He alone is great who turns the voice of the wind into a song made sweeter by his own loving. Work is love made visible.
– Kahlil Gibran –
Born in the belly of the Mediterranean sea, where grumbling volcanoes soar among shiny waves and howling winds, enrapturing the modern citizen, Stelio has been in love with life all along.
Since his early teen-age he’s been exploring the multitude of perspectives on life at play in far-off cultures.
In the ways of knowing cultivated by ancient daoists, native americans, aborigenal people, shamans, medicine people, modern complexity scientists, and more sensitivities from all walks of life, Stelio has been looking for roots.
Shared patterns connect our being in the world. They speak to who we really are. Work — he’s found — is how each of us brings those patterns to life.
Soon enough, his passion for the ocean and the wind brought him to the studies of Fluid Dynamics within the Faculty of Aerospace Engineering in Rome, while his curiosity was already building his experience in the transcontextual field of Work Evolution.
In fact, a fast learner and a playful thinker, after a very early start with basic programming as a child, he went on developing his skills and started working as web strategy and technologies professional in 1995, while attending University.
Since 1995, Stelio has been supporting organizations in adapting to the evolution of their ecosystems and technologies. The “Web 2.0” revolution hitting all markets dynamics just after 2000 brought him to the study of the new Marketing and Communication trends. Thus came the birth of his first company in 2003, a Marketing 2.0 and Crossmedia Communication consultancy, focussing on the power of narratives.
Over the years, while also being an entrepreneur, he has been working as professional facilitator, consultant, coach and project leader with a wide range of organizations. Along this journey, and having already been working with lean management and open collaboration principles in different scopes, he himself met the need for organizational modes that could prove truly lean and resilient.
Unfortunately, at the time there was very little. In fact, in the crisis of 2009-2010, the structural and cultural rigidity that characterized most organizations did not offer valid answers, nor any practical support.
With this need Stelio’s journey began in generating a worldwide discipline of Adaptive Organizing, collaborating with pioneers from all over the world. In 2011 he co-founded Cocoon Pro, designed its end-to-end adaptive organisational setup and devised the LiquidO organizational framework for adaptive governance, later awarded by Gary Hamel’s Managemnt Innovation Exchange in NYC.
In those same years, with the other co-founders of Cocoon Pro, he gave life to the first completely emergent organization in Europe, while also contributing as an active part in the direction of the European Organization Design Forum (EODF).
In that context, in 2015 Stelio held the world’s first Masterclass in Adaptive Organization Design in Milan, with Paul Tolchinsky and Stu Winby, two of the greatest living pioneers of organizational design and systemic change.
Since then, Stelio has worked on the creation of a mastery development path in this new discipline, based on decades of experience learned from giants in different areas of practice and with dozens of pioneers like him experimenting in many contexts across more than a decade. He wrote the Adaptive Organization Design Manifesto, continued to live the reality of a highly adaptive organization within Cocoon Pro itself, and helped a broad range of organizations in their path towards real-world antifragility.
As a matter of fact, the more steps piled up in this journey, the clearer it became to Stelio that work — as a key expression of humanity — is a vital entry point for the regeneration of our society, the reconnection with the biosphere and Life herself, and the restoration of a relationship of reciprocity with each-other and with the upcoming generations.
In 2016, his life-long explorations in the multiplicity of cultures and ways of knowing on the planet reached the intersection with his socio-technical stream of learning about human work-systems. The work of incredibly sensitive people like Johanna Macy, Gregory Bateson, Nora Bateson, Dawna Jones, Margaret Wheatley, Myron Kellner-Rogers, Stephen Harrod Buhner, and the practice of ground-breaking communities like the Warm Data Lab, the Work that Reconnects and the Permaculture ones, begun to inform and harmonize his approach and practice of Work Evolution.
The reductionist focus on tools, processes and structures dominating the zeitgeist of work conversations looked to Stelio as increasingly inadequate for the challenges ahead. In fact, the whole management consulting “show-business” appeared to him as the obvious and rather discouraging counterpart to an organizational world still largely based on squeezing “efficiency” out of people’s lives, pursue egoistic interests letting the consequences out as “externalities”, and marketing superficial maps and models avoiding the responsibility and challenge of truly dealing with the messiness of allowing real-world people at work to thrive together.
Nevertheless, that very challenge started to shine for Stelio as one of the most beautiful to embrace and, at the same time, as one vital door of concrete possibility to radically change how our civilization shows-up in the broader family of life in this world.
This challenge, within a conceptual soil of openness and contamination, led to the beginning of Organizing Love in 2022. In fact, while developing a new practice of Ecosystemic Organizing as a lively way of evolving work by Nature, Stelio felt the need for a creation space able to overcome the context-barriers, jargon and power-games of the current pundits-driven mainstream. A place in which beauty and pragmatism can coalesce, as we learn together how to embody a better way of living, one that thrives on work meant as love made visible.