What Feminist Philosophy Taught Me About Scaling Autonomy
I spent years building teams I wanted to work in. But something was always missing.
Our new building was tall and thin with six floors. Perfect, we thought, for a team on each.
We’d completed a management buyout of uSwitch from our parent company. The move was a chance to build a company we could all be proud of and shake up an industry. But a few months in, climbing the stairs told a different story.
It felt like visiting different companies.
One floor quiet, everyone heads down. Another with music blaring. Another with start-up energy. Every team ran its own socials and built its own rituals. The technology was equally fragmented: serverless to SOA, different infrastructure, different languages. The one shared ritual was afternoon snacks. Feeding time, before everyone went back to their own enclosures, oblivious to each other and to how their isolated optimisations were limiting our ambition.
Years later, the heterodox insight of a feminist philosopher finally made a diagnosis possible. Her thinking revealed the same self-limiting pattern in me.
What I Was Trying to Recreate
This all began at a start-up where the founder built a culture of real autonomy. You owned the problems, solved them, and lived with the results. It was energising. I felt privileged to be part of it and encouraged every good person I knew to join as well.
After an experimental first year, I moved to “Carl’s Team”. He ran the most successful part of the organisation. His relentless innovation challenged us. To keep up, my friend Paul crawled under desks after work, secretly installing Hadoop on people’s machines to process data (this was before big data was even a thing). The work we did during that period even influenced industry thinking.
Carl’s team’s success helped fund the acquisition of uSwitch, a UK price comparison website that had lost its way.
Paul and I left to figure out how to turn it around. What I didn’t expect was Carl’s response. He gave us huge amounts of time, advice, and support. When our early success generated more traffic than our systems could handle, he sent over his team to help. Many never went back. He just adapted to a leaner team and continued improving.
Carl was playing a different game. He focused on doing the right thing for the organisation. Helping wherever he was needed, he built connections everywhere with no expectation of payback.
It was an influential time, which I attributed to the environment. The autonomy, the ownership, the space to innovate. When I was offered the role of CTO at uSwitch, I took it with the goal of recreating and scaling that culture.
The Diagnosis
The insight came years later, on a podcast, after the symptoms had got worse.
When we acquired uSwitch, we quickly integrated two more businesses. Organising teams around product verticals (energy, mobiles, financial services) provided sustained ownership and autonomy to deliver. It replicated the model I’d seen work before. The fragmentation across those six floors was not what I’d anticipated.
Then we were acquired by a property company whose answer to that fragmentation was homogenisation. Their ambition was one place to “find, move and manage” your home, a goal that was proving difficult to deliver. In a budget meeting, I had to explain why developers from different parts of the business, with different skills and context, weren’t fungible. Centralised control was strangling the very thing it was trying to fix.
Neither approach could get big things done. That’s when I found Dr Anne Phillips.
Listening to her describe relational autonomy, I felt something click. Phillips argued that autonomy isn’t about stripping away relationships to find your isolated ‘true self,’ nor dissolving it into the group. We become more capable of self-determination through our connections with others, not despite them.
Self-determination is a collective project. That’s as true for societies and companies as it is for people.
It felt revelatory. I’d been focused on operating independently, on individual achievement, fighting its removal. The blind spot was the relationships that sustained it all. It was what Carl had modelled, and I had missed. The structural problems were a consequence. And Phillips helped me see that my behaviour was another.
The Evidence Had Been There for Years
The buyout that led to the move was funded by a private equity firm. One who took their due diligence seriously enough to bring in an occupational psychologist to assess the exec team.
I remember when it was my turn, entering a room with black walls covered with chalk drawings. A small table with three chairs, two behind it, where two psychologists sat ready to diagnose. A single chair at an angle in front, waiting for me.
It was intense. They asked questions on every subject. I talked nonstop about the team, what we were building, what I thought was wrong and how to fix it. I answered, oblivious to the situation and its consequences.
It was a naive strategy, but in retrospect, I’m glad I approached it that way. Reading it back, it’s a record of how much I was fighting everyone. My colleague’s four-word feedback read: “Mike is about Mike.” When someone suggested I soften my approach, my response was “Gentle is inefficient!”
The culmination of their assessment was that I didn’t understand my impact on others. “Team” for me was the technology organisation. I excluded the senior leadership team I was supposed to be part of. To be more effective, I needed to recognise that a CTO carries responsibility for the entire business. That meant looking beyond the technology organisation and helping my peers.
At that time, I wasn’t ready to hear it and failed to act. The technology team did great work, and that bought me time. But by the time I started to change years later, we were already a different company, and I had to change jobs.
Building Differently at loveholidays
When I joined loveholidays in 2019, I was determined not to repeat the patterns. Not structurally or personally.
A new CEO joined shortly after I did. He had an intuitive grasp of what I’d spent years failing to articulate. The result was a team structure that looked similar on paper. Long-lived teams, sustained ownership, space to go deep. That part was still right. Ownership is what makes deep innovation possible.
What was missing was connection.
Large parts of the platform had no commercial ownership. The restructure fixed that: every part of the value chain got a business owner. We bound together technical and commercial responsibility. Every team was connected to each other and to the commercial part of the organisation. It was the CEO’s vision as much as mine, and working it out with him was itself part of the change.
We even measured it, and the results followed. Our engagement scores climbed, and we were named a Sunday Times Best Place to Work. The survey showed 88% of people “felt empowered to make decisions”, and 92% reported “strong relationships”.
But the draw of self-sufficiency doesn’t stop. Especially as you scale.
New leaders hired in their own image, built teams as reflections of their own personalities rather than components of a larger system. One even described servant leadership as “adapting to every team’s way of communicating.” That sounds progressive, but it’s the old model dressed up. Relational autonomy is mutual. I help you do your job, you help me do mine.
Changing the Pattern
The organisational foundations were right, but they couldn’t scale without the relationships to support them. So I started building those — treating everyone as someone I had something to learn from, not just someone to convince. It wasn’t always easy. An early attempt to build a relationship through shared feedback was met with: ‘No. We will never work well together.’ But I didn’t give up.
COVID helped, oddly. Tough times brought the exec team together in ways normal working hadn’t. Slowly, the shift Phillips described started to happen. I stopped trying to do it alone, and the curiosity I’d lost at uSwitch returned.
It made sense. The more senior the role, the more of the system you are responsible for holding together. The bigger the ambition, the more the connections are what make it possible.
Seven years after joining loveholidays, the whole exec team presented together to investors. It was the CEO’s call to include everyone, even though investor presentations don’t usually work that way. He wanted to show what we’d built together.
Our CEO opened the way he always does, engaging and visionary. Our CFO closed it with feeling, walking us through the numbers with the authority of someone who’d been there almost from the start.
I sat there during the other sections, willing them on. Watching the CDO and CPO’s overview land. Loving the engaging story our CMO told of our brand evolution. I was proud of what we’d built.
I did my bit, conscious of all the people’s work I was representing, and not wanting to let the team down. When I sat down, the CMO leaned over and whispered: “That was f*****g awesome, mate.” My Slack was filled with messages from the rest of the team.
We’d built something none of us could have built alone.
What I’ve Learned
Feminist thinkers gave me the name for this, but the more I looked, the more it appeared everywhere. Developmental psychology, sociology, and philosophy. It’s even how people fix themselves in therapy. The same insight keeps surfacing wherever people study how humans actually develop. And yet self-sufficiency is the default.
Knowing about relational autonomy isn’t enough. It has to change how you act, and that doesn’t happen naturally. Old Mike still pops up from time to time, driven by the instinct to compete and ‘win’. In the organisation, the pull towards self-sufficiency never goes away.
My deeper reading of Phillips led me to Pauli Murray, a civil rights activist and feminist legal pioneer whose work shaped landmark equality cases in the US. She wrote:
“When my brothers try to draw a circle to exclude me, I shall draw a larger circle to include them.”
Murray didn’t write from a position of safety. She wrote as someone being actively excluded. The stakes she confronted were incomparably higher than anything in a business. But the human pattern is the same. The draw of self-sufficiency and isolation is everywhere.
You don’t have to be hostile for it to limit you. You just have to stop reaching.