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.

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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

📚 Otto Scharmer – Theory U

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 als

Id. d’épisode : 1000726287342

GUID : N0Kpnhu1zJ_

Date de publication : 11/9/2025 à 16:07:22