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FIVE YEARS OF ORGANIZATIONAL TRANSFORMATION. RESULTS AND IMPACTS ACHIEVED, LESSONS LEARNED, AND FUTURE CHALLENGES

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  Five years ago, on July 15, 2020, we embarked on an organizational transformation at the Fundació el Maresme, based on self-management and self-organization. Our goal was to create a new organizational culture—a new leadership philosophy based on collective knowledge, shared decision-making, and listening to the different voices within the organization, all rooted in democratic governance. It was a culture that was more participatory and where power was also shared and redistributed. We sought to unleash leadership from all levels of the organization, where the architecture (the organizational chart) wouldn't confine people but would instead facilitate the creation of spaces for participation and co-decision. These spaces were intended to generate new management and leadership dynamics. At the same time, we wanted the technical perspective from the field of direct care for individuals—our mission as an organization—to be more present and carry more weight in the leadership te...
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COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE: THE TRANSFORMATIVE ENERGY IN ORGANIZATIONS

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  Daniel Innerarity, in his book “A Theory of Complex Democracy” [1] , points out that “ to truly understand what we mean when we talk about collective intelligence, the first thing we must do is distinguish between individual knowledge and collective knowledge .” “ What organizations and society do is generate knowledge that is superior to the sum of the members who compose them .” It is something more than a simple aggregation. It is emergent knowledge that is born from interaction, from relationship, and from dialogue. This is, in fact, one of the central principles of complexity science: the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Organizations are complex systems, and therefore cannot be understood as a simple aggregate of individuals. They are living spaces, where the quality of relationships —the organizational culture— determines the capacity to create shared knowledge. When we talk about organizations, we are not referring only to companies or entities, but also to ...
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"White Paper on Catalonia's Civic-Social Third Sector": current reflections

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  Original article published in Catalan on 03/25/2025 In recent weeks, I have been reading the first edition, from July 2003, of the White Paper on the Civic-Social Third Sector of Catalonia[1] (Castiñeira, A., & Vidal, P. (Eds.).(2003)). Although almost 22 years have passed, I believe it is a very good book to understand who or what the Third Sector is Civic-Social in Catalonia, as well as strengths, weaknesses, and future challenges. After reading it, however, I have been left with a certain feeling of concern, as many of the challenges that were detected then, I consider to still be very much in force in 2025, making me aware of the slowness of changes and asking myself what we can do to accelerate transformations that have been identified as necessary for years. We find ourselves in a moment of high social complexity, in which it continues to be more necessary than ever to work on and reinforce democratic values, and here the third sector (TS) and the Administration hav...
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DEMOCRATIZING MANAGEMENT IN ORGANIZATIONS

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  The intention of this reflection is to share what more participatory, more democratic management models should be used for, as well as point out some ideas to promote change based on learning from lived experience. By promoting participatory management models, we are essentially democratizing management within organizations. But what are we really talking about? By "democratizing management," we mean that the responsibility of managing should not be limited to a few individuals or teams within the organization—such as a management committee, coordination committee, department heads, or business unit leaders. Instead, this responsibility should be taken on by multidisciplinary teams with diverse knowledge bases, and these teams should be flexible over time when needed. Thus, the goal is to develop management through more complex organizational structures to better respond to the complexity of our environment [1] . It’s important to clarify that when we talk about manag...
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THE ROLE OF THE THIRD SECTOR IN THE NEW PUBLIC GOVERNANCE

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  The Third Sector and the Administration share the mission of working for the common good, contributing to welfare and social transformation both through the provision of services and the production of public policies. In a moment where the common denominator of problems and challenges is their complexity, it might make sense to think that both share the challenge of moving towards organizational models that facilitate responses to new realities and social needs. As Quim Brugué points out: “Today, it is not as simple as it used to be to find a professional for every problem. (...) In situations of complexity, there is an overproduction of routines that can end up saturating the organization. On the other hand, evolution and innovation become more difficult.” Brief Evolution of Organizational Models in Public Administration and the Third Sector In the realm of Public Administration, a theoretical framework of how organizational models have evolved and where they are headed co...
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