The post Maximum viable chaos: a recipe for emerging organizations appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>This is part of a series of articles that unpack some key insights I have had from being part of the OuiShare network for the past 6 years.
When I first joined OuiShare, in 2012, there was a lot more excitement than structure. We had an association in France, a list of values and a guide on how to organize a “OuiShare Drink”. The Sharing Economy was about to become a very hyped topic, attracting the attention of many early adopters.
Because that was the core subject that OuiShare had emerged around, we found ourselves in the heart of the excitement, mobilizing dozens of self-organized groups that enabled us to run almost 200 OuiShare events in 75 cities less than two years into our existence.
There was an influx of excited people from all over the world who wanted to get involved, start new projects and local communities. There was so much creativity and energy, it was baffling.
Accompanying this growth and increasing level of activity was also a lack of clarity. How does work get done? Who makes decisions? Who can join, how? None of these questions were answered yet, which led to tension. It seemed like it was time to get more structured, quickly… or so we thought.
We embarked on a journey to “design OuiShare”. In the summer of 2013, a handful of active members secluded themselves for two months to go through an intense “organizations design process”. The outcome would be a clear manual with rules and processes for how we would work together. When the summer was over, the team came back with the first version of the OuiShare handbook, a 40 page document.
Unfortunately, it met the sad fate of many such documents, it ended up in a (virtual) drawer (the google drive), gathering dust. We did not use it, because it did not match the lived reality of how people behaved in the organization.
Yet the knowledge that certain rules now existed in OuiShare made many people feel constrained and less empowered to take initiative. Our attempt to create a structure that supported the work of our contributors almost destroyed the spontaneous and chaotic energy that had allowed us to be creative and innovative until then.
Clearly ahead of its time, the OuiShare handbook nevertheless created an important foundation of our current governance principles (we just established a new handbook a few months ago). Though we were probably right that OuiShare needed more structure at the time, we were trying to design a-priori. We had moved too far towards order on the chaos-order scale, too quickly.
“The best-run companies survive because they operate at the edge of chaos.” — Burnes, Bernard, in Complexity Theories and Organizational Change
The experience of the OuiShare organization design really changed my mindset fromseeing chaos as something that needs to be eliminated under all circumstances, to a valuable resource. Like an engine blowing particles around when they get too static, the right level of chaos at the right time, can provide a fertile ground for behaviors to emerge organically.
To foster chaos in a productive way (which basically means becoming a complex adaptive system) in a world that demands a certain level of structure and bureaucracy, there are two elements that strike me as crucial and in need of further development.
Leadership to navigate a murky ocean
As I talked about in my last post, the nature of leadership is changing. In emergent organizations, leaders need a different skillset. While anyone working in an organization like OuiShare needs to have a high tolerance for chaos, there are a few things I have observed that leaders specifically need to be good at.
Firstly, recognize the positive energizing quality of chaos and then treat it as a resource in need of protection. However, it’s not only about fostering chaos, it’s about balance.
A new challenge for leaders is to enable chaos and order to co-exist in their organization.
To get things done, leaders can help create ‘spaces of clarity’ by pulling together resources in the organization to create a tangible action. I like to think of these spaces as islands in the middle of a wild, chaotic ocean. If OuiShare were the ocean, the individual projects such as a OuiShare Fest, a POC21, a research exploration would be the islands.
Project leaders are crystalizers that facilitate and hold space for a team to have a high level of focus and clarity in the midst of an ocean. Following the notion of sense and respond, they observe behaviors and then create the minimal necessary structures to support them. Like this, the role of OuiShare Connectors was created in a response to an emerging behavior of people taking on ambassador like activities by coordinating local communities.
Scaffolds that support emergence
The second crucial element that I think needs more development in a new world of work are the minimum viable structures for emergent organizations.
This includes both structures for internal organizing such as tools for communication, project management and collaborative decision-making, but also infrastructures that can act as intermediaries between more chaotic spaces and the real world. Opencollective is a great example of such an infrastructure.
They make it easy for loosely organized groups to grow and receive funds in a very lean way, by letting them operate through Opencollective’s legal “host” entity (instead of having to create their own). Encode and various new dynamic equity tools are creating structures to make it easier for holocratic and self-managed organizations to comply with legal structures and processes.
These are great starting points, but we still have such a long way to go. Organizations like OuiShare and Enspiral are trying to operate across borders and sectors, as well as outside of binary non-profit / for-profit categories, and the more we grow, the larger the pressure becomes to replace chaos with orderto conform with the administrative and legal requirements of the various countries we operate in.
The more an organization grows, the larger the pressure to replace chaos with order
The question I have been asking myself is whether it is just a matter of time until the chaos has to end.Is this just another classic story of a new organization that goes from from its early innovative and agile phase to becoming rigid, slow and institutionalized?Or will we be able to resist the pressure and enable a different generation of organizations to thrive?
Because I believe the latter, I have decided to dedicate more of my time to join those building infrastructures for emergent, collaborative ways of working at scale. With my team at Greaterthan, we’re working in the area of infrastructures and practices for collaboration around finance, starting with the development of the collaborative budgeting tool Cobudget.
More coming soon about how my experience in OuiShare has led me to work more on collaborative finance.
To learn more about the inside of an emergent organization, go to opensource.ouishare.net. If you’re interested in applying these concepts to your organization, check out OuiShare’s services on rethink-remix.ouishare.net.
These thoughts are based on my personal anecdotal experience, not academic research. Though I am not an expert on it, research on how complex adaptive systems can be applied to organizational theory appear to be a fruitful line of further inquiry on this topic.
A special thanks to my editor, Bianca Pick.
Photo credits: Davidaltabev (1); MassiveKontent (2); wwarby (3)
Thanks to Kate Beecroft and Susan Basterfield.
Originally published on Medium.com
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]]>The post Better Work Together: Reflections from a nascent movement appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>Last March I was sitting at the dinner table in Wellington with Susan and Anthony, two fellow members of the New Zealand-based collective Enspiral. “We are starting a book project to share stories and learnings from 8 years of building Enspiral with the world,” they said. “Do you want to join as a co-author, along with 10 other members?”
As a more recent Enspiral member based in Europe, they asked me to write about the larger landscape I saw a network such as Enspiral being part of. I had gotten to know this space quite well and from a different perspective, by being in the midst of the global Ouishare community since 2012. I liked the prompt, and said yes.
A global movement with no name
My essay in Better Work Together, Welcome to the age of participation, puts forward a question: are organizations like Enspiral and Ouishare isolated phenomena, or are they part of a larger, emerging movement? If this is a movement, what are its characteristics? What are the key themes and commonalities? Who is part of it? What could be its’ impact on the world?
In reflecting on my experiences over the past 8 years in various countries, communities and (many) gatherings, the conclusion I reach is no — these are not isolated phenomena. They are part of a growing movement. This left me with a challenge: how do I describe a movement that my intuition tells me exists, but that has no name or quantitative measure? In my essay, I put words to my experiences to draw out the common patterns and themes I can see.
There is a movement on the rise that it is leveraging the power of community, networks, and participation to work on systemic challenges.
Here is how I describe this global movement: a movement that it is leveraging technology and the power of community to connect local and global action and form networks to work on systemic challenges. This not only exists conceptually, but is a tangible reality with a growing number of projects scattered across the globe. The organizations that are part of it come from a broad range of sectors — from environment, to agriculture, to education, to health, to business, to politics. This diversity makes it harder for them to recognize each other. Yet, while their areas of work may differ, their modes of operating are similar. They are aware that their work is a contribution — not a complete solution — to the challenge they aim to solve, and that it is a piece in a much larger puzzle (of global wicked problems).
To understand the facets of this movement more clearly, I identified five main fields (not the only ones) it spans across:
- The Sharing & Collaborative Economy
- Circular Economy & Ecological Activism
- Social Entrepreneurship & Impact
- Open Source & Decentralization
- Digital Nomadism & Freelancer collectives
As broad and different as these fields may seem, many of the people and organizations working in them share an ethos, a culture, and many common values. In my essay I paint a colorful picture of this culture and those who are championing it.
Its’ stars are not famous figureheads, but the communities as a whole.
Here is a snapshot of some of the organizations I alone have encountered throughout my work, whom I see as part of this culture (and which are mentioned as examples in the book):
Amanitas Collective, B-Corp, Civic Wise, Commons Network, Edmund Hillary Fellowship, Fab City, Holochain, Impact Hub Network, MakeSense, Malt, Open Collective, Open Food Network, Ouishare, Platform Coop, P2P Foundation, Remotive, Scuttlebut, Shareable, Transition Towns Network, Wemind, Zero Waste Network.
And there are so many more.
Moving from connecting to collective action
This movement has matured a lot since I entered it in 2011, from a fuzzy niche to gradually becoming more defined. The level of connections between the people and organizations within this ecosystem has been increasing, but that is just the first step.
We can all be different and united in action.
Cross-community initiatives like Neotribes, Human Networks, and Dgov Foundation are demonstrating the value of working beyond your own community and networking the networks. Now it’s time we use the fabric we have been weaving between us to move from connecting to collective action. If this movement is to achieve the impact the world needs right now, we need to recognize: we can all be different while united in action.
Read the full essay in Enspiral’s first book, Better Work Together!
Better Work Together reflects on 7+ years of learnings from the Enspiral community through short essays, practical guides, toolkits and personal reflections. It covers different facets of the future of work, including self management, collective structures, cultural processes and tools to deliver a global perspective on how embracing new ways of working together can transform how we do businesses — with practical examples from real world learning.
If you liked this article, I appreciate your claps, following me on Medium and twitter.
Follow the organizations mentioned above on Medium: OpenCollectiveHolochain Design OpenFoodFrance B Corporation B Lab UK BCorpSpainRemotive Malt Shareable TransitionTown Media Fab City Global InitiativeImpact Hub makesense
Thank you Kate Beecroft for the edits and Joshua Vial for the title inspiration!Some rights reserved
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