Toward what? Most of us probably aren’t sure. But the people involved in a Wellington, New Zealand-based network called Enspiral have done more than just about anyone to figure out — to figure out where we’d want the future of work to be headed if the better angels of our nature were in charge. I’ve had the chance to visit them (and lived to tell the tale for Vice). Now, a trip down to Wellington, although I absolutely recommend it, is a little less necessary. The Enspiralites have created a book, Better Work Together, which chronicles in conversational stories and pictures their attempts to create a kind of community worth working toward.

Enspiral is fairly small, as organizations go — a few hundred active participants, a modest budget. Rather, it’s lean. Most of the Enspiralites’ businesses exist outside the organization, but attached to it, allowing Enspiral itself to take risks, learn lessons, and reinvent itself when necessary. It’s a community of early adopters. They offer themselves as beta-testers for a suite of collaboration software they’ve co-produced, such as Loomio and Cobudget. They relentlessly explore challenging governance frameworks like sociocracy and teal. They even funded the book’s production through a new blockchain-enabled platform called DAOstack (which still crashes my browser when I try to use it). These are not ordinary workers; they’re people with the passion, the patience, in many cases the privilege, and the fault-tolerance to repeatedly try stuff that may or may not work.

In the book, you’ll see why. There is a generosity and pleasure and even a spirituality in how they talk about their efforts that makes it all seem less like, well, work. There are typos, but these pale in comparison to the challenges we collectively face. The upshot is not a final theory or doctrine or destination, but a mode of working toward it, of declining to accept disguised versions of feudalism as good enough. Order it, digitally or physically, here.

Cross-posted at the MEDLab website and on Medium.

The post Become better together with Enspiral appeared first on P2P Foundation.

When: Thursday, 27 June – Friday, 28 June
9:00 am – 8:00 pm

Where: University of London, Malet Street, London

In previous years, we’ve promoted platform co-ops in a traditional conference format. This year we’re doing things differently and will be exploring opportunities to increase decentralised collaboration in a completely open space format. We’re proud to be working on collaboration with Phoebe Tickell and Nati Lombardo from Enspiral, to convene and facilitate the event.

Who is OPEN 2019 for?

OPEN 2019 is an inter-network event for community builders, network organisers and key connecting members of organisations from a wide range of progressive communities. We welcome all cooperators, rebels, mavens, network builders, systems architects, open source developers, and anyone else who is interested in designing and building our collective future. The idea is to network the networks by creating deeper connections and relationships between some of the key connectors from a wide range of mutually aligned communities.

What will we be doing?

To kick off each day attendees will be introduced to a handful of new, distributed, cooperative, technical and social projects, through a selection of lightning talks. After that attendees will be guided to co-design the event by proposing, refining and voting on the content for the rest of the two days’ sessions. Experienced facilitators from the Enspiral network will help us create a ‘container’ for our time together. Working in small groups we will discuss, debate and feedback ideas to the wider group, to ensure everyone has a chance to have their say and that the collective wisdom of the group is captured and shared.

With an informal evening dinner and drinks and more networking opportunities, there will be plenty of time for building deeper understanding and relationships too.

What will you get out of it?

Recognising that effective collaboration, at any scale, can be hard to define and even harder to achieve OPEN 2019 does not aim to build immediate collaboration between attendees. Having studied the key ingredients of collaboration we know that the first step towards effective collaboration is building deeper connections and trusted relationships, and that is what OPEN 2019 aims to deliver.

By introducing more connectors to each other, getting to know one another, and working together over two days we aim to strengthen our relationships, deepen our understanding and to cross-pollinate and fertilise the pre-existing projects and evolving ideas within our networks.

We will explore opportunities to coordinate our existing organisations better, to keep each other better informed about what we are working on and to potentially cooperate if we can find opportunities to do so. Ultimately, as a result of the networking, we aim to pave the way for any collaborative opportunities which might arise as things evolve…

When and where is it?

The OPEN 2019 Community Gathering will take place on the 27th and 28th of June at the University of London in Holborn, London.

What should I do if I want to come?

Spaces are limited to 150 attendees in order to keep the group small enough to be effective so, if are interested in being involved, please order your tickets below asap. If this event becomes over-subscribed we will explore the possibility of running additional events. If you have a project you would like to present at a lightning talk we’d love to hear from you (please email a short description of your project) but please note – all attendees, including presenters, will be required to buy a ticket.

Please join us to discuss, explore, connect and decide how we can deliver systemic change, together.

For more information and tickets click here!

The post OPEN 2019 Community Gathering – Decentralised Collaboration appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Darren Sharp: How do you create a viable business or organization without a hierarchy?

Enspiral, an entrepreneurial collective based in Wellington, New Zealand, has been working to answer this question since 2010. Started as a group of individuals doing contract work together, the community quickly shifted to launching companies focused on making its ongoing experiments in self-organization accessible to a wider audience. Successful projects include Loomio, a worker-owned co-operative that developed an open source app for consensus decision-making.

Distributed leadership has been key to the success of Enspiral and thousands of other sharing, open source and peer-to -peer communities around the world that rely on participation and networked governance to achieve outcomes for the common good.

Alanna Irving, who contributed to Enspiral’s new book Better Work Together: How the Power of Community Can Transform Your Business, has co-founded multiple startups, including Loomio, Cobudget, Enspiral, and Dark Crystal. She currently works as executive director of the Open Source Collective. We caught up with Irving to learn more about bossless leadership and her practical advice for how groups can both share power and tap members’ strengths to drive personal and social transformation.

Darren Sharp: What’s the book’s core message?

Alanna Irving: Better Work Together doesn’t give you a formula to instantly make your organisation collaborative, flat, or purposeful — because there isn’t one. In this book, we share what we’ve learned by pushing the boundaries of the future of work in a network of social entrepreneurs called Enspiral.

It’s not a book of theory, but a field guide by and for practitioners. As is fitting for a book about non-hierarchical, peer-to-peer, distributed practices, these stories are told through many voices, in many forms, like essays, toolkits, illustrations, exercises, and even a bread recipe. Sharing the failures is as valuable as sharing the successes. The truth is organic, emergent, and human. You can’t tie it all up neatly with a bow on top, or claim that everything fits into a clever 4-quadrant diagram.

We want to offer what we have learned to others, so they can make it their own and take it even further. We’ve gathered up the best insights and transformational experiences we’ve had while growing companies, networks, and ourselves in pursuit of truly meaningful work. The core message is: Join us on the journey.

Why was Better Work Together developed, how are people using it, and what’s its impact so far?

We’re doers, often too busy doing to reflect and communicate. Enspiral has never been great at marketing itself. We’ve never been good at productising or selling what we do, because that’s never what it was about. But whenever bits of our story got out, in talks or blog posts or podcasts, people clambered for more.

I think there’s a lot of abstract theory out there about new paradigms for human group dynamics, but a lack of real, unvarnished, on the ground lived experience. People are hungry for it. The book is a way for us to bring some structure to analyzing and communicating the ideas, tools, and practices we’ve developed, and offering them to the world in an accessible format. It’s our way of recognizing that we’re part of a much bigger worldwide movement, away from top-down, command and control structures, toward bottom-up, consent-based, shared power. The book is our contribution to the larger collective discourse.

It’s been truly amazing to see people respond to the book all over the world, excitedly realising that they are far from alone in this work, and how much further we can go by sharing our stories. A lot of people are telling us they want to go deeper, so now we’re developing workshops and courses based on the book.

Your contribution to the book is largely about distributed leadership in groups. Can you share what that looks like using examples from your personal experience?

Some people think that rid of bosses means there’s no need for leadership. I think just the opposite: It means you need to grow the leadership capacity of everyone. Personally, it took me a long time to reclaim the notion of leadership, because I felt uncomfortable with all the baggage it carried from coercive power hierarchies.

There is a name for this thing I do, and it’s called leadership, but it’s not about bossing people around. Once I was able to uncouple leadership from positional authority, I began to see it purely as a force that moves human groups toward coordination and velocity and away from entropy. It became clear that leadership is not contained in a specific role, but can and should be distributed among many people and processes.

This led me to questions like “How do I develop as a leader when there’s no ladder to climb?” and “How can I increase overall leadership capacity in my network?” I developed a framework for understanding these ideas, which is in a section of the book called “How to Grow Distributed Leadership”, which builds up from the base of shared power and self-leadership through leading others, leading leaders, and ecosystem leadership.

The framework has definitely helped me think more consciously about my own development, and how to mentor others who are intentionally developing leadership capacity in their own networks.

You use archetypes or personas to describe different types of leadership which have their corresponding shadow aspects. How can people become aware of their shadow aspects and make the most of them in group situations?

One of the chapters I wrote in the book describes a leadership development framework I created called Full Circle Leadership. In my work at Enspiral, I noticed an eight-step life cycle projects went through, and saw how projects fell over or fizzled if they missed some steps.

It partly came out of my annoyance that, as a network, we were great at coming up with new ideas but not as good at taking them all the way to completion. I needed to get the word “operationalisation” into our collective vocabulary. I also saw other organisations with the opposite dynamic: great at maintaining but struggling to innovate.

In parallel, as an operational leader, I went through a process of developing empathy for visionary leaders, and came to understand that we weren’t at two opposite ends of a spectrum, but part of a circle. Each of the eight steps represents its own unique kind of leadership, all of which are valuable and important.

This became a lens to better appreciate and nurture diverse leadership strengths. Equally, it’s a lens for awareness of the shadow sides. I got better at seeing my own shadows as a leader, and seeing both the light and dark sides of my collaborators. This is why working alongside diverse, respected peer leaders, who are different to you, is so important.

How can groups leverage people’s strengths and also take team members out of their comfort zone to learn new skills?

This work asks a lot of us. There is no way to keep engaging deeply, purposefully, and vulnerably in community without a lot of self-development. Sometimes we call that The Work. It never ends because humans are dynamic, complex, living beings, and groups of humans even more so.

On one level, it means always being out of your comfort zone. On another level, it means gaining a profound sense of purpose, confidence in you abilities, and unambiguous commitment to guiding values that stay steady in the face of enormous change. It’s great if you can be responsibly and safely held and guided by someone who “knows what they’re doing”, but really, no one knows what they’re doing when you’re charting new territory and constantly experimenting. It can be risky. You need a lot of self awareness and excellent boundaries.

My seven or so [years] at Enspiral felt like a never-ending stream of intensive challenges and growth opportunities. I learned so much about myself, at the same time I was learning about startups, facilitation, building technology, social impact, money, and everything else. It was incredibly rich — and, frankly, exhausting. I miscalculated and burned out multiple times.

There’s a lot in the book about self care, well-being, group processes for looking after each other, and strategies for avoiding burnout when you’ve got a fiery passion in your heart. The risk and challenge are inherent, so I’d definitely encourage people to regularly reflect and check in about how it’s really going. But to me, there is no question that it’s worth it.

Power dynamics are an inevitable characteristic of human groups. What advice do you have for groups for making them more transparent? When does it make sense to share power and what steps can groups take to get there?

The first step is to practice talking about power dynamics openly, regardless of their shape. A healthy culture means being honest about power. If you are a hierarchy, admit it. Own it! Sometimes hierarchies are the right shape for what you’re trying to do. You can have consent-based, ethical hierarchies. A lot of people actually just want to be told what their job is.

Talking about power dynamics will allow you to collectively ask important questions, like “How is our structure working for us? Could it be improved?” Sometimes groups that aspire to less hierarchy will treat power like a taboo, and try to pretend it doesn’t exist. This will not result in shared power, only in implicit, unaccountable power.

Power dynamics are an inherent property of human groups. Your collective task is to take ownership of your group’s power dynamics and make them work for you. One frame I often use is “align power and responsibility.” If people have responsibility for things they don’t have power over, or are exerting power over things they aren’t taking responsibility for, you’ve got a problem.

Sometimes that’s about an internal emotional boundary around what you will feel responsible for. Sometimes it’s about restructuring roles to give power over their scope of responsibility. Sometimes it’s about calling out unacknowledged power. It’s a frame I find useful to examine in a lot of situations.

Finally, consider how our work on power in the context of human society overall [is] inextricably linked to social justice. We need to consider how power dynamics function at every level, from the macro to the micro, to truly understand them.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Darren Sharp | Twitter

Darren Sharp is a leading sharing economy strategist, consultant and researcher.  As founding Director of Social Surplus he develops strategy and facilitates capacity-building using strength-based approaches including asset-based community development,

The post What Enspiral can teach us about how to run a company with no boss appeared first on P2P Foundation.

If you’re interested in the future of work, you may have heard rumours about Enspiral, a network of 200 entrepreneurs in New Zealand working on “stuff that matters”. The network is composed of many start-ups and small co-ops experimenting with radical self-management practices, decentralised ownership, and shared leadership.

Nati and Rich come from one of those co-ops in the network, a software company called Loomio. With Loomio we’re building a tool for deliberation and collaborative decision-making. Recently we launched The Hum, a consulting company providing practical guidance for decentralised organisations. Our focus has expanded beyond just software, to consider the cultural and structural elements that support people to thrive and create humming teams. With The Hum we travel all over the world, visiting organisations across a huge diversity of sectors: from the Seoul city government, to corporate consultants in New York, to anarchist activists in Barcelona.

What these unlikely neighbours have in common is a shared desire to work in a less hierarchical, more collaborative way. We present our Patterns For Decentralised Organising, based on our lived experience building Enspiral and Loomio, combined with our research over the past 2 years on the road. We propose that the ideal structure for any truly thriving organisation must be unique: the structure must respond to the unique context, opportunities and objectives of the particular people involved.

So while we reject any “one size fits all” prescription for organisations, we offer a collection of design patterns. These patterns offer solutions to the recurring challenges that humans encounter whenever they try to work together in harmony. In this talk we’ll share a sample of the patterns, considering the cultural and structural elements required for a thriving decentralised organisation. We’ll look at decision-making methods, digital collaboration tools, and rhythms for continuous improvement, as well as more subtle topics such as power imbalances, interpersonal skills, and emotional intelligence.

The post Patterns for Decentralised Organising / Richard D. Barlett and Natalia Lombardo / Intersection18 appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Enspiral is a rather unique organisation, often featured in this blog. Over the years the number of participants, its core structure and overall network have evolved in fascinating and informative ways. This evolution along with the many lessons learned is chronicled in their collective book “Better work together”.

As such the book does not theorise. Instead, it offers tales of success and failure as well as the occasional bread recipe. That is, it employs a diverse set of story-telling methods (which reflects the diversity amongst Enspiral members), enhanced by striking visuals to provide empirical accounts of peoples’ experience within this initiative which is driven by the nicer part of the human psyche. There is practical advice abound and even spiritual guidance to achieving personal growth but also better work results through meaningful collaboration and generosity.

The book is written by ten authors and structured in short essays that can be read independently. Different viewpoints with different insight to instil. Overall it offers a beginning but no end. Perhaps a set of principles or a template on social change which comes with hard work and positive negotiation. So, for those looking for a grand narrative about changing the world, this book might not be for you. For those interested in the nitty-gritty of how to build more democratic structures, however, as well as some stories to restore faith in humanity then it is definitely worth a read.

You can get a digital or physically here.

Chris Giotitsas is a Core Member of the P2P Lab research collective and a post-doctoral researcher at Tallinn University of Technology.

The post Better Work Together: A Short Review appeared first on P2P Foundation.

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:

1. The Sharing & Collaborative Economy
2. Circular Economy & Ecological Activism
3. Social Entrepreneurship & Impact
4. Open Source & Decentralization
5. 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

The post Better Work Together: Reflections from a nascent movement appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Sep 1, 2015: I was recently invited to talk with the Lifehack Flourishing Fellows, who are starting projects to improve the wellbeing of young people in Aotearoa.

Since co-founding Loomio a couple years ago, I receive these invitations fairly regularly, to talk with uni students or activists or start-uppers or social entrepreneurs about starting a project and holding it together long enough to make some positive social impact.

Regardless of the audience, I’ve noticed my advice basically comes down to the same three points. I’ve also noticed they are all really hard!

Here’s a little snippet from the recording of the talk, explaining what I mean by “prioritising the vibe”:

Full video

Here’s the full talk (20min + Q&A) along with a transcription for those who prefer reading to listening. It draws on a lot of the material in my recent blog post about caring organisations, but filled out with lots more personal anecdotes.

Transcript

I was born and raised in the Wairarapa, and then moved over here for high school and have been here ever since.

I live in a really amazing house in Newtown, a big pink house there. It’s a house, but it’s also a community.

I used to stay at Garrett St, which is a house that Mark and Sophie lived in, and that’s the same thing: a community of people that are trying to do something more than just live.

Like Gina said, I’m involved with Loomio, I’m one of the cofounders of Loomio and a member at Enspiral. I’m involved with an arts collective called Concerned Citizens that runs a community space in Tory St…

All of these groups of people are all action-based groups that are trying to do something.

My identity is in the composition of all those groups.

The reason I’m working on Loomio is because there’s something about that group identity thing, and having multiple groups, for me that’s where I get my strength from and my confidence. The reason I have an ability to get up in the morning and do stuff is because I’m held by these groups. The work I’m doing is trying to help people find their group, start their group, do their group thing.

So yeah, the three hard steps:

Number 1 is: find something worth holding on to and hold on to it. For me the way to hold on to it is to write it down. When you write it down you actually have to force the words out, and show those words to other people, and see what they think. There’s a lot of fun and hard work involved in that.

Number 2 is: do everything with fun and love and colour and cups of tea. I call that prioritising the vibe. That means it should feel good when you’re doing it.

Number 3 is: hold on to the first thing that you wrote down, and throw everything else out every single day. It’s about trying everything.

I’ll run through each of those steps in a bit of detail.

The first one: finding something worth holding on to. It takes a long time.

From what I know about Lifehack, a lot of people that come to Lifehack are looking for their thing to hold on to. They know they haven’t found it yet and they’re like, ‘it seems like maybe somewhere down this way there’s maybe my thing to hold on to?’

For me, like I said, I moved over here for high school. Got to the end of high school and I went to the careers advisor and she said to me, ‘what are you good at?’ and I said, ‘maths and science’. So she said, ‘you should go study engineering’, so I said OK and then I went to university and I studied engineering. Then four years later I graduated engineering school with an engineering degree.

It was 2008 when I graduated. That was just when the global economy went nuts and there were no jobs available, especially in engineering in New Zealand. So suddenly I was out into the world, without school, without uni, without a job, without a boss or really anybody telling me what to do.

For the first time I had to stop and think, like, ‘what do I want to do?’

It was a bit weird waiting until I was 24 to ask myself that question, but I got there in the end.

When I’m invited to talk at universities, I’m like, ‘If there’s one thing you do at university, it’s figure out what you’re into. Don’t worry about the grades and stuff like that, that’s totally irrelevant. I got great grades in a degree I don’t care about that has no value to me.’

I didn’t figure out what I was into until after I left.

When I left I was sitting there with time on my hands (that’s the great thing about being on the dole is that you have as much time as you need). Somehow it finally clicked, like: ‘I’m a musician, and I know how to make electronics, maybe I could make electronics for musicians!’

Total lightbulb moment, a flash of the blinding obvious. I just wish that somebody had prompted me to think about that four years sooner, but so it goes.

So I got started making weird noise machines for weirdos that like weird noise machines.

I was really surprised to find that other people really got a kick out of the stuff that I was making. I’d build something, put it online, and then someone would see it and be like, ‘that’s awesome, can I buy it?’ and I’d be like, ‘huh? okay…’

So then I started making a whole bunch of these random weird machines. Eventually these quite awesome musicians would come to me and say, ‘hey can you ____?’ They were trying to commission me to make stuff for them. I got into building crazy machines for people to use on stage. I was working with Riki Gooch and he was like, ‘I’m on stage with a lot of electronic equipment and it looks so lame to be here with my knobs and buttons, I want something that’s more theatrical’. So I made him a device that picks up his arm movements and translates that into his computer.

That’s awesome work. What totally awesome work. It’s a real buzz doing that kind of stuff, to facilitate someone else’s dream and work on my skills. That was really awesome.

From that I got into teaching people about electronics as well.

It’s one of those subjects that is really hard for people to get into, but it shouldn’t be because it’s actually really easy, they just teach it the wrong way. It’s kinda like maths, they make it sound hard but it’s not. They just teach you all the dumb stuff you don’t need to know and divorce it from your real life.

I was teaching because it is fun to show people like, hey these things are electrons and you can play with them! Electrons are awesome! Electrons are your friend (apart from if you have too many of them)!

That was fun. I was having fun. I wasn’t really making enough money to live on. I was kinda scraping by, but something in me still wasn’t full. It was good fun stuff to work on but it didn’t really… I was like, ‘do I really want to spend my whole life making products? Do we need more electronic junk in the world?’

It wasn’t quite there. It was awesome, it was motivating, and people liked it, but it just wasn’t quite the whole thing.

Then I met Ben.

Ben’s another person from Garrett Street with these folk. Meeting Ben was a moment where my life turned a bit of a corner. He’s just universally positive about everything. Everytime I see him he’s like, “I just met the most amazing person!” and I’m like, “you mean you just met a person?”

He’s just set with this really high default for everything, it’s really awesome to be around. It kinda rubbed off on me, I pay more attention now to positive stuff when I used to be real cynical and dark all the time.

Him and his partner Hannah and a bunch of others got involved with this thing called the Concerned Citizens, which is an arts collective that was putting on creative events that have some kind of social benefit.

Like, we’d host an art exhibition, raise a bunch of money, and give it to Women’s Refuge or something like that. A really simple format but it was my first taste that there’s something beyond just me and my weird interests, there’s a whole world out there and I can combine my interests with doing some positive impact.

That was really fun. That was hosting events, that was the work. From that I met so many people that were sorta on the same wavelength, like trying to do something good in the world.

From there, we hopped on down to — when Occupy Wall Street arrived in Wellington — Ben and Hannah and Jon and I and a bunch of others, we got involved with Occupy.

Occupy was my first experience of, practically, sitting in a circle with people. I don’t think I had ever done that before. It’s really basic right? It’s a good thing to practice, sitting in a circle.

Not just sitting, but talking to each other. Doing that kind of talking where one person speaks and everyone else listens, and when they’re finished it’s the next person’s turn to talk. One person speaks and everyone listens. I’d never been exposed to that before.

Out of that conversation, not just talking for the sake of it, actually trying to make decisions. Trying to get somewhere.

There are a bunch of people that have for some reason decided to live in the middle of the city for a couple of months, how are we going to operate? How are we going to feed people? How are we going to come up with shelter — our crappy $40 tent from the Warehouse doesn’t actually work for more than 2 weeks when you’re parked up in Civic Square.

We had to make all kinds of decisions together about how to structure our little community and we took it for granted, it was there before I arrived, that there was no boss. No one is in charge, were going to figure it out together. We figured it out by sitting in circles in talking it out until it was done.

There was a minor dash of tikanga to make that work. We had hand signals: ‘I agree with what you’re saying’, ‘no I don’t’, or ‘hell no I don’t’.

That process was the first time I’d seen that happen and participating in that. I said meeting Ben was a little corner in my life, this was like a full U-turn. It totally redirected the course of events for me. It just reset my understanding of what individuals are capable of and what groups are capable of.

Prior to that I’d just seen decisions being made by someone in charge saying ‘Right, you do this, go do that, do that…’ and everyone in the background kinda grumbling like, ‘this sucks, that person doesn’t know what they’re talking about…’

To see people just figure it out together, creating a space where everyone’s voice is actually valuable, noticing that

when you throw in everyone’s voice you can come up with something better than any individual would have had on their own.

…that was totally mindblowing for me.

At the same time as that was awesome and massively inspiring, it was also so frustrating to have to sit in a room — or not even in a room because we were out in Civic Square — to sit around outside in the cold for four or five hours, trying to make a decision sometimes. Sometimes there’s some real complex stuff you’ve got to work through. I felt like this isn’t realistic, like, no one’s going to do this, people have jobs and kids…

So we were stuck with this question, how do we share this experience and make it fit in the modern world we live in? Another flash of the obvious: we should put it on the internet! Make it so that people can have that experience where they can talk to each other, respect the different kinds of opinions and different perspectives and try to develop consensus together, without having to be in the same room at the same time. They can just participate in their own time.

With that idea, we were introduced to Enspiral. We didn’t know what Enspiral was, I still don’t really and it’s been three and a half years. Someone told me they like technology and they want to make the world better and I thought, ‘yep, sounds like us.’

We went to them, “hey, we’ve got this idea: we want to do the Occupy decision thing, but on the internet. Can you build that for us?”

They said, “No. But it’s a good idea, we love the idea and we want that too,” because Enspiral is a big group of people that doesn’t have a boss as well and they wanted to make decisions online too. They’re like, “we’re not going to build it for you, but we’ll help. You build it. You’re going to have to figure out how to build it, but we’ll help you.”

So they gave us some space and connections, they just kept throwing people at us all the time, a consistent stream of people, like Chelsea. Over time, the idea and the space and the people, they stuck. What they stuck around was the purpose. That’s why my Step One is write something down, figure out what your purpose is. That’s the thing that we stuck to.

In the last three and a half years of working on this software, now ninety thousand something people have used it in a hundred countries in thirty-two languages. So many decisions have been made along the way, to navigate to get to that point, and all the way through, when you get to a hard decision, we just look at what we wrote down in our purpose: why are we here? Then all the decisions make themselves, when you go back to ‘why are we here?’

You’ll find it’s the guiding light, it’s the navigator. We don’t need a boss, we got a purpose.

said these are hard steps. Finding your purpose is super hard. I notice that my purpose actually keeps evolving all the time and I have to keep checking in on it: what am I doing now? what am I doing now?

It’s number one for a reason, it’s the most important thing.

Point number two. Step number two. Do everything with fun and love and colour and cups of tea. I’m a big believer in cups of tea. The whole thing for me, I call it prioritising the vibe.

The thing about the vibe, when I walked in, well before I even walked in actually, when I got off my bike at the gate, and started walking up the hill I thought, ‘hmmm, this place has got some vibe’, y’know.

And then you come around the corner and you can see this incredible building and you’re like, “Wow, that building has got some vibe! There’s some real vibe in there.” This is DIY fortress architecture and I love it.

Then I stepped in the door and I could see — I was a bit early, people were still in there working — and I could see there’s some vibe getting cooked. Everyone’s putting their thing in the room.

It’s such a privilege to have that experience. It’s awesome that Lifehack can host that kind of experience for people. The Lifehack crew, I couldn’t imagine a better crew to be cultivating that vibe for people. You know it right: it feels good. In your tummy, it feels good to be here. You can keep that good feeling, pretty much all the time, if you pay attention to it.

You have to pay attention to your tummy. I’ve got my head brain, my heart brain, and my tummy brain, and the tummy brain tells me when the vibe is right.

What that actually means in practice: it means that,

In our workplace, we respect feelings. Feelings are legitimate information.

Emotions for me, they’re like, they’re just inarticulate expression. Your emotion is trying to tell you something, and maybe you haven’t got an awesome way to say it yet, but it’s like “arggh I’m real stressed out about something!”

It’s really critical information, if you’re trying to work together as a group to achieve something, you need to have that information in the room with you. You can’t pretend that it’s not there. In a lot of workplaces you try to pretend like:

“I haven’t got feelings. I left them at home!
I’m at work now and I have my special uniform on that says No Feelings.”

We’ve said, nah, we’re having your feelings. Please bring your feelings, all your feelings are welcome here. We’re going to do what we can to make space for them.

It’s real simple stuff. You will have already practiced it here I’m sure: just sitting in a circle and hearing from everyone. It doesn’t have to be major, it doesn’t have to be an amazing speech or anything. Just hearing people’s voices. Hearing the quality of the voice, oh there’s a little shake: this person is nervous, they’re anxious…

It gives you so much information to just hear each person one by one by one.

Little practices like that, really simple stuff that allow people to arrive fully, and allows you to have full context about what they’re doing.

We do that all the time. Any meeting at Loomio, whether we’re talking about the business model or the capital raising or the software development, we’ll start with a check-in.

It’s really important, if someone’s got some strong feelings, you need to know about that. If it’s like, ‘my dog got run over’, that’s still relevant information, maybe you should take the day off! If it’s like, ‘I’m actually feeling really anxious about the cashflow’, that’s really important feelings to bring in, because then we can fix the cashflow.

We’ve seen it happen over and over again at Loomio. It’ll be just a mundane regular meeting, we start by hearing from people, and someone will say something… they can’t put their finger on it, “I just feel a bit uneasy. Don’t know what it is. Don’t worry about me, I think I’m having a weird day or something.”

Then they’ll sit back and the next person will be like, “I’m the same, yep, yep. Kinda anxious, kinda, doesn’t feel real good. Vibe’s not right.”

Then they sit back and the next person will be like, “I’ve actually been thinking,” they might have a bit more detail, like, “that strategy that we signed on to two months ago, it was awesome at the time, but I’m starting to really question it. It doesn’t seem right.”

As we go around the circle, by the time you get to the end of the circle you realise that work we did where we planned out where we’re going, that was wrong. No one feels good about it. We’re only doing it because everyone else thinks that everyone else thinks it’s a good idea.

By having space for people to be inarticulate, and not be awesome and make a really compelling argument, you get to the heart of the matter real quickly. You don’t have to wait til you get to the end of that plan and realise it was a dumb plan. You can just say “this doesn’t feel right.”

We respect the tummy brain as well as the heart brain and the head brain. They’re all good brains.

Then number three, the third hard step: hold on to that first thing, the one that you wrote down, and throw everything else out all the time. Keep throwing it out, keep throwing it out, keep throwing it out.

Because…

Most of your ideas are not very good. I’m really sorry about that. Same with mine, most of my ideas are not very good either.

In software development land, we’re lucky because we’ve got users. Like I said, there’s ninety something thousand people using the software, so we don’t have to worry about what our ideas are, we just listen to their ideas. When they say, ‘we need this’, then we say ‘ok we’ll make that.’

We’ve got all kinds of process and structure around how we “try everything.” We want to try lots of different stuff, we want to hold on to our purpose and throw everything else out and try and try and try and try. You need some kind of system.

There’s 17 people in co-op now, and if you have 17 people all trying different things it doesn’t work, you need to be systematic. We’ve got a lot of different containers, like, “For this three month period, we’re looking at this area, this is what we’re trying. This week, we’re going to try this part of this problem.”

We break it down and say, we’re going to look at this part. We try to hold loose to our own ideas, to our hypotheses. It’s like, I’ve got a hypothesis, how am I going to test it?

It’s funny, when you say, “I’m just testing this idea out”, somehow it frees you up. It makes it easy. You don’t have to be arguing your case and saying “this is what we need to do”. Instead it’s like, “I think this, this is my reasoning, and this is how I’m going to test it to prove whether or not it is a good idea.”

That’s an easy way to get a group of people to think together and learn together and point in the same direction together. Quite often, different people are going to have different opinions. So you can design the experiment together: okay I don’t agree with your hypothesis, this is how I’m going to disprove it. That’s fine, that’s really productive.

The way that we can hold that kind of space for that productive tension, is because we prioritised the vibe. That means everyone is quite capable of communicating to each other, and holding a different opinion.

It’s ok that your perspective is different from mine, which is different from yours, and different from yours and yours. It’s ok, we’ve all got a different one. We can hold them together.

We have this baseline, we’ve got our purpose. All of our feet are like old roots of a tree grown into that purpose. We’re like an old married couple of 17 people. They’re all grown together. We’re all playing footsies under the table, we can be disagreeing with each other up here, but down there we’re all knitted together, because that’s the thing that pulled us together in the first place.

So those are the three hard steps to do anything.

Q&A

[Question] How do you define your purpose now?

[Rich:] That’s actually going through a little process at the moment, but the one that we agreed to, that’s on the wall is ‘we’re here to make a world where it’s easy for anyone to participate in decisions that affect them.’

Each of those words means a lot to me. ‘Easy’, ‘anyone’, ‘participate’, ‘affect’: there’s so much work under all of those words.

It took a crazy amount of work to get those words agreed. Lots of different workshops…

I shared my story about how I came to my purpose. Then you’ve got all these other people, with their own totally different story. To find words that you can find the overlap between everyone’s core motivation comes from, that’s hard work and you’ve got to prioritise it. It takes a lot of time.

I think in the first stages of a new collaborative project, you can kinda get away with it, without having it written down, without being too specific. You’ve got enthusiasm and lots of vibe and that will get you through, but before the enthusiasm runs out you’ve got to write something down.

So what happens when the vision is set by 6 people and then it keeps growing?

[Chelsea] I can share because I was one of the not-6. I was probably #8 or #10. It was largely an experience of walking into the room, reading the wall, and going ‘cool, I’m home.’

So you buy into the vision that’s been set?

I guess every single person that’s shown up since, has gone on their own journey to realise the same thing, and then they’re like, ‘oh those are the words, yep.’

[Rich] It wasn’t like 6 people went away and wrote it down as well. It’s the product of a lot of conversations with a lot of people.

Can you talk about the stewardship model?

[Rich] Sure, yeah. I’m glad you asked, because I had a note to say that and I didn’t.

One of the things about the vibe is that we pay attention to how everyone’s feeling. We make it our job to make sure people are feeling as good we can make them feel. Sometimes there’s shit going on that you can’t fix, but…

Because we don’t have a boss, sometimes that can get tricky, not having a boss. A boss is a really good person to turn to if you’re having a hard time, “Boss, I need some time off. My dog ran over my girlfriend.”

So we haven’t got a boss and instead we have this thing called stewards. Up until recently, Chelsea was my steward, I was Alanna’s steward, Alanna was MJ’s steward, and it goes round in a circle. So if I have an issue, I can go to Chelsea and be like, “Chels, I’m freaking out!”

Or, more frequently actually, if some kind of conflict comes up, because that happens all the time, people have productive conflict. It can get a bit sticky, like I don’t want just you and me to nut this out, I want some support. So Chelsea would be the one that would come in and support me. Her job is just to support. She doesn’t have an opinion about the argument, she’s just there to make sure I’m ok.

That’s awesome. It’s really awesome to have that there and it’s awesome to be that for someone else as well.

As far as organisational structure stuff goes, that’s the number one for me.

In the last couple of weeks I’ve been involved with some really hard work. We had a pot of money and we had to split it up between a bunch of people. There’s more people with claims on the money than there is money to go around. It was me and two others that were in charge of deciding where the money should go. Because there were more claims than there was money, that meant some of them were going to get disappointed. It meant I had to push back on people a little bit.

In the work over that two weeks, I realised that I’m not prepared to push back on someone, unless I know that they’ve got someone behind them, catching them. My first job for the first of the two weeks was to make sure everyone had someone standing behind them, and then it’s like, ok, now it is time to push.

We pushed, and we got to a place. At the end of it, everyone goes “this is a good result, we all agree with the process, yes I’m personally disappointed but I’m also personally supported.” Instead of it being like, some boss turning up and being like, here’s the decision, go deal with the feelings. We made sure the feelings were looked after first.

What’s your views on the size of a group that all these things can work with?

There’s a lot of people will tell you a lot of different things about group size. So far I haven’t developed a strong opinion about any of them, other than that I don’t trust any of them that are like ’15 is exactly the number!’

What ever processes you use, totally have to be context-specific. You have to realise what size group you’re working in. The difference between collaborating with 7 people and 9 people is totally different. Totally different.

That’s why there’s no recipe that you can just get online, like, how to run a group of 7 people. It’s so context-dependent.

That’s why we prioritise the vibe. Pay attention, is this working? No it’s not, so let’s change it.

Our structure and our processes have changed so many times. It makes it really hard when someone turns up for the first time, like ‘what the?’

It’s kinda why Enspiral is so hard to explain as well, because it’s changing so much all the time, but it’s changing because it’s growing. Adapting to the position that it’s in.

Have you ever lost the vibe?

The vibe comes and goes, right.

We just had this workshop on Wednesday, about stress and stuff like that. There was a comment that really highlighted for me how that works.

Like I said, in the last two weeks I was doing this really hard work. I was super stressed, I lost the vibe, hard-out. I was dark, wasn’t sleeping properly, like, “there’s too much expectation on me, I can’t carry this, it’s too much.” Just really exhausted, “why should I have to deal with all this crap”. I was losing it, like:

“I’m not the one for this job, I’m just making it up, we need a professional!”

The way that the vibe got saved was that my colleague Ben was like, “Rich you look stressed, do you want to go have a drink?” Just the offer, for starters, that was half the problem was fixed because someone else has noticed, there’s someone looking after me.

Yeah, each of us loses the vibe all the time, that’s why you have a group. They look after you like, ‘hey I think you need a few days off’, or, ‘let’s go climb a tree’, or whatever you need.

As we’ve gone through this, over all this time, I’ve got a pretty comprehensive diary in my head of everyone’s stress triggers, how they respond when they’re stressed, and what to do to intervene. You build up that catalogue in your head, when you get to know people in a deep way.

I know that when I’m stressed, I’ll try to take over. Do things my way because it’s a lot easier than trying to negotiate. When Ben’s stressed, he gets into a state where he can’t make decisions. So when I see Ben being stressed, I’ll go work with him and we’ll make the decisions together. I can go round the whole 17 people and tell you what the recipe is. We’ve just learnt that by paying attention to each other.

The post How to do anything in 3 hard steps: sustaining a project with purpose, care, and humility appeared first on P2P Foundation.

After nearly a decade of testing and growing ideas, this is their first collectively written book. Sharing vision, reflections and insights, this practical resource will help you create radically collaborative, innovative and caring workplaces where people thrive.

Better Work Together includes:

• Practices you can use to grow your capacity to lead and innovate.
• Waus to expand your thinking with new ideas for a different kind of workplace.
• Useful processes and tools you can adopt in your business.

Are you using business as a force for positive change in our world?

Looking for your community?

You are a solo entrepreneur or freelancer who is missing a deeper sense of purpose and connection. You are looking to collectivise and build your tribe. You might be exploring co-working or looking for aligned collaborators.

Growing your community?

You’re actively building the future of work already, and you want to learn from the experiences of others and find solidarity in stories of your peers—to use what works and avoid what doesn’t.

Leading transformation?

You are a leader or intrapreneur in an existing organisation, and you are actively learning about the future of working together. You want to create a purposeful, engaging culture. You are looking for other ideas to get unstuck or increase your impact.

Authored, with love, by a team of passionate entrepreneurs.

This project would not have been possible without the support and contribution of the Enspiral community. Learn more about the people behind the book here.

Republished from BetterWorkTogether.co. Buy the book here.

The post Book of the Day: Better Work Together – How the power of community can transform your business appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This video was filmed at New Frontiers / Te Tūhura Nuku – November 2018 in Upper Hutt, New Zealand.

The post Alanna Irving on Tools for Value Sovereignty appeared first on P2P Foundation.

See the shared notes from this session too.

The post OPEN 2018 – Decision making for participatory democracy appeared first on P2P Foundation.