organizations – P2P Foundation https://blog.p2pfoundation.net Researching, documenting and promoting peer to peer practices Mon, 20 May 2019 04:42:07 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.5.15 62076519 The Key Themes of Collaboration https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/the-key-themes-of-collaboration/2019/05/20 https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/the-key-themes-of-collaboration/2019/05/20#respond Mon, 20 May 2019 08:00:00 +0000 https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=75134 Cross-posted from The Open Coop and written by Oliver Sylvester-Bradley. Having re-watched the webinar on Catalysing Collaboration at Scale I wondered if it might be possible to identify some of the key themes of collaboration. Truly effective, synergistic, collaboration is an elusive beast at the best of times and the idea of making it work at scale,... Continue reading

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Cross-posted from The Open Coop and written by Oliver Sylvester-Bradley.

Having re-watched the webinar on Catalysing Collaboration at Scale I wondered if it might be possible to identify some of the key themes of collaboration.

Truly effective, synergistic, collaboration is an elusive beast at the best of times and the idea of making it work at scale, for decentralised projects and organisations, is possibly the essential challenge of our times.

If we want to work out how to work together more effectively, to build an equitable and abundant world for all, it seems important to recognise, what hinders collaboration, to identify great examples of effective collaboration and to at least attempt to identify if there are any key themes which we can build on and incorporate into our work.

I’m especially interested in what Group Works call the magic which sometimes happens at particularly effective meetings, which they describe in pattern language for bringing life to meetings and gatherings:

“At certain moments, something beyond the group emerges, accompanied by a sense of awe . . . and resulting in a unanimous feeling of astonished accomplishment. Conditions inviting Magic include shared passion, urgency, openness, energy and trust–yet the quality is always mysterious, never guaranteed.

Participants are not always sure why it happens. You can plan for it all you want and you may not get it, or it can sometimes emerge with no planning whatsoever. After it occurs, people are likely to have a variety of theories of what led to it. The most unified thing about it is that usually, when it’s present, people will agree right afterward that it was – even if they call it different things!”

That magic feeling – and the emergent, synergistic outcomes it can deliver – is the holy grail of collaboration. When we achieve that feeling, through the effectiveness of all our intra and inter-group work we will, presumably, feel more rewarded, be more effective and ultimately be heading for the synergy we need to break free from the competitive mind-set.

But, as the quote above mentions, collaborative magic can be elusive. Shared passion, urgency, openness, energy and trust can help it appear but don’t guarantee it happens… So I combed through the discussion on Catalysing Collaboration at Scale in an attempt to identify any other key ingredients. I started to assemble these into themes – but on closer inspection they turned out to mainly be subsets of a larger, over-aching main ingredient: the need for deeper, trusting relationships.

What follows are the themes, and the quotes from the panelists which describe them… plus some conclusions about possible routes to more effective collaboration.

The Key Themes of Collaboration

1. Understanding / Alignment / Resonance / Relationships
Collaboration requires understanding, both of the people and groups that are working together, but also of their shared objectives.
Understanding each other, and aligning to the point of resonance requires well formed and trusting relationships.

“The forming of relationship provides ways to collaborate in the future…”

Collaboration requires:

“…lasting relationships of meaningful solidarity…”

“…Face to face experience – recognising each other – coming into relationships…”

“…Creating an atmosphere to bring people into emotional resonance…
or at least so we are neutral – so we’re no longer potential competitors…”

“We don’t need alignment across the whole group – only those that are in a relationship…
We can be in alignment with others in different ways… this create flows of richer ecosystems”

“Coherence requires coming into alignment”

2. Recognition / Shared understanding / Definition of “The group” / “The self”
Collaboration requires we recognise who “we” are, who we are working with and where our goals align and diverge

“Who are “we”? – where does “our group” start and end…? Who does it include and exclude?”

“…Power and privilege is THE issue – There is no one size fits all answer…”

“…The individuals involved need to be able to define their own answers…”

“… a fluid boundary of self – enables us to come into alignment…”

“…In murmurations – we should be able to experience our own integrity…
to respond to the big ideas – without losing the tune that is “me”…”

“…There are no boundaries – everything is interacting with its environment, in a dance, of things which are themselves dances…”

“…Boundaries have a role – to help us see we’re not the same – and we peruse different goals – but we should be careful when defining them…”

3. Shared Purpose / Values / Vision
Collaboration requires a shared purpose. It is the goal of the collaboration.
Shared purposes, mission statements and values should be carefully developed, with the input of everyone involved.
Beware of any top-down mission or values which are imposed from above – they rarely help produce alignment.

“…We had a set of words – but we didn’t agree about the meaning of the words…”

4. Context / Place in space and time
Collaboration only ever exists in some type of context – and that context affects the best way/s to collaborate.
Just like nature, contexts constantly evolve, so methods of collaboration need to be fluid and adaptive.
Maps can help, but only within particular contexts and points in time. By default centralised maps are out of date.

“…collaboration is always in context … What comes before and after matters…”

“…It’s not a static thing – its not objects… collaboration is flows or dances…”

Check out these useful thoughts on mapping the space to get collaboration flowing much more smoothly and naturally, from Maptio who define initiative mapping as an enquiry into:

  • how the overall vision breaks down into the ever smaller ideas which contribute to it;
  • who has taken responsibility for each part;
  • and who is helping with what.

There’s also some useful mapping examples from the Real Economy Lab, listing initiatives and perspectives around the idea of what a better economics might look like, as well The Open Co-op’s own Mapping working doc, where you can collaborate directly.

5. Glue / Gravitational pull / Cohesion
Collaboration requires cohesion above that which can be articulated through shared purpose.
Effective, on-going collaboration, is held together by the people who provide the glue within any endeavour.

Collaboration requires…

“…Recongising the value of the glue in the fabric… that supports a community…”

“…distributing the invisible glue evenly…”

“…We should recognise it and surface it…”

6. Communication / Grammars / Patterns / Protocols
Collaboration requires clear communication. You can’t have collaboration without communication.
So, effective collaboration requires a shared language and grammars via appropriate mediums of communication.

“…The architecture of how we communicate sculpt the possibilities of what can be done…”

“…Every interaction is a communication, which alters you…”


What stands in the way of collaboration?

The webinar panelists also identified a range of factors that can hinder collaboration… this is not an exhaustive list.

“…So much: our minds and thinking and our emotions…”

“We’re sub divided into representations – broad blokes backed up by ideologies which people haven’t had a chance to contribute to developing…”

“…centralisation, to some degree, is a way of preventing other forms of centralisation… so we should be more intentional about building these institutions…”

“…Beware of the top down, enforced taxonomy – Categorisation is useful for the party that is doing the naming…”

See also Nathan Schneider’s Co-ops Need Leaders, Too… and thoughts from Ethereum about Distributed governance as well as systems


Examples of collaboration in action

The following are just a few examples of successful collaboration that were mentioned in the webinar:

Linaro – collaborative engineering

“… it’s like a “club good” – all the collaborating companies benefit… That’s what collaboration is!”

Associated press – one of the most powerful media co-ops – founded by competing news papers

“…They found they could be more efficient together – on a narrow overlap… It’s powerful – creative competitiveness + Alignment of collaboration…”

Rural electricity co-ops – powering 80% of the US

New Economy Coalition – Build diverse networks – that would otherwise be separate

Giveth.io – A Community of Makers… Building the Future of Giving


Collaboration in practice – requires a genuine shared need

The final words of the webinar came from Ben Roberts, from the Thriving Resilient Communities Initiative in the states. Through his work he has experienced the difficulties of increasing collaboration first hand, and that experience seems especially pertinent to others working on the challenge of ‘networking the networks’.

At the Thriving Resilient Communities Initiative they asked

“How do we do this across the states…? Like minded organisations should be working together more… They ought to be collaborating…”

So they set out to catalyse that – and found it was really hard. They discovered that, If the organisations they wanted to collaborate together had more capacity (in terms of time or money) they would simply do more of what they know works already, rather than collaborating. After all, if you have something that is working and delivering a positive difference, it makes sense to do more of it, rather than explore more complex challenges with no guarantee of results.

So, instead of trying to force collaboration – which is really hard – they identified that cooperating and coordinating can be easier and more powerful. By simply sharing information about what each organisation is doing, about their events and activities, they could start to grow more solid bonds, through which possibilities for collaboration might arise.

As a result of the increased coordination, and the identification of a shared need for income, the organisations in their network started thinking together about how to manage grant money.

“Suddenly we had a collaborative activity which really mattered to everybody”

What emerged from that was a genuine collaboration, with a direct incentive for participation. Organisations in the network started writing each other into their grant proposals – including people outside their “normal membrane”.

This is a key point:

suddenly, through the coordination work and the deeper relationships and understanding that evolved because of it, the definition of “self” changed.

The individualistic, “My organisation only”, mentally dissolved and was replaced by a wider definition of “self” which included other organisations and people. A genuine evolution of perception which paved the way for effective collaboration.

“…So we are now collaborating in more organic rather than forced ways…”

Once the organisation were collaborating in one way, via agreed communication channels with a shared language and shared understanding, they were able to explore other options for co-creation more effectively, by asking themselves:

“…What can we do that nobody is doing yet?”

The results became more distributed – collaboration became not only more possible but more effective at any scale.

“…This was happening at a national level – but it changes at a community level – so now we have regional scale relationships so new projects are showing up which build on the relationships – bringing in partners – to meet shared needs and goals – because its all there as an ecosystem…”


The conclusions:

  • Collaboration is hard – you can’t force it.
  • There are some key themes – and it pays to understand them and work with them…
  • But effective collaboration only really happens when there is a shared need…
  • And the best way to identify shared needs is to be aware of, and understand each other…
  • Which requires building trusting relationships…
  • So, before you try to launch a collaborative endeavour, it pays to work on coordination and cooperation, as stepping stones to future collaboration.

If you’re interested in building deeper, trusting relationships with other people and organisations that are building the collaborative, regenerative economy, please join us in London this summer at the OPEN 2019 Community Gathering.


For more background and further reading around collaboration see also:

Corina Angheloiu’s Weaving networks — when we all need to be spiders

“We’re at a point in time where different networks working towards systemic change are starting to see the need for deeper and more strategic collaboration to increase our reach, impact, access to audiences and funding.”

TRANSIT has mapped out 20 case studies of prefigurative translocal networks which ‘embody their ultimate goals and their vision of a future society through their ongoing social practices, social relations, decision-making philosophy and culture’.

Wise Democracy Project’s patterns to “further the development of wiser forms of self-governance.”

Group Works, “pattern language for bringing life to meetings and gatherings

Decentralized Thriving” a free e-book from DAO Stack – “A digital anthology from 19 innovators on the forefront of decentralised governance”

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Essay of the Day: On the Verge of Collective Awakening https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/essay-of-the-day-on-the-verge-of-collective-awakening/2018/05/29 https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/essay-of-the-day-on-the-verge-of-collective-awakening/2018/05/29#respond Tue, 29 May 2018 08:00:00 +0000 https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=71161 This is a beautiful essay penned by our colleague George Pór. It is well written, informative and reflects George’s life’s work. George Pór: My decades old quest for higher meaning reached a new phase with the question, “what is the pattern that connects awakening to our highest potential in individual, organizational,and social life?” I felt if I could discover that pattern, I’d be able... Continue reading

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This is a beautiful essay penned by our colleague George Pór. It is well written, informative and reflects George’s life’s work.

George Pór: My decades old quest for higher meaning reached a new phase with the question, “what is the pattern that connects awakening to our highest potential in individual, organizational,and social life?” I felt if I could discover that pattern, I’d be able to unlock the synergy between the directions of my calling to walk on the paths of personal, organizational, and social evolution.That discovery started in the early years of this century, when I got acquainted with and dove into Integral Theory and Spiral Dynamics, frameworks that I could apply to the three domains of evolution that were of most interest to me. The exploration continued when Otto Scharmer introduced me to the Process in 2005. This is a process that takes a group through cycles, where they can access different perspectives and solutions regarding organizational and cross-organizational (or even personal) issues.

In the years following my first Theory work-shop, I immersed myself in the life of various“we-spaces,” nourishing environments for accelerated personal and collective development. That made me expand the domain of my pattern-seeking and insert the “community” level between“individual” and “organizational” in the chain that stops at the “social” scale of awakening. 

The understanding of the patterns that connect the edges of our evolution (in those four dimensions), and what drives them, became both my passion and an ever-deepening and endless work-in-progress. What follows is a report reflecting the current state of my quest, at least as much of it that I was able to pull into this writing, as of May 2017.

The four sections of this essay that serve as contexts for outlining the meaning, conditions and practices of “collective awakening” are: What Brings Me to We; Collective Buddha; Wisdom-Driven Enter-prise; and Awakening to a Wiser Society. Exploring and unleashing the synergy of transformative work across all four domains call for an action research.

Read the full essay below:

On the Verge of Collective Awakening by George Pór on Scribd

Photo by byzantiumbooks

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The Vibes Theory of Organisational Design https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/the-vibes-theory-of-organisational-design/2018/04/25 https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/the-vibes-theory-of-organisational-design/2018/04/25#comments Wed, 25 Apr 2018 09:00:00 +0000 https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=70658 The bigger the group, the more rules they need. Can we do better than written agreements? In this article I’m going to bite off some big ideas, musing on the limitations of encoding agreements in text. To keep it grounded, I’ll illustrate the ideas with real-world stories. I’ll include a couple of practical tools you... Continue reading

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The bigger the group, the more rules they need. Can we do better than written agreements?

In this article I’m going to bite off some big ideas, musing on the limitations of encoding agreements in text. To keep it grounded, I’ll illustrate the ideas with real-world stories. I’ll include a couple of practical tools you can try right away. But mostly, this is a reflection from the frontiers of decentralised organising: the ideas here probably only reflect the reality of a tiny number of organisations. It’s highly speculative, subjective, exploratory. I’m not educated in social psychology so I haven’t quoted any sources and I’ve probably mangled the science. In other words: don’t try this at home. The invitation is to put on your safety gear and come exploring with me…

First I’ll set some context, exploring why groups create written rules as the grow. Then, I’ll name some of the dysfunctions that emerge from the rule-setting process. Then I speculate that we might get different outcomes if we used something other than a written rule book. Here goes!

Where does togetherness come from?

Lately I’ve been reflecting deeply on this question: what holds a group together?

Small groups can maintain a lot of togetherness without much explicit structure. We can hold shared context without needing to agree precisely on the words that describe that context.

When the group is small, everyone can build peer-to-peer trust bonds with everyone else. It is pretty easy to trust someone once you’ve shared food with them a couple of times, or done some engaging work together, or supported them through a hard day. With a small number of members, it doesn’t take long for everyone to have a coffee date with everyone else. If you have a team of 5, it only takes 10 coffee dates for everyone to get some time together.

The number of relationships R in a group of N members: R = (N x N-1) ÷ 2
The number of relationships R in a group of N members: R = (N x N-1) ÷ 2

Arriving into this high-trust environment, newcomers can accelerate their own trust-building process. If I’m the 6th person to join, and I spend some time with three of the original members and decide I like them, then I can skip ahead to trusting the other two without having much direct interaction with them, because any friend of yours is a friend of mine!

You can have all of this lovely trust and belonging and harmony without having to talk about it. Bonding operates down at the level of your emotions and psychology: we stay together because it feels good to be together. We have a sense of each person’s unique skills and interests. We like each other. We have a shared sense of direction. Notice none of that needs to be written down.

When there’s some tension between people, it’s easy to spot. If the team is made up of emotionally responsive adults, somebody will notice that Tina and Sam are not talking to each other, and will support them to repair the relationship. Everyone can see everyone else. Everyone can know everyone else. Everyone can fit around a dinner table and have a conversation. So you don’t need to formalise a lot of processes or make explicit agreements.

But this lovely easy harmony is impossible to maintain with many more people. Once your group grows bigger than a dinner table, you need to introduce some scaffolding to maintain the togetherness. If you have a team of 5, everyone could have a 1-on-1 conversation with each other member, and it would only take 10 meetings for everyone to see everyone. You can do this over a weekend retreat or a roadtrip. For 30 people that leaps to 429 meetings. 150 people: 11,175 coffee dates. This unavoidable algebra makes big groups much more challenging than small groups.

Bigger groups require more structure to keep them together

At a certain size we start making explicit structures to keep the group together, because it’s cognitively impossible for everyone to maintain a lot of context about everyone else.

Usually, this “explicit structure” comes in the form of written agreements, contracts, policies, rules, roles, guidelines, and best practices. In this article I’m going to take a closer look at this legislative approach to creating structure, and ask if “writing things down” is the best we can do.

If you review the Enspiral Handbook, or the Gini Handbook or the handbook for any of these hip “future of work” organisations, you’ll see a bunch of roles and rules. These written agreements are the artefacts of deliberations. The deliberations follow a general pattern, something like:

  1. something harmful or frustrating happens
  2. people in the group talk about it
  3. they grow a shared understanding of the problem
  4. people suggest different possible responses
  5. we evaluate the possibilities, collectively running a complex simulation (if we agree to this, what might happen next?)
  6. then finally, we decide on a response

When we talk through a problem, sometimes the response requires no action, like “that restaurant was crap, let’s not go there again”. Most of the time though, the response is a new piece of structure: you agree to a set of Restaurant Selection Criteria (rules), or appoint the Restaurant Selection Working Group (roles). I’ll jump to a real example to give you the flavour:


Story 1: Don’t feed the trolls

Right now I’m involved in a deliberation about a software project called Scuttlebutt. The founder Dominic Tarr was gifted $200,000 (thanks Dfinity!) to work on this ambitious community-driven project. Dominic decided to break up that big dose of money and distribute it in a series of $5k grants, available to anyone who wants to help grow the ecosystem. Grant-making decisions are made with community input, up to 4 grants per month.

A few months in, after allocating 10 or 15 grants, one of the community members suggests a “pause and review” to check how well the process is working. There’s a big discussion, lots of people taking lots of time to write out their thoughts and consider the ideas of others.

Here’s my summary of the conversation so far: essentially everyone is saying “this is the best grants process I’ve ever participated in”, with a bit of “we could improve this or that detail”. Everyone that is, apart from one person, who alternates between trolling, insulting people, making incoherent arguments, demanding attention, and not listening.

So now we’re at a crucial point in the development of the community. Can we collectively agree that “don’t be a dick” is a good enough principle to keep the grant-making process running smoothly? Or do we need to make an explicit written agreement about what behaviour is appropriate? — Join me on Scuttlebutt if you want to see how this plays out!


Problem > Deliberation > Agreement

This is a common pattern right? There’s a problem, we talk about it, and then we decide to add a bit of structure to prevent the problem from recurring. You deliberate together, aiming to get to a new agreement: we expect to handle that problem in future with this new rule.

These conversations are a good way to get to know each other, and discover what the community values. Deliberation takes up hours of time that could have been spent on more obviously productive activities. Sometimes that is a good investment in bonding, but it can get a bit tiring if you over-do it.

I’m interested in what happens when you run the problem-deliberation-agreement loop over a number of years. I’ve been experimenting with self-governing groups since 2011 so I have a bit of firsthand experience to reflect on. I’ve noticed a few side-effects of this loop. I’ll name three of them: attention drift, constitutional accretion, and delusional mythology.

A. Attention drift

If you govern your network/community/organisation with a lot of deliberation, eventually some people tune out and learn, hey, nothing falls to pieces when I withhold my opinion — I’ll stay out of it and just focus on my little corner. You’ll see some of your most experienced people stepping out of the way.

So the decision-making population narrows down to a) the people with the biggest investment (e.g. your personal identity is closely tied to the collective identity) and b) the people who most enjoy sharing their opinions on governance questions. That’s not a bad way to make decisions, exactly, but it leaves a lot of collective intelligence un-engaged. It also leads to a gradual decrease in legitimacy of these decreasingly shared decisions, opening room for a fork or a decay of the “togetherness”.

B. Constitutional accretion

If you keep running the problem-deliberation-agreement routine, you’ll start to experience constitutional accretion: over time, these agreements start to build up.

I’ll illustrate the accretion process with another story. This one comes from Enspiral, which is a network of 100-300 people forming social-impact companies. It’s a group with strong boundaries and a lot of engagement in governance.


Story 2: Digging Through the Sedimentary Layers of Enspiral’s Agreements

When I joined Enspiral in 2012, we had 3 agreements (People, Ventures, Decisions). Later on we added the Diversity Agreement to signify our intention to grow the demographic diversity of our membership. In 2016 there was a major renovation of the network which brought us up to 8 agreements. Within a year, that number has grown to our present set of 11 agreements.

These agreements are expensive to produce. Each of those is the result of a long deliberation, involving anywhere between 100 and 300 people. They are designed to symbolise our most important shared values and commitments. A new agreement is A Big Deal™, signifying some new shared understanding.

This is highly subjective, but I’ll sort them into three categories:

  1. First are what I call “structural agreements”. We have six of them that to me are crucial to the day-to-day operation of the organisation (Board, Brand, Decisions, Financial, People, Ventures).
  2. The next category I call “boundary agreements”. They set expectations for what behaviour is appropriate and what can be excluded. I count three of them (Diversity, Harassment & Abuse, Personal Conduct). I’ve seen other communities get by with just one boundary agreement: “don’t be a dick”. The extra detail at Enspiral is probably a result of spending a lot of time together and doing high-stakes collaboration.
  3. The third category I call “Nice idea, but”. We currently have two of them (Catalyst and Stewardship). They were the best solution we could design at the time, but we’ve never had the resources to implement them well.

So of our 11 agreements:

  • 6 Structural Agreements govern the day to day interactions of people and companies in the network.
  • 3 Boundary Agreements don’t make any difference to my day-to-day interactions (note I’m speaking as a high-privilege, high-status community member). I hope they contribute to the safety and wellbeing of other folks, but personally they do nothing for me.
  • 2 “Nice Idea, But” Agreements: they exist on paper, officially carrying as much weight as the rest of them, but they just don’t match reality.

Right now we’re in a pleasant limbo where people haven’t really noticed that the Stewardship Agreement and the Catalyst Agreement are not being implemented in the way they were intended. (I’ve probably collapsed that liminal space by publishing this article, whoops.) As far as I can tell, nobody is overly concerned just yet. But it would be nice if our theory matched our practice: it seems sub-optimal to have divergence between our explicit structure (what we say holds us together) and our implicit structure (what actually holds us together).

In a sense, if you can’t trust one of the agreements, you can’t really trust any of them. They’re either a set of highly significant guiding documents, or they’re not. How is a newcomer supposed to make sense of the discrepancy? We have agreements that are not up to date with our practices, and we have practices that are not up to date with our agreements. So what do we do?

C. Delusional Mythology

Full disclosure: I believe that groups are mostly held together by good feelings, and the explicit structure is just an artificial scaffold. Enspiral’s written agreements are important because of what they symbolise, not necessarily because of the precise words they say. I think a group is held together by history and relationships and collaborative meaning-making and amorous feelings and psychological responses and co-imagined futures and shared identity, and yes some written agreements and explicit roles too, but I’m convinced the explicit stuff is just the tip of the iceberg.

The explicit stuff is a lot easier to talk about, because we have shared language for it. So it’s easy for us to get distracted and focus on the agreements and lose sight of the underlying meaning that they signify. It’s easy to confuse what we say for what we mean. At times during the Enspiral journey, I’ve felt like we’ve given more attention to the abstract structure of our organisation and lost sight of the tangible things that people are doing. We mistake the symbols for what they symbolise.

Okay I’m getting pretty far-out now, time for another story:


Story 3: Hallucinating together

Let’s say the group is a tree, and we’re all little kids playing in the branches. (Please use a little kid voice as you read this story.)

I’m climbing in this huge tree telling you I’m Jack and this is a beanstalk 🌱 and we’re going up to see the giant. You’re happy to play along with my fantasy, so long as you can count on me to play along when you say this is a spaceship 🚀 and we’re astronauts and we’re going up to space to camp on the moon 🌛.

The kids know the tree is a tree, but it’s fun to tell stories instead. Well, it’s fun when we all get to take turns inventing the story, and nobody is confused between fantasy and reality.

In organisations we make up some imaginary stories called “roles” and “rules” and suddenly everyone stops playing. We all have to agree on the One True Fantasy. Even though most of us know the group is held together with good vibes, it’s easier to explain “well we have the People Agreement, and the Ventures Agreement and if you look here in the handbook you’ll see…”


No gods, no masters, no books?

We make a rule-book, elevate it onto a pedestal, and then put ever-increasing effort into keeping it relevant, accessible and engaging. Meanwhile, the bigger the group, the less this book can describe the lived experience of any of the members.

The obvious solution is to try harder. Find more volunteer hours, or pay someone to put more energy into keeping the agreements up to date. But I’m never satisfied with “try harder”; I think sustainable solutions usually look more like “try different”.

Some of us have a sense that there are negative side effects from the problem > deliberation > agreement loop (I’ve named three of them, I’m sure there are more). So when I reflect on these dynamics, I can’t help but blame the written form itself.

When I get together in community and deliberate about a problem, what’s important to me is that I feel heard, that I feel we are responding intelligently and compassionately, that what we’re working on is meaningful, that we are adaptable and efficient, that I’m a valued member of the community, that I’m seen, that I can count on the community to respond to my needs, that I can be proud to overlap my personal identity with our collective identity. A good deliberation can meet all those needs. The written agreement we produce at the conclusion of that deliberation is a symbol, a placeholder that represents my needs and feelings and experiences. The actual written words can’t capture a fraction of the meaning.

“Forgive me for this introduction to computing, but I need to be clear: computers really do operate on symbolic representations of the world. They really store and retrieve. They really process. They really have physical memories. They really are guided in everything they do, without exception, by algorithms. Humans, on the other hand, do not – never did, never will.” — Your Brain Does Not Process Information and It’s Not a Computer, by Robert Epstein

Can we do better than written agreements?

So this is my big inquiry at the moment: assuming we need some explicit structures to hold our groups together, can we do better than written agreements?

I don’t have a great answer yet — it’s taken me weeks just to articulate the question! While I’ve been exploring, I’ve picked up some interesting leads to follow:

1. Community Mastery Board

Illustration of the Change-Up Process facilitated by the Community Mastery Board
Illustration of the Change-Up Process facilitated by the Community Mastery Board

Drew Hornbein from Agile Learning Centres introduced me to the Community Mastery Board (CMB). Working with self-governing groups of young children, they use CMB as a tool for “creating sustainable culture within a community through iterative trial and error”. Documentation is sparse, but you can start to learn about it in Drew’s blog hereanother blog here, and this one-page PDF. (Also my long distance crush Art Brock wrote a teaser way back in 2014C’mon fam, write that sweet documentation!)

“For instance, in our current space everyone is expected to clean up any dishes they use. We didn’t come to this decision by having a meeting and coming up with rules, rather by way of becoming aware of a problem and trying out a number of solutions and sticking with the one that stuck.” Drew Hornbein — Agile Learning Centres

Instead of the expensive “problem > deliberation > agreement” routine, the process is focussed on finding something safe to try, as quickly as possible. The process takes minutes, not hours. Rather than spending a lot of time designing the best possible guess and getting everyone to agree with it, with CMB you just focus on trying a solution and reviewing it quickly. What most interests me about CMB is that it seems to be less focussed on the rules, and more focussed on the “deltas”, i.e. what needs to be changed. I can imagine running a “change-up” meeting every week or every month and developing a shared sense of “this is our capacity for change.”

Compared to a rule book on a pedestal, CMB feels much better suited for the way our brains work, and the way our groups are actually held together. Over time, the good rules get embedded into the group culture: if you see everyone else cleaning up their own dishes, you don’t need a sign to tell you you’re expected to clean up yours.

I don’t think this process is ready to be dropped in to large self-governing groups as a replacement for deliberation and legislation. But it’s inspiring to see an approach to governance optimised for ongoing change, rather than trying to capture an ideal steady state.

2. Guide Board

When I told him about the Community Mastery Board, new Enspiral contributor Matti Schneider introduced me to his Guide Board, which is thoroughly documented here (swoon!).

“A guide is therefore the reification of a debate conclusion, a reminder that a discussion took place. These keywords and drawings are here to recall the agreement to participants, as a tangible trace of the decision. […] it became clear that the illustrated guides were easier to memorise, and much easier to identify when glancing at the board. ”

Things I like:

  • Guides are primarily graphical icons, not written words. (The dynamics of creating, agreeing, and updating graphics is very different to what we’re used to with text. I don’t know if it is better, but different is worth exploring.)
  • Closing a guide (i.e. erasing a rule) is part of normal business. (I’ve never participated in a community that could undo old rules without a huge amount of effort and drama.)
  • The guide board (like CMB) is designed for flow: the passage of time is laid out intuitively from left to right. It’s more like a movie, less like a book. Each rule is contextualised in time: acknowledging it was relevant last year, without claiming that it will be eternally relevant.
  • A guide reminds us that we talked about something, it doesn’t pretend to capture the content of the conversation.
  • Both the Guide Board and Community Mastery Board are oriented towards continuous participatory change, less “what are the rules around here”, more “how much capacity do we have for changing the rules here”

3. Team of Teams

As I’ve been contemplating these questions, trying to put my finger on my discomfort with written agreements, I’ve noticed a new trend at Enspiral. In conversation with the longest-standing members, I’m noticing a new consensus emerge: I believe Enspiral is evolving into what General Stanley McChrystal calls “a team of teams”:

The invitation was “welcome to the community, jump in and contribute, find opportunities, get supported to do meaningful work” and I think it is maturing into “welcome to the community: find a dinner table you like, or start a new one”. The difference is subtle but represents a profound shift in expectations: the network does not provide support, you can only expect support once you’ve found your team.

I’m anticipating a future version of Enspiral which has the minimum set of agreements to govern the whole, and maximum autonomy, diversity, and subjectivity in the parts. If we all spend most of our time in one or two dinner-table sized groups, we can stay focussed on the squishy human-to-human kind of togetherness, and put much less effort into the explicit, written scaffolding that holds the whole together.

I don’t want us to spend a few hundred hours to design the Tables Agreement! I think it would be much more effective to have a few of the elders telling stories like “I thought I found purpose and connection when I joined Enspiral, but that was nothing compared to the depth of support I experienced once I found my table.”


So I’m publishing this as an open question, and I’d love to hear your contributions. Who do you know that is doing collaborative governance with something other than written agreements?

Writing this highlighted the gaps in my education: I have tonnes of practice but very little theory. I’m open to your reading suggestions. I get the feeling that I’m bumping up against the artefacts of colonial/ patriarchal/ judeo-christian/ anglo-saxon/ greco-roman epistemology, so I’m most interested in learning from thinkers outside of the academy. Specifically I know I need to learn more about governance in oral cultures — if you have experiences to share, I’d love to chat with you. I also wonder if anyone can share stories from, e.g. collaborative governance with children, or with people who don’t read — there could be some interesting leads to follow there too.

Thanks to Matti SchneiderHailey CooperriderBilly MathesonTheodore Taptiklis, and Drew Hornbein for their thoughtful contributions to this piece.

p.s. If you want to encourage me to keep writing: please share/ like/ recommend/ tweet or otherwise validate me quantifiably 😍 📈

p.p.s You can give me money on Patreon if you want me to hurry up and finish my first book.

p.p.p.s. I waive copyright on all my writing: you may do anything you like with this text. You’ll find pdf, markdown, and html formats on my website.

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Project Of The Day: Platform Design Toolkit https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/project-of-the-day-platform-design-toolkit/2016/10/14 https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/project-of-the-day-platform-design-toolkit/2016/10/14#respond Fri, 14 Oct 2016 21:06:37 +0000 https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=60539 Recently, I attended a conference on Community Land Trusts. One of the elective workshops aimed to help non-profit land trusts develop additional businesses. The model for developing business ideas was taken from a book (Business Model Generation) written collaboratively by over 400 practitioners. One trend in business models is platforms. Airbnb and Uber built extractive... Continue reading

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Recently, I attended a conference on Community Land Trusts. One of the elective workshops aimed to help non-profit land trusts develop additional businesses. The model for developing business ideas was taken from a book (Business Model Generation) written collaboratively by over 400 practitioners.

One trend in business models is platforms. Airbnb and Uber built extractive platforms on top of the sharing movement. But online platforms do not have to evil.

The Platform Design Toolkit released it’s 2.0 version this year.  Despite it’s marketing hype concerning brands and industry shaping, the toolkit is released under a Creative Common license. One of its commons oriented aims is to create additional value within an ecosystem by generating ecosystem knowledge.

In fact, this is the essence of conferences, like the one I attended.  The event (a platform) assembles practitioners, theorists, regulators, and entrepreneurs (an ecosystem) to interact and exchange ideas (knowledge generation).


Extracted from: https://stories.platformdesigntoolkit.com/your-organization-too-can-be-a-platform-8d0668e55cb#.9vueudhbk

Platform Design Thinking is a totally new way to look at your organization going beyond traditionally imposed barriers on what a business or organization should be. Approaching organization design with a fresh mindset on what a modern organization can leverage on will help us reflect on its physical, structural and sometimes legal boundaries. This conversation is key to designing revolutionary value propositions and organization like creation spaces, that aim to be great for people, instead of big for shareholders.

Extracted from: http://platformdesigntoolkit.com/

Who is the Platform Design Toolkit for?

Corporate pioneers that want to shape reference markets, startup founders that want to disrupt incumbents, social entrepreneurs that want to achieve high impact.

Consultants that want to help clients, journalists and analysts that want to understand how platforms work: the toolkit is also a premium analysis tool.

As we’ve seen in many occasions while developing and explaining the Platform Design Toolkit, there are two key aspects of being a company-platform.

First, you need to ensure you build the right channels and contexts that make it possible for the transactions and relationships that exist in your ecosystem to happen smoothly and flawlessly.

The second key aspect is to see your organization as a powerful engine of learning. Provide means for performance improvement that can benefit not only the company shareholders but the ecosystem as a whole.

Extracted from: https://stories.platformdesigntoolkit.com/platforms-are-engines-of-learning-4f7b70249177#.2i98pvxcl

The topic of Positive Platforms is of course on our radar since a while. We’ve been keeping an eye on every relevant analysis and, in a few months old post, Marina Gorbis and Devin Fidler from Silicon Valley based Institute For The Future, identified eight principles of Positive Platforms design. All the points raised in the post are key and interesting, ranging from open access and transparency to democratic governance and more, and we took all of them into account in developing a new version of the Platform Schema that we will soon publish. By the way, among these principles, you will find one that we think is obviously key, that of “Upskilling”:

“The best platforms already show those who work on them pathways for learning […] and connect people to resources for advancement”

Extracted from: http://us11.campaign-archive1.com/?%20u=e272a9d50c52efb331777c60a&id=5dbfee3a1e

Earlier on in July the team held a company workshop with one of the primary financial institutions in Europe. We’ve learnt how human capital in knowledge intensive industries can help these companies become platforms, capable of multiplying the value for the customer through the facilitation of the ecosystem interaction: experts can successfully play the role of trusted advisers for customers.

The greatest learning we achieved was that Platforms help these brands climb the value chain and provide customers with higher level services by leveraging the expertise in the ecosystem and the convergence of strategies between several customers, helping them connect around more ambitious plans and projects.

Extracted from: http://us11.campaign-archive1.com/?u=e272a9d50c52efb331777c60a&id=d19099239a

Blockchains & Platforms: shaping the future of Insurance and Liabilities

The future of the insurance will therefore be on one side unbundled and commoditized?—?with trading of standardized risk and high-speed on Blockchain?—?and on the other will be a key process to give the brand a chance to take responsibility for complex and dynamic business processes that they will create by combining components as the DAO, smart contracts, distributed resources and open-source data: that “general intellect” that?—?despite the destructive force?—?can not be held legally responsible.

In a nutshell, Platforms (not only in the insurance industry) will increasingly take advantage of distributed tools and resources to build their business processes. These processes will be made of activities and information that are not owned by the brand itself, but of which the brand will be accountable for towards the user and the law; in doing so, the ability to calculate the overall risk of such complex combinations, will be an essential factor in determining the success of tomorrow’s brands and companies.

Photo by -Jeffrey-

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Why we don’t like organizational charts https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/why-we-dont-like-organizational-charts/2015/12/13 https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/why-we-dont-like-organizational-charts/2015/12/13#comments Sun, 13 Dec 2015 12:16:50 +0000 http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=53054 How they resolve the tension between mechanical elements—structures—and organic—interpersonal relationships—is the difference between a community that empowers its members and one that drains them. The kibbutzim inspired by Gordon understood through practice that every community is the result of the development of interpersonal links between its members. Structural and hierarchy, they said, is nothing but... Continue reading

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organigrama-faircoop

How they resolve the tension between mechanical elements—structures—and organic—interpersonal relationships—is the difference between a community that empowers its members and one that drains them.


The kibbutzim inspired by Gordon understood through practice that every community is the result of the development of interpersonal links between its members. Structural and hierarchy, they said, is nothing but a “mechanical” impression, with its own logic, which is apparently rational, but really alien.

It is true that both have to coexist. But it’s also true that the mechanical forms (enterprise, association, party, cooperative, etc.) tend to be imposed on the smaller-scale organic part in the interests of the predictability that makes it possible to set objectives over time and in the name of the reasoning that emerges from majorities and desirable plans.

colaborando kibutzObviously, we aren’t talking about removing the mechanical component, but developing a conceptual toolbox for its management, and putting it at the service of the organic development of community. When we hear things like the individual-community conflict, from Gordon’s perspective, we’re really witnessing a conflict between the organic and mechanical conceptions of what a community is, or better still, between the two inevitable components of its development.

Communitarianism does not consist of denying one dimension in favor of the other, but rather, understanding that the organic side (couples, families, groups of friends) strengthens community and erodes the mechanical structures of organization by making them more or less unnecessary, and that, therefore, organic relationships must take priority over the mechanical side as much as possible. Anything that can be “org-charted” is a antibiotic that should be carefully reserved for times of need, because just as it allows us to confront extraordinary limitations, its prolonged use hopelessly weakens the body that we’re trying to care for.

Conversational communities are amazing and inviting, not just because of the wealth of their deliberation and what this tends to create (simple experiences of fraternity), but because they  have an almost complete lack of mechanical organizational elements (especially virtual ones). So,the leap to an economy of their own is also usually conflictive. It’s not easy to understand the difference between a community with companies and a community of companies. Nor is it widely understand how far collective majority rule and democracy are mechanical tools which only should be used in difficult moments.

primera comunidad kibutzEven  today, on Degania’s webpage, the first point that describes community lifestyle is “Degania has never had separate children’s quarters.” Being differentiated in this issue remains, almost a century later, part of the identity of the communitarian kibbutzim as contrasted with those of Marxist origin.

The practice of parents and children sleeping separately appeared relatively early in the Marxist-inspired kibbutzim–especially in those of Hashomer Hatzair–and was consolidated at the beginning of the ’20s, obeying a rational argument and internal coherence: the members of the youth movements sought to extend to their children the self-managed and communal education system that had marked their adolescence. As good Marxists, everything organic and uncontrollable was left out of the analysis and replaced permanently and definitively by the mechanical. The couple and family-centered model of Degania and the small kibbutzim was criticized as “bourgeois,” and in the majority of the big kibbutzim, couples didn’t even sit together to eat until the ’40s. The family was replaced by the democratic structure of community: parents only spent a few hours of the day with their children, in some cases even the names of the children was voted on in assembly. The result was what the director of the famous documentary “Children of the Sun” called a generation of “orphans of idealism.”

But the truth is that the organic side always ends up breaking mechanical constrictions. The trouble is that it is very possible that, in the process, the wrong lessons may be learned.

The Israeli writer Batia Gur imagined those tensions would end up breaking the kibbutz and its more celebrated accomplishments when, at the end of the ’80s, she began writing the iconoclastic book: Murder in the Kibbutz. There still has not been one case of murder on a kibbutz either inside or outside Israel, but is true that the “common dream” and mechanical barbarisms of the Marxist community tradition were the engine of many privatizations starting in the ’90s, and to a greater extent than the economic and cultural reasons that people were less shy to offer. This appears clearly in another famous documentary, “Inventing Our Lives.”

asamblea kibutzThe problem with the mechanical conception of community isn’t just that it destroys real communities that decide to adopt it, but it destroys the whole field of meanings around community values by association.

It is true that the non-communitarian kibbutzim were not “the same” as Soviet farms. The Soviet system created scarcity from top to bottom, through the State authoritarianism of the single party, while the kibbutzim of the Marxist tendency created it with democratic procedures. And, without a doubt, the kibbutzim found scarcity produced by a majority-driven system that was sincerely concerned about community more acceptable than that produced by an authoritarian State system. But, in the end, what is unbearable is the logic of scarcity as the governor of life in common because it’s inevitably going to create an intimate ideology that will see every decision as a “zero-sum game”. Regarding the rest of the world, what’s left of all mechanical communitarianism is the same thing that’s left of monasticism: the idea that a community is a zero-sum game where, when the “community” wins, the individual loses. So, when tensions become unsustainable, the crisis always blows up due to fairly rapacious and suicidal individualism, but ultimately, isolating, myopic, and defeatist individualism.

Why do organizational charts make us nervous?

indianos y el loboNothing represents the mechanical conception of the human organization better than an organizational chart. Sometimes needed, is true, but if we need it to tell others what we are, normally it’s because we have an over-scaling problem. If we tell ourselves what we are by using it, we don’t value the real community that supposedly is are underneath–the individuals and organic relationships that make it.

But when the organizational chart expresses planning and desire, when the organizational chart really is an organizational program, and therefore political, it could be said that is, in fact, an extreme idealization of the mechanical component of the organization. All those structures, groups, committees, all those names cry out from the paper about the absence of real names, names of people who take and accept personal responsibilities, who think of themselves in a mesh of family affection, couple affection, and friendship. The work of the org chart has to encapsulate the explicit commitment that they could make to a stranger indistinguishable from any other. People are limited thus to predictable capacities, and they become interchangeable.

The community then becomes a mere form, an empty structure, anonymous. That’s the opposite of what always gives the word “community” an affective ring.

Translated by Steve Herrick from the original (in Spanish)

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