviors, there's no clarity of limits or agreements.
not good. Let's just get rid of that one. think we covered it before in a
Samantha Slade (46:56.651)
Hmm, okay. Let's go.
Lucas Tauil (47:05.392)
Let me bring you another one.
Samantha Slade (47:08.031)
Alrighty, I'm ready.
Lucas Tauil (47:11.62)
Sam, how can horizontal organizations handle crisis situations in... sorry, I'll try again. Sam, how can horizontal organizations handle crisis situations as effectively as traditional ones?
Samantha Slade (47:32.952)
So.
I just want to unpack. It's like we're dealing with horizontal organizations as being one thing when there are a multiplicity of things. We're just, we're teams and organizations, departments and units that are functioning together with a more conscious way of doing healthy collaboration in more egalitarian ways and more holistic ways. Okay. So if I look at it like that and I go, how do we deal with
crisis. Anything that we're doing is we want people to be in their most capable to see an issue going on and to take responsibility and initiative. That's what everybody wants. So see what's going on, take responsibility and initiative. And if you can take that responsibility and initiative, not just from a
self-interest but from the collective purpose interest. This is what we cultivate in places of healthy collaboration is getting discernment between my what's good for me and what's good for the the organization or the team or the project and that tension point and navigating it. This is you can start to get a lot of discernment around that. So in a time of crisis you can be together in it.
That's mostly what I'm trying to say instead of alone. I just think back of when we went through COVID and if you want to talk about crisis, it just comes into my body as a business of we had 100 % of our contracts cancelled within, I don't know, a two week time period. And I was like, oh, if I was a traditional boss, I would have all of that on my shoulders.
Samantha Slade (49:34.594)
But thank goodness, I have sold the business to the team and we are now a worker run cooperative and everybody is in this and a shared responsibility place and we put it in the center and together we held it. And I was, I just remember thinking about it that, I can live any crisis with collective wisdom, with collective capacity, with collective care.
and thank goodness for that.
Lucas Tauil (50:11.174)
Sam something that really caught my attention in your book is when you mention power as abundant rather than scarce. How does this perspective shift leadership practices?
Samantha Slade (50:18.445)
Mm-hmm.
Samantha Slade (50:25.261)
So, I mean, I love talking and thinking about power because we've gotten so many assumptions that have come down. I would give them the lineage of colonialism down today. We think about power in specific ways and it's the assumptions that are the way we do decision making and work with power dynamics in organizations. And so,
If we don't think of it, if I ask you the question, when you think of power, do you think of it as something that's like a pie and that's something we could divvy up and there's pieces of the pie. So if I get a bigger piece, you have a smaller piece. If you get a bigger piece, I have a smaller piece. so I feel restricted around power.
Whereas about, if I think about everyone's in their power and you're in your power and I'm in your power and this person's in their power and that person's in their power, then that means we will all be able to do amazing things. But to be able to be everyone in their power, you have to break through your actual inner understanding of what
power is for you and that is not always known to oneself. So I often ask people like what is power for you and it's like a question of him like but there are those that way of thinking about power and I feel that even just like naming that out loud it helps people to to like kind of see it for themselves and unravel it and then straight away you're like
Maybe I was feeling a little bit competitive around power in spaces where I didn't need to be, because what we really want is we don't want everybody to start functioning like all employees and nobody's being directors. We want everybody to be functioning as if they were taking care of the business and the organization. Right? That's what we're trying. That, takes people a while to figure that out.
Lucas Tauil (52:34.076)
Power is much more like love, right? You don't love one child less because you had a second child. It's not divisible.
Samantha Slade (52:37.889)
Yeah.
Samantha Slade (52:49.005)
Yeah.
Lucas Tauil (52:50.468)
Sam, how do horizontal organizations address inherent power dynamics and invisible hierarchies?
Samantha Slade (53:02.497)
So you're talking about power dynamics that exists beyond positions within an organization, right? So, and let's just say, you know, I'm not saying that positions are bad and that having hierarchies is bad in an organization. Some ways depends on whatever's going on. I mean, you can go and...
look at them. There very many examples. Frederick Lelouz does a great job of explaining this. Let's cut that and go at it again.
Lucas Tauil (53:39.461)
Yeah, I actually, this was here by mistake. This was a code question. And I don't know how it ended up in my teleprompter. And after I finished, I saw the C for code and go like, this shouldn't be here. So we can just skip it. Sam, what practices have you found most effective?
Samantha Slade (53:43.661)
Okay.
Samantha Slade (53:49.365)
Okay.
Samantha Slade (53:54.88)
okay, we're done. that's great.
Lucas Tauil (54:06.542)
for decolonizing organizational structures.
Samantha Slade (54:09.389)
the big word. Tending towards decolonizing. I mean, as soon as we begin working with power, more consciously and collectively and care and relationships and reciprocity, we are tending towards decolonizing in a way because colonization just, you know,
has left a legacy of I barge in, I decide for you, I don't listen to you, I dominate, I take from, I extract. Like it's just all of it, right? And it's in us. It's in all of us. And so the unraveling of it slowly, right? And moments where we see, we just see things. So
I can talk about when I come to talk about listening, having the inclusion of everyone and you can start to see and hear and value perspectives that are not your own is part of my decolonizing journey.
Because that's the whole thing is the just thinking my way is the right way is what we're trying to break through, right? There are ways. There are ways. Do I have curiosity for these other ways of thinking, being and doing, right? And so.
Yeah, there's no, I don't want to give like, there's no recipe and I will not give the recipe 123 of decolonizing, right? They're like, I think everybody if you if you become intentional on that as a journey, it will find its way to unravel itself in you. So that listening to the perspectives is one and I like it makes me
Samantha Slade (56:20.075)
to span my hands out. But then if I went to the other one, this other direction is we already mentioned it a little bit of lineage. understanding where things are coming from. And from anybody who's spent some time with Indigenous people, at one point, they're going to talk to you about the elders, the ancestors, they're going to start they go down because the stories come. And they come up and there's an
honor and respecting and that so you're walking in a more respectful way with all that is and has been before you. So you come into that humility, right? And that's a practice, but
You know, there's an organization we've been working with right now and they wanted to put humility into their strategic plan part and they were challenged on it of like, hmm, do we really want to need to be humble? Aren't we supposed to be taking our place in the world? And it's it's it's such an these are some interesting things to be journey and just having the conversations around them is so beautiful.
Samantha Slade (57:39.586)
Yeah, there's so much work I'm doing right now in this space. I don't know what to say that respectfully honors it other than.
The number one thing I have is like, had at one point in a Percolab retreat, we gave ourselves a, we always have a talking circle on something, but one that really stayed with me as part of our process was how is my practice of allyship going? And we put that in the center of a talking circle at our team retreat. And...
I loved it because we had a new person from the team who just immigrated from France. was like ally, like never like allyship with First Nations and Inuit and Indigenous peoples was like...
a concept she had never heard of. It was completely off her radar and she really checked in like that. But as we went around, she could see that, she had just immigrated to a place that had a history that was off her radar. So like she was starting to see that and naming it as a practice is
Yeah, how do we be in all the work that we do with more consciousness and awareness of all that has been before us? Yeah, it's part of the work we need to do in the world today.
Lucas Tauil (59:05.082)
Stim, could you speak about how insights from indigenous organizational practices have influenced your work?
Samantha Slade (59:18.899)
It's really interesting because, yeah, Indigenous practices, Indigenous organizational practices, it's quite... There's one Indigenous organization that I worked with and, you know, we do what we do often when we're restructuring based on this other paradigm, which is, how do we do our roles? So they were an organization that said, we want to restructure based...
on who we are as First Nation peoples and not based on corporate structures. And so how do we organize in roles different than job descriptions and all that? And so...
We're in there and we're spending some time and we're, we're, we're, we've just like let go of job descriptions and the idea of roles and that you steward a role. And this role of stewardship is so natural for indigenous peoples. They understand that like intuitively. And we were going through and I was just holding process for it and they were coming up with their roles. And it's so interesting because the first two roles that they identified,
documented as far as responsibilities and accountabilities and all the things that you do in a properly structured organization were financial caretaker and keeper of spirit. And this for me was like a moment I really stopped and I was like of course financial caretaker because every organization has one and of course you're going to have that role is going to be structured but keeper of spirit really
Yeah, it made me stop in my tracks to say. And they did that so naturally and with such shared alignment that of course we need to tend just to the spirit.
Samantha Slade (01:01:14.613)
Yeah, and so we're at a different level of listening. that's talking about listening, not just like listening to you from your perspective, but listening to the in-between and listening to the beyond and listening to the other than humans. And it's that deeper wisdom and listening. so for them, their role was somebody who would just bring in little rituals into their day to day that would keep them connected to
the spirit of life. Because, so yeah, I just, I just want to name that because we don't even that's so off our radar, right? That an organization could be doing something like that and doing that in like a really professional structure. Let's get organized and roles and accountabilities process. And that just comes up in an indigenous organization says a lot.
Lucas Tauil (01:02:09.55)
Yeah, I recently joined a training on integral practices and it's been the first time I feel I embodied the U on Theory U. So this letting go, connecting to Source and then letting come to prototype. But it was a rational thing to me before during this retreat I joined in Australia.
I think I embodied the connecting to source, the listening to spirit you're talking about, letting go and going like, hey, what is here? What wants to emerge? For then, letting it come in, thinking of together prototyping. And it's been life-changing as an embodied experience rather than just one in the mind.
I think that Otto Scharmer drank from a huge number of indigenous...
practices in even religious cosmologies to summarize theory. And I'm going, yeah, of course. How can you do it if you're not silencing enough to listen to what is existing in here? What's the source? What's the spirit?
Samantha Slade (01:03:44.682)
I, you know, in the world today, one of the things when you look at the way we understand the world, the mainstream.
world we've all been trained, myself included, to think of the world from like I'm going to analyze it and use my expertise to figure it out and just need more data and more information and to dig in. It comes from a very linear understanding of the world and it's totally appropriate for many things if you want to build an airplane, all that stuff, And...
There's all the other stuff and I mean, go read the works of David Snowden and others on the complexity theory about, you know, it's not about doing all that analysis or something else to do to be with and you're in a, for me and in my work, it's...
when we're really dealing with complex issues that we're in today in our work world, to being able to stop and have that more intuitive sensing and trying things out and listening between the lines. That for us as a non-Indigenously trained person and with work experience like that felt really
not how I'm supposed to do things, right? And yet it is the way, I'll go back, cultural anthropology and the Indigenous communities I'm with, they know that sense is there. There's the being with complexity is, I think, that's the skill set of those...
Samantha Slade (01:05:31.224)
people, organizations and spaces that are still kind of in their connection to the world that we're in. If you still have that connection, you're still can be in that feeling. And so you can work with complexity because you understand the interconnection and the interdependencies that are going on at so many levels beyond just what we're seeing.
And that is what the work world is facing today. And there are, you know, methods to do that. But there are also peoples who've got that deeper know how have been doing it. that's, yeah, one of the things working. Tyson Yonkapura, he talks about you can read in some of his work, the the how indigenous thinking and complexity really go together.
Lucas Tauil (01:06:18.14)
Yeah, I'm fascinated by his invitation to look into stories and identify right story and wrong story, story that's out of context and doesn't belong to that place or people. It's been super inspiring. Sam, can you share a success story that particularly stands out to you from your work with the Percolab?
Samantha Slade (01:06:25.175)
Yes.
Samantha Slade (01:06:37.581)
Mm.
Samantha Slade (01:06:49.609)
Any success story. Wow.
Lucas Tauil (01:06:51.238)
any.
Samantha Slade (01:06:58.047)
So I know what I consider successful today, but it's very particular to the work I'm doing. So if I get back to everyone in their power, that's really your power, your agency, your awareness, your consciousness, all of that. So the work I'm in.
I'm working with an Inuit school board right now, Kadavik Ilisarni Lidenik. Took me one year to be able to pronounce that. Proud of myself. And as we do the work for the past year, we're doing strategic planning. Everybody knows strategic planning. Everybody does strategic planning. And for me,
The indicator of accomplishment that I've been having in this over the past year is witnessing a community who at the beginning didn't really say anything about their language.
being honored and respected and then beginning to speak it more themselves and then actually like go, hey Sam, if you're working with us, Kedeviki lissardilirnik, should be able to say it. And I was like, yes, I should. so that revitalization of language and revitalization of their own voice,
leadership, agency, creativity, contribution to the world gets stronger as we do the work. And so, yeah, at the end, we're landing a strategic plan that not only, you know,
Samantha Slade (01:08:59.819)
The content feels completely aligned. The form feels aligned. But the process, the journey along the way is already creating the impact of, you know, it's involved a thousand people, but some of those people are really leaning in.
and through the processes of doing, working in this way of being more egalitarian and more holistic and more inclusive and thinking about power differently, people are showing up and are being in their own power in their own own ineptitude voice. Yeah.
Lucas Tauil (01:09:40.591)
Yeah, I remember reading the work of a fellow Canadian of yours, Wade Davis on Wayfinders, where he says that each language is a way to understanding what it is to be human. And that of the 3,000 languages spoken on the planet nowadays, half are not being taught to children. So being actively engaged with a culture.
Samantha Slade (01:09:47.373)
Mm.
Samantha Slade (01:09:56.998)
yes.
Lucas Tauil (01:10:10.328)
in its renaissance, it being taught to children and staying alive and having a diverse way of understanding what it is to be human. It's just brilliant, brilliant.
Sam, I think...
Samantha Slade (01:10:26.913)
Yeah, so that's success. That's success. Indicators of success is, sorry, we're have to cut that. Because I got new phone, somehow it's back pinging on my computer. You heard that? You did, okay, yeah, I don't know how, because that's, I don't know if my new phone has messed me up somehow. But.
Lucas Tauil (01:10:43.132)
I did. I did.
Samantha Slade (01:10:52.333)
We're gonna breathe. wanna say one of the other big success factors that I'm seeing today is when we do work, everybody wants indicators, right? How do we measure success? How do we do evaluation? And the systems around there are also an expression.
of a way of thinking and perceiving the world. And so I've been on part of our research lab inquiry is, what, like, how do we flip these? How do we upside down? How do we engage or decolonize or rethink this whole world of measurement indicators? And I think for a while I was like, you know, you go through the phases, I'm just angry with them. I'm not going to do them.
But I know that it's not about turning away. It's about really leaning in and being with it is how we've transmuted things. so the other day we had a woman from an Indigenous organization, Mekana, here in Montreal with a public health physician in a conversation around
evaluation indicators and he talked about how you could actually have well-being indicators and there's like some frameworks around them and ways of looking at well-being from accomplishment and positive emotion and relationships and engagement and these things and was talking about how we could just shift it and he's like a researcher in public health physician and this woman was like yeah well that's just
that sounds like you're doing things the Indigenous way with putting wellbeing at the center and doing it. So in some of the projects we're doing right now, we're transforming with actual partners who are in like their beautiful courage.
Samantha Slade (01:12:56.127)
without really knowing how that will be deployed in full-on strategic plans, but doing a strategic plan with wellbeing indicators embedded in its rollout. That for me is huge work. It doesn't, there's not like a recipe for doing it, but an agreement of adopting a framework and working on it for the next five years as it gets rolled out. That's a different project that we're doing. It's great.
Lucas Tauil (01:13:21.466)
Sim, would it be correct to say that you're moving from transactional indicators to relational indicators?
Samantha Slade (01:13:33.078)
I haven't thought about it. we're actually, this is really work in my belly. You can feel this one, right? It's quite alive.
Well, well-being indicators are definitely relational and relationships is one of the key whole elements in there. And the way we do conventional
evaluation indicators. I mean maybe you could call it transactional but I guess I was thinking of it more as linear, cognitive, those are the words that were really coming to me more.
Lucas Tauil (01:14:17.948)
Gotcha.
Samantha Slade (01:14:21.719)
performative.
Lucas Tauil (01:14:25.648)
I see, see.
Samantha Slade (01:14:27.575)
They're not going into the depth underneath. Like it's what's on the surface and what you see. So that's what you're focusing on because it looks good. That's the performative part. But well-being indicators really go into say, this is, we're really looking at the impact that matters.
Lucas Tauil (01:14:47.034)
Yeah, I think I connect transactional with linear and relational with exponential. relationships can literally reproduce, right? Like we can fall in love and have children. Transactions are always linear. They don't have this exponential capacity. I think this was the...
Samantha Slade (01:14:51.916)
Mmm.
Mm-hmm.
Samantha Slade (01:15:05.186)
Right.
Samantha Slade (01:15:16.326)
yeah.
Lucas Tauil (01:15:16.535)
point I was coming from.
Samantha Slade (01:15:18.955)
I guess because I'm working in thinking about new economics as well. you know, transactions are part of how we negotiate and are together. And they can be extremely relational and build out well-being or can be the opposite. They can be extractive and yeah.
Lucas Tauil (01:15:40.462)
I love the invitation that even transactions can be held in kindness and love.
Samantha Slade (01:15:46.293)
Yeah. Yeah.
Lucas Tauil (01:15:50.82)
Sam, this has been tremendous. think we have a beautiful interview to share. I really appreciate your time and your wisdom. It's always a gift to be with you.
Samantha Slade (01:16:05.837)
It's really sweet. I love the fact that you are taking on this initiative, this endeavor to bring stories into the world and to weave that with your work. I love it. Thank you so much.
Lucas Tauil (01:16:19.292)
Thank you so much, Sim. I hope we can host you again in a while and hear more how your work is progressing and what the new learnings and experiences are in there. Thank you very much.
Samantha Slade (01:16:35.063)
Thank you, Lucas
Lucas Tauil (01:16:38.961)
Goodbye.
Samantha Slade (01:16:41.784)
Goodbye.