Better

work
together
How the power of 
community can transform 
your business

Producing authors
Anthony Cabraal
Susan Basterfield

Published by 
Enspiral Foundation

Forward by Douglas Rushkoff

The future of working together has arrived.
A radically different workplace is possible.
We can build organisations that change lives,
and grow resilient, committed, self-managing teams.

If you are curious about how the power of community

can transform the way business works, and has the
potential to change the world, this book is for you.

Enspiral is a community of entrepreneurs experimenting

at the edges of ownership, governance, decision making,
resource sharing, and organisational design.

This work illuminates the power and potency

of deep care for people and planet, radical ambition
for systems change, and the commercial drive
to get things done.

After nearly a decade of testing

and growing ideas, we’ve
collectively written this book
to share vision, reflections,
and insights. This practical
resource will help you create
radically collaborative,
innovative, and caring
workplaces where
people thrive.
Better Work Together
How the power of community
can transform your business

betterworktogether.co

Copyright © 2018

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0

International Public License

Producing authors:
Anthony Cabraal
Susan Basterfield

Design and layouts

by Renato Inacio.
Fluency Design Brazil.
fluencydesign.com.br

Published by Enspiral Foundation Ltd

All Rights Reserved

ISBN: 978-0-473-46036-5
 Anthony Cabraal
Producing Authors
Susan Basterfield
Preface
Douglas Rushkoff is an educator, media theorist, and author: Most recently of the
book Team Human and host of the Team Human podcast. (https://teamhuman.fm/)

I receive over a hundred emails a day from people with great ideas for
social change, new democratic platforms, eco-villages, and alternative
currencies. Some of them have already written eloquent white papers,
created gorgeous renderings, or plotted out cyclic revenue streams that
seem to challenge the laws of perpetual motion. These are well-meaning
people, with great educations and skills, turning their attention to the
most pressing “wicked problems” of our age.
Yet almost all of their ingenious blueprints for the salvation of human-
ity have been conceived and generated alone, in a room, on a computer.
Yes, they want to find the others now - people and organizations who
share the same fundamental values, and will recognize the wisdom of
their master plans. But no matter who I try to connect them to, it never
quite works out. That’s because they’re reaching out to the other people
much too late.
Solidarity is not the result of world-changingly good ideas, it is the cause.
There’s no paucity of solutions to our collective woes; from permacul-
ture and the commons to consensus building and platform cooperatives.
What we too often lack are the communities of people to organize and
apply these solutions in the real world, from the bottom up. It doesn’t
have to be this way.

5
 The Occupy movement has long been criticized as lacking substance
or purpose. As if it were just a bunch of idealistic college students and
dropouts with great motives but no plan. But to me, this was precisely
their strength: a willingness to gather together with no particular expec-
tation other than to forge solidarity, and model a new approach to social
change. Less a demand or a eschatological goal than a process: a new
normative state, and a new way of occupying reality. This may not have
been Adbusters’ intent when they called for a protest against Wall Street;
it’s simply what happened when people came together with a determi-
nation to engage in the long game of social change, one collaborative
step at a time.
No, Occupy didn’t achieve some landmark concession from government
or the corporate sector. But it did set in motion a new approach to col-
lective action, governance, and trade. Or maybe it just retrieved some
lost approaches, from the General Assembly of Ancient Greece, to the
commons of pre-industrial Europe. These mechanisms were not part of
some master plan, but rather emerged in response to the needs of peo-
ple engaging differently. And as the needs of the people in the park and
streets changed, different experts rushed into the scene to provide food
solutions, technology, WiFi, and more. Each solution generated from the
bottom up, in an occasionally ad hoc but always organic way.
Enspiral may have predated Occupy by a year, but it arose in the same
way and for some of the same reasons, asking the same questions: How
can a business, organization, or society itself work without bosses? How
can a group take everyone’s opinion into account, and still get anything
done? How can a company make money for its stakeholders without
extracting needed funds from somewhere or someone else?
The collective’s solutions and now-thriving initiatives were as much re-
sponses to its own challenges as they were bright ideas for the world.
Loomio, a consensus tool modeled on Occupy’s General Assembly
meeting style, helps groups agree on difficult issues. Instead of promot-
ing winner-takes-all, polarizing outcomes of traditional debate, it seeks
to minimize total discomfort with group choices. And yes, solving this
problem for themselves gave Enspiral a tool that was applicable as far
and wide as the Podemos movement in Spain or local government in the
United Kingdom. Similarly, Enspiral’s Experience Agency organizes and
facilitates events and retreats - but only because its founders needed to
develop this expertise to facilitate their own meetings and workshops on
6 open source.
The efforts grow, for sure, but they don’t “scale” in the way Silicon Val-
ley may think of growth. These are not the one-size-fits-all Industrial
Age solutions now being distributed through digital networks. These ini-
tiatives spread because they are techniques that can be modeled by oth-
ers, and then adapted to particular circumstances. They are not products
but processes. They are less services than offerings.
Because the problems engendered by the monolithic solutions offered
by industrial capitalism aren’t countered by more big solutions but by
many different local responses. Enspiral’s methodologies are more fun-
damental than any fully realized rendering of an eco-village or white pa-
per for another blockchain. Like the service offered by Enspiral’s com-
panies, these are not answers to your challenges so much as recipes for
finding and developing your own.
The work itself - the process of collaboration - ends up as important as
whatever product or service is being delivered. It’s less of a final solution
that can be thought up, written down, and emailed to the world than it
is a commitment to engaging honestly, openly, and transparently from
the beginning.
Here’s how that happens.

Douglas Rushkoff
New York, November, 2018 7
 BETTER WORK TOGETHER

“If you are sincere in your

desire to make the world
a better place then your
personal success is our
number one priority.”
~ enspiral.com/recruitment 2010

8
Thank you for your attention.

As a species we have never been so powerful.

New tools, unprecedented levels of resource, and our ability to mobilise

enables we humans to rewrite the rules of how life can be. As individuals
we are smarter, healthier and more connected. Together, we have har-
nessed our collective creativity to build systems that make us more pow-
erful and effective than at any point in history, on any planet we know of.
With this power we’re changing things.

The world we’ve built is changing dramatically. How we control infor-

mation, money and power, how we connect with each other, share, and
create together is changing fundamentally. Our businesses, markets,
financial systems, and nations are being transformed.
We are reaching limits we haven’t encountered before.

Our collective footprint has never been so heavy on the Earth. There
have never been so many of us demanding so much from the planet.
The impact of our individual and collective decisions has never been so
strong. Every side effect, every externality, every waste product we create
lands hard on a planet that once felt infinite, and has quickly become
smaller and more fragile.
What do we do?

Disruption, collapse, reimagination, transformation, revolution. These

are the times we are living in. As individuals, as agents of change, com-
9
munity builders, entrepreneurs, parents, employers, leaders, followers,
 citizens, (whatever the hats we wear), as participants on Planet Earth we
must navigate this time of immense challenge and opportunity together.
The fundamental natural systems that support stable life on this planet
are shifting with our weight. Technology is making our wildest imag-
inings more possible every day. The future is our hands - right now.
We have the potential (and the urgent need) to change everything.

Where do we start?

What is this book about!?

This book speaks from a community, not on behalf of a community; the

words are written by many voices, and not all of them agree. It is it not
intended to be ‘the Enspiral story’ or an answer to the ongoing question
“what is Enspiral?”
There is much work still to be done, innumerate angles yet unexplored,
work that has not been surfaced, and plenty of space to continue to ex-
pand the frame of this conversation. Depending on where you are right
now, this could be...
• A book about building teams and successful companies, to grow live-
lihood and support new ways of working together.
• A book about challenging the way things are and creating alternative
systems for a radically different world.
• A book about committed action, persistence and the first steps of
progress on a very long journey to answer some big questions.
• A book about big ideas to change the world, and what happens when
the right people find one another, and something remarkable happens.
If the essays, guides and reflections in this book point toward one thing,
it’s an urgent need for conscious attention.
Regardless of what kind of world we want to build, or the lives we want
to lead, perhaps the most powerful starting question we can ask our-
selves is: Where do we choose to put our attention?
Our attention is so valuable.
10
It is fleeting and difficult to control. With effort we can focus it, but we
cannot acquire more of it. We can protect it but it cannot be stored or
transferred. It is constantly demanded, always under threat and yet we
give it away freely as we move through the world.
Our attention silently determines how we choose to build our livelihoods,
look after ourselves, and make decisions about what is important to us.
The world that will exist 10 years from now, 20 years from now, 30 years
from now is being built today. It is our conscious attention, put into
action, that is building that future.
Our attention is our power. It is the invisible, constant force that ultimately
determines our individual and collective potential.
This book is an exploration of what happens when our conscious atten-
tion is turned to how we choose to work. What is the most important
work of our lives? What is right work for us as individuals? As groups
and teams and organisations? What is good work? What is better work?

What does better work together look like?

11
 How to read this book

The book has been designed to be read front to back, or back to front,
middle to end or picked up and browsed spontaneously.
You’ll find short essays written by 10 co-authors that speak deeply to
expertise developed through practice, alongside guides, provocations
and reflections from dozens of contributors.

Some questions to keep in mind might be:

• Might these provocations start much bigger conversations?
• Do these ideas shift your thinking?
• Which processes might you experiment with?
• Are there practical resources here you can use?
• Are there tools you can adopt?
• Are there mistakes you can avoid?

• Are there assertions that you can challenge?

12
Ultimately, we hope these pages challenge you
and open you to opportunities that bring more
attention and action towards a future that will
work better for all of us.

Thank you for your attention.

Anthony Cabraal & Susan Basterfield
Producing Authors

13
Essay 1
More people working on stuff that matters 18
Joshua Vial

Essay 2
Evolving Enspiral 34
Alanna Irving

Essay 3
A radically good livelihood 48
Susan Basterfield

Essay 4
Welcome to the age of participation 60
Francesca Pick

Essay 5
Saying yes to purpose 80
Sandra Chemin

Essay 6
All things being equal: 88
when community is the business
Anthony Cabraal

Impact theory
The Open Startup 102
Anthony Cabraal

Resource
Blueprints 106
Anthony Cabraal
Resource
handbook.enspiral.com 112
Anthony Cabraal
Reflection
Collective reflections 114
Gina Rembe-Stevens

Resource
How to grow distributed leadership 118
Alanna Irving

Reflection
Breaking bread 120
Doris Zuur & Lucy Carver

Reflection
We can’t get ‘there’ from ‘here’: 122
The ceremony of meeting
Billy Matheson

Impact theory
Doing what we can only do together 128
Susan Basterfield

Resource
Full Circle Leadership 132
Alanna Irving

Resource
Patterns of decentralised organising 142
Richard D. Bartlett

Resource
5 threads that weave strong community fabric 152
Anthony Cabraal
Resource
Unfolding purpose: A five-step journey 166
Sandra Chemin & Sandra Otto

Reflection
Sharing power, money, and information 172
Alanna Irving

Reflection
Coffee, beer, and pizza 184
Anthony Cabraal

Reflection
This thing called Enspiral: 196
Holding a collective story
Nick Laurence

Essay 7
Finding the stuff that matters 200
Chelsea Robinson
Essay 8
Out beyond consensus there’s a field: 214
I’ll meet you there
Richard D. Bartlett

Essay 9
Start with I 228
Kate Beecroft

Essay 10
21st century leadership 244
Silvia Zuur

Essay 11
In service of change 258
Damian Sligo-Green
Final reflection
Where to from here? 272
Charley Davenport, Lucas Tauil de Freitas,
Phoebe Tickell, john gieryn

Glossary
Our buzzwords: Unpacked 278
Susan Basterfield, Anthony Cabraal, Hannah Smith

Acknowledgements
It takes a village 282
Susan Basterfield, Anthony Cabraal

References 288
 essay.One

More people
working on stuff
that matters
by Joshua Vial
 More people working on stuff that matters

It all started with a story

In February 2011 Enspiral was just about to turn 1 year old. A handful
of us had moved into a shared office a few weeks before. This email
showed up in my inbox:

“Hi Joshua, I’m really interested to learn about what Enspiral is doing right
now and how I might collaborate with you guys. I’ve been programming for a
long time, launched a startup, and I’m now working on a new venture focus-
ing on rest homes. So, If you think I’m the right kind of person for Enspiral, or
there are opportunities to talk about, please let me know. Kind Regards, Rob”

We organised a time to meet, and I shared the Enspiral story. Shaped by

hundreds of conversations, it wasn’t just my story, but I was the main
story-holder at the time. It went something like this:

More people working on stuff that matters

There is a growing awareness of some big problems in our society—cli-
mate change, extreme poverty, ecological collapse and gender inequality,
to name a few. It feels like core systems in society are fundamentally bro-
ken and our current political and economic systems are not adequately
responding. Often, the knowledge and resources to provide solutions
are there, they just aren’t pointing in the right direction.
A growing number of people are becoming aware of these big problems
and are deciding to do something about it. Our strategy is help those
19
people connect with peers and help each other succeed.
 BETTER WORK TOGETHER

I don’t care what you work on, whether it’s climate change, global pov-
erty, self management, social enterprise, planting trees, gender equality,
decolonisation, or steady state economics. If your primary mission is
to make the world a better place, your personal success is the reason
Enspiral exists.
There is a trickle of human energy going into the most important issues
of our times. Enspiral exists to help turn that trickle into a river.

We organise differently
Most organisations in the world look like pyramids. Their strategy is to
choose the best people they can find and centralise money, information,
and control. The leaders distribute information, delegate power, and
allocate resources as best they can, and those resources flow down like
a waterfall. People who work in the organisation have limited ability to
influence who the leaders are and what they do.
This is a very successful form of organising. Many organisations in the
world use some form of hierarchical, command and control model. When
the cost of transacting information is high (meetings, letters, phone
calls), it makes a lot of sense. Collaboration costs can be managed and
people can work together to deliver big projects.
However, as Clay Shirky would say, technology changes everything. The
flood of information makes the attention economy as important as the
financial one. Leaders are forced to reason about a complex world with
simple abstractions, and information loss occurs as data flows up and
down the pyramid. People who are conditioned by the culture of pull
requests, wikis, and participatory media feel friction in a read-only world.
The revolution in communications technology and the culture it produces
has opened the possibility space for how groups can work effectively
together. A core hypothesis of Enspiral is that a new form of organising
is not just possible, but optimal—one based on peer relationships that
value individual sovereignty and consent-based decision-making. We
want to exercise power with others, not over others. No one should lead
all the time and everyone should lead some of the time.
We consciously decentralise money, information and power, and use rich
information systems to coordinate our actions. We borrow old social
technologies from cooperative organising and integrate them with modern
20
technologies to explore new ways of working together.
 More people working on stuff that matters

Get paid well to change the world.

Many people who dream of changing the world are constrained by having
to earn a livelihood doing something that doesn’t contribute to their
core mission. For many of us with commercially valuable skills, there
are plenty of opportunities to help companies earn money, or to work
for charities as an ambulance at the bottom of a cliff, or to work in the
public sector wrestling with large and inefficient bureaucracies and politics.
At Enspiral, we focus on helping each other earn sustainable livelihoods
that are aligned with our values. This might be through freelancing, start-
ing a mission-driven venture, or working for another organisation. The
Enspiral challenge is to get paid well to do work you love, with people
you love, while working on a systemic issue you care deeply about.
It isn’t easy, but it is possible. People join this community to help each
other meet that challenge. Enspiral doesn’t have jobs, but we’ve got lots of
opportunities, and we find that the right people tend to hire themselves.
Rob resonated with that story, and became the 49th person to join Enspiral.
That’s the story we came from.
These days, there are many Enspiral stories, and no one person can hold
them all. The only way to understand Enspiral is to listen to many peo-
ple, which is why many of us are contributing to this book.

My Enspiral journey
Each of us have our own stories of how we found this community and
what it means to us. My Enspiral journey began in 2007 at the feet of
the Eiffel tower.
I had just spent two months walking the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage
path through France and Spain. I don’t remember what made me want
to walk the Camino. I was restless and figured walking for a long time
would be a good way to figure things out. But by the end, I hadn’t figured
out much at all; my feet were sore and my mind clear. On my last night
in Europe I went for a walk through the streets of Paris.
I found myself at an art exhibition by Yann Arthus Bertrand on the
banks of the Seine called ‘Alive’. There were dozens of beautiful pho-
tographs of people, animals, and the planet. Alongside each photo was
21
a fact about global systems failure: biodiversity loss, extreme poverty,
 BETTER WORK TOGETHER

climate change, and so on. Devastating data told an irrefutable story of

the harm caused by humans and a small story about a group of people
trying to do something positive offered a glimmer of hope.
Image after image washed over me. Some of the facts I knew, and some
I didn’t. Most I’d bumped into previously, and were drifting around in
my subconscious under the title of ‘bad things happening in the world’.
As I walked away from the exhibition, I was left with a voice ringing in
my head: “maybe there isn’t enough time”.
I started educating myself. I actively researched global issues, and the
more I looked the more horrified I became. It seemed to me that the ma-
jority of human systems were fundamentally flawed. It wasn’t a case of
if they would collapse but when. I did some maths and figured out that,
if I was lucky and had a full career, I would probably have about 80,0001
hours in my working life. That realisation was profoundly enabling. I
didn’t have to take responsibility for solving massive problems; I just had
to spend my time as best I could.
Over the next two years, I supported myself as a freelance programmer,
which paid well and left me a lot of time to volunteer as I tried to turn
my time into impact. I worked on climate change, youth leadership, a
‘no plastic bags’ campaign, a young professionals’ network focused on
sustainability, and various other projects.
Over those two years, I didn’t make much impact but I learned a lot.
I met many other people who were passionate about making a difference
but were limited by their livelihood options. Either they were working
full time on something that wasn’t aligned with their purpose or they
were struggling financially as they put all their energy into volunteering.
It occurred to me that maybe the best way I could contribute was to help
people who wanted to change the world get highly paid contract work.
And so, Enspiral2 was born. The Alive exhibition provided the moti-
vation, the research into global systems the conviction, and the idea of
helping changemakers find great livelihoods the focus.

1 Based on 2,000 hours per year for 40 years

2 People are often curious where the name Enspiral came from. In 2003 I needed a name for a company
and wasn’t inspired by “Joshua Vial Contracting Limited”. I spent a few hours on a long distance phone
call with my mother brainstorming ideas. Spir is a latin root which means breathe and is the root of
words like respiration, spirit and inspire. En means to cause or grow - encourage, enlarge, endear. Spiral
reminded me of the Fibonacci sequence and golden ratios. So to me, the word Enspiral meant “to cause
and grow an outward flowing of spiritual fractal energy”, which seemed like a good thing. Plus the .com
was available and no one was using the name. I built a placeholder website and used the company for a
22
few contracts before leaving it dormant.
 More people working on stuff that matters

Thinking in decades
The 80,000 hours concept naturally extended my time horizon. I started
to think in decades more than years.
The thing about decades is that questions start to matter a whole lot
more than answers. I sought lines of inquiry likely to keep my attention
for decades. The question “how can I help more people work on stuff
that matters?” is still alive and present for me today, whereas I’m no lon-
ger pursuing the specific strategy of a freelancers’ collective. Focusing
on the deeper questions is key in the startup world, where falling in love
with a problem and understanding it deeply is a prerequisite for success.
Thinking in decades also makes it a lot easier to focus on what is truly
important. Early on, I realised that by far the most important thing at
Enspiral was our relationships with each other. If we lose all our money
and businesses but keep our relationships, then we can build it all again.
If we lose our relationships then we will destroy anything we have cre-
ated. Likewise, it doesn’t matter how many people join the community;
what matters is the quality of the relationships.
This led to a conscious strategy of “always put the relationship before
the deal”, which has served me well. When all parties in a negotiation
are genuinely putting the relationship first, it becomes so much easier.
Whether subcontracting, splitting equity, or allocating tasks, it makes the
concept of exercising power over others seem odd. How can there be
any quality of relationship if one person is using sticks and carrots to
influence the other’s behaviour?
For many people, the word ‘business’ implies selfish individualism.
“It’s just business” becomes an excuse for ignoring consequences de-
cisions have on others. But it doesn’t have to be that way. By creating
a community with clear boundaries and norms, I could create a bubble
where helping people unconditionally is normal. A high-trust, small-scale
ecosystem takes a specific set of skills to manage, but I can’t imagine
working any other way.
I have found that thinking in a longer time frame can be radically dis-
ruptive. Like showing up with unconditional generosity, designing for
Around 2005, my housemates gleefully suggested that I google Enspiral and to my bemusement some
folks had launched a sex toy company with the same name. This prompted me to register various other
Enspiral domains, cross linking them all and taking back the first page of search results with naive search
23
engine optimisation. It wasn’t until 2008 when I started contracting that I used the company in earnest.
 BETTER WORK TOGETHER

intrinsic motivation, or putting purpose at the heart of everything, it

helps people imagine new futures and connect with what is important.

A culture of experimentation
From the very beginning, Enspiral was an experiment. None of us knew
if it would work, but we hoped it would. Pretty much every successful
pattern at Enspiral was inspired from somewhere else. For everything we
tried that worked, we tried a dozen things that didn’t. The path became
littered with failed experiments.
A big cultural influence for Enspiral was open source software. As a
programmer, I was very familiar with building on top of code others had
written and shared freely online. I would adapt it to the problem I was
trying to solve and, where possible, share code back. This led to a culture
of copying ideas wherever we found them, and sharing our learnings for
others to build on.
When I think back on the early days of Enspiral, what stands out is
just how much stuff we tried. We ran a social enterprise internship pro-
gramme, once. We ran a programming internship, once. We ran a ‘Night
Owls’ programme for people working on startups outside of work
hours for about three months. We used to have ventures give equity to
the Enspiral Foundation, until we decided that wasn’t a good idea and
gave it all back. For a while, we experimented with the Enspiral Village,
where people working on startups would meet for breakfast at 7am on a
Monday morning, but that didn’t last long.
We also honed in on a membership model that has stayed consistent since
2011, committed to consent-based decision making that has changed
little since 2012, and formed a not-for-profit cooperative to anchor the
network, which is still running today. We managed the evolution from a
network of freelancers to a network of ventures, and throughout it all
the purpose—more people working on stuff that matters—has never
wavered.
A culture where it is normal to try new things is one of the things I value
most about Enspiral. Here are three examples of long-term experiments
that have been run at Enspiral, and some personal learning.

24
 More people working on stuff that matters

Enspiral Services
The first big experiment at Enspiral was to create a freelancers’ collec-
tive. In March 2010, I took my personal contracting company and turned
it into a collective vehicle for people to earn a livelihood. The initial deal
was simple: 80% of revenue goes to the contractor, 20% to the collective
funds, which we decide how to spend together. I started running all my
contract work through the same 80/20 split and focused my volunteer
time on supporting the growing community.
I had managed employees before and didn’t want to do that again, so
everyone worked as a freelancer. Security didn’t come from having an
employment contract, but from having a healthy cash buffer and the
ability to find work when you needed it. Most of us had more offers for
contracts than we could take up, which lead to a healthy internal referral
network. People set their own contracting rates, and the plan was that
we would all pitch in to run the company. The ideas were exciting and a
lot of us jumped in to give them a try. As Enspiral evolved, we renamed
the company Enspiral Services. For many people it was an onramp to
the community.
We no longer have a freelancers’ collective at Enspiral. While it worked
well for a few years and was vital to Enspiral’s early days, we never found
a model that stuck. The premise that people could earn more than they
needed with 80% of the contracting revenue and use their surplus time
and money to serve the community was flawed. It worked for some of us,
some of the time, but we didn’t have a reliable enough source of organising
and supporting energy, which created endless problems.
The core problem we didn’t solve was designing a financial model that
paid for people to work on the core of Enspiral. The collective worked
well when a handful of us were volunteering to keep it all together but
as we moved on to other projects we weren’t able to replace ourselves.
We went through many iterations, but in 2017 I resumed control and
transitioned Enspiral Services back to my personal consulting company,
changing the name to Blackwood Systems. It was a little like hosting a
party at your house and making a huge mess with your friends, only to
be left with a big cleanup job the next day. I had invited the guests to the
party, and I made more mess than most, so I took responsibility for the
25
cleanup.
 BETTER WORK TOGETHER

Enspiral Services taught me the value of just getting started. It doesn’t

matter that the model didn’t work in the long run and we ended up clos-
ing it down after seven years. Without the momentum from the initial
freelancer collective, Enspiral wouldn’t exist at all. We were asking the
right questions and the lessons informed much of our future direction.
Our experiments in this space continue, and a group of us are now
exploring how a swarm of micro-cooperatives can support people and
help secure livelihoods.

Enspiral Space
A bunch of us in Wellington wanted to work in the same space, so I
partnered with some other companies and rented a quarter of a large
office in 2011. We eventually took over the full lease and Enspiral Space
was born. It became the physical heart of Enspiral for the next four years.
We no longer have a coworking space. It turns out that while lots of
people wanted a coworking space to exist, few people wanted to run
one. Managing the Enspiral Space company was a constant burden. We
moved the office in 2014, and wound down the company in 2015.
Enspiral Space taught me that it isn’t enough to focus on a need. There
also needs to be passion, ability, and a sustainable business model. We
had an amazing space manager who was passionate about the physical
space and facilitating meaningful interactions, but we never found some-
one equally skilled and passionate about running the business side of
things. Many of us stepped up at different times to be that person, but
it was always driven by a sense of obligation to serve the community at
significant personal cost. If we’d found the other person for the team,
the space would probably still exist today.
After we closed the coworking space, we experimented with the concept
of multiple Enspiral Spaces. The idea was for ventures with their own
offices to offer desks that Enspiral folks could use to connect with the
community. This experiment is ongoing and working to some extent,
but it is unclear whether it will be a long-term solution.

26
 More people working on stuff that matters

Retreats
A small group of us co-hosted the first Enspiral retreat in April 2011
in a large house outside of Wellington. Sixteen people attended, and
we spent our time in open space3 sessions, sharing stories, meals, and
outdoor adventures. The biggest question most people came with was
“What is Enspiral?”, and the most common conclusion was “I still don’t
know, but I like the people”.
Not much has changed since then. We started running retreats every
six months and they became the heartbeat of our community. For the
first half dozen or so, they were extremely stressful. We celebrated the
first retreat we held where an organiser didn’t cry, and we have slowly
improved our practice on each iteration.
From our retreats, I learned about the power of bringing people to-
gether. To some degree, I feel that Enspiral only exists when we gather,
and lies latent during the times in between. I also learned that as an
idea evolves the experiments continue, they just get smaller. Instead of
experimenting with the concept of retreats, we run little experiments
about how to gather better. A few things are the same at every retreat,
but there are always new experiments as we deepen our hosting practice.

Managing the cost of failure

In an ideal world, an experiment is purely for research, with a clearly
defined hypothesis explored under tightly controlled conditions. There
is no need to deliver anything apart from learning, and the focus is solely
on discovery. Unfortunately, experiments in the entrepreneurial world
do not have the same luxury.
The costs of experimenting-as-you go are real, and they are often hu-
man. We’ve had people leave Enspiral because of relationships damaged
by broken decision-making processes. We’ve seen a continuous stream
of people who care deeply about the community ground down when
working on the core. We’ve had contractors walk away from clients halfway
through a project without a word, leaving others to clean up after them.
Of the first 50 people to join Enspiral, only Rob and I are still active in
the community. Of the next 50, who joined from early 2011 to mid 2012,
about five people are still with us. Some of the early Enspiral folks are still
27
3 Open space is a participant-driven process whose agenda is created by people attending
 BETTER WORK TOGETHER

good friends of the network and have just gone on to other things. Most
drifted silently away, and a few left with a hiss and a roar. How much was
healthy selection, and how much was unnecessary attrition?
Sometimes failure is a mistake, an error that causes harm, something to
be actively avoided. Other times it is the unavoidable cost of exploring
new terrain. Knowing the difference is the art of innovation. It all comes
down to understanding how to manage the costs of failure. This is also
the secret to overcoming the fear of failure, and one thing I know for
sure is that the fear of failure kills learning.
Here are some things that I’ve learned that reduce the likelihood and
cost of failing.

Respect the status quo

The more I see of the world, the more respect I have for the way things
are. I am no less resolved in my intention to experiment, but I respect
that things are the way they are for a reason.
It is critical not to be satisfied with those reasons. We must deeply under-
stand the status quo in order to overcome it. The more widely a pattern
is replicated, the more respect it is due, even if we don’t like it. There are
reasons people organise in hierarchies, politicians ignore climate change,
and people feel more empathy for folks who look like themselves.
Trying to cause change without deeply understanding the status quo is a
dangerous game that increases the likelihood of failing.
Decentralised organising is an excellent example. Optimi, an Enspiral
venture that optimises business processes, is currently experimenting
with self-management practices that respect the status quo. They want
to organise without having a boss, so they asked themselves what a boss
does. They generated a list of topics such as feedback, accountability,
allocating roles, and so on. They then hold a weekly team meeting and
cycle through these topics one at a time, reviewing their systems for
these functions without making anyone the boss.

Copy patterns that work

Copying a pattern that works somewhere else is more likely to succeed
than creating something from scratch. Things that we ‘invent’ draw in-
28
spiration from many sources, so actively looking for ideas in a wide va-
 More people working on stuff that matters

riety of domains is a good strategy. Adapting a pattern to a specific

environment is hard enough work without the complication of creating
something completely new.
Sometimes it is necessary to create a new pattern, but it should always
be a last resort. I have found that people attracted to experimenting (my-
self included) will have a bias towards creating new things as opposed
to researching how other people solve a problem. It is similar to the
way programmers will unconsciously underestimate the costs of starting
from scratch because new projects are more enjoyable than building on
legacy code.
Enspiral has drawn on ideas from many domains, and it’s at this inter-
section that something interesting is created. Enspiral can be understood
as a group of programmers, facilitators, entrepreneurs, activists, and de-
signers who came together to help each other meet a challenge: get paid
well to do work you love, with people you love, while contributing to a
systemic issue you care deeply about. We all shared ideas from our var-
ious backgrounds, tried lots of things, and kept the stuff that worked.

Start small
Don’t bet the house on a speculative idea, even if it has had success
elsewhere. Try new ideas in environments where the cost of failing is
small. Trying to make a whole company self-managing, or agile, or teal,
or whatever, is a lot of work. Start with one team, and when they succeed
share the stories honestly. If the patterns have merit, other teams will
copy them.
When I had the initial idea of creating a collective of freelancers, I didn’t
rush out and start trying to scale. I worked with one person, then another,
then another. With every person I tried to help, I learned something. Over
time, the patterns that make Enspiral what it is evolved and solidified.
Just because a series of small-scale experiments yields promising results
doesn’t mean that longer term success is guaranteed. Both Enspiral Ser-
vices and Enspiral Space were built on top of lots of small successful
experiments but had deeper issues. But if we hadn’t started small, we
would have got nowhere at all.

29
 BETTER WORK TOGETHER

Let things settle

If you are interested in running experiments in your community, it is
likely that you have a higher tolerance for change than those around you.
This is especially true if there are significant information asymmetries
and you know more about your community than others.
One of the biggest lessons I had to learn with Enspiral was to honour
the role of time.
Trying to cook a cake faster by turning up the oven doesn’t work; you
just burn the outside and undercook the inside. Communities aren’t built:
they grow, at the pace it takes people to develop shared understanding
and close relationships. There are no shortcuts.
I would often get frustrated when people couldn’t keep up with the rate
of change at Enspiral. There was friction between people who were
rapidly evolving ideas at the core and people focused on their ventures.
We live in an attention economy and people’s attention is a precious
resource. When I started to evaluate initiatives based on how much
attention they would consume to be successful, I found it naturally kept
the rate of change healthy.
Failing to count the impacts on the attention economy is like failing to
count any economic externality. It makes things look artificially cheap by
not counting their true cost.

Deliver value early

Where possible, make sure an experiment delivers value when you test
a new pattern. Sure, learning something is always useful, but if the
experiment can deliver value above and beyond learning, it’s much better.
This idea also ties into thinking about timescales for experimentation.
When viewed from a short-term time frame Enspiral Services and
Enspiral Space weren’t experiments, they were ventures. Ventures that
failed while creating a bunch of value and helped us learn a lot of
lessons. But when zooming out to a longer term timeframe they were
absolutely experiments that helped us learn.
Whichever viewpoint you take, the important thing is that the project /
experiment delivered value. Learning how to deliver value through exper-
iments even if they fail is an important part of making an experimental
30
culture viable. When planning a new experiment I will look for ways that
 More people working on stuff that matters

it can do things like strengthen relationships, provide livelihoods, help

people grow and build reputation above and beyond the core purpose.

Distributing leadership
As Enspiral started to gain traction, I had a very clear goal. I wanted a
community of peers to engage with in a dance of dynamic leadership
and followership. I started living by the philosophy that ‘no one should
lead all the time and everyone should lead some of the time’ early on,
and it has served me incredibly well.
It’s easy to say those words, but when it came to putting them into
practice I found there weren’t that many patterns I could copy. I found
reflecting on asymmetries extremely useful. By asking where there were
asymmetries of power, information, relationships, skill, reputation,
money, and time, I could find small interventions to make the asym-
metries smoother. I don’t believe you can (or would want to) have a flat
community where everyone is equal in every way. Instead, aim for a con-
scious community where asymmetries are spoken about and consciously
managed.
When I sat down with Rob in 2011, I had selected and onboarded every
member of the community personally. There was a massive relational
asymmetry, so the most efficient strategy for someone to navigate the
ecosystem was to talk to me directly. Over time, I supported other mem-
bers to invite people in, and now plenty of folks know more people
in Enspiral than I do. Without any formal decisions or big moves, the
power contour became a little more balanced because the relational
asymmetries reduced.
That, times a thousand, is how I became the ex-founder of Enspiral.
It took about five years.
There were some formal steps on the way, but the real work was managing
all the asymmetries.
Just after the first retreat in 2011, we registered a new company called
the Enspiral Foundation. I chose 12 other people and we became the
first 13 members of Enspiral. The Foundation is not for profit and each
member has one share. With a stroke of the pen, 12 other people had
the same legal powers I did to govern Enspiral.

31
 BETTER WORK TOGETHER

Nothing changed overnight, but slowly the community became more

balanced. I celebrated and supported every independent act of leader-
ship, and made it a habit to discourage permission-seeking behaviour.
Through a very clear indication of intent, I encouraged other people to
step up. It took lots of little interventions to get the asymmetries under
control, but by 2015 I was just another Enspiral Member who happened
to have a lot of context.
So that’s my Enspiral story. I’ve spent about 20,000 hours on and in this
community and I would do it all again in a heartbeat. I had lots of ideas
when I began this journey, but mostly I just had hope. A blind, naive
hope that there were people who wanted the same things I did, and that
we could do some interesting things together.
My heart sings that this turned out to be true. I am left grateful and ex-
cited as I start imagining how to spend the the remaining 60,000 hours
I (hopefully) have.

32
 essay.Two

Evolving Enspiral
by Alanna Irving
 Evolving Enspiral

July, 2011

“Hi Joshua. I keep running into Enspiral people at events around Welling-
ton related to trying to make the world a better place. You must have hit
on a powerful way to organize if you’re attracting so many switched on
and motivated people. My goal is to bring my professional life in line with
my values and passions, and work with people who feel the same. If you
think there’s a place at Enspiral for a communicator-organizer-prob-
lem-solver type person such as myself, that would be awesome.” ~ Alanna

Finding my place
I had recently arrived in New Zealand, searching for something I could
not describe. I knew I couldn’t go on doing “just a job”, but I didn’t
know what was next for me. I wanted meaning and connection. I wanted
to bring my whole self to work. I wanted to grow.
After living in six different countries throughout my 20s, I had a good
feeling about New Zealand, and Wellington specifically.
Wellington is a compact city, where you always run into someone you
know walking down the street. Close-knit communities are easy to form
when everyone’s within walking distance. The local business culture is
very collaborative, and people help each other out. You don’t come to
these far-flung islands to climb over others on your way to the top.
Kiwis are, for the most part, egalitarian, and relationships are hu-
man-scale. If you want to talk to a politician or CEO, you can generally
just ask them to lunch. When you call a government agency, you can
expect someone to simply pick up the phone and say, “Hello, how can I
help you?” (Kiwis don’t even understand why people from other coun-
tries find this incredible).
As a small, isolated market with a relatively educated and open-minded
populace, New Zealand is a fantastic place to incubate new ideas. You
35
can experiment without getting immediately crushed by competitors.
 BETTER WORK TOGETHER

You can be more idealistic in how you go about building a company.

Nature is ever-present and wilderness never far away, which keeps our
interconnectedness at the front of mind. Māori culture brings an em-
phasis on stewardship of the land, community, and inter-generational
awareness. While I won’t presume to try to explain Māori culture, it has
a big influence on everything in Aotearoa New Zealand, including busi-
ness.
There is a much stronger social safety net here, compared to the US
where I grew up, which means more people can take risks as entrepre-
neurs. No one has to stay at their nine-to-five for health insurance, take
out huge loans to get an education, or end up on the street if their start-
up doesn’t work out.
At the time, I didn’t know what was next, but I stayed in Wellington,
knowing on some level that I would find what I was looking for.
Ever since I was a child, I’ve had a tendency to end up in charge of
things. I’d get impatient with a lack of clarity or coordination, and next
thing you know I’m organising the group. When I grew up and got hired
for a corporate job, I quickly started climbing the pyramid.
But it didn’t feel right. Even in corporate environments, no one laboured
under the illusion that a pyramid was the best way to organise. In fact,
most hated it. Yet they remained resigned, because that’s just the way
things were. I grew impatient with the restrictions and inefficiencies, and
couldn’t accept wearing a mask to work every day. I tried to make things
better, but my manager told me I “had too many ideas” and “cared too
much”.
After not long, I looked up and realised that, no matter how high up the
pyramid I climbed, it wasn’t somewhere I wanted to go.
Outside work, I sought environments that weren’t shaped like pyramids,
instead gravitating toward circles. I lived in a housing co-op where we
made decisions by consensus, and I organised egalitarian groups of vol-
unteers. I saw the best in others, and in myself, when we coordinated as
a community of peers, as our authentic selves, primarily driven by values.
In that kind of environment, I could use my skills to help everyone take
collective action without having to be the boss.

36
 Evolving Enspiral

Jumping in
When I first arrived in Wellington, I went to a lot of networking events
related to business for social good. People would hear a bit about me and
say, “You have to meet Joshua”. So I got in touch.
He invited me to visit the Enspiral office, and I went down on my lunch
break one day. I found about a half dozen computer programmers and
a few other people sharing a sunny office with wood floors and brick
walls.
It was kind of like a coworking space, except they shared a brand and
cooperated on projects. Kind of like an agency, except they chose their
own work autonomously and had variable income. Kind of like a com-
pany, except there were no bosses, no job titles, and no receptionist.
Kind of like a startup incubator, but totally ad hoc. Kind of like a busi-
ness, but focused on positive social impact.
A lot of people need time to wrap their heads around all that. But to me,
it felt like coming home. I immediately sensed that Enspiral was a place
where having ideas and caring a lot would never be seen as weaknesses.
That’s not to say everything was perfect. On that first visit, I asked an
Enspiralite: “So, how do you know what projects everyone is working
on?” He looked around. “Uhhh, we don’t, I guess.” Then, to the person
on his other side, “Hey, what are you working on, anyway?”
I listened to some more conversations and asked some more questions.
Apparently, information flows were a challenge. Great stuff was hap-
pening, but the stories weren’t getting told, internally or externally, and
opportunities were being missed.
On my walk back to my boring job that afternoon, I thought about how
I had got involved in previous projects and communities that had meant
a lot to me. I hadn’t stood on the sidelines waiting for an invitation, and
I hadn’t first needed to know what I would get in return for my con-
tributions. I just found a gap with my name on it and filled it. Enspiral
needed better information flows, and I needed an excuse to get to know
the network.
When I got back to the office, I wrote Joshua another email. This time
the subject was: “Ready to jump in!”
Thus I began the process of joining Enspiral, following a pattern I 37
 BETTER WORK TOGETHER

would later recognise as common: get attracted to the vision and the
people; make it through some natural filters (no set pathway, not much
money, no stability); hang out, get context, and identify some needs; then
hire yourself to meet them.
Doing all that on the first day might be less common, but if the shoe fits...

Getting to know the collective

A few weeks later, I sent out the first Enspiral newsletter, created during
slow times at my boring office job. It had a video of Joshua explaining
what Enspiral was all about, updates from nascent internal startups, ar-
ticles sharing expertise of people in the network, client testimonials, and
stories about ongoing projects.
As I’d hoped, gathering the content for the newsletter helped me get to
know Enspiral and the people in it. Through many conversations, I came
to understand how it all worked.
At the time, Enspiral was one company. There were a bunch of freelance
programmers and a few designers who did work for clients autonomous-
ly, all invoicing through Enspiral. They shared office space, group soft-
ware subscriptions, client leads, and personal and professional support.
When an invoice was paid by a client, the money went into Enspiral
Ltd’s bank account, just like any company. From there, 80% went to the
freelancer who did the work and 20% was contributed to shared costs.
Instead of getting a regular paycheck, freelancers were credited virtual
dollars in their Enspiral account, which they could withdraw as income
or spend on business expenses as they saw fit.
This way of working enabled powerful possibilities. Since everyone was
already set up in the company, dynamically forming internal teams was
frictionless. Money could be transferred between Enspiral accounts with
the click of a button, so it was common for everyone to hire each oth-
er. People could work as little or as much as they chose, on whatever
projects they chose. Everyone’s work built up the Enspiral brand and
generated more leads to share.
The freelancers benefitted by collectivising. We paid a lawyer to create
client contract templates that everyone could use. Each person didn’t
have to set up their own legal entity and bank account to do business, in-
stead using Enspiral Ltd as a common resource. Taxes were managed by
a shared accountant. In some ways, it was the best of both the freelance
38
and in-house worlds at once.
 Evolving Enspiral

As I came to understand the back office processes, I realised that, while

the genuine intention was to be a collective, behind the scenes Joshua
was still the backstop. He was the one with access to the bank account,
and the sole owner and director of the Enspiral LLC. He took on liabil-
ity so others didn’t have to, and so Enspiral could keep moving quickly.
In some ways this was awesome, and in other ways it was dangerous. Let’s
just say Joshua has a higher risk tolerance than admin tolerance. There
was virtually no documentation, no policies, and no decision-making
processes. Everything came down to “just do it” or “ask Joshua”.
In the absence of policies or systems, natural filters were key. No one
was offered a job, or any direction. To join, you had to be capable of
generating your own income stream, but prefer to be part of a collective
by choice. To get anything done, you had to be willing and able to com-
municate and collaborate. This generally selected for competent, trust-
worthy people who were more or less aligned.
Working elsewhere was much more straightforward, not to mention
more lucrative, so there was no reason to get involved if you weren’t
committed to the values and vision. That meant trust was implicit. Since
everyone was ultimately focused on positive social impact, helping each
other furthered that common goal. There was a ton of generosity flow-
ing around the system, and, while it was sometimes hard to quantify,
people were getting back more than they put in.

Getting to work
When I turned up, Enspiral was growing. You can’t wing it with a larger
group the way you can with just a few people. The bubblegum holding
everything together was beginning to stretch. Once it was no longer fea-
sible for everyone to have a conversation with Joshua about everything,
the lack of systems became more painful.
It was time for Enspiral to go through a phase change. I saw a whole
class of work that wasn’t getting done while everyone was busy with
client contracts and their own startups. It was the ‘in-between’ stuff,
the meta-layer, the substrate to support all the other work — a cross
between operations and governance, from the details to the big picture.
This bothered me.
In an environment like Enspiral, the work that bothers you most proba-
39
bly has your name on it.
 BETTER WORK TOGETHER

I quit my boring job and jumped into Enspiral full time, and immediately
got to work downloading information from Joshua’s head, writing doc-
umentation, creating onboarding processes, cleaning up finances, chas-
ing unpaid invoices, updating the website, improving communications,
organising retreats, facilitating group decision-making, and ensuring we
always had coffee in the kitchen (very important!). And I continued do-
ing the Enspiral Newsletter every month.
Enspiral grew quickly, expanding from a few people to more than 50
over my first year. I considered myself employed by everyone at Enspi-
ral, and I tried to serve all those employers well.

Leadership that grows leadership

When I’m inspired and excited, my natural inclination is to jump right
in, not worrying about stepping on toes. This had gotten me into trouble
in the past, when I bumped up against petty fiefdoms and institutional
inertia. But this time, I felt welcomed as I mucked in and started sug-
gesting changes. Part of me kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, but
it didn’t.
Of course, people had differing perspectives, and not all my suggestions
were good ones. But I noticed a distinct lack of colliding egos. There
was a shared understanding that our most precious resources were ener-
gy, attention, and motivation, so the default setting was cheering on and
giving things a go, instead of shutting down new ideas. We were playing
a non-zero-sum game, where more for me doesn’t mean less for you, it
means more for everyone.
What enabled this culture? I think a large part was thanks to a particular
kind of leadership.
Meeting people trying to work in highly collaborative ways around the
world, I’ve encountered two leader personas repeatedly. Both embody
a natural ability to attract people and resources to get a vision off the
ground, but they differ at the point they start to scale.
One type of leader just takes on more work, figuring out solutions as
efficiently as possible, without taking much time to consult or delegate.
He constructs of a house of cards around himself, becoming trapped in
the centre for fear it will all fall over if he moves.
The other type of leader is overly concerned with making space for
40 others and not taking over, leaving a vacuum. Even when she knows the
 Evolving Enspiral

way forward she doesn’t claim the mandate, and momentum is paralysed.
The kind of leadership needed to build effective collaborative communi-
ties transcends both of these archetypes. It neither hangs on too tightly
nor hangs back. It’s confident, yet humble. It’s forever optimistic about
what others can contribute, while constantly insisting on moving for-
ward. It uses accrued power to further distribute power to others. That
was the kind of leadership Joshua brought, and that founding DNA
attracted others who could lead in a similar way.
When I joined Enspiral and started working closely with Joshua every
day, I realised our leadership dispositions complemented one another: he
overflowed with ideas, while I wanted to make visions real. He went ten
steps ahead while I was figuring out the first nine. Together, we worked
to distribute power, money, and information throughout the network.

What? Enspiral is evolving!

As Enspiral continued to grow, we started to bump up against the lim-
itations of being a single software development company. Our challenge
was to evolve into an entrepreneurial community, where many kinds of
professionals could work in different ways, without losing our values and
organising DNA.
The complexity of a growing community increases exponentially, so lin-
ear change–the same as before but more–isn’t enough.
One of the early systems I tried to create at Enspiral was an attempt to
answer that question I’d asked on my first visit: what is everyone working
on? I went around and got information about all the current projects,
and put it online where everyone could see. For one beautiful moment
there was actually a comprehensive view of what was going on. I was
pretty pleased.
Unfortunately, the very next moment everything went out of date. That’s
the problem with a system like that in a network like Enspiral: everything
is constantly changing, people are busy, and, while you can try to per-
suade people to engage, you can’t compel them.
A similar thing happened with a system to track availability and skills, to
make it clearer who was available to work on different projects. We built
a system, and I tried poking people to update their data. I sent out lots
of email reminders, but again, it was impossible. 41
 BETTER WORK TOGETHER

I thought about suggesting making these boring tasks a mandatory

gateway to picking up jobs or getting paid. But coercive strong-arming
went completely against Enspiral’s essential nature. Our strength was
the free-flowing way collaborations formed, and our value was our busy,
creative, independent-minded people.
In a community of peers, effective solutions have to go with the tides
of energy, not against them. When you’re going with the tide, there’s an
amazing rush of collective energy. I had to learn (and re-learn) not to try
to push things upstream—even the most efficient or beautiful solutions.
As someone who loves designing processes (and, ahem, never fails to
action an email reminder), this took me a while to accept.
We didn’t need better information tracking systems; we needed a com-
pletely new level of collective intelligence. While the first phase change
was about scaling up one company, now it was time for Enspiral to
evolve into a network.
Tensions were emerging. While some people wanted to take on long-
term client projects, others really valued the flexibility of short-term
freelancing, and still others wanted to develop their own products instead
of working on other people’s. Most people in Enspiral were professional
and reliable, but a few instances of people falling short threatened to
tarnish the brand. Quality control was a problem. With no central com-
mand, there was no good system for detecting problems before they
fully surfaced, or bailing out troubled projects.
While the default revenue split—80% to the freelancer and 20% to
overheads—still worked for certain contracts, we needed more flexibil-
ity. Sometimes the person who had the initial relationship with a client
found themselves in an unpaid account management role, because it
was their reputation on the line. There are some essential differences
between a unified software production house and a pool of freelancers,
and Enspiral couldn’t be both at once.
At the same time, more people from different professions were getting
involved in the network, such as lawyers and accountants, and several
startups that had been informally incubated in Enspiral were ready to
become ventures in their own right. All of these different companies
required different legal and ownership structures, brands, governance,
and internal processes.
We were also learning another critical lesson: A community without
42
boundaries is no community at all. A few people abused our high-trust
 Evolving Enspiral

environment, showing us that we needed to draw some lines in the sand.

We rallied as a community and agreed a simple but strong Diversity Pol-
icy (which remained the only official written policy at Enspiral for some
years). Beyond these few extreme cases, there was a growing need to
clarify what being “in” or “out” meant, and for different levels of en-
gagement to be defined.
The emergence of these tensions scared me. Looking back, I can see
that they were necessary growing pains, but at the time it almost felt like
the group was fracturing. Fundamentally, I see creating anything in this
world as a fight against entropy; if people floated off in all directions,
we’d lose our collective potential. I was torn between holding together
and letting go.
Thankfully, we found a way for the network to stay connected, while
allowing for a lot more freedom, scale, and diversity.

Building the foundation

Enspiral evolved from one company into an ecosystem of people and
companies connected through a co-owned hub, called the Enspiral
Foundation.
Enspiral Ltd, the original company, became Enspiral Services Ltd, and
continued as a home for freelance contractors, much as it had been. Sev-
eral other companies were founded by Enspiral people, including a law
firm, an accountancy firm, and a more traditional software shop focused
on large contracts, where employees got a normal salary and the owners
carried the risk. Several product-based tech startups spun out into their
own companies, each with a unique culture and structure. The few peo-
ple who threatened trust were asked to leave altogether.
The Enspiral Foundation was conceived to support the network as a
whole, and to further the social mission of more people working on
stuff that matters. It served as a home for our collective commons,
like the Enspiral brand and website, and for things that applied net-
work-wide, like the Diversity Policy. My job evolved, too, into something
like a dual role of Executive Director of the Enspiral Foundation and
General Manager of Enspiral Services (although we had no job titles).
Starting the Enspiral Foundation was a critical opportunity to structural-
ly express different levels of commitment and trust in the network. Core

43
 BETTER WORK TOGETHER

participants, called ‘members’, got one share of the Foundation each,

and collectively became its owners.
Newcomers and people who were not as deeply involved were called
‘contributors’. Any member could bring in a new contributor, while be-
coming a new member required a consensus decision by the current
members. While contributors were welcome to participate in nearly
everything, the members ultimately held responsibility for the core of
Enspiral.
To keep these definitions fresh and meaningful, a couple times a year
we asked everyone to self-assess their level of engagement and adjust
accordingly, creating a gentle current you had to swim against to stay
involved.
Shares in the Foundation represented decision-making stakeholding, not
financial dividends, and the Foundation was run as a non-profit. Similar
to how individual freelancers funded Enspiral Services with a percentage
of their income, Enspiral ventures funded the Foundation through shar-
ing a percentage of their revenue. We experimented with contributions
of equity, like many incubator programmes, but Enspiral Ventures were
optimised for social impact over big exits, and the Foundation needed
an operating budget immediately, so revenue sharing made more sense.
The big dream was that some of the ventures would get commercial
traction and contribute enough to the Foundation to kickstart future
generations of ventures—essentially spreading out some of the risks
and rewards of entrepreneurship and multiplying our collective impact.

44
 Evolving Enspiral

Levels of Engagement

Enspiral Foundation
Collectively owned by the members

Friends &
Partners
form a wider
ecosystem Enspiral Members
of supporters invite ventures,
contributors, and
new members
Contributors
are involved in collaboration
Enspiral Network
and decision-making
Community of people and ventures

45
 BETTER WORK TOGETHER

Voluntary Contributions

foundation

clients &
customers

What we were really building

Reflecting on it now, I think the dream came true to some degree. The
network is still going strong, many individuals have been supported to
continue as social entrepreneurs through tough times, and many more
46
Enspiral ventures have started up.
 Evolving Enspiral

But it turns out getting big commercial traction is pretty hard for
social enterprises on an island at the bottom of the world. While several
ventures have turned into solid businesses, others failed, and none turned
into unicorns. We got by, but we never managed to achieve abundance.
Looking back, it’s easy to focus on where we came up short. Although
Enspiral Services operated for seven years and generated a lot of
revenue and opportunities, it never reached its full potential. It was
never anyone’s main priority, but more of a means to an end. Yet, I still
think that, with the right leadership, a freelancer collective using Enspiral
Services as an inspiration could be a success story.
That issue—tragedy of the commons, essentially—is the same reason
we never excelled at running our coworking office, Enspiral Space.
Although good people did a lot of work to keep it going, no one was
super passionate about it as their main venture. Enspiral Services and
Enspiral Space provided critical functions in the network and benefited
a lot of people, but they were no one’s baby. There were many other
failures along the way too, whether they were someone’s baby or not.
That’s how it is with startups.
What we did achieve, in addition to supporting hundreds of people to
earn their livelihoods doing meaningful work, was a web of skills and
relationships that enabled profoundly radical socio-technical experimen-
tation. We supported one another, emotionally and financially, to free
ourselves from the baggage of hierarchy and capitalism and try out gen-
uinely transformative new ways of working. We can now tell stories of
our experiences, which add to the global discourse about new paradigms
of business and culture.
The dream lives on, continually emerging. At each stage of Enspiral’s
evolution, we didn’t know exactly what we were becoming. A lot of
times it felt like we were a fish with legs. We survived and served the
needs of the time as best we could. We didn’t have any answers. All we
had was a culture of experimentation, a drive to do meaningful work,
and each other.

We discover the path by walking it together.

47
 essay.Three

A radically good
livelihood
by Susan Basterfield
 A radically good livelihood

The original meaning of

‘livelihood’ is ‘the way of life’.
How much control do we really have over our way of life? How does
our upbringing and privilege (or lack thereof) affect which choices are
available to us as adults? If our livelihood is created through our choices,
why do some of us choose a path aligned to the predominant stories in
our culture, and others choose another way?
We tend to follow that paths we can see.

Momentum carries us along, in the current. For decades, I didn’t even

consider that there was another option for livelihood - I was in the river,
in the flow of traditional expectations of career and financial accumula-
tion. Some of that time I was simply moving too fast, other times I was
drowning and fighting for survival. Eventually, I stepped onto dry land,
looked around, and decided that the second half of my life was going
49
to be different - and it would be a story I created, not one I inherited.
 BETTER WORK TOGETHER

My Inheritance
I was born in Chicago, USA, and my parents were children of the The
Great Depression, the first American-born generation in an immigrant
lineage. They were traditional, working class, patriotic, and square—also
extremely loving and focused on building the best possible opportu-
nities for me and my brothers. They also hid things. They hid the fact
that they lived paycheck to paycheck. I had no idea growing up that our
circumstances were so tight—we lived in an archetypal cul-de-sac in an
archetypal suburb in sunny Southern California. We kids rode bikes till
dark, and lived with a sense of community and safety. Until I was ten, my
mom didn’t work, and life was a suburban fantasy—of the 30 houses on
the street, 25 had kids. The moms and kids were in and out of each oth-
ers’ houses all the time. I thought our family was the same as all the rest,
but our ‘money story’ subconsciously influenced my life significantly.
My family money story reflected the post-war American dream: strongly
self-made, anything is possible with hard work, the land of opportunity.
My father worked his ass off, he tried so hard, starting a number of busi-
nesses, desperate to provide us with everything—the dream. But it didn’t
always work. I can remember, so vividly, one Thanksgiving someone left
a food parcel on our front doorstep—that was my first realisation that
our money story was different. Because my parents were holding things
together by a shoestring, or maybe in spite of it, there was an expectation,
but not a clear message, of what it would take for me to attend university.
Neither of them had been, and though my father had won a wrestling
scholarship to Purdue, he had to look after his disabled father instead.
So I got my first job at 17 (while still in high school), at what we now call
a startup—at the bleeding edge of the brand-new computer industry.
PMCP sold computer peripherals, green-screen terminals, printers, etc. I
worked there 30 hours a week while I funded my university experience,
where I studied Radio, TV, and Film Communications. I thought I want-
ed to be a sports journalist, but fell in love with business. At PMCP, an
IT hardware distributor, I learned everything about business, and did
just about every job, from accounts to inventory control to vendor re-
lationships to sales. I loved sales the most—building relationships and
solving problems. I also enjoyed making money. I was able to buy my
first home at 23. I was on the pathway to the next-generation American
dream. I got married and tried to have babies. Neither of those things
worked out. My father died two weeks after his 60th birthday, of lung
50
cancer, having worked from the age of ten.
 A radically good livelihood

After the breakdown of my marriage, I got on a plane to England. I’d

fallen in love from afar with the man of my life, and left everything to be
with him. When I say I left everything, I mean I had just one suitcase and
a box. I started over at 30, and was completely OK with that.

dot.com BOOM
My years living in the UK radically impacted my money story. It was the
time of the first dot.com boom and we were living the high life. There
were many great things about that experience that shaped and changed
my relationship to power and leadership. The founder and leaders of
the organisation were as interested in people development as they were
in building innovative technology. I was encouraged and liberated to be
myself and see my value as a leader.
The founder also impacted my ideas about building business together
on a financial level. He said no to a buyout offer that would have net-
ted him well into eight figures. He said no because it wasn’t enough to
appropriately compensate those of us who helped build the business.
Whether that was selfless or merely pragmatic (he eventually did sell for
a sum well into nine figures) is up for question, but the idea that he saw
the value of the collective was striking to me. It was a real contrast to
my previous experience with monolithic multinationals like IBM and BP
who valued shareholders way above employees, and fed my accumula-
tion mindset.
I think my big shift away from an accumulation mindset happened one
Saturday during a shopping trip to London. I remember walking down
Regent Street and thinking to myself, “What am I doing here? I don’t
need anything! I don’t want anything!”.

Emigration and citizenship

In 2003, we emigrated to New Zealand. We had worked diligently and
saved up a little nest egg. I was certain that with our skills, we’d easily
find work that suited us and things would be rosy. Of course, that was
extremely optimistic and naive. But New Zealand felt right. From our
first visit in 1998—I literally felt myself sinking into the whenua (the
land) - and knew I was home.
Part of the impetus to emigrate was for a more balanced life—I knew
51
that if we’d stayed in the UK things might not change, or slow down
 BETTER WORK TOGETHER

enough for us to enjoy the life we wanted: a life connected to the out-
doors that wasn’t rife with competitive energy. I also knew I wanted work
that was both meaningful and engendered a healthy relationship with
money. I thought it would be linear: now I knew how to do the ‘career
thing’ I could just keep going. And now that I’d had a great experience
with work, I could seek and find that elsewhere, even in New Zealand.
My first three years in NZ I worked with my friend, AJ Hackett, in his in-
ternational bungy jumping businesses. AJ is a legend in New Zealand—
he created an entirely new segment of adventure tourism by commercial-
ising bungy jumping. I was responsible for sites from Bali to Acapulco,
Cairns to Macau to Las Vegas. We had interesting projects, new builds
and new partnerships. His business was still in startup mode—lots of
sunk cost and experimentation. He was (and still is) an enigmatic vision-
ary. People said, “If there is an easy way or a hard way, AJ will always do
it the hard way, because it’s bound to be more interesting”.
Because there was such broad geographic and business model diversity
in the bungy business, this experience allowed me to get up close and
personal with the money stories of entrepreneurs - and with their capac-
ity for risk-taking. Whether financial risk, or in this case, the physical risk
of throwing oneself off a bridge or building attached to an elastic band!
This was also my first experience of remote working in a decentralised,
distributed team, long before video calling and other virtual work tools.
It’s hard to believe that this was how the world was only 15 years ago!
After retirement from bungy, over the next few years I tried to initi-
ate the approaches that had brought me business success and personal
growth in a number of companies in New Zealand, but it didn’t work.
In the large organisations, there was a lack of willingness to innovate, in
the smaller organisations the founders just weren’t into it. I decided to
leave the business world and went back to university to do a post-grad
degree in education. I became head teacher at an alternative high school
for at-risk youth, which was the hardest job I ever had. In 2011, an earth-
quake decimated Christchurch, the city where we lived, and I suffered
significant trauma. I needed a change and that tragedy was the impetus.

Shifting plates
My time away from business changed me. The trauma of living through
the destruction of a city, seeing the impact on people I loved and thinking
52 about the people who were lost helped me gain clarity. I was suffering
 A radically good livelihood

from PTSD, and ironically, the break I needed was to go back to the
corporate world, where I knew the ropes and how to play the game.
We moved to Wellington and I joined Telstraclear as Head of Enterprise
and Government.
I enjoyed the privilege of being ‘high up’ the ladder because I thrive on
system-level challenges, problem solving and context. In most organisa-
tions, ‘Head of ’ rank is correlated with being a people manager. Tradi-
tional organisations align HR policy, financial controls and professional
development with the people-management function. This means giving
power over decisions that impact people doing a certain job to others
who have proven themselves good at doing that same job. Essentially,
being responsible for their livelihood. I’ve always enjoyed managing ac-
tivities and making sense of complexity but I’ve always felt wrong about
the command authority and coercion that goes along with being respon-
sible for another person’s livelihood.
What gives me authority over another human? How fucked up is it that
our system readily gives people that power? I am really, really good at
building solutions and relationships. Why should that be conjoined with
command authority over the livelihoods of the people who join me on
an adventure? That’s just the way the game works. Bosses have ‘their
people’, and human resources decides who is worth how much. Most
of us willingly go along with this. It’s a game that we know the rules of.
And of course, our entire society is set up to support and encourage
this game, because the interdependencies are inextricably linked. Want
a mortgage? Prove you have a stable job and wage. It’s rigged and fixed.
And we play along.
I played along for another few years. Then I stopped.

Finding Enspiral
I like to say I’m a slow learner. Or maybe I just wasn’t paying attention to
the potential alternatives. But after over 20 years on the corporate tread-
mill, I had finally had enough. I was sick of spending so much time on
the second job no one was paying me for: the one where I was playing
politics and protecting my heart from the bullies. I tried my hand at en-
trepreneurship and contracting but I did not thrive. What I missed were
thinking partners ‘at the watercooler’. I appreciated being free from tyr-
anny, but I was bereft of community. A few months after I’d left the cor-
porate world and was trying to find my way, I read this job advertisement: 53
 BETTER WORK TOGETHER

Enspiral Catalyst
Enspiral – Anywhere
Initiator, Leader, Coordinator, Entrepreneur, Facilitator. What does
servant leadership mean in a non-hierarchical, distributed network,
where there are no bosses? How could you facilitate and activate the
collective potential of an incredible group of 180+ highly skilled profes-
sionals brought together by a passion for positive social impact?
Come work with us, and let’s find out together.
You’re the kind of person who could be on top of a pyramid some-
where else, but you don’t like pyramids. There’s no such thing here, and
that excites you. We are looking for someone with serious skills in stra-
tegic thinking, entrepreneurial creativity, process design, and motivating
and empowering others, who can bring to life the possibilities of a de-
centralised organisation.
This is a unique opportunity well suited to someone who can navigate a
chaordic environment, build relationships, spot opportunities, and em-
power people to achieve success. You will be a master of the art of the
invitation, and very comfortable leading in environments where influ-
ence and inspiration trump authority.
We’re organised as a network of interconnected nodes, with the Enspiral
Foundation linking it all together. Enspiral Ventures and individual con-
tributors contribute money, time, and skills to the Enspiral Foundation,
which become shared resources. Projects to support the network and its
vision are funded using a transparent participatory budgeting process.
Everyone comes together online and offline to collaborate and make
decisions collectively.
After several years of growth and learning, Enspiral is emerging into a
new stage of evolution. There is more money, talent, and strong net-
works here than ever before. The challenge now is to identify insightful
next steps to leverage that richness. We’re inviting new thinking to find
the lever to pull to create maximum impact. As many of Enspiral’s core
members are heads down on their individual businesses, the purpose of
54
the Enspiral Catalyst is to step into the heart of the network.
 A radically good livelihood

When I read this, my heart just about leapt out of my chest. It felt like it
had been written specifically for me. But I did nothing. I was so beaten
down, so afraid of being rejected. I’m not the typical Enspiral person.
I’m in my early 50s - most others are in their 30s and had been involved
in the Enspiral community since their 20s. I’d had a couple of entire
careers before I arrived in this community. What would these cool kids
want with a washed-up, middle-aged corporate hack like me?
However, a year later, I finally took the plunge, connected, and attended
a Network Retreat. Around this time the first ‘Catalysts’ were stepping
down and a second iteration of the same experiment was starting. Was
this a ‘Susan-shaped hole’? I was finally ready to put my hat and heart in
the ring and find out. As a Catalyst, I was dependant on Enspiral ven-
tures funding the role through the Enspiral Foundation. It amounted to
a basic livelihood, with space to create other income streams and oppor-
tunities. I wasn’t short of ideas, but building a business takes time. I had
never thought of myself as an entrepreneur, but more of a consigliere
serving the visionaries with practical doing. I still carried the fear of be-
ing self-employed from watching my father struggle for years with one
venture after another, never quite reaching sustainability.
Being supported and challenged as an entrepreneur inside
a community was a breakthrough for me.

I began to really process my shadows and assumptions about liveli-

hood—the ones that had me believing security was only possible through
a corporate job and that there was a correlation between my value and
my paycheck. Enspiral’s culture involves a real expectation that we will
all be processing our ‘stuff ’ together—it’s a journey of co-evolution and
it’s an amazing privilege. As Damian, a fellow Enspiral member, wisely
noted: “working in a traditional company didn’t work for me; working
as a solo freelancer didn’t work for me; I tried working in a collective,
and it works for me. It works for me because we can manage complexity
together, since abundance and diversity are impossible for one person to
understand alone’
Enspiral is agnostic about individual purpose, supporting anyone to do
meaningful work - or ‘stuff that matters’ - no matter how they define
it. There is no adherence to dogma about specific ways to change the
world, other than to help one another. My ‘stuff that matters’ is helping
leaders and organisations co-create and manifest their own version of a
55
place that makes possible what I call a Radically Good Livelihood: a way
 BETTER WORK TOGETHER

of life that aligns financial imperatives with meaningful and significant

work. Through Enspiral, I can truly express my values and my work
comes alive; my purpose aligns with the literal ability to have an impact.
In the Enspiral community, each of our very unique livelihood journeys,
winding as they have been, are supported in a way not normally seen in
startups. We value the person over the product, the flowering and un-
folding of the person over profit. And we’ve created a place where these
are not mutually exclusive.

A Radically Good Livelihood - in community

I’ve made a decision in my life to examine all the stories I’ve been told
about money and worth, and step into a new story that I consciously cre-
ate. Sometimes this involves painful realisations. Capitalism bombards
us with messages of unworthiness and pejorative definitions of success,
and advertising manipulates our will. Even if we are aware of this, it’s
not easy to articulate an alternative story.
Even within a system that’s rigged, at some point we all need to make a
decision. Whether from exhaustion, inspiration, or an event that shakes
our core and changes everything, we can all ask ourselves: How do we
want to live? Traditional workplaces built on hierarchy and defined job
roles may work well for some people. However, I believe many people
would work and live differently if they knew there was an accessible
alternative. Stories of alternatives don’t reach everyone, and if they do
they can seem too radical, too scary or too weird. Risking failure feels
unsafe.
I want more people to know how we can live and work differently.

In my twenties, thirties, and forties, momentum carried me - I didn’t

stop or notice what could be different. Through Enspiral, I’ve come to
believe our greatest opportunity to choose to live and work differently
is in community. More than any time in our history, we can choose our
communities - no longer predetermined by birthplace, tribe, religion, or
caste. More than ever we can explore, convene, and try out new ways of
belonging. We can build communities to create livelihoods in the config-
urations we choose but the onus is on us to make it happen.
I fully acknowledge my privilege. I am a white woman, university educat-
ed, a homeowner, and I had the ability to choose the country I wanted
to make my home. Aotearoa New Zealand is unique in every dimension:
56
geography, demographics, history, government, and social norms.
 A radically good livelihood

Without this privilege, I may not have had the choice, or the chance, to
reassess and realign my personal relationship to livelihood—in terms of
money, meaningful work, leadership, and community. Creating acces-
sible alternatives is our best chance to give more people a choice. Any
organisation focused on the work of reconnecting the evolving capacity
of the organisation and its people creates the conditions for Radically
Good Livelihood. If we live into the assumptions we have about each
other as humans, both hold the space for and intentionally create the
conditions for our evolving development, we’ll never be static. Nothing
ever is. And that’s one of the reasons I’m grateful for the ‘looseness’ of
Enspiral—the lack of much written down about purpose or values or
mission or vision. That’s confronting for many, even for me. I often wish
it was easy to describe. But I’m grateful I can’t. And I’m grateful it exists.

57
#ChangingTheFuture
 essay.Four

Welcome to
the age of
participation
by Francesca Pick
 Welcome to the age of participation

A small drop in a big ocean

A small drop in a big ocean—that’s how it felt for a while. But drop by drop,
it’s changing, I can feel it. Drip, drop, drip, drop. Like a wave, slowly gathering
energy and speed.

It’s February 2017, and I am sitting in a grand geodesic dome, locat-

ed in a beautiful valley in New Zealand. I’m at the annual Enspiral re-
treat, sitting in a circle with my fellow members, talking about our work
and the future of the organisation. It’s the end of the event and one
member stands up and says to the group: “Are we the only ones in the
world working on this right now? Are we alone in this pursuit?” The
question almost sounds rhetorical, which surprises me. There is a lone-
liness in his voice, a yearning for comrades to work with on this grand
endeavour. He wonders whether there are other decentralised commu-
nities trying to find more participatory and open ways of operating.

There is a voice inside me, yelling:

No, you’re not alone! There are so many others out there, you just don’t know
they exist!

His conclusion is quite understandable from his perspective of doing

“impact work” in New Zealand, a small country in the remote South
Pacific. It’s easy to feel isolated and disconnected from the rest of the
world there. My experience growing up in the heart of Europe was quite
the opposite.
I’ve sat in circles, such as this one, in so many places—Germany, France,
Spain, England, Canada, the US, Brazil, Costa Rica—and I helped build
a like-minded network in Europe, called Ouishare. It’s clear to me that
61
we are not alone. On the contrary, there are more of us than we think.
 BETTER WORK TOGETHER

We just need to open our eyes and see each other.

Barely a year later, we find ourselves in Catalunya, Spain, in yet another
circle, the “Network Convergence”. This time, not only members of
Enspiral, but people from a multitude of networks and communities
from around the world are here. We have gathered to connect, collabo-
rate and increase our impact together.
These organisations, communities and networks are shaping an emer-
gent movement together. What are its characteristics? What are the key
themes and commonalities? Who is part of it? What could be their im-
pact on the world?

What is this global movement?

After seven years of observing, researching and being part of Enspiral
and a number of like-minded organisations, such as the global network
Ouishare, I have come to the conclusion that, despite the loneliness one
often feels in this work, these are not isolated phenomena. They are part
of a global movement that is on the rise, a movement that is leveraging
the power of community, networks, and participation to work on sys-
temic challenges. This movement not only exists conceptually, but is a
tangible reality with a growing number of projects scattered across the
globe. The organisations that are part of it come from a broad range
of areas—from environment, to agriculture, to education, to health, to
business, to politics. This diversity makes it harder for them to recognise
each other. Yet, while their areas of work may differ, their modes of op-
erating 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.
Before giving you a detailed picture of the characteristics that make this
movement unique, let’s look at its origins, influences, and catalysers.

Origins, influences, catalysers

Just as society is always evolving, this movement is so diverse that one
cannot name one origin or inciting event. It is more like a series of
streams that are now slowly converging. Each has its own influences,
ranging from socialism, post-capitalism, and Degrowth1 to Lean Startup
62
culture2, the free software movement, and Occupy Wall Street.
 Welcome to the age of participation

Why has this movement taken hold now, and how is it any different from
previous movements? Let’s consider these frames:
• Movements that address societal problems of all sorts are nothing
new. From the feminist Suffragettes movement of the early 20th cen-
tury, to the anti-nuclear movement of the 1980s, to the many student
uprisings and sit-ins that have taken place to fight for democracy and
human rights around the globe.

• Communities have always been essential for providing purpose and

structure to humans in society. Although diverse in type (religious,
political, cultural, economic), all communities enable people to orga-
nise around shared identity, values, and rituals.

• Participatory organising and sharing practices are ancient. They

started within the natural world, and evolved to tribes and any group
sharing time and resources.

However, movements today have one fundamental difference. There’s

a new dimension that radically changes their potential: connective tech-
nology. Thanks to the mainstream adoption of the internet and smart-
phones, communities now have the tools to self-organise and grow glob-
ally at almost zero marginal cost3.
This new power is leading to the reinvention and amplification of an-
cient ideas and practices, like sharing resources and producing goods
locally. The organisations that are part of this movement have been es-
pecially good at embracing and leveraging technology to connect local
and global action and form networks to increase their impact. For in-
stance, the Permaculture movement (permacultureglobal.org), started in
the 1970s in Australia, has gained new momentum and has, thanks to
technology, become a global network. Ouishare (ouishare.net), an in-
ternational network of changemakers, was literally born online, out of
a blog, connections on Twitter, and a Facebook group. By making it
easy for like-minded groups to connect despite timezones and distance,
technology has helped create and accelerate many movements that were
trickling along.

1 The rise and future of the degrowth movement, Federico Demaria, 2018
https://theecologist.org/2018/mar/27/rise-and-future-degrowth-movement
2 Lean Startup principles, http://theleanstartup.com/principles
63
3 Jeremy Rifkin, The Zero Marginal Cost Society, 2017, https://thezeromarginalcostsociety.com/
 BETTER WORK TOGETHER

Two secondary catalysts are also worth mentioning: the global finan-
cial crisis of 2008, and a growing awareness of global problems such
as climate change and social inequality. I believe those two factors had
an important influence on the professional choices of (Western-world)
‘Millennials’, my generation, and therefore on the emergence of this
movement. Seeing the collapse of the global financial system, having to
start your career in a dire-looking job market, and working for organisa-
tions that are exacerbating systemic social and environmental problems
rather than solving them, have made many young people question the
‘business-as-usual’ career. As a result, we have seen a wave of profes-
sionals choosing alternative career paths or transitioning from tradition-
al employment into freelancing, entrepreneurship, part-time work, or
leaving the system all together. Technology has significantly lowered the
barrier to making this jump by creating many alternative ways to make a
sustainable living other than being employed by a company.
Globally, the percentage of people choosing such paths is significant.
According to a study by Metlife in 2018, 40% of millennials intend to
leave their full-time employment to work as a freelancer by 2023. Only
23% of Gen-Xers and 13% of Boomers had the same goal4. We can’t
deny the existence of this wave. It is no coincidence that one of the
most shared articles in the history of Ouishare’s online magazine talked
about how young professionals “don’t want to board the Titanic they
already know is sinking—they want to build the new vessels that will
carry us to safety”5.

Five streams becoming a river

Although the boundaries between the different threads that weave them-
selves through this movement are blurry, I would like to highlight five
that share certain common themes and values.

The sharing and collaborative economy

Coined in 2011, the concept of the ‘sharing economy’ (also known as
‘collaborative consumption’6) is essentially the reinvention of the flea-
4 Metlife Annual Report on Employee Beneffts, 2018, https://benefittrends.metlife.com/us-perspec-
tives/ebts2018/
5 Les jeunes talents qui partent en courant, (shared over 10 000 times on social media), Marc-Arthur
Gauthey, http://www.socialter.fr/fr/module/99999672/125/ces_jeunes_qui_partent_en_courant
6 What’s Mine is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption, Rachel Botsman & Roo Rogers,
64 Harper Collins, 2011
 Welcome to the age of participation

market and physical pin-boards for things like ridesharing (a concept

originally from Germany), through online platforms and smartphone
apps. Technology put a critical mass of users at our fingertips, making
the collaborative creation, production, distribution, trade, and consump-
tion of goods and services a potentially viable business, and a powerful
way to create a more sustainable and socially connected economy. One
classic example is borrowing a drill from a neighbor through an app,
instead of buying a new one.
The sharing economy is how I got involved in this movement in 2011, by
writing a thesis on the topic and joining the nascent Ouishare network.
From the beginning, the idea spoke to a variety of actors who don’t
often mix—from grassroots communities, to startups, to large corpo-
rations (commercial carsharing), to government (‘Sharing Cities’7). This
is the soil on which Ouishare grew, dedicated to connecting this rich
emerging ecosystem through physical gatherings such as the conference
Ouishare Fest.
For many of those involved in its beginnings, the sharing economy has
been a big disappointment, as it failed to deliver on the transformational
change many had hoped for. As the homesharing platform Airbnb and
taxi-app Uber became the posterchildren, it seemed the original values
of co-ownership and peer-to-peer sharing were being lost. But many
organisations are still working towards what some call ‘the real sharing
economy’8. The P2P Foundation, the Commons Network, and the Plat-
form Cooperative movement, for instance, have been supporting the
emergence of peer-to-peer platforms that are owned by the service pro-
viders themselves (e.g. Uber owned by drivers, Airbnb owned by hosts).

Circular economy and ecological activism

The circular economy aims to create regenerative systems, in which
products and services no longer create waste and have a minimal neg-
ative impact on the planet, in comparison to the currently widespread
‘take, make, dispose’ model of production. Apart from its implications
for industrial production and new regulatory standards, the circular
economy and a series of related concepts, such as Cradle to Cradle, Blue
Economy, Zero Waste and more have given life to a wide range of com-

7 Sharing Cities: Activating the Urban Commons, Shareable, https://www.shareable.net/sharing-cities

8 Sustaining Hierarchy: Uber isn’t sharing., Francesca Pick & Julia Dreher, 2015 http://kingsreview.
65
co.uk/articles/beyond-hierarchy-why-uber-isnt-part-of-the-sharing-economy/
 BETTER WORK TOGETHER

munities and organisations aiming to create change by tackling environ-

mental issues from a systemic perspective. This can range from small
groups building urban gardens, to beach-clean up initiatives, to regional
political activism around the concept of zero waste, to global networks
for hyperlocal digital fabrication such as Makerspaces and Fablabs.

Social entrepreneurship and impact

The term ‘social entrepreneurship’ has been used broadly since the
1980s, but gained in popularity following the publication of Charles
Leadbeater’s “the Rise of the Social Entrepreneur” in the 2000s. It is
founded on the idea that we can use startup companies to implement
solutions to social, cultural, and environmental issues. A social entre-
preneur focuses on serving people and the planet first, by reinvesting
their profits in the causes they seek to address, rather than maximising
shareholder value. This concept has inspired the development of a rich
ecosystem of communities, accelerators, university programmes, fellow-
ships, impact measurement tools, and membership networks looking to
support these businesses. They describe themselves variously as social
innovation, social business, impact, and tech for good. The social entre-
preneurship sector has grown globally, with various well established ac-
tors, such as the fellowship network Ashoka (ashoka.org), the microloan
business Grameen Bank, and the entrepreneurship programme Singularity
University (su.org).
It isn’t these established actors that I am interested in here, but a new
generation of organisations moving away from the “Hero Entrepre-
neur” narrative toward a more nuanced view of impact. Examples such
as the distributed coworking network Impact Hub (impacthub.net) or
the bottom-up social innovator community MakeSense (makesense.org)
show that many of these newer organisations are more participatory,
decentralised, and community-driven.

Open source and decentralisation

We cannot overlook that the technologists building the software are
themselves a driving factor of this movement. The philosophy of free
and open source software—that anyone should have the right to freely
use, copy, remix, and distribute software—has been an inspiration to this
movement at large. Today, communities of open source software devel-
66 opers are playing an important role in exploring new socio-technologi-
 Welcome to the age of participation

cal territories, underpinned by strong values of openness, cooperation,

and decentralisation. A quick look at Open Collective (opencollective.
com), a platform used by many open source projects to transparently
collect and spend funds, shows the level of activity and resources in this
space. Especially the invention of the decentralised cryptocurrency Bit-
coin, blockchain, and other crypto-powered technology has been fertile
ground for creating a decentralised, collectively-owned internet. Many
of these projects, such as the decentralised social network Scuttlebutt
(scuttlebutt.nz), or the web protocol Holochain (holochain.org), seek to
use the principles of open source and decentralisation to create a more
human internet and transform society as a whole.

Digital nomadism and freelancer collectives

One impact of the modern internet, the increased availability of high
speed data connections (and laptops fitting into purses) is the rise of
digital nomadism. Fueled by low-cost travel and the ease of working re-
motely, thousands of professionals are choosing flexible work and living
arrangements over traditional employment and a permanent residence.
Flocking to places with low living costs and great weather like Chiang
Mai (Thailand) or the island of Bali, these freelancers are building in-
ternet businesses as coaches, writers, consultants, designers or web de-
velopers. A whole ecosystem of products and services has emerged for
this audience—so-called ‘WorkerTech’9 from freelance job marketplaces
such as Malt (malt.com) and Remotive (remotive.io), to collective buying
of health insurance on Wemind (wemind.io).
A generally affluent and white demographic, the sub-culture and life-
style that digital nomadism promotes is often idealised—think working
in bikinis on the beach. But this solo lifestyle comes with many chal-
lenges, especially if you want to make it work in the long term. Hu-
mans need social and professional support systems. As a response to
this need, many freelancers join coworking and co-living communities,
or even form collectives to share work and support each other. There are
many examples of such collectives10, from the SMart network (smart-eu.
org), a cooperative dedicated to supporting freelancers, to Enspiral itself,
which emerged out of the intention to create a place where freelancers
9 How WorkerTech is meeting the need for flexible support for the self-employed, Inline, 2018, https://
www.inlinepolicy.com/blog/how-workertech-is-meeting-the-need-for-flexible-support-for-the-self-em-
ployed
10 How Freelancers Are Reinventing Work Through New Collective Enterprises, Shareable, 2016,
https://www.shareable.net/blog/how-freelancers-are-reinventing-work-through-new-collective-enter-
prises 67
 BETTER WORK TOGETHER

and entrepreneurs could support each other.

The common threads:

different starting points, same direction?
These organisations and themes may seem quite different. Apart from
being driven by technological innovation, how could they be part of the
same movement?
Although many of them are not aware of it, the people and organisa-
tions I have described above share an ethos, a culture, and many com-
mon values. It is a niche—call it a bubble—that has been growing and
becoming more clearly defined, developing its own language, memes,
references, and ways of doing things. This culture is truly global:
I have often flown thousands of miles only to find myself in the midst
of a meeting or encounter that feels more familiar than visiting the com-
pany next door to my office in Paris.
In an instant, a way of speaking, referring to concepts or facilitating a
meeting, gives me that feeling—“Oh, they are one of us.”
What is this culture? We tend to look for differences when we analyse
things, and the more similar we are, the more we do it. As diverse as we
may seem, I’ve decided here to focus instead on what we have in com-
mon, because I sense that this is what the world needs more of at this
moment. I’ve identified common threads and themes that I believe make
this movement one. It’s important to keep in mind that each thread is
not present equally in each organisation and can vary quite significantly.
These threads are mainly about how we approach challenges, not about
the challenges themselves, since the sectors and activities of the organ-
isations I speak of are varied. What unites them is not what they work
on, but why they do it and how they work. In my experience, the why has
become an implicit consensus: people and planet are more important
than profits. This deep sense of purpose is so embedded that it can be
assumed. So instead, we’ll focus on the how.

Local action, global networks

These organisations are leveraging a powerful duo by connecting lo-
68
cal communities through global networks. They have the best of both
 Welcome to the age of participation

worlds: tangible local action that is adapted to a specific reality, and ac-
cess to much broader knowledge, skills, and expertise provided by their
network. They build collective brands, which helps with fundraising and
increases reach. Take the Zero Waste network, which has dozens of local
groups involved in hands-on initiatives, such as campaigning and events,
while they are all connected through their shared brand, governance, and
annual meetings.
The current socio-political climate has created a strong feeling that now
is not the time for sitting around and talking. We can’t spend all our
energy climbing corporate ladders or wiggling our way through politics
before making a difference. Nothing is stopping us from taking action
now, we just need to find right people or start our own project to attract
them. Goodbye think tanks, hello ‘Do Tanks’.

Self-organization and decentralised power

One of the strongest themes of this movement—which has very much
been a focus in Enspiral—is experimenting with new ways of governing
collectively in a networked, ‘emergent’, collaborative, and self-organised
manner. A key idea is that decision-making power and ownership should
be shared among those doing the work. There is the strong belief that
the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ and community-led solutions can be more
relevant and create more value in the long term than top-down ones.
Great ideas can come from anywhere, and those who implement them
should own them. Many communities in this movement started in a bot-
tom-up manner from the beginning.
A concept that accurately explains these new ways of organising is that
of New Power, as described by Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms. As
they describe in their book, in our chaotic, connected age, Old Power
is controlling, extractive, and held by few. New Power, in contrast, is
“made by many. It is open, participatory, and peer-driven. It uploads, and
it distributes.”11 While organisations such as Facebook and Uber may
leverage what the authors call New Power models, they still represent
Old Power Values. They leverage New Power for growth and profit, not
to address social or environmental problems. In comparison, the organ-
isations that are part of this new movement aim to align their modes of
operating with their values. Their models are contributive rather than

11 New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World--and How to Make It Work for You,
69
by Jeremy Heimans & Henry Timms, Doubleday, 2018
 BETTER WORK TOGETHER

Managerialism, institutionalism, Self-organisation; opt-in decision

representative consolidation making; Informal, networked governance

Exclusivity, competition, authority, Open source collaboration,

resource consolidation crowd wisdom, sharing

Discretion, confidentiality, separation

Radical transparency
between private and public spheres

Professionalism, specialisation Do-it-ourselves, ‘maker culture’

Long-term affiliation and loyalty, Short-term, conditional affiliation;

less overall participation more overall participation

(Diagram adapted from: https://hbr.org/2014/12/understanding-new-power)

competitive, which means that they only need to capture a fraction of

the value they create to survive.
A great example is the Open Food Network (openfoodnetwork.net), an
open-source platform for buying local foods, which is run as a self-or-
ganised network of producers, distributors, and retailers.

(Eco)systemic thinking
Another characteristic that runs through this movement is the ambition
to create change at the systems level, while taking a systemic approach
to how the work itself is done. Systems change is both an outcome and
a process12.
In practice, many of these organisations have a broader vision of so-
cietal transformation that goes beyond the scope of their own work.
They understand that wicked problems are too complex to be solved by
one organisation alone and acknowledge the need for collaboration of a
diverse ecosystems to achieve the change they are working towards. It is
not unusual for these organisations to approach problems with Design
Thinking13, systems design, and ecosystem mapping.

12 The School of Systems Change, https://www.forumforthefuture.org/school-of-system-change

13 A simple overview of Design Thinking: https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/what-
70
is-design-thinking-and-why-is-it-so-popular
 Welcome to the age of participation

The ecosystemic approach primes this movement to collaborate with

those working in other areas. Key events in the space are interdisciplinary.
The digital society conference Republica Berlin (re-publica.com) brings
together “artists, activists, scientists, hackers, entrepreneurs, NGOs,
journalists, and marketers”, Ouishare Fest (ouisharefest.com) connects
“tech, society & business”, the Impact Hub Network’s event Unlikely
Allies (unlikelyallies.net) brings together “a great diversity of sectors, ge-
ographies and demographics”. Events like the NESI Forum (newecon-
omyforum.org/) connect a broad range of actors from the space of
“New Economy and Social Innovation”.
Problem-solving inspiration also comes from the natural world. The dis-
tributed ledger technology Holochain, for instance, has been designed as
a living, evolving system. ‘Emergence’14, which is often used to describe
how collective intelligence works, is a concept from biology that explains
how bird swarms and ant colonies coordinate without centralised power.
Many terms have been borrowed from nature, which has shaped the
language of this subculture, making Mycelium (a mushroom network),
swarm, nutrients, and compost common metaphors.

Spirituality: balancing doing and being

The systemic approach invokes an understanding that we as individuals
are not disconnected from this system, but are part of the whole. “Be
the change you want to see in the world” rings truer than ever. Rather
than sacrificing ourselves for a cause and perpetuating a ‘work harder
to save the world faster’ mindset, there has been a collective realisation
that the path to more impact leads straight through our personal devel-
opment. If we want to change the world, we need to take good care of
ourselves, physically and spiritually.
Communities are important places for those doing change work to re-
ceive and give the support they need. Amanitas, for instance, a collec-
tive of practitioners, artists and designers of “inner and outer system
change”15, has been experimenting with how to balance being and doing,
moving toward a more wholesome entrepreneurship. The project was
sparked by a frustration with a culture in the social impact sector that

14 Recommended further reading: Emergence, by Steven Johnson, Scribner, 2001

15 Balancing Being and Doing, the Amanitas Collective, https://www.amanitas.cc/balancing-being-doing/
16 Principles of the Transition Network, https://transitionnetwork.org/about-the-movement/
what-is-transition/principles-2/ 71
 BETTER WORK TOGETHER

continuously drove entrepreneurs to burn-out and only valued measur-

able output.
Making space for our spiritual selves is a theme in almost every project.
The Transition Network states that finding a balance between “head,
heart and hands”16 is one of their guiding principles. At Enspiral’s
coding school, Dev Academy, learning empathy and practising yoga is
part of the program. Meditation and mindfulness practices are part of
most events and conferences. Vipassana, a Buddhist practice involving
ten days of silent meditation, has practically become a right of passage
(I continue to be surprised that almost everyone I meet through my
work has either participated in or at least heard of Vipassana).

Cooperative entrepreneurship and experimentation

Although the culture of this movement often shows up as very anti-Sil-
icon Valley, we cannot deny its influence. In comparison to some im-
pact-focused organisations, one of the strengths of this movement is an
emphasis on pragmatism over ideology. It manifests as a ‘get shit done’
attitude, along with the popularity of principles from The Lean Startup,
such as ‘fail often, fail fast’. This culture of experimentation and appetite
for crazy projects is often termed “do-ocracy”17, indicating that power
and responsibility accrues to those who execute.
n contrast to mainstream startup culture, rather than exponential ‘uni-
corns’ led by masculine hero-entrepreneurs, this space is more collective,
feminine, and willing to embrace ambiguity. Faced with the challenge
of combining purpose and profit into successful businesses, there is a
willingness to hack existing structures. This often means navigating a
murky space between nonprofit and for-profit, writing custom bylaws,
using accreditations such as BCorp18, or creating brand new models like
Stewardship ownership19. Some projects in the Cryptocurrency space are
even choosing to go fully beyond the limits of existing legal structures
and creating a new type of organization that is not centrally owned, so-
called Decentralised Autonomous Organizations (DAOs).

17 Definition of Do-ocracy, https://communitywiki.org/wiki/DoOcracy

18 Bcorp is a certification for social and environmental performance purpose driven businesses, https://
bcorporation.net/about-b-corps
19 Stewardship ownership is a set of organisational principles where profits are a means to an end and
ownership equals entrepreneurship, http://purpose-economy.org/en/
20 Guiding principles of the P2P foundation, https://p2pfoundation.net/infrastructure/our-guid-
72
ing-principles
 Welcome to the age of participation

Embracing the new while building on the old

A last characteristic is being able to simultaneously look forwards and
backwards. Many of the projects in this space strike an interesting bal-
ance between recognising the importance and value of tradition, while
embracing the opportunities of new technologies and social structures.
The P2P Foundation, for instance, says it is “combining digital culture
with older cooperative traditions.”20 The cooperative movement specif-
ically is experiencing a revival, thanks to the advent of digital Platform
Coops (platform.coop). The Edmund Hillary Fellowship (ehf.org) in
New Zealand, which often selects entrepreneurs working on cutting
edge future-focused ventures, has the patronship of local Māori elders
and has made connecting with Māori traditions an integral part of their
programme.

Who is this movement?

Due to their collective nature, most of the stars of this movement are
not famous figureheads, but the organisations and their collective brands.
However, I would like to acknowledge a number of recent thinkers who
have deepened my understanding of this movement, such as Elinor
Östrom’s and David Bollier’s research on the Commons, Yochai Ben-
kler and Michel Bauwens’ writing on Peer-to-Peer Networks, Charles
Eisenstein’s Sacred Economics, Frederic Laloux’s Reinventing Organi-
zations, and Christian Felber’s work on the Economy for the Common
Good. I also recognise those who have played an important role in mak-
ing this thinking accessible to large audiences, such as Chris Anderson,
Clay Shirky, Lisa Gansky, Rachel Botsman, Douglas Rushkoff, Zeynep
Turfekci, Rick Falkvinge, Cory Doctorow and Jeremy Rifkin.
What follows is a snapshot of the organisations used as examples above.
This is not intended to be a comprehensive list and, since this is a very
emerging and rapidly changing field, it may already be outdated by the
time you read this.

73
 BETTER WORK TOGETHER

Ouishare is a global network that connects

people and accelerates projects for systemic
change. With 80+ active members in 20 cities,
Ouishare has organized over 300 participa-
tory events, connected diverse ecosystems
through physical spaces and published research
on emerging topics.
A non-profit and global network that, since
2005, has been researching, cataloging, and
advocating for the potential of P2P and
Commons-based approaches to societal and
consciousness change.
Shareable is a non-profit news, action and
connection hub that has been telling stories
since 2009 on how grassroots movements
including the Sharing Economy are tackling
today’s biggest challenges.
CivicWise is an international distributed and
open network that promotes citizen engage-
ment, developing concrete actions and proj-
ects based on collective intelligence, civic in-
novation and open design.
Fab City is a collective of citizens, research-
ers, policy makers, teachers, developers, and
entrepreneurs working on bringing produc-
tion back to cities. It is part of the Fab Lab
Network, an open, creative community work-
ing in Fab Labs around the world.
An international network of citizens, entre-
preneurs, and organisations supporting posi-
tive change. 70 active members in eight cities,
with 2800 projects supported.
A global network focused on building entrepre-
neurial communities for impact at scale. They
offer workspace, community, and startup pro-
grammes for entrepreneurs creating tangible
74 solutions to the world’s most pressing issues.
 Welcome to the age of participation

The Edmund Hillary Fellowship is a fel-

lowship programme from New Zealand for
purpose-driven entrepreneurs and impact in-
vestors, who are working on new paradigm
solutions.
The Transition Towns movement started in
2005 and supports communities to address
the big challenges they face by starting local
and using crowd sourced solutions. Today they
have thousands of groups in 50+ countries.
Zero Waste Europe is a network of 29 na-
tional and local NGOs promoting the Zero
Waste strategy as a way to make Europe more
sustainable. It is part of a larger loose network
of Zero Waste initatives in other parts of the
world, such as Australia and New Zealand.
Holochain is a technology that enables a dis-
tributed web with user autonomy built direct-
ly into its architecture and protocols. Born
out of the Metacurrency project that started
in the mid 2000s, its mission is to enable a
new generation of decentralised applications
that do not abuse user privacy, or destroy the
environment.
Scuttlebutt is an open source, decentralised
and secure peer-to-peer social network, and
its underlying protocol, SecureScuttleButt,
works without a connection to the internet.
The ecosystem around this protocol is being
developed by a self-organizsed community of
software developers.
Open Collective enables groups to quickly set
up a collective, raise funds and manage them
transparently. Many of their users are meet-
ups, open source projects, neighborhood as-
sociations, clubs, unions, movements, and
more.
75
 BETTER WORK TOGETHER

Open Food Network develops, accumulates

and protects open source knowledge, code, ap-
plications, and platforms for fair and sustain-
able food systems. Its open source platform
is collaboratively built by like-minded people
around the world.
Malt is a platform that connects +90 000 free-
lancers with companies and allows for secure
collaboration, from initial contact to payment.
They are focused on matching high quality tal-
ent in close proximity to each other.
Remotive is a platform for remote workers to
find jobs, connect with each other and get ad-
vice on how to be productive and supported in
their work.
Wemind is a platform that offers freelancers
and collectives in France home, health, and
company insurance through group buying and
solidarity that is equivalent to being employed
through group buying and solidarity.
Platform cooperativism is an international
movement that builds a fairer future of work.
Rooted in democratic ownership, co-op mem-
bers, technologists, unionists, and freelancers
create a concrete near-future alternative to the
extractive sharing economy.

These examples don’t all fulfil the characteristics described to the same
extent. Plotting them along the following two dimensions is useful for
giving an idea of where they sit: level of openness towards and usage
of technology (y-axis), and extent to which they work with traditional
businesses (x-axis).

76
 Welcome to the age of participation

More techy
Scuttlebut
Holochain

Open Collective
Malt
Enspiral
The Edmund Hillary Remotive
Open Food Network Fab City Fellowship
Wemind
Platform CivicWise
P2P Foundation Ouishare Make Sense
Cooperativism Impact Hub

Shareable

The Transition
Zero Waste Europe
Less techy

Network

More activist More business friendly

Where to from here?

It’s time for convergence.
Could this be the onset of a new age, the age of participation? The first
important step is already happening: those who want a better world and
are forging their own paths to creating it are becoming more aware of
each other. They are sharing, copying and remixing each others work.
At the Network Convergence in Catalunya, we saw connections becoming
convergence.

The movement has matured a lot since I entered in 2011, and I can see
that people are ready to work beyond their own community. In 2016 I
ventured to New Zealand to work on Enspiral’s conference OS//OS
and to share what I had learnt building Ouishare Fest. Small steps like
these have taught me that it’s not about creating a network of networks,
but networking the networks—cross-pollinating, building bridges, and
enabling them to blend and flow together.
And ‘with great awareness comes great responsibility.’ Responsibility to
move from connecting to collective action. No matter how many in-
77
spirational projects we create, if we can’t learn how to collaborate and
 BETTER WORK TOGETHER

cooperate more, despite small ideological differences, our impact will

always be limited. Convergence is not only about coming together phys-
ically, it’s about aligning projects, resources, and communications. For
this movement to achieve real impact, we need to recognise that we can
all be different while united in action.
How? That is the challenge I leave you with. This book is about helping
you, no matter who and where you are, to join us—but in your own way
and with your own style. It’s not going to be easy, but once we truly tap
into our collective intelligence it will be worth it. We’re greater than the
sum of our parts.

78
 essay.Five

Saying yes
to purpose
Vagas: a case study

by Sandra Chemin
 Saying yes to purpose

Many strings wove me into the Enspiral tapestry. In 2015, I was structur-
ing the international expansion of the innovation startup Mesa&Cadeira
in Brazil. A successful design sprint for Auckland Council in New Zea-
land resulted in an invitation to go to Wellington to attend New Fron-
tiers, a well-curated festival for impact entrepreneurs and change-makers
from all over the world.
The day before the trip, I received an email introducing me to Richard
Bartlett1. “You need to know Enspiral; it has everything to do with your
work,” said our common friend. Rich invited me for a coffee and the
connection was immediate. The idea of a network of activists, entre-
preneurs, and companies ‘working on stuff that matters’ just lit me up.
As I arrived at New Frontiers, Alanna Irving2 was on stage. “The global
economy was not created by the laws of nature. We created it—and
because we created it, we can change it.” The possibility to codify how
economy, society, and organisations work, and then redesign the whole
system to attend to a higher purpose was mind-blowing. My journey in
Enspiral had started.
Several months later, Joshua Vial and I went to Brazil to host an Open
Enspiral tour, a series of workshops and talks to share the learnings
of building a participatory network. As we shared our experience with
others, we had the opportunity to revisit our personal journeys that led
to Enspiral.
Joshua shared the story of his pilgrimage in the Camino de Santiago in
Spain, when he questioned the impact he wanted to have in the world:“I
came back from that trip and realised that, if everything goes well, I will
have 80,000 hours to work in my life. What is the best use of my time?
I see there are a lot of people wanting to work on meaningful projects.
But they do this in their extra time. What if more people could work full
time on stuff that matters? What if I could help them do it? That would
be the best use of my time.”
1 Richard Bartlett is co-founder of Loomio and the consultancy The Hum
2 Alanna Irving is co-founder of Loomio and was key in structuring Enspiral. Watch her talk at New
81
Frontiers searching in you tube for Alanna Irving, Growing A New Economy.
 BETTER WORK TOGETHER

Our conversations made me reflect:

“When did I start to ask the big questions in life?”
I went back fifteen years, to when I was enjoying one of the best
moments of my professional career. I had co-founded Hipermídia,
one of the first digital agencies in Brazil, at a time when the internet
was only accessible in universities. I sold the agency to Ogilvy,
a global advertising network, and was responsible for their internet
operations in Latin America. I traveled a lot and met amazing
people. I was creating the future, and that vision moved me forward.

But one day, I got news that would change my life forever. I was preg-
nant with my first daughter, and my partner Lucas was diagnosed with an
aggressive type of cancer. The doctors said he would have two years to
live. Months later, we found out the diagnosis was wrong: he didn’t have
cancer. But the transformation inside us had already happened. For the
first time we asked ourselves “What would you do if you just have two
years to live?” That was the beginning of my purpose journey.
We bought a sailboat and lived on it with our one-year-old daughter,
Clara. After two years in the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean, and
pregnant with my second daughter Julia, we crossed the Atlantic Ocean.
It was an inner journey of discovery as much as an ocean passage. My
course was traced by asking“What moves me?”
The questions I asked myself changed over time3. When moving to a
small village on the coast of Brazil, in search of a better place to raise
our daughters and facing the challenge of not having a good education
system, I asked: “What are the values we would like to model for our
children?” Following that question led us to co-found a Steiner school,
designed for social inclusion and owned by the community.
Fast forward to living in New Zealand, far from family. When my father
had a serious health problem, it brought on a new set of questions:
Where do I want to live my purpose? Where does the world need me
most? Where can I make the biggest impact?
Looking back, I realise our purpose journey is a lifelong cycle of Search,
Find, Integrate, Search, Find, Integrate in which we continuously chart
new territories and leave past ones behind.
As Joshua and I shared our stories, we realised there was a pattern. It
seemed to us that the individuals who joined Enspiral had a particular

82 3 To know more about my purpose journey watch the video in youtube “Sandra Chemin - New Ways of
Working, Living and Being” from a talk in New Frontiers in 2017.
 Saying yes to purpose

experience in their lives, a small opening to the possibility that they could
be in service of something bigger than the demands of the day-to-day
life. A moment of Awakening, when we start to ask the big questions
in life and look for others on the same journey. The Enspiral purpose,
“helping more people work on stuff that matters”, was attracting indi-
viduals that were saying yes to their own purpose journey.
This was happening to people outside Enspiral as well. One of them
was the founder of the biggest technology company in e-recruitment
in Brazil, Mario Kaphan. His company, Vagas, was a pioneer in hori-
zontal management, working with self-managed teams that made deci-
sions based on consensus. Mario invited Joshua and I to talk at HSM,
the biggest management event in Latin America, and we invited him to
the Enspiral retreat in New Zealand, our annual network gathering. We
developed a deep sense of respect for each others journey.
Vagas wanted to improve its understanding and practice of horizontal
management culture and create the conditions for a better decision-mak-
ing process. The possibility of supporting another company with similar
values was the invitation we needed. My partner Lucas and I got excited
and accepted the challenge.
So, we began to follow a new question: If we could codify how Enspiral
works, could it work in other places?
What we learned at Vagas was that each culture is unique and that what
actually happens is a cross-pollination, where Enspiral practices helped
Vagas and practices from Vagas inspired us to pursue lines of thought
we had not considered before.
Here are some of the design principles we developed together:

1. Collective leadership
As Mario shared the story of Vagas, we understood the reasons behind
the decision to be a horizontal management company, with no hierarchy.
“We believe in an environment where individuals can live their own val-
ues. And values become alive when you make decisions. Because it’s one
thing to identify yourself with values, and it’s another to live them. The
only way to live your values in a daily basis is to participate equally in the
decision-making process.”
They created an unique model, where every decision is made by con-
83
sensus: when everyone agrees, or no one objects. The idea behind it was
 BETTER WORK TOGETHER

simple - anyone can make a decision, the only prerequisite is to make it

visible. By doing so, if someone believes there is a better way to solve
an issue, they can open a conversation and build a new consensus. The
system auto-regulates itself as controversies indicate the need to include
others in the process. As a result, a better understanding is reached of
the minimal consensus group for each decision.
The model came out of lived experience, but as the company grew, it
needed to make the process alive to everyone.
At the start of the Vagas project, we interviewed the team, and noticed
the need to move from the vision of the founder to a collective under-
standing of the organisational model they were pursuing. It can be hard
for a founder to let go and let the team co-create their own understand-
ing and sense-making. Joshua faced a similar challenge when he decided
to become the ex-founder of Enspiral.
Mario understood the importance of making it a Vagas project and said
yes to the challenge. A team of Stewards of Culture and Purpose was
formed and together they co-created the plan.

2. Purpose comes first

Purpose aligns us as individuals and can powerfully connect us as groups.
Companies ‘driven by purpose’ are common these days, but there is a
difference between having a purpose and having a shared purpose that
makes sense for all, drives decisions, and becomes a practice. Vagas al-
ready had a purpose, but it was not clearly articulated. The goal the team
defined was to improve the understanding, embodying, and practice of
the purpose. They recognised the need for strong shared understanding
of the bigger reasons why they made the choices they made as a com-
pany. Only by understanding their big why could they hope to improve
their decision-making process.

3. Design for trust and safety

In the report “What makes a team effective at Google?”4, Google
researchers found out that who is on a team matters less than how
the team members interact, structure their work, and view their con-
tributions. They identified that the single most important dynamic of

4 You can read the full report here - https://rework.withgoogle.com/guides/understanding-team-effec-

84
tiveness/steps/introduction/
 Saying yes to purpose

successful teams is psychological safety. Can I express my opinions and be

heard? Can I share the challenges I am facing, both personally and professionally, and
be supported? Is there space for vulnerability? Can we take risks in this team without
feeling insecure or embarrassed?
Trust and safety doesn’t happen by chance in an organisation. They have
to be intentionally designed and embedded with practices such as:
a. Regular check-ins: spaces for sharing how you really are, what you
bring to a project, and what inspires you. Verbal sharing, especially
a brief story, weaves the interpersonal net and creates trust in a
team. It also ensures people are truly present.
b. Check-outs: an opportunity to say how you are leaving a meeting,
align expectations, address any frustration, and celebrate what was
accomplished.
I will never forget one of our remote meetings when the team
wanted to cancel the call at the last minute, saying the inter-
net connection was bad. We called them over the phone just to
do a quick check-in and found out the real reason behind the
change of plans: one of the contributors from another team
lost a parent that day and they were very sad. By having space
to express their feelings, they could transform the dynamic and
find meaningful connection. The check-out was reassuring:
“This meeting was the best thing that happened in my day.”

c. Deep listening and facilitated conversations to ensure all voices are

heard. In times of polarised opinions, the ability to deeply listen
to each other with empathy has a huge effect on a team. Meth-
odologies such as nonviolent communication can help transform
conflicts into positive conversations.

4. Purpose is emergent
Purpose is not something you create with a marketing campaign and
enforce top-down. I have worked for more than a decade in marketing
and branding and know how powerful the right communication can be.
There is a huge difference between a purpose created externally and a
purpose that emerges from what is already true in the collective. Finding
the shared purpose that truly resonates is a process that can take time,
and the right conditions, to emerge.
85
Having purpose conversations is important. As Enspiral formed, Joshua
 BETTER WORK TOGETHER

had hundreds of conversations to come up with “Helping more people

work on stuff that matters”. Mario gave a powerful talk on the 18th
anniversary of Vagas, when they celebrated the company’s maturity and
the ripeness of their purpose “Purpose is not something you choose. You harvest
when it is ripe, like a fruit.”
Because of all the work the team did, Vagas’ purpose was already alive
in the community when it went onto the walls on a big poster stating:
“Contribute to a world where companies can make better choices about
the people they work with and individuals can make better choices about
the companies they work for. This is what moves us”.

5. Purpose has to be embodied and lived

How can you talk about something you haven’t experienced? Purpose
cannot be created by empty words. It must be alive.
Purpose conversations start by first asking ourselves what moves us, to
then see if there is resonance with one another and the collective pur-
pose of the organisation. It is deeply personal.
At Vagas, we carefully designed Purpose Rituals, workshops to allow
each person to reflect on their own journey and share what was mean-
ingful for them. For some it was the first time they had questioned their
own sense of purpose. A deeper connection was created, even among
those who had been working together for a long time. There was also
space to have an open conversation about collective purpose: “What does
our purpose mean to me? How does our purpose influence the way we interact with
our customers and partners? What is the impact of our purpose in the community?”
This type of conversation requires a safe space and the understanding
that the purpose might not resonate with everyone. Purpose Rituals re-
sulted in a significant increase in engagement, retention, and willingness
to contribute to other areas of the company. Vagas invested deeply in
these rituals, rolling them out to all 150 employees in a series of 18
workshops.

6. Purpose-led teams
“We would like to contribute more to our purpose.” That is how the meeting
requested by the customer support team started.

“Do you need a bigger team?” we asked. “No, we optimised the way we work
86
and now have more time to contribute to other areas. We thought we could
 Saying yes to purpose

serve others by offering a customer-centric approach, identifying client needs,

and interacting with the product teams.”

To my disbelief, this was an actual conversation, led proactively by a team

who wanted to champion their own efforts and do more to contribute
to overall organisational goals. Throughout this process, we noticed that
teams that believed they were working on something meaningful outper-
formed others.
Here is what we have learned about working with teams:
• Understand the context: No two teams start in the same place,
so there is no ready recipe. Everything begins with conversations
and listening to understand their story and their needs. “I don’t have
dedicated staff and share developers with another team. I would like to find
what unifies us so we can actually be a team,” or “Our problem is that we are
very slow in delivering what our clients need”. Find where the energy is and
work with the team members that put their hands up. Co-create
rituals together so they can own them.
• Connect at an inspirational level: When there is connection with
why a team exists and how they can contribute to the collective,
there is energy to do whatever needs to be done. It is common to
start a meeting with urgent pain points and needs, but trust me. It
will make a huge difference to start with why.
• Design for collective intelligence: Strategic design of conversa-
tions and meetings is one of the most important skills of our time.
One person just downloading information will kill the potential for
productivity. When a team member has something to share with
others, design activities to move from an individual perception to
shared understanding. Co-create with the team, allowing them to
own the purpose of the meeting or conversation. Only then will
they be co-responsible for making it happen.
Real stories help me understand what is possible. This was the beginning
of Vagas’ purpose journey, and I can’t wait to see where it goes in the
future. Its purpose is alive, so the work continues as it grows.
This aliveness of purpose is also true at Enspiral.
Enspiral is much more than a network of activists, entrepreneurs,
and companies. It is a container for individual and collective pur-
pose to unfold, a safe space where we support each other to live
87
and work together with purpose.
 essay.Six

All things
being equal:
when community
is the business
by Anthony Cabraal
 All things being equal: when community is the business

You work for a company.

You work at a company.
You work with a company.
Maybe you own the company.
--
Why does that company exist?
How does it serve your life?
What does it do?

What if your company was designed from the ground up to challenge

and support you to be the best possible version of yourself ?

What if your company gave you the freedom, accountability, and support
you need to lead your own work projects in whatever direction you want?

What if your company was also your long-term community, where your
co-workers actively supported you to keep moving towards solving the
problems you most cared about?

Imagine your company existed to serve

your positive impact in the world. 89
 BETTER WORK TOGETHER

What would you do with your life?

You might...
• Build and launch a product you are truly passionate about, build-
ing a livelihood doing what you love—making a positive impact
on the world.
• Engage with like-minded peers to deliver amazing, world-changing
projects that you could never do alone or within the constraints
of a nine-to-five job.
• Access and contribute to common resources that help create
opportunities for everyone in your community.
• Develop skills in community governance, leadership, negotiation,
and group dynamics that go well beyond your day-to-day work.
• Build lifelong relationships with inspiring people who will chal-
lenge and support you to grow.
• Transform how you think about yourself, how you impact the
world, and what is possible in your life.
This is not a fictional scenario. This is the ongoing experience and explo-
ration we’ve been living for more than eight years at Enspiral. What fol-
lows is a reflection on the key challenges, benefits and immense potential
that sits behind it all. At the heart of this experiment is an intersection
of mindsets; it is what happens when community meets business.

Building community is a business strategy.

The strategic challenge.
Building a business means thinking a lot about how to acquire, keep, and
grow a customer base. Huge amounts of resource goes into improving
our understanding of how we can serve customers and grow our busi-
ness. For ambitious organisations, who want to thrive over the long term
solving big meaningful problems, there is another more fundamental
enquiry: how do you attract and support the people you need to get the
right work done?

90
 All things being equal: when community is the business

This is important work.

Startups get funding based on the strength of their team. Bad hires and
team issues can quickly kill a small business. Growing organisations win
market share based on their ability to coordinate and execute togeth-
er. Large organisations survive disruption and thrive into the future on
their ability to innovate, stay competitive, and sometimes entirely rein-
vent themselves.
This isn’t easy work.

For a business, the economics of attracting and engaging amazing hu-

man beings are changing. Some cold, hard truths of modern society
mean we need to be evolving our thinking about how we build compa-
nies and engage highly skilled professionals:
• The industrialised workplace isn’t winning anymore.
More and more leaders, owners, workers, investors, and markets
are starting to recognise that many workplaces are failing to serve
our best interests. Arbitrary nine-to-five working hours that re-
quire long commute times and incremental pay-scale progressions
with fixed job descriptions make no sense in dynamic, creative
industries.
• People want purpose in their work. Corporations with all the
money in the world are struggling to engage or retain talented
people. Staff are churning through roles and organisations at un-
precedented rates. Meaningful work is becoming recognised as a
key motivational driver for the millennial generation. These signif-
icant shifts in attitude are rising up like a wave ready to wash over
our rusting, clunky industrial age economy.
• More people have more choice. For many ambitious profes-
sionals, the idea of a long-term career has been replaced by a
string of projects (and interesting work). The rise of the freelanc-
er and the gig economy means that work choices are becoming
more flexible. This leads to new employment models, different
structures and everyone to acquires new skills more quickly.

91
 BETTER WORK TOGETHER

The overall insight and challenge is very clear:

Organisations that best engage and grow

talented, caring people that will do the
best over time.
In a business context, these challenges might be framed as human re-
sources, innovation management, talent acquisition, or team-culture.
The underlying drives they represent point towards more fundamental
human truths that have been central in our lives long before the modern
workplace existed.
They are about belonging, purpose, and trust. They are about helping
people feel safe, connected, and cared for. They are about personal
growth and nurturing relationships.
These are the ancient, enduring challenges of community.

The return on investment in community.

To successfully use a community mindset to tackle strategic business
challenges, we must think about return on investment. Participating in
community is very different to just ‘showing up to a job’ but it’s still ‘real
work’ and takes committed energy. Supporting community to grow is
very different to owning or managing a business, but it takes a similar
level of drive and focus. So, what’s the point in taking on this challenge?
What makes the extra work worthwhile? What magic does a community
mindset enable?
Reflecting back, as someone drawn to Enspiral for the business oppor-
tunity rather than the idea of being in community, I’ve found three in-
sights to be profound and entirely unexpected from working this way.
Development: Evolution is a team sport.

It is hard to describe the transformative experience where you feel your

individual potential radically amplified by a supportive community.
Something happens. A conversation, an interaction or a new opportu-
nity emerges. Suddenly, you feel different about yourself and what you
can achieve in the world. The growth feels tangible, like you’ve grown an
extra limb or unlocked a new super power.
92
The community magic bubbles away silently behind the scenes, proj-
 All things being equal: when community is the business

ects start, companies grow, new people join, and structures evolve and
change. The value of strong community becomes clear as we learn to
pay attention to it, through the inspiration, motivation, and growth of
the people doing the work.
This growth can look like drastic changes in people’s physical, mental,
and spiritual health. It can look like strong relationships, new friends, or
marriages. It can look like awards and recognition, speaking opportuni-
ties, and new connections.
As business owners we see the measurable benefits of growing teams,
new ideas and innovative initiatives, great people showing up wanting
to help, and talented, engaged people deeply committed to the organi-
sation.

The truth under the metrics suddenly jumps out: our professional
growth and development is deeply impacted by the people around
us. Or, taking it all the way back to the schoolyard; you are who you
hang with.

Resilience: When the going gets tough, the community gets going.

In a company built through transactional relationships people move on

when the money stops coming in or a better offer comes along. And why
shouldn’t they? In an industrial economic model we are just rational units
of labour, framed by job descriptions, making self-interested decisions.
Positioned in a linear model, we make linear decisions about our careers.
An organisation built with the social bonds of belonging, relationships,
care, and sense of purpose is much more resilient than one stuck togeth-
er using employment contracts and job descriptions. Decision-making is
different when we think as whole humans.
People in community don’t stop working when the money stops; often
they work harder. Relationships kick in and teams galvanise, align, and
work out what to do together because they depend on each other and
deeply want each other to flourish. The connection to the mission burns
brighter and people dig in and find a way to make things work. In this en-
vironment, breakthroughs happen, new projects emerge, and challenges
improve the whole system.
This resilience-through-scarcity is critical for long-term endurance.
93
The challenge for the business is to recognise and develop these im-
 BETTER WORK TOGETHER

measurable bonds in a meaningful way. An all-hands meeting, a rousing

quarterly speech or poster on the wall won’t cut it.
The only real test of an organisation’s resilience is hard times. Hard
times eventually come to all. Projects will fail. Jobs will disappear.
Sectors will be disrupted. That is when people choose how to re-
act based on their social connections and shared commitment to a
mission. It won’t be perfect, it won’t work for everyone (and not al-
ways straight away), but in a healthy community when the pres-
sure goes up, things don’t break - that’s when the diamonds emerge.

Fearlessness: Anything is possible when people have your back.

Turning ambitious, unproven ideas into real action is challenging. It re-

quires an organisation to do something it hasn’t done before. It means
people doing things they haven’t done before. It means operating with
uncertainty, accepting risk, and embracing the potential of failure.
Being a ‘fearless innovator’ is a nice idea that makes inspiring memes.
But fearlessness is not (yet) a pill you can swallow. Fearlessness is com-
plex. We can’t buy it, and we all have different starting points with differ-
ent obstacles and privileges. What unites us all is that we all seek safety.
To truly put ourselves out there, we need to be confident enough in
ourselves and in the support of those around us to push through the
barriers, internal and external, real and imagined, that stand in our way.
To really extend ourselves we need to feel genuinely safe to fail.
For people committed to doing innovative, risky work, a community
safety net is priceless and powerful. As an entrepreneur, a safety net buys
you leverage and emboldens ambition. When you feel like your commu-
nity has your back, you feel safer to fail on every level. It’s OK to fail
financially. You’ll survive and more opportunities will come up. It’s OK
to fail emotionally, you’ll be supported to pick up the pieces and work
out what to do next. It’s OK to fail personally, you’ll learn, you’ll grow,
and you won’t be cast into the wilderness and rejected.
Regardless of what you are trying to achieve, a community can amplify
your dreams, challenge you to grow, and transform your sense of what
is possible. You can try more. You can take more risks. You can reach
higher.
94
 All things being equal: when community is the business

Equality is the secret sauce.

If a community mindset provides an advantage, then equality is the se-
cret sauce that drives the mindset. Equality is not an abstract notion or
‘core company value’ to talk about in the induction of new team mem-
bers. It is a constant practice that is improved over time. It only exists
when it is put into action. If we take the invitation, community can be
the literal, great equaliser of us all. It provides us with one of the greatest
gifts we can receive.
It is in the places where we can practice
being equals that the most important
work to develop ourselves can happen.

Not all equality practice is equal. We need to consider how our organisations
are designed and operated to enable (and disable) equality in different ways.

Structural equality.

The governance, power and operational control dynamics of most

businesses are rooted in structural decisions that are not designed to be
equal. Business structures generally centralise ownership (and financial
return) with a small group of owners and maximise efficiency by imple-
menting a command and control hierarchy. Equality can be a confronting
idea to raise in these spaces, specifically designed to be more powerful
than others.

Ownership and governance

Direction and strategy

Level of power

Management and control

Execution
95
 BETTER WORK TOGETHER

Who sits in the power rooms to decide how things are?

Which voices dominate these rooms? Which ideas get listened to?
Which ones ignored? Who makes the decisions at the end?

These questions strike right to the heart of where power is held in the
organisation.
Redesigning a business structure for equality is not always possible inside
inherited systems, especially where existing funding or legal relationships
are entrenched. However, recognising where power really sits can illumi-
nate the opportunity to change decision-making and cultural dynamics
at any level of an organisation.
How can owners engage as equals with employees? How can executive teams engage
as equals with investors, financiers and governance? How can working teams engage
as equals with their leaders and managers? How can juniors been seen as equals to
seniors?
As an overall system, Enspiral was structurally designed around prin-
ciples of equality. The central entity in the middle of the community,
Enspiral Foundation, serves as a vehicle where all members are treated
as equal shareholders with equal voice. No Enspiral member comes to a
conversation with more structural power than anyone else.
This structure has been central in helping us reinforce a culture of rec-
ognising and sharing power. This continues to ripple out to influence all
the ventures and initiatives in the wider ecosystem.

Cultural equality

Cultural equality can transcend structural limitations, as long as everyone

is willing to engage as equals and listen to each other.
Regardless of how entrenched or hierarchical the structure of an or-
ganisation, at some level people can always decide to engage informally
as equal people—not as job titles, managers, CEOs or board members.
However, building a culture of equality is not a decision that is signed
off by a leadership team and then magically happens. Making it actually
feel OK to act as cultural equals, regardless of position, payscale, or ex-
perience takes real work and commitment to ongoing practice.
96
A simple, profound and ongoing practice within the Enspiral commu-
 All things being equal: when community is the business

nity is the check-in. Before a significant meeting or gathering starts, re-

gardless of the internal or external stakeholders in the room, time is
assigned for everyone in the room to speak, uninterrupted, to ‘check in’
to the meeting.
The process is not intended to be a formal introduction and reinforce-
ment of status and job title. It is used as a chance to be human, vulnera-
ble, and open and becomes a profound reminder of equality.
It is a practice that brings relationships back to the human level. It often
has a radical effect on the outcome of the meeting and subsequent work.
It surfaces context that would never normally have been seen, it creates
openings for empathy and stronger relationships to form, it gives every-
one more understanding of the breadth of talent, passion and humanity
in the room.
With one person in the room speaking, uninterrupted and uncontested,
everyone else gets a chance to build their active listening skills, clear their
own minds and be present in the room. It is a recognised investment in
time, sometimes 15 minutes of a one-hour meeting may go into a full
round of checking in. This may seem like a challenge, but it invariably
creates more long-term alignment to get the ‘rest of the work’ done
together.
This practice builds self awareness in both the speaker and the lis-
teners, and becomes a cornerstone in a culture of honesty and sup-
port for people to be their full and whole self in the workplace.
Like any other learned skill, the more practice and commitment, the
stronger the results.

Making it personal

Working in spaces of structural or cultural equality can have profound

effects on how you operate professionally and make decisions (not to
mention how you treat people and see the world).
However, for this to happen significant personal experiences need the
space to land. These are the personal ‘aha’ moments where something
deeper shifts. These are the visible lightning strikes that come after the
slow build up of pressure inside the thundercloud.
They will arrive differently for each person and it is by paying attention
97
in a culture of equality that they are made possible.
 BETTER WORK TOGETHER

• By learning to listen more closely to how others are feeling,

or understanding what is going on for someone in their personal
life, you might realise how the weight of your voice lands in a way
you hadn’t intended.

• Recognising how you react and behave when your ideas are chal-
lenged, ignored, or disregarded, might change how you give feed-
back and value the ideas and efforts of others.

• Your understanding of group intelligence might shift while wait-

ing for your chance to speak in the closing circle of an event when
someone says the exact words you have in your mind.

• Disregarding positional hierarchy and authority to confront peo-

ple far older, more senior or high ranking might enable you to
have more influence than you expect, in circles that might have
seemed inaccessible before.

A culture of self development arises through these personal experienc-

es of feeling equal, challenged, and supported. In these experiences we
recognise and smooth our rough edges, we learn to listen, empathise,
and grow in confidence. Slowly we can begin to change our own expec-
tations of ourselves.

These types of realisations are deeply personal and difficult to engineer,

yet have lasting impact when a community can create the conditions for
them to happen.

A healthy balance creates a culture of mutual service between individual

growth and collective co-evolution. Community bonds prove strong and
resilient when the community is stressed by external challenges and lack
of resources.

People make breakthroughs on ambitious, daunting projects. The com-

munity enables people to operate at their top of their game. They are
not just fluffy, feel-good spaces, they are competitive structures that will
perform well in the marketplace.

This is where, as business owners, we all harvest and share the abundant
rewards of doing community well.
98
 All things being equal: when community is the business

Pointing towards a world that works better.

By supporting one community of entrepreneurs to build successful, im-
pact focused companies, Enspiral is adding a tiny sliver of capacity to
the global effort to help make the world a better place. But a couple
hundred people supporting each other to have a nice time together is
not going to make any meaningful impact on our global issues. So, what
are we actually doing?
Is Enspiral just creating a self-serving bubble of privilege for a few peo-
ple to grow up and create a livelihood together? What’s the point when
we need to fix climate change, structural inequality, systemic racism, and
plastic in the ocean? How is this going to help? What’s the hard problem
we are trying to solve here?
The answer is in the underlying structures that govern our individual
potential to make decisions and shift systems.
Systems change work isn’t about one tangible output. It’s not just about
solving plastic waste, or food miles, or government corruption, or fast
fashion. It’s about changing the underlying structures that enable and
disable how the world can work.
What would the world look like if…
• It was normal and expected that businesses in any industry were
run with equitable ownership, transparent control, and governing
decisions made accessible at all levels of the organisation?
• It was normal to engage equally and practice vulnerable, honest
self development alongside co-workers in our workplaces?
• It wasn’t an unusual privilege to earn your livelihood working on
problems you care about, where you could grow to be your best
self, surrounded by people who care for you?
Our exploration at the intersection of business and community moves
forward in the direction of these questions. It is through these questions
that we continue to envisage, test and improve the structures that enable
impact driven entrepreneurs to do their best work. When you keep pull-
ing the thread, it ultimately leads back to people.
All things being equal, every world-changing initiative, company, proj-
ect or institution achieves greatness with the same core inputs: beating
hearts and inspired minds. 99
 BETTER WORK TOGETHER

With this view, a central question of this whole

community / business experiment emerges: can these structures
and processes help support enough people to build the solutions
we need to transform the world?

There is a version of the world where people engage as equals in the

workplace, developing themselves and growing their resilience, ambi-
tion, and capacity for success alongside community.
There is a version of the world where people find the connection and
support they need to take the risks they have always wanted to take, to
do the things they have always wanted to do, to build their livelihoods in
line with their values.
There is a version of the world where all the people wanting to change
the world are enabled to spend more of their lives doing just that - and
we are all better off for it.

Our work continues, in service of that world.

100
 #ChangingTheFuture

All the
networks potential

money technology
opportunity

As
individuals countries

companies cities
communities

If we don’t have love,

we don’t have anything.
 The Open
Startup:
Copy / Improv / Share
By Anthony Cabraal

Enspiral is not a business that builds, protects, and sells intellectual property.
It is not a startup trying to disrupt and claim a market for the benefit of
shareholders or investors.
Enspiral is a way of organising and working together. It succeeds when
we all make the world work better for everyone. It is not designed to be
competitive, playing a zero-sum game against other organisations trying
to do the same thing.
The pages of this book tell our stories of dreaming, experimenting,
and iterating, and the ongoing development of enabling structures and
patterns that support a community of people to earn their livelihood.
These structures are now supporting some ambitious companies to
launch products and people to do work to drive a social mission.
How can a small group of people doing this kind of work have meaningful
impact on the world?

There is a chance that the companies we build impact markets, change

behaviour, and influence how we solve specific problems in our society.
There is a chance that the people we support and connect with might
have some notable influence in the work they choose to do.
However, as a community, the more progress we make, the more we
recognise that our most powerful, impactful work is the processes,
102
systems, and culture we are developing as we go.
This is what this book is all about.
If Enspiral continues developing innovative, entrepreneurial methods
of organising together to deliver impactful work, then perhaps we can
influence how other people choose to build their livelihoods, design
their companies, and invest their resources.
We want to make the most useful parts of our culture as replicable as
possible. By codifying replicable chunks of organisational DNA, we can
seed more participatory, collaborative, impactful organisational culture
to grow in many forms, in any sector, in any market, all around the world.
Building new pathways for how society can work isn’t easy. Challeng-
ing and replacing existing dominant paradigms doesn’t come cheap, or
quickly. There aren’t many direct precedents to copy, which means we
bear the cost (and risk) of pioneering and invention. It requires entrepre-
neurship and persistent, focused effort.
We know a new, different, and radically better world of work is needed.
We’re making slow and steady progress, and we know we aren’t the only
ones doing the work. It is being built every day, by many people, invisible
brick by invisible brick.
If more people, more organisations, and more communities recognise
and contribute to this work, we will build our better future faster.

Our invitation is to copy the patterns,

processes and ideas that make sense to you.
We want to support you to test them and
improve them within your own context.
We encourage you to continue to share
learnings and improvements openly.

We all know we need some

new solutions in our world.
We know no one has
all the answers when they start.
We have made plenty of mistakes.
We’ve made some good progress.
We have a much longer journey ahead of us.

Let’s work out the future of working together, together. 103

 Where did
‘The Open Startup’
idea come from?
Two strands of culture that have greatly influenced the devel-
opment of Enspiral have been The Lean Startup and the Open
Source movements.
Eric Ries’ book The Lean Startup (http://theleanstartup.
com/) gave an identity to a new way of thinking about build-
ing companies. The work borrowed best practice processes
from waste reduction in manufacturing and applied it to how
founders could think when they start a business. One of the
fundamental lessons from ‘lean startup’ is to focus on building
measurable experiments that are as small (and cheap) as possi-
ble in order to be effective. Working this way means ideas grow
and iterate with constant feedback from customers, minimising
wasted effort and resources. This helps founders to avoid ar-
chitecting a grand system or spending a long time developing
an expensive product that may not be needed by the market.
The process suggests the primary challenge of any startup
business is to run experiments to build something, measure the
results, and integrate the learning before repeating the process.
Executed successfully, the result will be faster, cheaper, more
effective ways of developing the right product for the right
people at the right price.

104
It could be argued that the Open Source movement does
not have one founder or specific origin point. It is a broad
set of ideas and principles that encompasses commercial li-
cences for software code, ethical frameworks, communities
of practice, and advocacy groups. Underlying the movement
is a mindset that encourages transparency of work, making
collaboration and participation accessible to anyone, and
encouraging people to innovate with existing resources as
much as possible. Open Source culture and tools are respon-
sible for shaping much of the early growth and infrastruc-
ture of the modern internet. The principles are also begin-
ning to be applied outside of software in government, data,
hardware, art, and business practices.
Using an Open Source mindset encourages thinking be-
yond your own project and business to recognise the wider
ecosystem of partners and collaborators who might gain
value from your work. It is a reminder that to solve complex
problems (like how to build the internet) leveraging many
minds is better than only using a few.

105
 Blueprints for a community
that works together
By Anthony Cabraal

Unbundling a complex, dynamic organisation into ‘clean theory’

requires some creative licence. This breakdown outlines different
layers of Enspiral as a cohesive total system that is simple, clear
and replicable.

It starts with a mission

106
As members and shareholders
of a central legal entity
Members MVB
are equal shareholders A ‘minimal viable board’
of Enspiral Foundation. of directors for the Foundation is elected
Constitution dictates no by the membership. The board takes
personal financial return responsibility for the legal compliance
from shareholding. of the entity.

Enspiral Foundation Ltd This entity exists to serve the

is a registered company community as a vehicle for
(New Zealand) with a the shared social mission.
non-profit constitution.
• Runs core financial operations
• Legally owns Enspiral brand

Members engage as active citizens of the community,

with a relationship predicated on participation
rather than profit extraction. 107
 As members and Members invite trusted
contributors to the community
contributors of and act as cultural stewards.

a community All members and contributors

choose their own financial
contributions toward the
community commons.

Everyone in the community engages each other

as equal human beings.
108
 As active Members and contributors
choose to opt in and participate
participants of in community working groups.
Sponsored catalysts act as
a community sense-makers, facilitators and
coordinators of action.

Community enables new experiments,

testing ideas, and building connections.

Working groups act as organs that maintain

critical functions to ensure a healthy community.
109
 As collaborative Members and contributors in the
community own and run ventures.
ventures Ventures define their own value
exchange with the community.

• Creating opportunities for each other.

• Providing operational infrastructure

and services to each other.

• Sharing resources and learning together.

An ecosystem of companies with distributed ownership and

control, representing a diversity of methods and tactics.
110
As an interconnected system

The Ventures

The Mission

The People The

Community
functions

It’s not one company. T  here isn’t one person in charge.

It’s is a changing, growing system.
The future is unwritten…
111
 handbook.enspiral.com By Anthony Cabraal

How do you develop structure, rules How do you build cultural coherence How do new people and outsiders
and agreements in a community in a vibrant community system that joining the community make sense
founded on principles of radical encourages innovation and trying of things without years of context
autonomy and non-hierarchy? new things? and relationships?

For Enspiral, part of the answer to these questions comes through our open, public handbook.
A single source of impermanent truth Hold the truth tightly or lightly?

handbook.enspiral.com is publicly available online for Written documents, policies and guides will always, at
anyone to read, download, fork, or translate. It is open best, be one or two steps behind the truth of the day.
for anyone in the community to update or contribute This is especially true in a fast moving, dynamic
towards. organisation without centralised control.

It was written to help the community align around our The goal is to create a resource that reflects the current
core agreements and share practices and processes for processes without enslaving you to them when they no
getting things done together. longer serve.

It is a living document. It grows and changes. Different voices in the community will recognise and
respect written policies in different ways. It is important
to recognise the spectrum of opinion in your community:
 “These are our policies.
It is critical that we all read,
“The words don’t really matter, understand, and abide by
the process to align around them is them when we are doing our “We should
what matters. Once they are written work as a community.” invest in ensuring there is
down they are only really useful accountability and
“Without
when we need to resolve follow-through on all
agreements we
difficulties or issues.” agreements.”
don’t have a
community.”

“We should just focus on

getting the work done in “If people are working “We should always
whatever way suits us rather well together outside of the ensure we keep agreements
than having too many official agreements that is and documents up to date
agreements and rules fine, as long as they are and create new ones
in the way.” happy and getting work as we need too.”
done.”
 Sometimes the work isn’t easy. We hosted several group
conversations to reflect on the
So much is invisible or unknown. harder, hidden parts of this work.
Things don’t go to plan. This is a harvest of insights,
reflections and ideas on the topics
Not everyone agrees. of power, control, privilege, and
the social complexities that
Things fail. arise when ambitious ideas
People get hurt. are put into action.
These insights are paraphrased and
condensed from the thinking of many
hearts and minds.

Collated by Gina Rembe-Stevens

Contributing voices: Respecting

Nati Lombardo, Sarah Houseman,
Anake Goodall, Charmaine Meyers,
different voices
Richard Bartlett, Francesca Pick,
Damian Sligo-Green, Teddy Taptiklis, I am interested in the manifestation
Susan Basterfield, Anthony of extroverted power as authority:
Cabraal, Silvia Zuur, Nanz Nair. the deep voice, speaking with confi-
dence, answering quickly, speaking
authoritatively and categorically.
Hierarchy and capitalism I see a lot of it, from communities
like Enspiral right through to cor-
Hierarchy means someone higher up tells porate boards I’m on. Early movers
you what to do. Fewer people are in have the power in conversations.
control at the top of the pyramid, and
What interests me more is the quiet
more people are doing what they are told
person who’s deeply introverted,
further down. Challenging the dynamics of who processes more slowly with less
hierarchy goes hand in hand with challenging confidence, and who is perceived as
capitalism. Capitalism keeps people small. being quiet or disengaged. What’s
It is designed to have winners and losers. not being said and who’s not speak-
Not everyone will have enough; this power ing? How do we invite those people
and create space for them? How do
disparity is maintained using hierarchy.
we recognise this need and practise
We end up with billionaires extracting
getting better at it?
profit from companies while workers
114
struggle to live on the wages they earn.
 Power and
Privilege of place
privilege are linked
In largely volunteer-run organisations like A lot of us are based in New
Enspiral, you need high context to do the work. Zealand. It’s a place with a
social security system, where
If you are privileged with income and spare time, you can feel safe to fail. We can
you have more capacity to engage, which is crucial experiment, and if it doesn’t
to gaining power and influence in the network. work, you’re still safe, because
you won’t be homeless or
The ones closer to the middle of the circle, who starve. This is less common in
have more capacity to be engaged whether it’s other parts of the world.
mental, physical, or energetic capacity
are the ones who earn more influence This privilege is even stronger in
Wellington. Government, which
and social capital. is based here, is a client of
some of our products
commercially. Wellington
provides a noticeable intimacy
Just keeping up is real work of place and relationship.
Enspiral grew here for a reason.
Sometimes it’s hard to keep up,
let alone find time to contribute to
the ever-changing context and deep
and thoughtful conversations about the
future of the community.

There is always a temptation to do more, and it’s

easy to burn out. To be sustainable, communi-
ties need to be aware of this and provide care.
Every community of purpose has grappled with
the capacity and burnout question. Burned out
people can’t do their best work in the world.

What is non-hierarchy actually about?

We often talk about non-hierarchy, but that’s saying what we’re not, not what
we are. Hierarchy is the distance between the people making decisions and the
people affected by those decisions. We’re talking about reducing that distance.
Ideally, there would be no distance at all.

If hierarchy is the model, then power relationships are the practice.

Power is manifest through practices. What we are is healthy power
relationships and practices.
115
 Exclusivity Learning the weight
of your words
Enspiral originated as
group of IT contractors. Three or four years ago
Some of our language is IT-based, I didn’t have the power
which can be a stumbling block. in the community that I
It felt exclusive. I almost dropped have now. When I spoke
out because it seemed too hard to in a circle, the weight of
understand what people my words was not the
were talking about. same as it is now.

Even if I was as fierce

We are a really about what I was try-
computer-literate group, ing to get across or it
relatively speaking. What does was just as important,
this require from people who it didn’t land the same.
That feeling is very hard
don’t have that background to
to describe. You can learn
find a way to really to be conscious of the
embed themselves in the weight of your words,
community? and how they are landing
with other people.

That’s a skill that directly

relates to understanding
Leadership your individual power.
without hierarchy
In the work of dismantling hierarchy,
it’s important to consider experience, influence,
expertise, and capacity. It’s romantic to think that
everyone in a group situation has the same power;
that’s a confronting conversation. It becomes easier
when we start to acknowledge that soft power
comes in different forms. It’s
all about
We should redefine the role of power
supporting people
and talk more about leadership.
We should be talking about stewarding,
The best model we’ve come up with to
facilitating, and coordinating. Instead of
support this work is to offer support to each
empowering others, it’s about holding
other. It may be social, emotional or financial
space for them to step into power.
support, and it differs for every person.
Rather than a blueprint of non-hierarchy,
perhaps we’ve created a blueprint of
supporting a whole lot of amazing,
well-rounded, effective, passionate,
and caring humans to do great
116 work in the world.
 We need management,
not managers
Even though the role of manager may be redundant, the function of
management—of tasks, work, and people— is still needed. This function
can take the form of coaching, guiding, and supporting, rather than
coercion or direct power from a job title. It comes down to how people
can be supported to manage themselves and develop the skills they
need, rather than relying on someone to tell them what to do.

Confronting power
Its about people leads to self awareness
In hierarchy, we can blame the structure Acknowledging your own power, and recognising
for any wrongdoings, and deflect how you wield it is a secret piece of work that
responsibility to others. changes how you think. Just saying, ‘I have more
But can we blame a structure when power or influence,’ doesn’t happen much in our
it is just the sum part of the behaviour
society. Maybe that’s one of the biggest wake-up
of individuals? On a fundamental level,
it is just about how we as calls people get at Enspiral. Everyone has had
humans behave, and relate some sort of journey of personal development
to each other. and self-awareness in this community.
That sort of journey itself is a privilege,
Whether or not we work in and really valuable for
hierarchical ways—clarity is key. everyone involved.
When power and responsibility are clearly
assigned, so that we can consciously opt
into power and responsibility, working in
a hierarchy can be empowering. A clear Influence
dictatorship is better than a murky, faux and responsibility
non-hierarchical situation. are earned
Over time at Enspiral,
we’ve learnt to distinguish
between the coercive
power that someone holds
over another person, and
The power of meeting offline the social power that
someone has earned
I have witnessed online conversations where I’ve, seen a from their contributions
change of tack and wondered what happened—only to to a group over time.
realise that an offline conversation had happened to help They don’t just happen,
resolve a conflict. The importance of being physically they have to be earned.
present, face-to-face, is hard to overstate. There are very The balance is between
few people who’ve only connected with us only online respecting someone who
and managed to understand large amounts of context and has earned influence while
stick around for very long. For most of us, it all depends on not putting them on a ped-
starting and building relationships in the real world. estal or creating a fixed
power dynamic. 117
 BETTER WORK TOGETHER

How to grow In a pyramidal structure, leadership

is concentrated at the top.
But what if your organisa�on is

distributed more like a network, community,

or ecosystem?

leadership
How does leadership without bosses grow?
How can I grow as a leader if there’s no
ladder to climb?
by Alanna Irving

4. Flowering:
Growing Leadership You see that long-term success depends on
constantly nurturing more leadership. You cra�
opportuni�es for people to step up, even when
The ul�mate success is growing so you think you could do it be�er or faster yourself.
much leadership that you make People feel safer prac�sing leadership skills with
yourself obsolete. your support.

3. Sprouts: Leading Others

Coordina�on without hierarchy You can see how a project
is the art of facilita�on. fits into the big picture.
You design and implement effec�ve systems and You help groups delegate,
processes to distribute power. You have a knack communicate, and
for unblocking people. You’re a mentor to people collaborate, without
learning about self-leadership. coercion.

2. The Seed: Self-Leadership

Distributed leadership begins with leading yourself .
You can iden�fy and execute work on your own. You set good boundaries.
Both your 'yes' and your 'no' are powerful, because you only make
commitments you can keep. You adapt and collaborate. You know and
communicate your preferred ways of working. You can weave yourself
into a project usefully.

1. The Soil: Shared Power

You can’t just declare 'There are no bosses,' and expect
everyone to 'self organise'. Hidden hierarchies will
emerge and distributed leadership will die on the vine.
Power doesn’t just come from posi�onal authority, like a job �tle. It accrues
118 to people for a lot of reasons, like founder status, communica�on style,
gender, age, and skills. Power dynamics will always exist. What’s important
is how a group deals with power.
 5. Pollina�on: Ecosystem Leadership
Ecosystem leaders work across all these modes of leadership,
and think about impact beyond their own community.
How can we create catalysts who seed new collabora�ve communi�es?
How can we support network-to-network collabora�on?

How can we restructure our communi�es, ci�es, and companies

so everyone can lead? How can we change societal power
structures? How can we give more people access to shared
power? How do we coordinate collec�ve ac�on without fla�ening
diversity? What are processes, structures, and ideas that create
whole new levels of collec�ve agency?

You are a mentor to others working to distribute power.

Your track record of gaining consent engenders trust.

You implement systems for support, accountability, transparency, and

con�nuous improvement that can operate without your direct involvement.
You cri�que power on a systemic level: if the pathway to leadership isn’t
accessible to everyone, it means there are seeds le� unsprouted.

Harvest: Growing
Understanding
You’re good at building and nurturing teams,
apprecia�ng people’s differences and preferences. In a collabora�ve environment,
You synthesise diverse perspec�ves into con�nuous we’re moving around each other
improvement.
constantly—giving and taking,
You facilitate ongoing cri�cal engagement about leading and following.
power, and use any that accrues to you to create
ways for distribu�ng it.
• If someone tried to step into leadership here,
is there room for them to grow?
Experts at self-leadership know • What power am I holding? Can I distribute it?
when to follow. • Am I taking care of myself? Do I have
self-awareness? What do I need to learn?
You can take instruc�ons and communicate when you
need help. You contribute to con�nuous improvement • In a given situa�on, do I want to work on my
and share ownership of outcomes. You’ve developed a own, collaborate, follow, or lead? Can I see
cri�cal level of self-awareness and prac�ce self-directed, how to make my most valuable contribu�on?
con�nuous personal and professional development. • Am I crea�ng opportuni�es for other
Skillful self-leadership builds credibility, crea�ng to do their best work?
possibili�es for engaging in other modes of leadership • Who is showing leadership around me?
in the future.
Am I no�cing it and learning from it?
• Do I know when to step in, and when
If the culture is hos�le to ques�oning power, to step back?
co-leadership can’t flourish. To have an effec�ve • Am I building systems that don’t depend
cri�que of power, everyone needs a voice. on me directly?
In the absence of an explicit hierarchy, those with power • Am I thinking long term about growing
have a responsibility to recognise that and proac�vely leadership in my environment?
distribute it.
• Am I contribu�ng to the wider discourse 119
about leadership evolu�on?
 Rye sourdough bread.
For two loaves, takes 24 hours
Breaking bread
Recipe and Reflection by Doris Zuur
At the table
There sits between us Find a starting culture.
A wild ferment Sourdough bread is baked from a live yeast culture.
If you do not have a starting culture, instructions for making
one are outlined below. A much better way, however, is to make
And as we fill our bellies a call out into your community to find a starter. Use it as an
We may also fill our hearts excuse for a coffee - meet up and chat when you go to pick it
up. Starter cultures often spread throughout the community
As our conversation simmers and can stay alive for years. Discover its origin story,
and make a new friend.
It may reveal a savoury broth

And this can be the basis We have one circulating around

For a life that’s steeped in love Paekakariki, New Zealand with a reputation
of being over a hundred years old!
Mine is five years old. This year, I dehydrated it, spread it out on baking paper
Connecting together over food is a fundamental and let it dry for 24 hours. I travelled around the world with these dehydrated starter
building block of community. Taking the time crumbs and left a bit of my starter culture wherever I went. It only takes one
tablespoon of the starter into a new mixture and the original culture carries on.
to ferment sourdough culture and make bread
is a powerful reminder of ancient processes Think of your personal life, your story, your mission, your legacy. What will live on
that teach us the wisdom of patience. beyond you? A story, a song, a poem, a start-up (or is it ‘starting-culture'?),
a nature sanctuary, a policy, a family tradition, a recipe…
it only needs a spoonful and your legacy will live on.
After all, good things take time.
Ingredients Step 2: Making the bread Starting a starter culture
1 tablespoon of sourdough starter culture Add the following to the dough you have prepared: If you don’t have a starter culture,
4 cups of rye flour • 2 tablespoons of molasses (or treacle) you can make one.
2 tablespoons molasses (or treacle) • 3 tablespoons of oil (rice bran, grape seed or sunflower oil etc., Mix ½ cup of rye flour with ½ cup of warm
3 tablespoons of oil not olive oil as the flavour of olive oil is too strong; olive oil is water and let sit it for two days at room
(rice bran, grape seed or sunflower oil) used for pizza dough) temperature. Then make a new mixture of
2 level teaspoons of salt • 2 flat teaspoons of salt ½ cup of rye flour with ½ cup of warm water
5 cups mixed flour and add one tablespoon of the first mixture
Mix well with a sturdy wooden spoon, and only then, when above to this second mixture and discard the first
Optional ingredients are mixed in well, add the remaining flour: mixture. Repeat this process every two days
Mixed seeds: Linseeds, sunflower seeds, until the mixture looks and feels ‘alive’
sesame seeds. About 4 ½ - 4 ¾ cups of flour in whatever ratio and combination (10 – 14 days) and then proceed to bread
you like (eg. half white/half wholemeal, or more rye, or include baking using this as your starter culture.
¼ cup of rolled oats), adding the flour gradually until it just starts to
come ‘off the bowl’,clumping together into a ball, but still too sticky
to knead. You could also add some sunflower seeds, sesame or
linseed seeds. Hold the spoon at the bottom of the handle to get
better leverage, or you might otherwise break the spoon! When we eat
Step 1: Preparing the dough May we be nourished
In the morning (or evening), mix In our bodies
4 cups of warm water In our beings
4 cups of rye flour
1 tablespoon of starter culture. Step 3: Baking the bread In our actions
Mix well and let stand at room temperature
for 12 hours. Should be ‘alive’ after 12 hours. Put the sticky mixture into two oiled tins and leave for another 12 hours
Now you have a bowl full of renewed starter! and bake in the morning (or evening), in preheated oven on fan bake,
And may that sustenance
2000C, for 20 minutes, and then turn down to 1800 for another 30 - 40 min. Flow into the lives
Save some of this mixture away as renewed Of all those that we meet
starter culture. Store it in the fridge and The actual time will strongly depend on your type of oven. Put an
discard the old starter. ovenproof dish full of water in the oven at the same time, to provide extra
moisture. Remove loaves promptlyfrom the tins so they remain crusty. So everyone may be sated
This culture will stay well for around 4 weeks.
Each time you make a loaf you can If they stick to the tins, let them sit in their tins sideways for five minutes, So everyone may break bread
renew/replace your starter culture. and then try again. If you like it extra crusty, you can put them back in the
oven for five minutes, after you have taken them out of their tins. Poems by Lucy Carver
123
The Ceremony of Meeting

As we all spend more and more time ‘in the

virtual’, this strange form of relating with our
fellow human beings online, I suspect that
the power of meeting ‘in person’ will grow
and grow.

Perhaps we will rediscover the art of connecting face to

face, in community, as a sacred act. Maybe it takes a crisis
to bring us together. Or it might be something we do when
we recognise some new potential, or when we know that
we have important work to do together. Perhaps it is when
we notice love is present.
As our technology continues to evolve and our behaviour
changes along with it, how might we honour the deeper
intention of meeting? How can we make the time we have
together in physical space truly exceptional?
This is not an abstract question. If we are travelling hundreds of miles,
spending thousands of dollars, and burning tonnes of carbon in order
to be together for a few days, we need the experience to be exceptional,
important and purposeful. Our world needs remarkable outcomes from
our meetings like never before.
Perhaps to envisage this new future we must look backwards, and
remember the power of ceremony.

The power of simplicity

Over time, ceremony can become elaborate - costumes, incantations,
songs and dances, smoke and mirrors, obscure rites and rituals, priests
and priestesses. Traditional ceremonies can be very beautiful and power-
ful, but they can also seem arcane, superstitious, and foreign, especially
when you are not familiar with them.
125
 Ceremony can also be very simple, and perhaps in that simplicity there
exists another kind of power. According to Joseph Campbell, ceremony
is composed of three elements:

1 Severance
We have to be willing to leave the known world behind. This is
the price of entry. If you are not willing to pay this price and
step out of your comfort zone, ceremony is not for you. If you
are willing, we can begin our journey.

2 Threshold
Having left the known world behind, the task is always to find
our own threshold. We can make the journey together, but
each one of us has to find our own unique purpose for the
journey. What is the line that you are nearly ready to cross?
What is the risk that you have not yet taken?

3 Return
Your personal adventure might have been a success, or a fail-
ure, simply confusing, or perhaps even incomplete. Whatever
it was, at some point you have to come home, back to the fa-
miliar world you know, and back to your people. What did you
learn? Who are you now? Who are we as a result?
The gift of ceremony is so simple that it is easy to miss, so I will try to
be very clear about it here.
As we grow up and get further into our lives, we will want to get to places
that are not accessible to our present self, or in our current identity. We
(hopefully) have aspirational goals that we simply cannot reach from our
everyday ‘normal’ state of consciousness. In other words, when it comes
to achieving some the things we most want or need in life, oftentimes we
can’t get there from here.
Sometimes we need to let go of where and who we are now. We need to
cross a line, to come back a ‘different person’, and to a ‘different place’.
We need trusted community to witness and share our new identity so we
can recognise our new selves and know how to bring these new gifts to
the world. Then we find ourselves in a new reality where our goals and
126
visions are suddenly within reach, or at least within sight.
To reach these exceptional destinations of transformation, revelation,
connection to deep purpose, and insight, we may need to rediscover the
art of creating ceremony.
There are a thousand ways to kneel
and kiss the ground

There are so many ways to create and incorporate

ceremony into our social process.
• The journey can be elaborate or simple. It can be dressed up or
dressed down. It might take the shape of a multi-day corporate
retreat. It might be a hiking trip into the mountains. It might be a
two-hour strategic planning meeting. Let the people and context
help create the form that will best serve the groups needs at the
time.
• There are no rules, or right or wrong concepts. It might be a
‘deep dive’, or ‘four quadrants’ exercise, or a ‘hero’s journey’ or
‘six stage design-thinking’. There are many great books to read,
methods to follow, and maps to guide you. Try to avoid process
fundamentalism and don’t be afraid to experiment.
• It is useful to consider the role of the participants and the role
of the hosts or guides. Having some trusted friends who are will-
ing not to participate and can hold the space, manage logistics,
and support people in their individual and collective processes
are invaluable. They might be from in your tribe, or people you
bring in ‘from outside’. Trust is the key, and usually is earned as
you go along.
Whatever spaces you chose to create together, the challenge of using
ceremony is the challenge of embracing a paradox. The process of gath-
ering as a group is deeply rational - there needs to be a purpose, and a
design, and people need to be organised to get there and back again.
When we get there, we need to be open to the non-rational. Our rational
minds keep us trapped in what we think we already know, often arguing
with other people who think they already know something different.
Ceremony is the key to this door. It is the timeless way out of the ‘prison
of the known’ world. It is an invitation to ‘get lost’.

Only when we are lost can we find ourselves again, find

new ideas and possibilities, and perhaps most importantly
can we find the other people who we need to work with on
127
this great adventure called life.
 Doing what we can
only do together By Susan Basterfield

“....there is something about building up a comradeship

— that I still believe is the greatest of all feats — and
sharing in the dangers with your company of peers....”
~ Sir Edmund Hillary

Sharing in the dangers of building a business, or working together to

achieve a specific goal is fairly commonplace. Although most stories of
outrageous success focus on one person’s dream or vision or leadership,
we recognise that there are always others supporting or contributing. But
to truly do something together, as a collective of peers, is much rarer.
How do we nurture and develop our individual gifts for better work
together?

What does it take to build a comradeship?

How do we develop as individuals so that we can
engage as true peers?

As individuals, our ego and velocity propel us through life. However, it

is in community that we really learn how to be. For most of us, this hap-
pens primarily in two places: first at school and later, at work. A common
assumption is that school is for learning things and practising relation-
ships beyond our immediate family unit. We learn how to play together,
to build together. We feel what it’s like to be laughed at or bullied, and,
if we are honest, often what it feels like to laugh at and bully others. We
share ideas and have our first experiences of groupthink; we learn what
it’s like to be on a team and what it’s like to win and lose. We fall in love
and have our hearts broken. We work hard and learn that’s sometimes
not enough. All of this happens in the classroom and in the schoolyard.
It’s expected that developing as humans is part of the deal - it’s acknowl-
128 edged and usually encouraged.
What changes when we enter the workplace? One theory is that the
workplace is just for working - a place for solving problems and ex-
tracting value from each other. It is a place of mechanical optimisation
- not a place for ongoing psychosocial development. Even in organi-
sations that espouse purpose beyond profit, there is no assumption or
requirement that they will nurture the human needs of the people who
work there. And yet there is an increasing understanding of how critical
it is to maintain ourselves in supportive, developmental environments.
We are discovering that our brains have the capacity to continually evolve:

Scientists used to think that brain connections developed at a rapid

pace in the first few years of life, until you reached your mental peak in
your early 20s. Your cognitive abilities would level off at around middle
age, and then start to gradually decline. We now know this is not true.
Instead, scientists now see the brain as continuously changing and
developing across the entire life span1.

What would happen if we designed our workplaces

to support our individual and collective evolution?

Leaders we admire strive to lead from a place of service to the whole

- creating opportunities for those they lead to flourish. However, there
are far fewer stories of organisations focused on doing this work to-
gether. Fewer yet are stories about organisations
where it is encouraged and expected
that work should be a place where
we can process our shadows,
recognise our neuroses,
and gently support one
another to keep on
developing.

129
1 https://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/how-memory-and-thinking-ability-change-with-age
 When we do the work collectively, we change ourselves.

At Enspiral we can tell one of those stories. Maybe because it all began with a
group of twenty-somethings. Maybe because it grew up in a small, connected
university city. Maybe because it was both those things and the lines between
educational and work environments got blurred somehow. Maybe it was the
radical ambition to shift the whole world. Or maybe it was just the overt ex-
pressions of compassion and doing ‘stuff that matters’ that left those edges
raw. Something about Enspiral has always honoured and nurtured the ‘inside
work’. Enspiral has never been simply about earning money, it’s also always
been about our hearts.

“Those who build the house are built by the house”

~ Founding Proverb - Tapu Te Ranga Marae

130
When we move beyond our concept of leadership being one benevolent
person doing good for the rest, and into a true comradeship of peers,
we move into the realm of danger and discovery. Sir Ed didn’t climb Mt.
Everest on his own - and he didn’t do it in one go. The team comes to-
gether, toils together, goes up, comes back down, acclimatises, waits out
storms, humbles itself in deference to what it can only do together. This
isn’t the work of the individual, but the individual must do their work to
be prepared for the work of the team.
Together, through the challenge, we gain strength. Together we support
each other to learn, to dig in and to expand the realm of what’s possible.
Together teams scale mountains.

What are the mountains we

can only climb together?

131
 sense

inquire
optimise

maintain envision

vi
si
op

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at

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io
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operationalise prototype

Alanna Irving
evaluate http://alanna.space

Full Circle Leadership

Leadership takes many different forms, particularly in dynamic, partici-
patory environments where it’s decoupled from positional authority and
job titles. Our challenge is to recognise all the different forms of lead-
ership needed for new projects to progress and communities to grow.
Full Circle Leadership is a model that helps us recognise and celebrate
different forms of leadership, and understand the different phases of
executing work together.
The Full Circle Leadership model works on two levels:
• a way to understand and visualise diverse kinds of leadership

132 • a way to map the innovation and execution lifecycle of projects

Full Circle Leadership is a recognition that aspects of leadership are
found across a range of people with diverse strengths. Groups that can
recognise and balance leadership across the circle will more successfully
engage their full leadership potential.
Work can proceed through the eight stages in different ways, but the
process of going all the way around enables the engine of innovation
and execution to turn over successfully. The last stage of the circle leads
naturally back to the first, opening up the possibility of an upward spiral
of increasing collective capacity.
For each type of leadership, there is a persona, an archetype we might
recognise in those who excel at it; a measure, indicating whether an
environment is conducive to that type; and a shadow, representing the
flip-side or risks.

Sense Persona: the nurturer

Measure: vulnerability
The leadership of empathy Shadow: overwhelm

You are a spider. Something small touches the far side of your web.
The vibration tingles your leg.
You’ve been reading the online discussion. You went to the event and
heard people talking. You brought someone a cup of tea and they shared
their thinking. You’ve got feelers out. You are practising the skills of
noticing and listening.
This same topic has come up in several conversations. Interesting.
You gossip. Gossip in your culture is about how to help people and build
them up, not about cutting them down. You help create a community
that is a safe space for sensitivity, your own and others.

Where you thrive:

The work of listening and the skill of noticing are acknowledged,
valued, and selected for. People aren’t stuck in silos — they can sense
across the whole. Sensitivity, vulnerability, and openness are seen as
133
strengths.
 Inquire Persona: the facilitator
Measure: inclusion
The leadership of contextualisation Shadow: permission-seeking

You’ve got an intuition and you want to explore it. You put it out there:
Has anyone else noticed this?
You’re seeing it from different angles. Who has experience here? Have
people worked on this before? You know how to identify stakeholders
and go talk to them. You are a relationship builder. Your questioning is
a kind of support, not an accusation or overstep.
You had some assumptions, but you’ve let them go. What you first
thought to be the problem turned out to be a symptom of a larger issue.
You’re seeing connections. When you pull this thread here, that knot
tightens there. Interesting.
You understand the attention economy. You hold this issue up next to
others. Is it a priority right now? Do people want change? You move
forward when you feel that mandate from the group.

Where you thrive:

Questioning is not taken as criticism, and past failures are shared as valu-
able lessons instead of being hidden away. Changing one’s mind and
letting go of assumptions is seen as a sign of strength. Skilled facilitators
are recognised and recruited.

Envision Persona: the dreamer

Measure: creativity
The leadership of aspiration Shadow: distraction
Something is forming in your imagination. It’s new and exciting. You’re
inspired. Your creativity is flowing. You’re ideating in the shower. You’re
furiously drawing maps of unknown territories.
You’ve got the courage to imagine a future that’s different—better. You
are fueled by the pain of the problem, but your act of creation is deeply
optimistic. In your mind, you’re already living in the new reality.
Unfamiliarity and risk enlivens you. You are courageous in the face of
change, even giddy. With a broad brush, you paint castles in the sky.
The hugeness of the possibility is calling to you. The gravity of the op-
portunity is pulling you in, and spreading beyond just you. You’re a story-
134 teller. Your passion starts to bring others with you.
Where you thrive:
Innovation encouraged, and dynamic change is welcomed as the essence
of living systems. No one will shut you down just because your think-
ing is unfamiliar. There space for exploration. Past failures are accepted,
even celebrated, so you want to go again. You aren’t hemmed in by arti-
ficial boundaries.

Prototype Persona: the hacker

Measure: efficacy
The leadership of experimentation Shadow: obsession

You’ve drawn some architectural plans for your castle in the sky. You’ve
created a scale model to interact with.
You hone in on the fastest, cheapest, most achievable way to test your
key assumptions. It’s a hacked version of that off-the-shelf tool, or a
hand drawn simulation — ugly, but functional.
You’re lean and mean, knowing what not to care about yet. You’re
watching the local attention economy. Are people feeling the pain this
idea solves, or will it just be a distraction? A critical mass has to be willing
to engage.
You’ve shoulder-tapped some willing guinea pigs, who represent key
stakeholders and personas. You’ve prepared the context, the READ-
ME, the instructions. You’ve imbued the invitations with your genuine
enthusiasm.
Where you thrive:
Your community is open-minded, and used to trying out new things,
even if they’re held together by bubblegum. If it doesn’t work at first,
people cheer you on instead of punishing you. There’s enough patience
and long-term thinking to invest in testing and feedback before jumping
straight to implementation.

Evaluate Persona: the scientist

Measure: integrity-
The leadership of measurement Shadow: cynicism

You show care through critical analysis. This is the moment right before
things start to get expensive. Before the build begins  is the  time to make 135
 sure you’ve got it right. You are compelled to get beyond your feelings,
intuitions, biases, and blind spots. It has to be rigorous.
It’s a survey, or a series of interviews, or quantitative data. You do the
legwork . You’re constantly tracking to the original purpose, the key
questions, and the assumptions that needed testing.
You understand how to get people to respond usefully. Your approach
inspires honesty in others. You take feedback gratefully, as a sign people
care. You take honesty as a sign of respect.
You have a sense for what’s signal and what’s noise in what you’re hearing.
You process the feedback and make changes in response. Maybe what’s
needed is a whole new prototype, or maybe just some small tweaks. You
build trust with your stakeholders, by showing that their feedback has
an impact.
Where you thrive:
In your culture, the process is emphasised more than the result. The
value of iteration is well understood. Diversity is a deeply held principle,
because without it, testing can be misleading. You inhabit a safe space
for honesty.

Operationalise Persona: the negotiator

Measure: accessibility
The leadership of implementation Shadow: ruthlessness

This is the moment when something goes from concept to reality. When
it’s time to do the work of making it happen, and making it stick, you
roll up your sleeves.
You have systemic awareness combined with operational knowledge.
You know how the software functions, what the law is, and how the
machine works. There is a map in your mind of people, resources, regu-
lations, culture, and strategy.
You ask: How does this fit into existing processes, habits, tools, and
policies? Will changing this thing over here impact that thing over there?
Who will need to be trained or onboarded?
You are not a purist. Elegant implementation is knowing how to compro-
mise, and this is where your creativity shines. You problem-solve as you go.
How can this be implemented to leverage what’s already here? How are
we going to resource this on an ongoing basis? How should it be docu-
136 mented, so the next person will know how to keep it going?
Judgement calls are required. You sense what can bend without breaking
the kernel of original purpose.
Where you thrive:
The cost of high-quality implementation is recognised and resourced as
an investment. There’s no illusion that people will magically ‘self-orga-
nise’. Admins, coordinators, and the back office are empowered and re-
spected. Decisions are made close where they are put in practice. You’re
given mandate in the face of complexity, compromise, or resistance.

Maintain Persona: the captain

Measure: reliability
The leadership of sustaining Shadow: bureaucracy

Staying the course means keeping focused, saying no to distractions, and

following through on commitments. In non-hierarchical networks, steer-
ing happens from the rear.
Holding steady is far from an inert state. It’s dynamic, like sailing a ship
on course in a changing sea. When the storm comes, you are in a state
of mindful focus.
It’s your soothing voice saying, “I know it’s unfamiliar. But let’s just
give it a chance and see how it goes.” It’s your grounded voice saying,
“We said we’d do this, so please follow through.”
You watch the clock and the calendar. When the time comes, you send
the reminder, push the button, run the process. The link is not broken.
The email has been responded to. The room has been booked. You
imbue the experience with a sense of trust, patience, and reliability. You
hold stable the foundation upon which all participation can occur.
Where you thrive:
Skilled maintenance and operational reliability is acknowledged as active
leadership. Visionary innovators around you understand that it is your
work that makes their next exciting idea possible. There is discipline
about following through on the last change before rushing into the next.
Commitments are taken seriously.

137
 Optimise Persona: the perfectionist
Measure: commitment
The leadership of improvement Shadow: meddling

The status quo makes you itch. You notice when a new tool or practice
isn’t so new anymore. Being comfortable is not quite good enough. You
see the slack that could be tightened. You’ve identified some blocks for
removal. You want to tweak things.
Yours is a gesture of iterative looping. Perhaps it’s a small change that
goes right back to maintaining. Maybe it’s circling all the way back to
prototyping.
With the courage to let go of the old and welcome new possibilities, you
are listening, empathising, sensing. Having journeyed all the way around
the circle, you’re coming right back to the beginning — it’s your moment
to start the cycle again.
Where you thrive:
Everything is up for questioning and improvement. Systems are modu-
lar, not gridlocked. Inertia is not destiny. Agitating for proactive change
is understood as a sign of loyalty, not undermining. Ego can make space
for change.

Seeing the whole circle.

Having come all the way around the circle, you find that the final
step ,  optimisation ,  is quite close to the first step ,  sensing. In fact, it leads
right into it. A full cycle makes organisational collective memory possi-
ble. If you don’t go full circle, it’s very difficult to build on what’s come
before — like trying to construct on quicksand.
When there is an operational foundation on which to build, visionary
innovation can flourish. Distributed leadership happens when different
people with new ideas can pick up where others left off. This is the en-
gine of innovation and execution, of evolution and growth.
138
Balancing the whole circle.
Diversity and balance are the keys to a healthy leadership culture. Dif-
ferent people are strong in different areas, and regard different parts of
the cycle as important. Often, it’s these very differences that create the
power of the engine, with complementary forces causing it to spin.
If a certain kind of leadership is unseen and undervalued, people who
excel in that area will not be able to work to their strengths, and others
will miss being balanced out and complemented by them. Ultimately,
the whole will suffer. Developing Full Circle Leadership means helping
people and teams grow competency all around.

Going Full Circle, together.

Team Workshop (60 minutes)
The Full Circle Leadership model can be used in a workshop format that
allows groups to quickly recognise and visualise their leadership profile.
This workshop can be facilitated for small groups of six-ten, or larger
groups who can then discuss and share learning in smaller break-out
groups.
Introduction: 20 mins
Introduce the Full Circle model to the whole group and explain each
step. Point out how it can be applied to an individual or team (where
different strengths lie) or a project lifecycle (taking it around the circle).
Self reflection: 10 mins
Have each participant consider their own leadership skills using the pro-
vided spider graph template. Ask them to give themselves a score 0–5
for each one, making a dot on each radial axis. Connect the dots to reveal
the shape of their leadership.
Prompting questions:
• Where do you see yourself as strong and weak around the circle?
• Does rating yourself in this way reveal where you might do your
best work, or how you might like to develop as a leader?
• Our vision of leadership is often skewed by our own lens. Think
about the aspects of leadership that are most challenging or unat-
tractive to you. Are you truly seeing those areas as leadership, and
people who excel at them as leaders? 139
 • Do you tend to get stuck in one step or a loop? For example, the
entrepreneur with a ‘great idea’ who spends years oscillating be-
tween sense, inquire, and envision, never building anything.
Small group discussion: 20 mins
Combine the individual shapes in small groups to form a picture of the
team’s overall leadership shape.
Prompting questions:
• Is the team skewed toward part of the circle? How is that reflected
in your working style and output as a team?
• Consider the individuals. Is one person alone in being strong or
weak in a certain area? How has this affected collaboration?
• Are you balanced as a whole? What might that say about your
culture or recruitment practices?
• Is there a place in the circle where initiatives tend to fall over? For
some it will be the courage to innovate, for others the discipline to
implement. What kind of leadership might you need to develop in
your team to address that?
• Is the whole organisation stuck at a particular stage? Are we
enabling or constraining some forms of leaders globally?
• If your work gets stuck, what might help you push through to the
next stage?

Moving ahead: 10 mins

Bring the whole group back together to share insights.
Prompting questions:
• What are the big insights and learnings for the group?
• How might the team better support diversity of leadership?
• Are there processes or activities that might enable new leadership
to emerge?

140
141
 Patterns for
Decentralised
Organising
By Richard D. Bartlett

Thriving teams
Teams are the organs of your organisation. The only way to have a truly
thriving organisation, at any scale, is to develop thriving, committed,
collaborative teams.
As a cofounder and coordinator at Loomio and Enspiral, I have worked
closely with dozens of teams experimenting with decentralised organis-
ing. In my past two years on the road, I’ve worked with hundreds more.
All of these folks are prototyping organisational structures for distribut-
ed leadership, high autonomy, and shared ownership.
It takes a constant effort to build our personal and collective capacity
for shared power, robust relationships, and autonomous work. The team
scale (say, five to eight people) is the perfect place to exercise these mus-
cles, learn some difficult lessons, and develop the readiness for larger
scale collaboration.

Painful challenges
In all my work with teams all over the world, I noticed many of them
faced similar, painful challenges:
How do we deal with power imbalances? How do we prioritise what to work on?
How do we undo our cultural programming and develop an open, collaborative
environment? How can we be inclusive without spending all our time in meet-
ings? How do we balance autonomy with alignment? And where does account-
142
ability come from if there is no boss!?
I believe the right organisational structure is unique to its context, peo-
ple, objectives, and history. So I wouldn’t recommend building an organ-
isation from a predetermined blueprint. However, we don’t need to start
from a blank slate either. Somewhere between the fixed blueprint and
the empty canvas are these ‘patterns’. Each pattern is a module, designed
to be remixed and adapted to your local environment. This resource
names some of the common challenges of working without a manage-
ment hierarchy, and shares practical responses you apply immediately.
This segment is a sample of a larger project. See thehum.org/book for more

8 patterns

Intentionally Systemically Make explicit

produce counter distribute care labour norms and
culture boundaries

Keep talking Agree how you’re Make decisions

about power using your tech asynchronously

Use rhythm to balance Generate new

flexibility and focus patterns together
143
 Intentionally produce counter culture
Challenge
You want to be non-hierarchical but you have hierarchical habits,
e.g. telling people what to do, or looking to others for answers. We are
conditioned by culture: if sexism and racism exist in your environ-
ment, it can be imprinted into your habits.
Response
We can unlearn hierarchies together. We can co-design a culture that
encourages each of us to develop our best qualities, making us all more
generous, respectful, trusting, courageous, etc.
How do you produce culture? Fermentation! To make sourdough
bread, you have a ‘starter dough’, mixed with fresh ingredients, and
put it somewhere dark and safe for some time. To ferment a new group
culture, your “starter dough” is a person or people who embody some
of the qualities you want to develop. The “fresh ingredients” are new
people who have a desire to grow in a specific way. We combine these
ingredients in a retreat: safe, quiet, isolated from the outside world for
a few days.
Results
We learn about each other’s dreams and fears, building deep relation-
ships of trust and belonging: the most important resource for all your
upcoming challenges.

144
Systemically distribute care labour
Challenge
Hierarchical culture trains us to not share the care labour fairly. Most
groups have one or two people, usually women, doing most of the care
work. If they get overwhelmed or frustrated, they’ll stop, and the group
loses its gravity.
Care includes the practical stuff of hospitality: preparing a comfort-
able room with food, lighting, decoration, refreshments, collaboration
tools, and tidying up after. It also includes emotional work, like noticing
tension between colleagues and supporting them to resolve it.
Response
Make all work visible, so you can share it fairly. E.g. the Loomio team
uses ‘stewardship’, a peer-to-peer support system. Everyone supports
one person, and is supported by someone else. Each pair meets once per
month, the steward asks “how can I support you?” and they figure out
the answer together. More info: loomio.coop/stewarding.html
Results
Builds deep trusting relationships; dissolves conflicts; continuously
improving emotional intelligence of everyone in the group; more dis-
tribution = more resilience.

145
 Make explicit norms and boundaries
Challenge
Norms = how we do things around here. Boundaries = what we
don’t do around here. Many groups leave these things unsaid, relying
on “common sense”.
Conflicts grow when people have different unspoken assumptions
(everyone has different ‘common sense’). When you cross an invisible
boundary, it takes huge energy to make the boundary explicit, before
you can get to the behaviour.
Response
Talk about your norms: how do we want to be together? e.g. open,
honest, authentic, gentle, inquisitive...
Talk about your boundaries: what behaviour do we want to exclude?
e.g. no mean feedback, no sexist jokes.
Results
Buy-in — clarity helps people evaluate whether or not they want to be
here. Expectations are clear. There is a process for challenging destruc-
tive behaviour, and a process for updating our agreements. E.g. see roles
+ responsibilities described in Enspiral’s People Agreement: handbook.
enspiral.com/agreements/people.html

146
Keep talking about power
Challenge
Power, influence, status, rank, social capital, volume, access... whatever
you call it, I’ve never met a group where it was equally distributed be-
tween all members. Equality is a compass point to navigate towards, not
a destination I’ve ever arrived at.
Response
Groups thrive when anyone can safely talk about power differentials.
Imbalance can be bad, e.g. inherited privilege, coercion, manipulation,
the ‘old boys club’. Some imbalance can be good: earned trust, reputa-
tion, eldership. Transparency reduces toxicity.
Discuss together: “How’s the power? Who has it? How do you earn
it?” Some roles attract power (e.g. manager, facilitator, spokesperson,
coordinator, director).
Rotation increases access: take turns, step out, encourage others to step
in. E.g. Loomio team coordinators are elected by the team for a limited
term; we intentionally support less experienced people to try the role.
See loomio.coop/coordination.html
Results
The best ‘elders’ use their status to praise, acknowledge, and encourage
people with less.

147
 Agree how you’re using your tech
Challenge
Many groups are dissatisfied with their communication technology.
Information overload: too much data but can never find the thing you
want. Half the team uses this tool, the other half uses another one.
Too many tools, don’t know how to get everyone’s attention, can nev-
er find the document I need.
Response
Agree together what tools are for what job. E.g. the ‘trinity of digital
comms’:
• 1. Realtime, like chat, messenger, or Slack. Informal, quick, organ-
ised around time: it’s about right now.
• 2. Asynchronous, like email, forum or Loomio. More formal, or-
ganised around topic. Has a subject + context + invitation. Can take
days or weeks. Makes a useful archive, considered comments rather
than random messy chatter.
• 3. Static, like a wiki, Google Docs, handbook, or FAQ. Very formal,
usually with an explicit process for updating content.
Results
Depending on your work, you will need different tools. The important
thing is that you have an agreement together about what tools are for
what job. With a shared understanding of the tools, they all fit together
beautifully. When people have different ideas, it gets messy.

148
Make decisions asynchronously
Challenge
Most collaborative groups make decisions in meetings or conference
calls. Meetings are a kind of synchronised or realtime communication:
you have to synchronise people’s calendars to find a time that works,
then when they arrive, everyone has to pay attention to everything at the
same time. It’s very expensive, excluding the input of people who can’t
attend, and often results in hurried decisions.
Response
With a little effort, you can develop a habit of asynchronous deci-
sion-making. People can participate in their own time, contributing
only to the issues relevant to them. This is what Loomio is for: more
inclusion and collective intelligence, less time in meetings.
E.g. I’m on a Board of Directors. We meet monthly. We co-create the
agenda in a Loomio thread ahead of time. A few days before the meet-
ing, a Loomio poll confirms everyone is happy with the agenda and
we’ve all read the reports. We all arrive at the meeting prepared and fo-
cused. We’ll make some decisions face to face. For decisions that require
input from more people, or more time to consider options, one of the
directors will take the decision to Loomio. We also use the software to
sign off the minutes, and find another meeting time.
Results
Over time you learn the unique qualities of realtime and asynchronous
communication. Meetings are good for bonding, brainstorming, and
dealing with complex or sensitive topics. Loomio creates more space for
deliberation: you can take more time, consider more options, hear from
more people, and keep a record.
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 Use rhythm to balance flexibility and focus

Challenge
Hierarchies are designed to manage flows of communication and de-
cision making. When you remove the hierarchy, you need to replace it
with something. If there is no agreed structure, your group can suffer
from information overload (everyone asked about everything all the
time) and exclusion (decisions made without appropriate input).
Response
Rhythm helps balance speed with participation. People can trust each
other to seek input at the right time, so they don’t need to be involved
in every decision. For example:
Here’s a set of working rhythms we have used in the Loomio team.
You can adapt to your context, e.g. maybe it makes sense to align with
seasons or moon cycles:
• Daily ‘standup’ meeting. Everyone answers, “What did you do yes-
terday? What are you doing today? Are there any obstacles we can
help you with?” Quick info exchange, accountability and support.
• Weekly ‘sprints’, a regular working period. E.g. on Monday we agree
what work we’re going to do this week. On Friday we share prog-
ress and have a ‘retrospective’ looking for improvements to try next
week.
• Quarterly objectives. Every three months we have a planning day,
looking for agreement on three or four measurable targets to align
all of the work in the cooperative. After we finalise the decision on
Loomio, everyone has freedom to do whatever work they feel is
most relevant to achieve those outcomes.
150
 • Bi-annual retreats. Every six months we go away together for three
or four days. This deepens our relationships, and creates a space
for the kind of conversations that can’t happen in the office, e.g.
dreaming together about our shared vision, or dealing with a com-
plex tension.
Results
We create distinct communication spaces for different time frames, e.g.
today’s work is discussed every morning; if you want to discuss the
long term strategic direction, we have a dedicated space for that every
three months.

Generate new patterns together

Challenge
There is no such thing as an organisational structure that suits every
team. Processes that worked for you last year are made obsolete by
changing environmental conditions and team makeup. You need a reli-
able way to notice what’s not working and make improvements without
losing people along the way.
Response
Retrospectives turn frustrations into improvements. You can choose a
frequency that suits you, but let’s say weekly. At the end of each week,
stop working. Have a retrospective meeting. Review the week just been.
What was good? Notice it and do more. What was bad? Discuss.
Agree a change that you’re going to try next week to make it more
good and less bad.
Results
Over time you learn the unique qualities of realtime and asynchronous
communication. Meetings are good for bonding, brainstorming, and
dealing with complex or sensitive topics. Loomio creates more space for
deliberation: you can take more time, consider more options, hear from
151
more people, and keep a record.
 By Anthony Cabraal

Building a strong, participatory community can’t be dictated by force, or

decided by a few on behalf of many. It requires the collective weaving of
hearts, minds and intent, like the creation of a vibrant fabric from many
different threads.
Weaving this strong fabric requires the community to invest time to un-
derstand the work they need to do together. When it begins, everything
might look a bunch of bright coloured, tangled threads, so before we
even recognise the ‘cloth’ that’s emerging we need to create shared un-
derstanding of the challenges for the group. When more people under-
stand what the group needs to succeed, and where the skills are, more
people can step into effective co-leadership, and the overall organisation
strengthens and moves forward. This powerful group consciousness is
152
what enables the weaving of collective identity, intent, and action.
This complex community fabric will be woven differently in every or-
ganisation, but we can simplify things by considering five fundamental
threads that run through all. Consider these five threads open conversa-
tions with no permanent answers.

Making Building Allocating Gathering Coordinating

Decisions Connections Resources Together Action

To weave community, the collective job is to recognise these threads

and define the right answers for your unique group. They each need to
be considered in their own way. The critical work is to have the conver-
sations, identify where the group stands and build towards collective
understanding, together. There are no universal truths define success
in this work. All stakeholders: leaders, founders, participants, advisors,
clients, and supporters will have different intent, needs, and ambitions.
Surfacing and recognising dissonance, conflict, and difference of opin-
ion is part of the job. Strong community fabric holds tension and weaves
coherence, so everyone knows where they stand and how best to be in
service, especially when there is disagreement.
Doing this work of weaving together is what brings the community alive;
makes it fun, meaningful, and worthwhile. Participation in this journey
is where the pattern of the community fabric emerges. The strength of
this fabric will get you through hard times, attracting and engaging amaz-
ing people. The time invested together will create ongoing returns, well
beyond the expectations and imagination of any one person.

Making
Decisions

Deciding who decides and how this happens means addressing gov-
ernance, power, control, and the limits of personal agency within the
community. Making the decision-making processes explicit is critical to
healthy participatory culture. It sets out the guidelines for how power
and control will flow. Creating the decision making protocol is like writ-
ing the rules of the game. 153
 You might worry that making your decision protocol explicit feels ‘too
formal’. But keep in mind that all groups, regardless of size, have a de-
cision-making process - it’s just a question of whether everyone is aware
of and agrees with it. Creating formal decision-making rules doesn’t
need to be heavy or formally structured. If a lightweight process works
best for your group, just agree to that proactively. It is still immensely
beneficial to think it through together.
When starting out, it is difficult to know what kind of decisions are go-
ing to come up, and where the balance between bureaucracy and ‘struc-
turelessness’ lies. As the community fabric grows, surfacing tensions and
dealing with power dynamics requires vigilance and communication.
The needs will change so expect this thread to evolve over time. Expect
to find knots, unpick them, re-weave and re-weave until a strong, clear
decision-making culture emerges.

Questions to consider

● Where might we learn about different decision-making protocols to

find out what’s right for us?
● How many people do we want engaged in the day-to-day running of
the organisation?
● Do we want all our voices to be considered equally? Should some peo-
ple’s voices have more power than others? How do we choose this?
● Who do we want to hold the ultimate, emergency powers to veto de-
cisions or make interventions? How do we want to govern the use of
these controls?
● Where do we want to delegate decisions to people with specific skills
and experience, and where do we want to ensure the collective intelli-
gence of the group shines through?
● What formats and tools do we want to use to make formal decisions
as a group?
● How much engagement in decisions is expected from everyone? What
are people expected to contribute to decision making?

154
The Enspiral approach

Enspiral has a well developed decision agreement in the Handbook (find

it here: https://handbook.enspiral.com/agreements/decisions.html).
We seek open, transparent decision-making, and strive to enable the
people who are affected by a decision to participate fully. Anyone can
propose a formal decision at any time.
This agreement has been improved slowly, over many years of com-
munity discussion. Hundreds of decisions have been made, including
changing the decision-making process itself.
● We use Loomio (loomio.org) for formal discussion and decision-making.
● We use our Handbook (handbook.enspiral.com) to document our
formal processes.
● We try to be clear about what kinds of decisions don’t need to go
through a formal process, and encourage people to take individual
action whenever possible. Resources like the Teal wiki are helpful:
http://www.reinventingorganizationswiki.com/Decision_Making

Building
connections

Strong, mutually supportive peer relationships are critical to the health

of any community fabric. Peer-to-peer connections are the first and last
defence for keeping people healthy and aligned. These stitches that hold
people together are often invisible or exist outside of formal community
process. Without them the entire fabric can fray or fall apart.
Without clear structure, the value and benefits of strong connections
can be spread unevenly in groups. Some people are able to attract the
relationships and connections they need, or are naturally more indepen-
dent, so they have less need for formal structure. Others feel an isolating
vacuum without structure and suffer silently, falling into the gaps or feel-
ing unable to voice their needs.

155
 Taking time to recognise individual requirements in the group is import-
ant work. Everyone is cut from different cloth and one size will not fit
all. Offering only what works for the majority will miss critical minority
needs. A community should develop a diversity of tactics to support
different people in different ways to feel connected and supported.

Questions to consider

● What levels of support do people in the community need to feel con-

nected to each other?
● How much do we want to foster self-reliance and informal connec-
tion, and how much do we want to formally offer support services?
● How can we create support structures that build relationships across
the community, to strengthen bonds as evenly as possible?
● How can we encourage people to grow the capacity and learn the
skills they need to better support others?
● Are we understanding and meeting the diverse needs in our community?

The Enspiral approach

For some, Enspiral is a series of relationships more than anything else.

We aspire to operate from a place of empathy, generosity, and deep care
for each other. Over time we’ve tried many different approaches to sup-
port these relationships.
● Buddy systems (everyone gets connected to someone when they join).
● Informal support pods (small groups of people informally creating a
check-in rhythm to support each other).
● Formal pods (small teams that have strong, formalised interdependent
connections or co-own a company together).
Stewardship is our most developed collective method of relationship
support. Everyone who joins the community has a steward, as at least
one strong point of contact. Stewarding pairs decide the rhythms and
dynamics of their own relationships together.
More information on our experiments and resources can be found in our
handbook guides: https://handbook.enspiral.com/guides/stewarding.html
156
 Allocating
resources

Although money isn’t the only important resource, because of its pow-
er in our society and psyches ‘the money thread’ has a special role to
play and requires specific attention. Allocating resources and spending
money are powerful dynamic in how a community operates. Deciding
how precious, shared financial resources are spent defines key patterns.
Should it be decided by just a few people? How can the group engage?
How can everyone have some influence? How can people engage with
resource allocation?
Building strong financial literacy in the community takes time and effort,
but its impact is powerful. Developing the strength of this thread can help
support other threads, especially decision-making and coordinating action.

Questions to consider

● How much money will be flowing through the system? Where is it

coming from?
● Is financial transparency important to us, and how could we achieve it
effectively? Do we want to be transparent only internally, or externally
as well?
● How much resource should be invested in the community commons?
How much should be held by individuals?
● Who is legally liable for compliance? How is their legal risk being
managed? Is our legal structure conducive to how we want to func-
tion?
● How should we manage accounting and financial reporting? Does our
record-keeping enable us to follow tax laws, or respond to due dili-
gence requests?
● If we have financial surplus, how do we decide what to spend it on?
● Do we have processes to help us align our financial decision-making
with our larger strategy and goals?
157
 The Enspiral approach

Although this thread has evolved significantly as Enspiral grew from one
company to a community of autonomous companies, the overall intent
stayed constant - we stayed committed to working out how to distribute
money, information and power.
Building strong financial literacy in the community is made possible by
investing in:
● Clear transparent financial reporting. Details of all income and
expenses of the Enspiral Foundation community entity are published
and kept updated in our Handbook: https://handbook.enspiral.com/
financial_transparency.html
● Collaborative spending experiments. We have built software (co-
budget.co) to help us spend money together and we continue to test
methods to facilitate group spending of shared resources. https://
handbook.enspiral.com/collabfunding.html
● Starting an interconnected ecology of companies. When Enspiral
evolved beyond one company, we distributed ownership throughout
the community. Earning and allocating resources to the commons as
individuals became the distributed process.

Gathering
together

Gathering is where a community comes to life. Face to face, we take off

our masks and see each other’s vulnerability. We share our gifts and talents,
sing, dance, play, and celebrate together. We remember that we are equal as
humans on this journey together. It is where we build deep connection and
really invest in our relationships.
Facilitation of gatherings is an art. Whatever the form that gathering takes,
paying conscious attention to the design and facilitation of this time is crit-
ical. When we spend time together, we learn about each other, recognise
158
each other, and amplify our potential to achieve together.
Questions to consider

● What kind of connection do we want to foster and grow in the com-

munity through gathering?
● How much time can we as a community invest in multi-day gatherings
together?
● Who can design and lead a culture of gathering? Who can teach and
share gathering practices? Where can we learn the art of gathering
together?
● If we can’t all get together in person, or cannot meet as much as we
would like, how can we introduce aspects of this thread in other ways?
Even with technology and our globally connected modern society, we re-
main biological creatures who yearn to connect in person, breathing the
same air, and sharing physical space.

The Enspiral approach

Enspiral grew under the guidance of several skilled social process designers
and facilitators. Bi-annual, multi-day community retreats quickly became
the heartbeat of our community. This rhythm built early momentum for
the reflection, connection and aspiration we needed to commit and grow
our livelihoods together.
There is no formal dogma or structure to our retreats. They normally in-
clude a healthy mix of productive working time, connection around new
projects and opportunities, alignment and inspiration around vision and
direction, time for quiet reflection, and space for wild celebrations that take
on a life of their own!
Over the years we have borrowed heavily from many gathering traditions
and methods including:
● Open Space Technology. This facilitated process allows groups to ‘self
organise’ an emergent agenda, distributing leadership and control over
‘the content of a gathering. Resources for running open space technol-
ogy are widely avaliable online: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_
Space_Technology
159
 ● The Art of Hosting Conversations the Matter. The Art of Hosting is
a series of tools, practices and methods designed to harness collective
wisdom and the self-organising capacity of groups. Enspiral has used
many dialogue practices, facilitation and the principles of co-creation
to design and evolve our group experiences over the years. http://www.
artofhosting.org/
● Sharing Circles. Sharing Circles are based on ancient practic-
es to create sacred spaces for groups to reflect, witness and align.
Well facilitated sharing circles are powerful experiences, where
individuals are liberated and transformed. They become a well-
spring for empathy, trust, and deep connection between people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_circle

Coordinating
action

How a participatory community ‘gets things done’ raises questions of lead-

ership, direction, accountability, commitment, and follow-through. This is
where we address who does what, what needs to happen, how and who
gets it done, and what is needed to support them to do it.
Healthy community fabric must ensure that critical functions are coordi-
nated and actioned, ensuring space and openness for people to participate
and lead their own work in the directions that call them.
The right balance encourages action without waiting for resources or heavy
permission seeking. It lets people see (or create) opportunity and then lead
the action that feels most important to them, learning and growing along
the way.
The community needs to find the patterns that allow it to achieve and
progress without stalling action, wasting resources, and wallowing in frus-
tration. The knit of the fabric must be tight enough to hold together and
loose enough to breathe. As the community grows, the right way to coor-
dinate this action can change radically. Be prepared to unstitch threads and
weave new designs.
160
Questions to consider

● What is the core work that needs to be done to keep the whole com-
munity healthy?
● What skills are needed to do that work?
● Who are the people ready and willing to do the work and what sup-
port do they need to do it?
● How open do we want the scope of action to be? How tightly do we
want to control what can happen and what can’t happen in the com-
munity?
● How can we sense and scan across the community to understand the
most important work and brightest opportunities?
● How will we prioritise the work to do? How will we approve work to
be done?
● When work is approved to be executed, how will we support the peo-
ple to do the work and hold accountability for outcomes?

The Enspiral approach

“No one leads all of the time, everyone leads some of the time” is a prin-
ciple Enspiral adopted very early on.
There are no ‘mandated leaders’ that do the work on behalf of everyone
else. Leadership or leading pieces of work is open to everyone in the com-
munity to step into. Over time we have tested and evolved many structures
to hold the leadership and execution of community work including:
Centralised support crew.

A few people with delegated authority and budget to execute specific tasks
and held to account by the whole community. This worked well until we
grew beyond 30 people. Eventually too much responsibility and control
was centralised, which disabled wider participation, so the Support Crew
was dissolved.

161
 Catalysts.

The catalyst role is an ongoing experiment that evolves with the people who
step into it. It has morphed through:
● a ‘distributed executive’ group,
● scanning, naming and coordinating tasks using public improvement
boards (improvements.enspiral.com),
● facilitators holding spaces and creating connections that help others
make sense of things, organise work and coordinate action.
Servant leadership, working in service of the collective rather than one’s
own opinions is the fundamental mindset. This allows the group to trust
catalysts to bring their own perspectives and gifts to the role without man-
dating a specific actions.
Working groups.

Working groups hold defined areas of work in the community and take
responsibility for coordinating and delivering specific functions or projects.

Pulling the threads together

Because the threads are woven together by many hands, strong patterns
emerge in the fabric. The vision, leadership and overall direction of the
community shows up in the fabric as the work is being done - it is not
decided or delegated beforehand.
There will be confrontation and uncomfortableness in this process. When
there isn’t a black and white way to do things, being in-between, in the grey,
is difficult for many people. Is it unhelpful controlling, dominating traits
being triggered? Or is the group just being too messy?

162
 Are the threads too loose?
Are people falling through the cracks?
Is the weave too tight?
Is it too stifling, with no room to breathe or try things?
How much messiness is too much?
How much shared risk can we tolerate?
Are some patterns OK even if some people don’t agree?
Can we use clashing colours?
If no one is getting what they want, is everyone wasting their time?
Is the fabric holding us together?

Long term success for this work looks like ‘leaderful’ fabric, full of active
participants who are capable and ready to lead all kinds of work in many
directions. If people are truly engaged in the community their leadership
will be expressed through their participation in the group. The result will
be a unique, collective signature - it is the feeling, the vibe, the spirit, the
pattern. This signature is what it feels like to be at a gathering, it is how un-
comfortable moments in meetings get addressed, how challenges are solved
and how people are supported in hard times.

What is your organisational fabric?

The only way is to find the edge of a thread and pull on it. Ask questions.
See what it unravels, see where it snags. Keep following what works, start
to recognise the key threads in your organisation and begin to notice the
unconscious patterns woven anew into the fabric everyday.

163
 #ChangingTheFuture

Checking in A simple process where a meeting

or gathering starts with everyone
having a chance to speak...

interruption
Without judgement
constraint

to be heard

Space to be safe
to actively listen

connection happens
Where empathy forms
self awareness grows

It is a practice where everyone gets

to see everyone else differently, and it
changes how everything gets done.
 Unfolding Purpose:
A five-step journey
by Sandra Chemin and Sandra Otto

What are your big questions in life? What does Purpose mean to you? How are
you making sense of Purpose for yourself and for the teams, organisations,
and communities you belong to? What gives your life meaning?

This guide describes five steps extrapolated from multiple purpose jour-
neys to help you to consciously experience and unfold your own journey
to purpose.

Cycle: Purpose Unfolding Patterns

This frame has been structured to offer guidance for people on their
personal search for purpose through:
- Questions that can guide reflection and sense-making.
166
- Experiments you can try.
A Purpose journey does not necessarily follow a logical linear sequence,
but like other natural phenomena, it unfolds as a cyclical and iterating
evolution. Some people might experience steps 1, 2 and 3 at the same
time or go from one step back to an earlier stage.
The same patterns can also be relevant for teams and organisations, but
with more complexity to consider. An example of this is illustrated in
Essay 5: Saying yes to purpose.

1 Awaken / Asking new, bigger questions

Awakenings are the moments where we ask ourselves deeper questions
of life. They arrive when we can sense life beyond ordinary pleasures
and duties. Often the questions arise when we have a chance to find
peace from everyday overload - on holidays, in new environments, or
travelling. These moments may also be triggered by a significant experi-
ence or crisis. They might arise and then go dormant again, until one day
we really step out to find an answer. An awakening cannot be forced, it
emerges and can be consciously recognised and supported by reflection.

Questions Am I ready and committed to change my life?

Am I ready to let go of the past?
Am I ready to potentially let go of a certain lifestyle and
financial security in order to pursue my purpose?
Am I ready to tell everyone that I am changing my life?
Am I ready to say YES?

Experiments Take yourself somewhere new, or out of the ordinary com-

pared to your normal routines. Gift yourself some quality
time to reflect and write in a journal:
What are the big questions I am asking myself ?
How fulfilled do I feel with my life?
What is alive in me right now?
167
Is something coming to an end?
 2 Say Yes / Conscious decision and commitment

Once we start asking the big questions, the moment comes when we
commit to a new purposeful way of living. We have an opportunity to
choose life by design rather than life by default. This takes courage as it can
have profound consequences on our decisions so far. It might throw us
into a state of uncertainty when we do not yet know what exactly we are
going to pursue and we are scared of letting go of the old ways.
At this stage, you might not be aware of your purpose, but you are prob-
ably getting more clarity about your passions: what makes you smile, the
things that make you lose track of time. You need to trust the path of
passion until the purpose becomes clear.

Questions Am I ready and committed to change my life?

Am I ready to let go of the past?
Am I ready to potentially let go of a certain lifestyle and
financial security in order to pursue my purpose?
Am I ready to tell everyone that I am changing my life?
Am I ready to say YES?

Experiments Intention setting for life by design rather than life by default:
• Seek advice from someone that has already taken a similar
path - choose a mentor.
• Create a vision board: a collection of images that repre-
sent what you want to manifest in your life. The difference
from a written plan is that a vision board can represent
what you want to feel - not just the practical things you
would like to manifest in your life.
• Create space in your life for purpose to unfold. It could
be reducing the hours you spend at your day job, studying
something new, or participating in community projects in
your areas of passion.

168
 3 Connect / Connecting with others

More and more people are transitioning to new ways of working, living
and being where they follow a higher calling. Connecting with others is
one of the main mechanisms of support and learning as the unknown
emerges. Connecting with like-minded people helps to hold the uncer-
tainty so you can feel supported in your exploration into new territory.

Questions Are my experiences normal?

How have you experienced this journey?
What were your experiences?
How can I stay on track?
When you witness me, does it sound authentic?
Does it resonate?
How can we support each other?

Experiments • Find others who have made a transition to a new life-

style or new ways of working and invite them for a cof-
fee. Have an honest conversation about their journey:

What was the life event that precipitated that decision? How
did you plan this move? How long did it take? What resources
did you bring with you and which resources did you discover,
that you didn’t know you would need?

• Join a group of like-minded individuals. Think about your

interests and passions and find a group of people who
may have walked along this path before.

169
 4 Identify / Naming your purpose

Naming your purpose in life can be daunting. You might think it is like
waking up one morning to discover the ONE thing you were meant to
be in life. It doesn’t need to be like that. As we change, what is meaning-
ful for us can change as well. What if instead of searching for the big
answer you just focus on what moves you now?
Looking backwards at your life can help you identify what brought you
joy and satisfaction. From here, you can better understand your authen-
tic interests and passions, and possibly the next meaningful calling that
is emerging.

Questions What were my favourite activities in the past? What about now?
What brings me joy and fulfilment? Where do my energy and
my willingness naturally flow to?
What are the things I do or am so passionate about that I
don’t notice time passing?
What is the ONE thing that I can’t even stop myself
from doing?
What are my natural talents, what is my superpower?
What do others say about my talents and superpowers?
What would I get up for at 5 am on a Sunday?

Experiments Create quality time for yourself and use a journal to answer
the questions. Consider your responses.
• Are there common elements in the answers, can you
identify patterns?
• Do they reveal something about the things that you find
fulfilling?
• Can you identify any internal resistance?
• How could you overcome these to name a purpose that you
could bring to life?

170
 5 Share / Making it visible

Making our purpose visible increases the understanding of why we do

what we do, bringing our community onto the same page. The more
clarity about our purpose, the more conscious we get. As our awareness
increases, and we begin to communicate our purpose, we begin to attract
others that resonate with it. This is when the work begins to grow.

Questions How can we share our purpose with others?

Who do we want to tell about our purpose?
Who would be interested in our purpose and why?
What are good ways of engaging others with our purpose?

Experiments Print a poster and put it on your wall to help you focus on
what really matters, reminding you why you are doing this
work. Include these words publicly on your website or social
media channels.
Invite others for a conversation about the impact your work
had in their lives.
• Take a moment to reflect on what you heard from them.
Does it resonate with your original purpose? What could
be improved to make it alive?
• With their consent, share their reflections on your work
and purpose to create more visibility.

We hope this guide contributes to your journey. If you made it to this

point and have clarity about what moves you, celebrate!
You have taken a clear and concrete step toward a better future. Keep
in mind that life will keep changing and it is good to check from time
to time if this purpose still resonates with you, or if the future calls you
towards slightly different paths.
To continue this conversation and find other ways of developing your
purpose journey go to www.futureyou.be
171
 Sharing power,
money, and information
by Alanna Irving

Sharing power, money, and information has been a theme of Enspiral

since day one, but what does that actually mean in practice? As a network,
we figured it out for ourselves, and then out of what we learned, created
tools that could transmit this cultural technology to others. There are as
many ways to tell the larger Enspiral story as there are people in it. I can
only speak to how my own work contributed to that bigger story - building
open source tools to enable highly collaborative, transparent social pro-
cesses, facilitated by technology.

Making decisions together

As Enspiral became larger and more geographically distributed, inclu-
sive decision-making became more challenging. We wanted to distribute
power, but power doesn’t just disappear because no one has the job title
of ‘boss’. It accrues like water runs downhill, following paths of least
resistance and ruts of habit. It takes time and effort to know what deci-
sions are being made, and to provide the context needed to participate.
If including more people in decisions is too hard, power will centralise. I
was acutely aware of this, as a person often trying to understand and act
in accordance with the collective will of the network.
As I was grappling with these issues at Enspiral, only a few blocks away
Occupy was camped out on the lawn of Wellington City Hall. Fate was
about to bring us together. A couple of Occupy organisers came to
see me at Enspiral, looking to talk to people who were good with tech-
nology. They described the challenges of consensus decision-making in
general assemblies: meetings were getting longer and longer, people who
didn’t have a lot of time or lived far away were being left out, and it was
very hard to hear all voices.
Everything they were saying sounded familiar. These activists had the
same problem with decision-making that we had as a business network.
172 I knew that if we could develop a solution that worked for both com-
munities, we’d really have something. They asked me if Enspiral could
develop a software tool for collaborative decision-making online. I told
them I couldn’t do it for them, but I could do it with them. After sup-
porting many others in the network with their startups, I was being called
to found a startup of my own. Enspiral provided a desk in the office,
those Occupy activists became my co-founders, and we got to work.

Collaborative Decision-Making
Diverse perspectives come together to make decisions
online, enabling shared understanding and collective action

173
 Together, we built a software tool called Loomio. No complex func-
tionality magically makes collaboration happen; it’s deceptively simple.
You create a group and bring in your collaborators. Anyone can start a
discussion with a clear topic and context. As potential solutions arise,
you can make a proposal. Everyone can state their positions and explain
their reasoning.
As this process plays out, a visual summary of where the group stands
on the issue emerges. It’s clear if some people disagree, and the whole
group is motivated to swarm and address their concerns. It’s not about
your solution versus mine; it’s about coming together and synthesising
something even better. Unlike a typical voting or polling app, Loomio
is not a conflict-based, majority-rules system. People are encouraged to
change their minds as they hear from one another. By the end of the
process, everyone has shared understanding and is ready to take collec-
tive action.
The first decision made on Loomio was agreeing the language of the
Enspiral Services employment contracts. The very concept of workers
crafting their own employment contracts and agreeing them by consen-
sus online was the essence of Enspiral in action. Loomio allowed us to
significantly scale up participation and transparency at Enspiral. It didn’t
matter where someone was located or whether they could make the
meeting time. People participated in the decisions they cared about, and
let others decide the rest. Loomio automatically generated an archive of
decisions, so new people could see what had been decided previously,
and why.
Soon, others started to use Loomio in their own groups, like businesses,
government agencies, community groups, schools, and political move-
ments. Loomio spun off into an independent worker-owned coopera-
tive to forge its own path as an Enspiral venture. Although enabled by
technology, the true impact Loomio had on Enspiral was cultural. In
order to effectively contribute to a decision, people needed context. This
meant more transparency, reporting, and effective information flows.
We developed a practice of working in the open and giving and receiving
constructive feedback. That’s not to say the online space superseded the
offline space. Conversely, by moving some discussions online, precious
face-to-face time could be freed up. As we used Loomio more effec-
tively, network retreats became less about working intensively and more
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about decompressing, having fun together, and deepening relationships.
Take it apart and put it back together again
Loomio allowed us to transform roles and powers held by a person into
distributed processes everyone could engage with. I began to see a lot
of our work at Enspiral as deconstructing core organisational concepts
and reconstructing them for a collaborative paradigm. As a bunch of
anarchists, activists, hackers, and disruptors, we saw the inefficiencies
and negative impacts of legacy patterns, and we wanted to do things
differently.
The saying goes, “Don’t ever take a fence down until you know the rea-
son why it was put up.” Our motto was more like: “Rip down the fence,
get lost in a muddy field, question the underlying morality of fences,
try and fail to build a car out of fencing materials, hold hands to make
a human fence, then, while having a picnic, enthusiastically reinvent the
concept of fences under a new name and resolve to build a better one
where the original fence was.” Sometimes this was a waste of time. But
sometimes we built a much improved fence 2.0, or proved we really
didn’t need a fence there at all, or replaced the fence with a waters-
lide that was much faster and more fun. Through this process, we went
back to first principles and thought about what we were really trying to
achieve, instead of unquestioningly using off-the-shelf solutions.
Some of the best learning opportunities of my career have come from
tearing down ‘fences’ like governance, employment, company structures,
and investment models. I talked to lawyers and HR professionals, and
delved into employment regulations, to figure out how to align the ex-
perimental ways we wanted to work with the law. Through exploring
alternative funding models, I came to understand how risk, control, and
ownership actually function. I figured out why tax regulations are the
way they are by asking our accountant a lot of crazy sounding questions.
I discovered why it’s important to separate governance and executive
functions, and what each really means. I gained an appreciation for how
the form of the corporation has evolved over time, and what makes it
powerful.
Along the way, we invented some genuinely new ways of working, and
built tools to facilitate them. The most exciting were when we took
something normally centralised and transformed it into a distributed,
transparent, participatory process. Many times, we took the long way
around right back to the standard way of doing things. But by doing so,
we gained a level of understanding that only comes from taking some-
175
thing apart and putting it back together again to see how it works.
 Sharing money
As Enspiral grew beyond 100 people, there were still only a few of us who
interacted with the bank account and budget directly. This had worked for
a while thanks to high trust, and because busy entrepreneurs are generally
happy not to have to delve into balance sheets and profit and loss state-
ments. At this stage, posing financial decisions to the network as a whole
usually resulted in responses like, “Uh, sure, sounds good…. Wait, how
much money do we have, anyway?”
Our collective money came from all of us, and belonged to all of us, as did
the responsibility to spend it well. We needed an accessible way to engage
with the larger strategic and financial context. We were inspired by a com-
munity we read about that hosted an event where participants were given
play money to put in buckets corresponding to the projects they wanted
fund. Out of all those individual decisions, a collective budget emerged.
Getting 100+ people together every time we needed to make financial de-
cisions wasn’t feasible. But I thought we could run a digital version of the
process using a shared spreadsheet. I called it Collaborative Funding.
Down the first column of the spreadsheet, I listed all the contributions to
collective funds that month. Then I listed the fixed overhead costs (previ-
ously agreed on Loomio) and subtracted that amount, leaving the discre-
tionary budget. Across the top row, I listed buckets, i.e. funding requests,
which anyone in the community could make. Each person or company
allocated funds in proportion to what they had contributed financially,
either into buckets or into savings. Everyone, even those without mon-
ey to spend, was invited to observe and ask questions. Despite being a
spreadsheet, the collaborative funding process was actually pretty fun. It
was gamified and engaging. People could directly see and influence the
impact of the funds they contributed, and those with more money than
time could fund those with more time than money to get important work
done. Crucially, collaborative funding helped us consider budget priorities
cohesively. It made it clear that saying yes to one thing meant saying no to
something else.
This was the beginning of collective strategy setting at Enspiral. We began
to do more experiments with strategic thinking, trying various combina-
tions of surveys, online discussions, in-person workshops, and working
groups. Once a year for several years, we all (300+ people at times) agreed
a few strategic pillars for the network as a whole, and made collaborative
funding decisions with them in mind. While we never fully perfected this
process, we sparked many rich conversations. The combination of co-cre-
ated strategy and collaborative funding led to a mindset of cooperation
176
over competition. People would willingly set aside their pet projects to
fund the most important work overall. If we decided to take a financial risk
and it didn’t pan out, we all owned the outcome together, instead of blam-
ing. Replacing centralisation with a participatory process breaks down the
‘us and them’ dynamic, inviting people to step into collective responsibility.
Real transparency isn’t just about making the information available; it’s about
accessible information that people can engage with meaningfully.

Being able to understand the budget was a major boost to trust and em-
powerment. People could get their heads around the numbers, and thought
in terms of how they could support collective goals with their individual
choices. Bucket proposers didn’t have to convince everyone of their idea,
only enough people to get it funded. Collaborative Funding is an example
of emergent decision-making, where lots of individual choices add up to
the collective will, in contrast to Loomio’s convergent decision-making,
where a common outcome is negotiated among participants. We started
developing a sense for which type of decision-making to deploy in differ-
ent contexts.
After several years and many incremental improvements, we decided to
build a piece of software based on the collaborative funding process, called
Cobudget. A purpose-built app made the whole process simpler, more
visual, and more conducive to feedback and accountability. It also made it
possible for other groups to try collaborative funding for themselves.

177
 Collaborative Funding
Projects to support the network and its vision are funded
using a transparent participatory budgeting process

Living documentation
The Cobudget app allowed us to share the collaborative funding process
beyond Enspiral, as Loomio had done for decision-making. I began to
see a pattern emerging in our work: deconstruct and reconstruct an or-
ganisational process, prototype and improve it internally, and then trans-
mit it to others through a useful tool.
Software is one form that transmissible cultural technology can take, but
there are many others, such as documentation. Like a budget spread-
sheet, documentation sounds incredibly boring. But also like a budget,
it holds a lot of inherent power. For years, we had very little documen-
178 tation at Enspiral. There was a one-pager we’d send to new people with
practical stuff about the office and a list of software they’d need logins
for. The only written policy we had for a long time was the Diversity Pol-
icy. Our website was ironically unimpressive for a company who made
websites.
Strangely enough, this was mostly intentional. Many more people were
interested in joining than we were ready for in the early years. We need-
ed strong natural filters, so that only those who were really aligned and
committed would find their way in. For a long time, I answered the ques-
tion, “What is Enspiral?” with “We’re not sure. Come join us and we’ll
find out together.” Enspiral was in constant flux. In a bossless, non-co-
ercive environment, policy is about discovering how people are doing
things, not dictating. If reality gets out of phase with documentation,
the documentation is rendered useless, and people will simply move on.
Trying to pin things down too soon can choke emerging evolution, and
leads to a bunch of reports no one reads.
It’s also disingenuous, or even dangerous, to spread cultural technology be-
fore you’ve lived with it enough to understand its true impact.

It’s possible to wait too long, hoarding stories that could be of service
to others and denying yourself data for internal reflection. Timing is key.
A few years in, the time for documentation arrived. You can feel it when
it comes. Your heart beats faster when it’s your turn to speak. You keep
getting annoyed that people don’t know what everyone should know.
The outline of the yet-unwritten document crystallizes in your mind.
You mentally prepare answers to questions you know you’ll be asked.
That’s when it’s time to write things down.
It started slowly, with internal documents to set the context for Loomio
decisions, and some updates to the website. I wrote six-monthly reports
on collaborative funding, showing how we’d spent money and what
the outcomes were, and worked on an in-depth timeline of the history
of Loomio. Creatives in the network made videos and infographics at-
tempting to explain what we were to the outside world (and our parents).
We began saying yes to some media interviews.
I wrote up our experiences developing Loomio and Cobudget for a con-
test seeking new approaches to management, and won, which meant I
was invited to give a talk at a conference in New York. This snowballed
into a steady flow of speaking invitations for myself and others in the
179
network, and some of these talks turned into videos we could share on-
 line. Getting people to write blog posts had long been an uphill battle,
because it was too hard to come up with ‘the Enspiral story’. But once
we funded a Cobudget bucket for the “Fairy Blog Mother” to support
people to write their own stories, called Enspiral Tales, our collective
story began to emerge through many voices.
I started the Loomio Co-op Handbook and the whole team contributed
to detailing our internal processes and practices. Surprisingly, it went vi-
ral online (among a certain kind of cooperative organisational develop-
ment geek). I gave a talk about it at an open source conference, where I
repeated a refrain that had been sounding in my head since I first heard it:
“If it’s not documented, it’s not open source.”

Being a transparent organisation without great documentation is like

saying the finances are transparent because, technically, you’d share the
financial reports if anyone asked. If it’s not accessible and usable, it’s not
really transparent. I wanted Enspiral to live up to its ideal of transpar-
ency more authentically. With this in mind, I began writing down some
Enspiral policies that were embedded in our culture. Some were explicit
decisions from the Loomio archives, while others were implicit practic-
es. For example, what exactly it meant to be a member or a contributor,
how the finances worked, and how we made collective decisions. For a
while, these documents just floated around our shared drive as unofficial
guidelines.
The power of documentation only became fully clear to me during the
Enspiral Refactor of 2015. Refactoring software is when programmers
go back and clean up code, taking care of ‘technical debt’, accrued by
moving quickly and not knowing exactly how things should work at first.
The Enspiral Refactor was a major project to clean up our ‘organisa-
tional debt’ in a similar way. I created the Enspiral Handbook to pull
various documents together in one place. At first, I thought it was just
an admin task, to make things easier to find. But I discovered that what I
was doing was actually a type of documentation-driven leadership. Once
I created the structure of the handbook, I could finally see what all the
headings should be, whether we already had content to go under them
or not. Blank spaces represented questions to be answered. The hand-
book could be edited by everyone at Enspiral, like a wiki, and was visible
publicly. We ran a process of seeking affirmation on Loomio for various
180
policies and agreements, and the pages started to fill out.
Reflecting on it now, I see the handbook as perhaps my most important
intervention to distribute information and power at Enspiral. Unwritten
rules cannot be challenged, and unexplored areas are hard to identify
without a map. Far from writing things in stone, documentation creat-
ed a point around which people could gather to constructively discuss
changes. For all of that to work, documentation has to be alive, to serve
as a resource to its users and be co-created by them on an ongoing basis.
Practitioners beyond Enspiral who are really getting down to the brass
tacks of collaboration in their own communities have told me that the
Loomio and Enspiral handbooks have been important resources for
them. Because every community is unique, when I hear this I wonder if
perhaps we’ve hit on some deeper truths, and that makes the challenges
we went through to learn those lessons seem worthwhile. The work of
sharing power, money, and information doesn’t end, because communi-
ties are living, dynamic systems. It is the constant process of understand-
ing and meeting emergent challenges that binds a community together.
There is no endpoint or final answer, only ever-deepening relationships,
ever-braver experiments, and ever-broadening possibilities.

181
 #ChangingTheFuture

with
profit,
not for
profit.
 Coffee, beer, and pizza
A stable community financial model where
everyone gets to choose and no one is in charge.
by Anthony Cabraal

The Enspiral community financial model didn’t emerge fully formed - it

has evolved over many years. Enspiral is not what it was three years ago,
five years ago, or even six months ago, when this book project began.
Who knows how different it will be by the time you read these words!
So, how does the Enspiral financial model actually work!?
Over the years we’ve experimented with many financial models. We have
moved from the original 20% revenue contribution when Enspiral was a
freelancers’ collective, to revenue shares from ventures, to self-set annual
individual contributions. There were times when we tried to maximise
the resources going toward the collective and times we tried to minimise
them. Each experiment taught us a lot, each solution was right at its own
time, and the learnings always folded forward into the next evolution.
For many years Enspiral grew without reliable funding for people work-
ing to support the critical core functions of the community. No matter
how hard we tried, it was easier for a few passionate, creative people to
just to get on with it, than it was for everyone to work together to recog-
nise, label, and understand what they were doing With people continu-
ing to stretch themselves to cover ‘the invisible work in the middle’ we
were not recognising the costs of supporting ourselves.
In 2017 we reached a critical juncture that began a process of chang-
ing the core financial model that held the community together. This is
the story of that iteration. In some ways, this evolutionary step for the
community is nothing special - it’s just another iteration in a long line of
experiments, executed by hundreds of people over many years. In other
ways, it was a huge leap. We changed the core financial model for the
whole community. We moved from relying on the love and adrenaline
of a few passionate, talented people volunteering their time, to a model
where our critical core functions are recognised, costed, and financially
supported. The model we chose was the right model for us. As for many
start-up projects around the world, in the end, the critical ingredients
184
were coffee, beer, and pizza...
6 collective steps towards
a stable community model
This is a reflection of how Enspiral found a financial model that worked
for us, and the questions we answered along the way. Consider these
steps as signposts for any group embarking on a similar adventure.

1 2 3
Defining the Aligning a Defining the
work and shared view. core functions
how to do it. together.

4 5 6
Deciding Building a Giving people
the core costs shared story. the best
together. opportunity
to choose.

1) Define the work and how to do it

Collective work doesn’t ‘just happen’ and people don’t just ‘self-organise’
to solve problems. The work needs boundaries and clarity before any-
thing useful can happen. It begins with broad core questions to diagnose
starting points:

- What’s the problem?

- Why is it a problem?
- What is the opportunity we have to fix it?
- How many people need to contribute their thinking?
- How fast does the project need to move to be successful?
- How do we work inclusively with divergent opinions?
- Who is going to do the work and what power do they have?
- How many people need to agree with the formal decision for
us to all feel OK to move forward?
185
- What happens when people completely disagree about what to do?
 There is no one model or right answer to any of these questions. Every
community has different needs and ambitions that they have to navigate.
When considering inclusive, participatory processes, acknowledge these
trade-offs:
● Sitting down with a few people in a small room and creating a
model on paper is relatively easy. However, relying on input from
only a few people means a model may not get buy-in and may
result in the community disengaging.
● Trying to involve too many people at every step can stall the work,
resulting in consensus paralysis, increased frustration and stifled
motivation.
The elusive ‘Goldilocks zone’ is a process that reflects a culture of in-
clusivity, and values the initiative and time of people executing the work.
Regardless of the outcome, openly confronting these questions is critical
because it is here that the issues of power, governance, control and man-
date to execute come to the surface.

Reflections from Enspiral

After several years of evolving ideas about what Enspiral was, how
it was structured, what it did, what it didn’t do, who did what, and
how much it all cost, keeping everyone on the same page became
almost impossible. As a result of this we did not have shared clarity
across the community. Only a few people really understood what
our core costs were, what we were collectively paying for and what
we were supporting with volunteer energy.
Enspiral was a startup community being bootstrapped by entre-
preneurs building startup ventures - fortunes were changing all the
time. Ventures and contracts were up and down, and as a result our
community revenue was not reliable. In March 2017 this dynamic
surfaced three critical challenges:
1. The legal business entity (Enspiral Foundation) in the centre of
the community was losing money every week and would have
been bankrupt within months without an intervention.
2. The current board members (legally responsible for Enspiral
Foundation) had provided years of service, were tired and wanted
186
to step down.
 3. A few critical community members had moved on to other work
outside the community and others wanted to step back - leaving
a vacuum to fill.
We were lucky to have a strong engaged group of members who
were ready and willing to step into this work - the luck was no acci-
dent either. It took years of work to build the distributed leadership
in the community where an intervention like this was possible at all.
Following a significant piece of work to ‘refactor’ the community in
2015/16 we also had a clear decision making process in place (find it
at handbook.enspiral.com). The community membership used this
process and made a collective decision to mandate a small group of
volunteers to lead a piece of work to ‘balance the books’.
So, at this stage we had the fundamentals of a “self-organised”
immune response to a threat:
● We had a clear challenge with known parameters.
● We had a small group of people - a ‘working group’ - with
a mandate to operate on behalf of the community.
We were ready to start.

2) Aligning a shared view

A distributed organisation will not have one shared mental model of
what the community looks like or how it works. There will be a mix-
ture of tight coherence, dissent, and alternative thinking on everything,
from defining what the community does to what the most important
and urgent problems are. This vibrancy is important, but it sets up a big
challenge.
When everyone holds a different view of the community (It’s like a for-
est! It’s like a computer system! It’s like a campfire! It’s an elephant! It’s
a really complicated! It’s really simple!), deciding what is central to its
existence can be a challenge.
Regardless of the starting point, taking the first step towards a stable
core model requires wide consultation with the community in a variety
of ways. The goal is to understand what people currently understand
and expect from the community, as well as what they think the critical
187
challenges are.
 Reflections from Enspiral
The first step of the working group was to consult widely, gain an
understanding of the different mental models in the community and
surface a model we could all agree on as a starting point. The work-
ing group formed a picture of the entire Enspiral system so people
could easily understand their place within the system and how they
related to the critical core: the Enspiral Foundation. (See the chapter
‘Blueprints’ for the example of this).
We shared this view with the community to ensure people could ask
questions and raise concerns before we continued.
So, at this stage:
● We had a clear challenge.
● We had ‘enough’ of a mental model of the different puzzle
pieces in the community.
● We had ‘enough’ understanding of how most people understood
the financial model and where the big gaps were.

What did we do next?

3) Defining the core functions together

This is a critical step that has important implications. Any community
requires huge amounts of work, effort, skill, and attention given to dif-
ferent functions that are all valued differently by different people. How
do you collectively decide what work lies within the ‘critical core’ and
what is outside it?
● One person’s description of what the core does might be a long
list of important functions that hold the community together and
desperately need funding.
● Another person might believe that the core doesn’t need to do
anything at all, so no funding is needed.
A key concept in this discussion is centralisation. How much should the
core be given a mandate to do in relation to what the community allows
188
to emerge organically?
Reflections from Enspiral
As a general cultural principle, Enspiral has always tried to be as
open to participation and collaboration as possible. We have always
designed our structure and processes around maximising individual
autonomy over centralised control. As a result people are always
doing experiments, testing patterns for organising and working on
projects they believe in without needing permission. Centrally coor-
dinating all the things that happen at Enspiral would be very expen-
sive, and perhaps impossible, given our culture of open participa-
tion and autonomy.
Our challenge was to work out the minimal set of core functions
Enspiral Foundation should be responsible for in order to support
our decentralised, participatory environment. Through wide com-
munity engagement and surveying, the working group surfaced a
broad view of the current ‘common’ work being done and its ben-
efits to the collective. With this data and some further discussion,
the working group began to distinguish between core enabling func-
tions, and everything else.
It was proposed that these core enabling functions include:
● Fiduciary management of financial contributions to the community
● Maintaining onboarding and offboarding processes for people
joining and leaving
● Legal compliance, reporting, and records maintenance of the
Enspiral Foundation
● Administrating software systems for core communication tools

These (also important) functions were excluded, amongst others:

● Newsletters
● Leadership coordination and reporting on work in progress
across the community
● Organising gatherings and retreats
● Managing peer support processes
189
 ● Managing our participatory budgeting and spending process
● The list goes on...

The focus was to ensure that the absolutely critical operational func-
tions could be covered with paid hours, so everyone could trust these
operations to continue. From this stable base, it would become the
responsibility of the community to self-organise and pick up what-
ever other pieces of work they felt were important or needed. It was
decided our financial model would cover the absolute baseline but
our community would continue to rely on active participation and
collaboration to thrive.
We had enough shared clarity to move forwards.

4) Deciding the core costs together

The rubber hits the road when you start to define the costs. When ab-
stract discussions about what is valuable and critical turn into numbers
on a spreadsheet, everything starts to feel different: objections get raised,
trade-offs become visible, and real progress starts to be made.
Not all work is valued the same.
An easy-to-read financial budget and discussion where people are actively
encouraged to raise concerns and questions are also vital at this stage.
Time spent making clear spreadsheets with detailed breakdowns is time
well spent.

Reflections from Enspiral

Enspiral was lucky. We had a dedicated, skilled operations team with
high community context.
This made it relatively simple for us to gain a view (with granu-
lar detail) of how much time (and therefore cost) would go into
supporting our core functions. The result was a clear cost model that
could be developed on spreadsheet and shared with the com-
munity. You can see the full model spreadsheet linked from
handbook.enspiral.com
190
 We facilitated a two-step online proposal process using Loomio
- first asking advice, then seeking agreement. As a result of this
process we gained approval on a spreadsheet as a ‘single source of
truth’ of our core costs, and how we would aim to cover them. This
ensured the community had time and space to raise objectives, ask
questions and point out holes in the model, before agreeing together.
So, now we had:
● General agreement about the shape and structure of the
community
● General agreement about what the core functions were
● A spreadsheet outlining costs

We were ready to move ahead.

5) Building a shared story

In a normal business with a linear value proposition, customers pay X
and get Y. The business can then work out how much it needs to sell
at what price to cover its costs. In a decentralised community, people
receive and contribute value in totally different ways, and no one is in
the middle ensuring they are all happy and their needs met. This is a
critical function in ensuring an environment of indirect reciprocity,
where people understand the need to be active participants, creating value
for themselves and others in the community. How can a community
ensure enough value is generated for enough people to retain its identity
and ensure the core is funded?
The most powerful tool is a story: a collective story of value in the
community.
Because communities generate different value for each person, those
in the centre, who are most convinced of the value (founders, leaders,
highly invested people) often do not see the whole story and need help
to articulate it. It is critical to build a story that represents the diversity of
value exchange in the community, including for people right at the edges.
This story needs to be aspirational and something people can take pride
in. People have to see themselves in the story and feel part of co-creating
it. Investing in quality design, video and art to create beautiful artifacts
191
is resource well spent.
 Reflections from Enspiral
For some people, Enspiral is their core livelihood vehicle, their so-
cial group, and a huge part of their personal and professional iden-
tity. For others, it might be a group of friends they interact with oc-
casionally, an office they visit for Friday drinks, or an event they like
to go to once or twice a year. Our challenge was to clarify a value
story we could all feel good enough about to opt in to together, and
ensure that the baseline costs (outlined in Step 3) were met.
The working group started a rough draft of a story using a slide deck
and consulted the community. Our goal was to surface enough of a
shared story that enough people could agree to. The words changed,
the narrative was questioned, the order of sentences moved around,
the overall structure dismantled and rebuilt. However, the important
hook in our story was clear: Different for everyone, defined by you.
Enspiral was not going to tell you what made it worth joining. The
value you recieved was up to you. Critically, there is no central
command group to complain to if you aren’t getting the value you
thought you would. This is not a customer-vendor relationship, it’s
a community where the work of generating value is in the hands of
everyone.
The working group engaged creative professionals in the community
to turn the story into a video and slide deck that framed the mission
of the community, gave some examples of how people have inter-
acted with it, and listed shared tools and different ways people could
participate. The work to surface the collective story was invaluable
in creating cohesion and connecting people at the edges who were
still trying to understand what Enspiral is and how it works. As in
previous steps, the process was more important than the outcome.
At this point in the process we had:
● General agreement about the shape and structure of the community
● General agreement about what the core functions were
● A spreadsheet outlining costs
● A story we could all say yes to
It was time to put the model to the test.
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6) Give people the best opportunity to choose
This final step is about trusting people to make their own decisions.
The work is to make one clear, strong signal so it is as easy as possi-
ble for people to understand their options (and hopefully say yes). In
a decentralised community, total engagement is a rare occurrence. The
attention economy is tough. People are busy and will engage in the pro-
cess in different ways. This is challenging because the people doing the
work have the highest context and are the most likely to misjudge how
engaged others, are and what they do and do not understand. Designing
for the lower end of engagement means carefully thinking through the
minimum information required from the entire process to bring people
quickly up to speed. The work is less about leadership and facilitation
and more about good user experience design so people can easily access
the information they need to decide and act.

Reflections from Enspiral

Enspiral is a busy community of working professionals. Everyone
is out there in the world building companies, raising families, and
delivering projects, so it takes real effort to turn inwards and reflect.
Dancing between group engagement and pushing forward with
whomever has the most energy is always a balance. It is a mixture of
art and science, emotional intelligence, facilitation, and guesswork.
After nearly six months of working through this process, some peo-
ple were completely up to speed and ready to act and some had not
engaged at all. The final step was to give everyone the information
they needed to quickly understand the initial challenge, get up to
speed with the decisions made, and take quick simple action. The
result was a semi-public one page website and an internal engagement
campaign we called ‘Coffee, Beer and Pizza.’
The offer was clear:

● To support Enspiral, you could contribute the monetary equiva-

lent of a coffee, beer or pizza every week, depending on the value
you felt you received. Those facing financial barriers could ask for
a 12 month bursary.

193
 We made the interaction simple:
● On welcome.enspiral.com, we outlined the video story, the slides,
access to the cost spreadsheets, and space for questions. With one
interaction, anyone in the community could choose an option and
sign up to say ‘yes’ to the next phase of Enspiral.
It worked! We ‘balanced the books’ of Enspiral Foundation with a
clear financial model supported by individual members of the com-
munity recognising the diversity of value they received. At a funda-
mental level, the model gave the whole community confidence that
the core was safe and we could focus on the next challenges.
Sort of.
After any piece of decisive action that changes something, new
complexity arises with questions to solve. For us that looked like:
● What happened to people who didn’t engage?
● What happened to all the other functions we didn’t cover in the core
expenses?
● How does this change the community roles and responsibilities?

This work to surface answers to these questions continues and the

answers will no doubt create more questions.

Stability achieved. Now what?

Recognise the value is in the process
The key word in each of the steps outlined is ‘together’. That is where
the deepest challenge and value exists. Going through the process to-
gether is how collective muscles get built. There are no universal an-
swers. Every group has to go through a process of working out their
own coherence to gain a clear sense of their reality. The process to en-
gage the community and instigate discussion is as vital as the answers
that are surfaced at the end. The model Enspiral landed on for this next
phase is a simple ‘pick your own value’ subscription that ensures that
core collective costs are met. Proposing this solution at the start of the
process would not have created the necessary alignment built by working
194
through the six stages together.
Recognise the model will change again
The model will never be finished because the needs of the community
will change again (indeed, they probably already have). Our goal is not
to ‘solve’ the question of the model forever or propose this as the right
solution for other groups. By reflecting and sharing these milestones we
hope to provide useful tools and maps, both for ourselves and others
interested in building and growing these types of structures in the world.

Recognise the benefits of a stable core

At a tangible level this is can be seen in a community financial model
that covers base costs, enabling people to focus on other, more pressing
challenges. In our case, how to build livelihoods that change the world.
It is like the underlying skeleton that gives shape, strength, and flexibil-
ity to the whole system. It should be strong enough to hold its shape
with the challenges of diverse opinion, but loose enough to evolve and
grow. Together with the governing agreements, this skeleton creates the
structure that underpins everything. The ventures and humans being the
organs, flesh and muscle that bring it all to life.
As a community member, the stable core model should not feel like
a mechanism of control that determines what you can and can’t do.
It should feel more like an enabling platform that you can leverage to
extend what you can do in the world.

195
 This thing called Enspiral:
holding a collective story
by Nick Laurence

Across a dinner table the other night, my sister remarked: “it’s never
simple to describe what you’re doing is it?” I was telling my cousin about
the New Frontiers, (affiliated with the Edmund Hillary Fellowship), a
community gathering I was working on with many others from Enspiral.
My family are interested in what I’m doing and ask good questions, but it
can be difficult for them to keep up. They’re used to conversations about
a regular nine-to-five job or starting a business that has a specific, easily
defined purpose.
In one pithy comment, my sister captured much of what had changed
for me since becoming involved with the ‘Enspiral world’ (as I refer to
it in my head). For me, it’s a world of paradigm-shifting conversations
and working in the gaps between sectors, connecting disparate groups
or ideas and asking “how about this way?” There are lots of incredibly
smart, socially aware, and active people working in different sectors and
in different ways. There are some common threads; innovative uses of
technology, horizontal or non-hierarchical organising, high-quality fa-
cilitation, co-operative business structures, open source, collective deci-
sion-making and budgeting, systemic thinking, to name a few. But how
to describe this to others? It’s not as easy as saying “I’m a nurse, I work
at Wellington Hospital”. It’s more like “I’m a… generalist? I work at...
no, with... um, in collaboration with Enspiral.”

What’s Enspiral?
Good question! In true Enspiral fashion, to gain more perspective on
this question we put together a survey and asked the community... Below
are some responses we got to the following questions:
How would you describe Enspiral? What is your connection to
Enspiral? How would you describe the value that Enspiral contributes
196 to your life and work?
 “I’ve been a member for more than 7 years earning a living with
Enspiral for most of that time. Enspiral is like family and friends with a
professional intent and shared values. Part personal development expe-
rience, part purposeful opportunity generator, part weird/wonderful
friends dating service.”

“I’m hanging in as a member by my fingertips.”

“I’m a contributor, have been on the fringes for three years or so.
I find it helpful to see Enspiral as a network of human relationships, rather
than as a solid, unified organisation.”

“It’s a ‘community in the cloud’ for me. A group of people who I can bounce
ideas off and check in with. It is a North Star and an example of how things
can be done differently with strong leadership, shared resources, and a
rebellious attitude. I’ve learned a lot in Enspiral and practised a lot. It’s
also the hat I wear when I show up in my work with other networks, and
ambassador the Enspiral spirit and story.”

“I’ve been in the swim for a few years, going to retreats, and starting to do
projects with Enspiral folks. I dip in and out, but I own an Enspiral t-shirt.”

“I heard about this Enspiral group when in Melbourne but it seemed too
hard to grasp, so when I moved to New Zealand, I had the opportunity to
dive all in and go to a summer retreat – it was one of the best things I ever
did. It introduced me to concepts that blew my mind and has put me on the
incredible learning journey I’ve been on since. You feel held in such a safe,
intense, magical space, listening to and sharing your deepest truths in a
story circle or short but deep intimate connections with strangers.”

These snippets show that there is not one way of relating to Enspiral.
It’s described as a “spirit”, “retreats and projects”, as both “a whole” and
as separate Enspiral “people”, a “safe, intense, magical space”, “family
and friends with professional intent and shared values”, and as a “net-
work of human relationships”.
One of the things that struck me about Enspiral is the resistance to ho-
mogenisation. Members value “being a fruit salad, not a smoothie” and
this creates resistance to a homogenised story. Descriptions like “more
people working on stuff that matters”, while useful, don’t quite get at
the magic of Enspiral or what makes it unique. For me, it’s more to do
with the depth and quality of thinking about social issues as well as the
practical things that could be done in the world to address them. And
then not just thinking about problems but actively pursuing solutions in
197
the world, together, in one big bold, interconnected experiment.
 There’s a multidimensional meta-story that exists because of all the
connected parts. What’s more, this meta-story is always in flux, always
emerging and the stories that fuel it live in interbeing with each other. One
useful visual metaphor for this is the ‘Buckyball’ (the carbon-based geo-
metric structure named after Buckminster Fuller, shown below) where
every surface represents a slightly different story of the same overarch-
ing metastructure.

Imagine that each hexagon or pentagon in the structure is actually a sto-

ry, a view, a perspective from an individual. There are lots of individual
perspectives, and they each name and describe the meta-structure from
a different and unique angle, reflecting their worldview, which is shaped
by their own history, their gifts, their ways of working and being in the
world. We can see the stories and different perspectives all linked, and
together become inseparable parts of the whole structure. The structure
wouldn’t be whole if any of the boundaries of the hexagons and penta-
gons were removed.
We can also see that the stories are illusory: there are no actual pentagons
or hexagons that exist independently of the whole. Each individual story
exists because of the overall whole, and yet our mind seems to like seeing
those smaller shapes. The individual stories are easier to digest than try-
198
ing to make sense of a complete, dynamic meta-story all the time.
 “I initially went to the retreat to connect with this group I’d heard so
much about as a business opportunity. As a designer working on pur-
pose-led projects, it was essentially a group of my perfect clients. Nine
months later I’ve worked on multiple projects with a variety of Enspiral
ventures and am essentially in partnership with a couple of Enspiralites,
building a collective agency. It’s been huge for building my livelihood...
and I’m gaining so much more than that. I feel like I have a short but
deep connection with dozens of people within the community that I can
reach out to at any time with a generosity of heart and mind, and that is
incredibly valuable to me.”

“Enspiral is a loose network of social innovators and freelancers who sup-

port each other to practice new ways of working, on matters that matter
to them and the world. It’s a professional network that encourages you to
do your best work. We share assets, resources, ideas, energy, money, and
time and make stuff happen together. It’s a community of people, mostly
in New Zealand, but with members across the world. And it’s an ideal of
how we wish people treated each other in the world, and sometimes we
embody that ideal, and sometimes we don’t. But it serves as an inspira-
tion to us all, and to others who hear and learn about what Enspiral is
and symbolises in our minds and hearts.”

Enspiral consciously holds a meta-story, its identity is collective and the

challenge of holding this is perhaps part of what it means to be an En-
spiralite. Being part of the whole supports and validates the individual
members, and acknowledges interdependence - it gives us something to
point to and say “Hey, look at this, there are other ways of doing things,
it’s not just me, I don’t have all the answers, there’s a whole network of
people doing cool stuff with different views over here”.
This is the same challenge we must reflect on for reality itself. Real life,
emotion, and the patterns of social relationships are infinitely more
complex than the Buckyball’s icosahedron shape. There is a wholeness,
albeit a messy one, to society and the systems of life on Earth, and it is
infinitely more complex than any of the individual perspectives that can
perceive of it. What is it to live in this super-complex, entangled society
in which we find ourselves in the early 21st Century? Organisations like
Enspiral that embrace this kind of multi-dimensionality may just be the
perfect training grounds for meeting the complexity of the contempo-
rary world, and the interconnected challenges and opportunities we face
199
going forward.
 essay.Seven

Finding the stuff

that matters
by Chelsea Robinson
 Finding the stuff that matters

“Find your place on the planet.

Dig in, and take responsibility from there.”
~ Gary Snyder

To shift the needle you need

to shift your mindset
In a world of converging issues, it’s natural for the mind and heart to be
twisted with questions:
How can you make the biggest difference on climate change?

What if the only thing you feel you can do is plant a community garden with
your neighbour?

How can you reduce the rate of suicides in your community with your soft-
ware skills?

What if the only thing you can think of to do is build a mindfulness app?

How can you strengthen the biodiversity in your region?

What if the only option available is to take a permaculture class?

How can you bring about new forms of organising?

What if you are happy to be a crypto entrepreneur and the only thing you can
think of is to experiment a lot with ethereum?

How can you make changes to the way capital moves, the way land and ideas
are owned, and do so in a way that creates more equal access to the things all
humans need to thrive? What if your first idea is to start a church discussion
201
group on these topics, or a book club?
 BETTER WORK TOGETHER

All these questions are driven by the same impulse: How can I make a
difference?
As you try to answer this question, your mind will take you towards a
problem or a solution. Where do your questions, needs, assumptions
and skills lead you? Do they truly help you find the greatest impact, or
do they just help you find your new favourite reddit thread? In a life of
service, how do we balance what we have to offer, the opportunities in
front of us, and who we could be? How do we come around a table to-
gether to figure that out?
Finding the “stuff that matters” can be counterintuitive. Discovering an
intervention that could really help others requires rigour and discipline,
and is a non-linear process. Many of us think our first idea is the best
idea. No matter where you start, whether you’re a seasoned investor, an
artist, an accountant, or a first-time entrepreneur, we all often jump to
conclusions and make illogical leaps in our thinking that prevent us from
having our intended impact. We get stuck in our subjective reality and
don’t engage rigorously with the shared reality.
Over the past 10 years, I’ve had the privilege of working in many arenas
of impact work. I’ve been part of delegations to the United Nations. I
co-founded and built a movement called Generation Zero, with 10,000+
active members changing national laws. I led business development in
social enterprises, including Loomio.org. I’ve run social innovation labs
and coached innovation for social change in many countries. I’ve con-
sulted on impact and philanthropic strategy for some of the largest
funds ever created. I’ve seen a useful cross section of impact work. I’ve
been inspired and disappointed at the same time.
People all over the world are working hard to make the biggest difference
they can to the issues that break their heart. It is deeply inspiring and
gives me hope. However, I’ve come to believe that the common short-
coming of most efforts is unwillingness of the leadership and teams to
look outside of their existing mindset towards learning what could be
more impactful. Regardless of who we are and what we have to work
with, the more we are able to question and understand our own thinking,
the more impactful we will be. I have certainly had my eyes opened to
new impact strategies again and again. Hopefully, I can help speed some
of your efforts by sharing what I see, and accelerate our communities
202
towards meaningful change.
 Finding the stuff that matters

In this complex world, we cannot assume we know what works, so we

must experiment. Issues are connected, and we need to look upstream
from what we immediately see and think through how to make a bigger
change. We need to shift toward a mindset of system entrepreneurship.
We have recently learned to idolise ethical business practice, and with
this new awareness ‘social entrepreneurship’ has become a strong focus
of students, academics, founders, economics and politicians alike.
For example, it is popular to work with the Lean Business Canvas when
starting a social impact project. But the matrix of a business plan: cus-
tomer, problem, solution, doesn’t cover the complexity we’re facing
today. System entrepreneurship is a mindset that takes interconnected,
compounding factors into account in the problem solving. Instead of
biting off one piece of the bigger picture and commercialising an in-
tervention, system entrepreneurship is iterative, first working with one
aspect of the situation, then another, unravelling the ball of wool that
has gone unseen by a culture of solving things as separate pieces. It is
harder to commercialise, and harder to explain, and harder to define a
single value proposition, but it is worth the effort, because the impact
of these interventions is so much higher. This new way of thinking can
direct you to what matters, and the Impact Canvas can help.

“This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine”

Remember: There is no single most valuable thing you can do with your time.
Our lives are winding journeys filled with setbacks, growth spurts, edu-
cational moments, and periods of stasis. We are hastened by hope and
slowed by fatigue. It’s no surprise that in our own personal complexity
we struggle to integrate our own worldview. Calculating impact is com-
plicated by not always being at the part of our journeys we consider the
‘right time’ to invest in societal change.
In my own journey, over and over again I have gone looking for the
single most influential role I can play. Each time, I’ve pursued something
specific, as well as looking for what I’m ready to do. So, not only are
we each searching for powerful intervention points, we are looking into
ourselves for the parts of us ready to shine in this particular chapter of
203
our journey.
 BETTER WORK TOGETHER

The Impact Canvas:

a tool to find what matters
The Impact Canvas was born out of my experiences in Enspiral. After
running non-profit activist groups for more than five years, I needed to
re-calibrate with reality. I had been consumed 100 hours a week (work-
ing to solve the climate crisis), which was not sustainable financially or
emotionally.
I got involved in Enspiral a couple of years into its development and
began learning about using business, cooperatives, and technology for
impact.
Building movements to drive policy change had taught me that the world
doesn’t work the way you want it to. I understood, despite the business
books’ advice, that even if you show up dressed well, with ambition,
insight, and confidence, people don’t always listen to you. There are en-
trenched corporate and political interests. This kind of training helped
me keep my clarity of focus on being real, retaining the somewhat naive
optimism of the startup community. I felt curious. While aware of the
risks, I felt a curiosity around the idea that technology and community
could change everything.
We were able to create magic and learn a lot from the diversity of ideas
in our community. I learnt about validation, design thinking, customer
development, bank account creativity, ownership structures, and more. I
shared what I knew about democratically run organisations, with rotat-
ing leaders who facilitate consensus; the importance of having a strategy
for impact agreed on by all; and how to draw an influence map and build
rapport with institutional stakeholders for systems change.
Out of all this, the impact canvas came to life. I believe community or-
ganising, activism, and entrepreneurship are the greatest forces of our
time. Let’s combine them to ignite our sense of agency.
The Impact Canvas is a worksheet of questions to answer as a team. It
helps build a shared purpose and strategy for your socially or environ-
mentally impactful project by connecting the big picture with a starting
point that’s unique to you.

204
 Finding the stuff that matters

Guide to the Impact Canvas

This tool is designed to help small teams, especially founding teams, find
their mission and discover how it serves the bigger picture. Whatever your
project is, this tool can help you make your assumptions explicit and test
them. This could benefit a community, school, or software startup. What-
ever your thing is, you can have a go with the canvas.
The Impact Canvas will summarise your impact strategy and the assump-
tions baked into it. It’s about exposing the mental model you have for
how change happens, and your role in that. You will need to articulate
your hypothesis about how what you are doing contributes to creating the
world you want to see. Even if you have already thought about this before,
think about it again with your team, and with more rigour. It’s important
to know: Why are you doing what you’re doing, and what are you hoping
will happen because of it?
Find the mechanism of reasoning between your vision - the world you
want to see - your mission, and your contribution to creating that world.
Map how your method of interfering with reality will lead to changes in
society. Make it explicit, so your team is in alignment and you can test if
it works or not. The end result should be something like this: “We be-
lieve that by doing X and Y, we will create Z effect in the world, and this
will lead to ABC changes, which will enable our vision”.
One of my projects at Enspiral was LifehackHQ, a social innovation
lab focused on finding and intervening in systemic factors to help young
New Zealanders flourish, and help reduce suicide rates nationwide in the
long term. As a social lab, we coached teams to identify prototypes that
might enable this vision within their regions and communities.
We needed an educational tool to help our teams understand that ideas
are not the most important part of impact work. Impact needs to be
considered on multiple levels, addressing the root causes of commu-
nity issues, surfacing the ecosystem of existing organisations, and what
unique talents each can bring to bear. The canvas helps you to be a
mindful changemaker, rather than to rush in assuming you know how to
fix everything.

205
206
IMPACT CANVAS
1. Examine Assumptions 2. Define the problem 3. History of the Problem 4. Your Vision 5. Ecosystem & Partners

Start here How do you currently define What historical patterns have What is your vision What are others are doing
List your assumptions about the problem? affected this issue in the past? for a future? about this problem already?
Other organisations or
how change happens
stakeholder groups.
BETTER WORK TOGETHER

I assume these problems

exist because...
What key societal milestones
What relationships with
What are some of the root must be reached for your
other organisations
causes of this problem? vision to become reality?
could you build on?
I assume right now that the What are some new insights
core levers for change are... on the nature of the problem?

6. You and Your Team 7. Your Impact Hypothesis

Your strengths, personally What unique value can you What is the clearest way to What is the intended area of What metrics can you measure to
or as an organisation contribute that others can’t? state the issue as you intervention? test if these ideas are effective?
Brainstorm some interventions understand it now?
you could uniquely offer
 Finding the stuff that matters

7 Step process
Here are seven steps to work through with your team or thinking part-
ners. Imagine these as prompts for conversations that could take place
over time. One meeting per week for six weeks, or perhaps a full im-
mersion weekend to dive in and focus. Be prepared for divergence of
ideas in your team. Addressing differences at this stage will allow you
to question your impact at meaningful levels. If you put your best into
it, you will come out with a clarity of purpose, a reason for your shared
direction, and an easy starting point.

0) Know what you want to change

Know what you want to shift before you start this process. Identify an
issue area such as child poverty, youth depression, elderly care, native
species protection, privatised fractional reserve banking, or anything
else. At this stage you can be broad.
If you have already narrowed your issue into so much specificity that
there’s no room for finding deeper issues, such as ‘lack of vegan lunch
options in schools’, then you need to zoom out a little. A very narrow
problem area only allows you to agree with yourself. You can test this
by trying to turn your problem statement into a solution by removing
‘lack of ’. In this case, ‘Vegan Lunch in schools’ is the assumed solution.
Try shifting your sense of the problem to describe the qualities that are
wrong, for example: ‘kids are hungry or eating poor nutrition food in
schools, which is affecting performance’.
The closer you get to describing the thing you want to change, the
broader the problem will feel. Try something like: ‘Poor school perfor-
mance and health of five-to-ten year olds in Chatsworth’. This does
not assume you know why problems exist, or that school lunches are
not vegan enough. This is a good starting point for further exploration.

What change do you want to see? In what area of society?

1) Recognise your assumptions about how change happens

Many people use their current worldview to diagnose a problem. A school

teacher who wants to increase the environmental awareness in their school
might start a series of educational workshops to teach more people in the
community about plastic. This is an ‘educational’ theory of change, where 207
 BETTER WORK TOGETHER

the assumption or underlying belief is that people will behave differently

with more information. An economic theory of change would explore a
different angle. Assuming instead that if you want society to make better
decisions about plastic, making non-plastic options cheaper and more de-
sirable will result in behaviour change. Both examples show problem-solu-
tion logic heavily biased by the worldview of the person thinking it through.

Ask yourself how you think an issue was created, who has power and who
doesn’t, why you believe the problem still exists, and what you believe needs
to happen to make a difference. Notice that you may be making assump-
tions because of your worldview. Work with others to help you notice this.

2) Deeply examine the problem you are trying to affect

I asked a young woman from a low income community to explain why

she was focusing on educating parents in her area. She saw youth issues
as caused by a lack of parenting and values in parenting. During the
conversation, we explored further the conditions facing her communi-
ty. We uncovered that dire unemployment and the lack of government
investment into infrastructure (including schools and public transport)
may also be contributing to a general lack of support for young people
transitioning from childhood to independence.
The assumption she had made, that it was the parents’ fault, was a
popular belief at that time, emphasised by the narrative of the gov-
ernment. Educating parents could have massive benefits, but it was
important for her to realise the bigger picture: cycles of poverty per-
petuated through investment decisions and institutionalised racism.

What logic leaps are you making? What are you leaving out of the picture?
Ask yourself how you would define the problem you’re trying to address. Try
to capture it in one sentence. Ask yourself what is causing this problem. When
you name causes, ask yourself “What is causing that cause?” Follow the links
of causality to improve your understanding of the system that is making this
issue occur. Get input from other people to understand whether our thinking
aligns with the way others see the problem, especially those affected by it.

3) Investigate the historical context of this issue

Whether it’s local history or global history, looking back can help you
208
look forward. Consider the history of democracy in various countries.
 Finding the stuff that matters

How was it won? Was it only through protest? Or through changes in

economic structures?
The invention of the credit union (mutual banks) was a way for the
working class to amass financial power and become part of the owner-
ship/investment class, and thus become politically influential. When we
look back at the history of the United States we see how wealthy families
influenced policy and electoral campaigning during the post-world-war
and civil war rebuilds. The United States today is still shaped by the de-
cision making of those times, and philanthropic industry is still heavily
influenced by those families. Looking at these histories shows that an
initial understanding of a problem like ‘there’s not enough funding for
progressive political parties’ is really better thought of as ‘the role of
money in politics has shaped where we are today and the unmitigated
contributions of wealthy families in democratic election processes needs
rethinking’.
Exploring past examples of social change (positive or negative) can help
us to understand the dynamics of society and come up with new defini-
tions of the problems we seek to solve.
Pause: notice any new ways of understanding the issue. What new ideas have
come to you since you dug deeper into the root causes of the issue? What new
insights emerged from examining history that have changed your assump-
tions and initial hunches?

4.a) Articulate your vision

Clearly state how the world looks when you’ve succeeded. It’s as simple
and as difficult as that. Do not state a solution in this vision statement.
Describe what your community or the world is like when your deeper
vision for the world is achieved.

4.b) Name the steps or milestones

Name the steps or milestones that indicate you are moving the world
towards your vision. These are likely to be big-picture milestones that
you do not have direct control over, like ‘the price of oil makes globally
transporting goods less economical than local production and consump-
tion’, or ‘there is a national review of high school curriculums and how
history classes portray slavery and colonisation’. Milestones can act as a
pathway for you.

209
 BETTER WORK TOGETHER

Take care not to write a to-do list. This is NOT a list of actions; it is a list of
positive symptoms that the world is recovering from the illness. They are signs
that the issue that you are working on is healing, shifting, or changing. What
are those signs?

5) Explore your ecosystem

You are not alone. Map other organisations that are helping solve the
issue, and look into how your interventions or ideas line up with or
duplicate what they’re doing. What can they do that you can’t? What’s
better left to them?
When we were working on LifehackHQ we decided not to work direct-
ly with anyone younger than 18. Instead, we worked with people who
supported under-18s. We also decided to be interdisciplinary and live
between sectors, as very few entities were doing that weaving work.
What have others got covered that you don’t need to do?
6) Identify and claim your unique strengths

List your unique strengths as a person or as an organisation in the con-

text of this issue. Do you have first-hand experience with one of the
problems in the web of issues you’re facing? Do you have more access
to money and resources than others in the sector?
In Generation Zero, we realised that being young was a key strength
when building a movement around intergenerational justice. Even
though other organisations of much older folks were saying the same
things, in the eyes of the media, moral messages about what Earth we’re
going to inherit meant more coming from the mouths of babes.
What do you have that no one else does?

7) Articulate three sentences that help you:

Summarise what you have learnt about the issue and what you’re going to try.
• What are you here to address? Name the issue clearly, based on
your problem and vision exploration.
• What are you going to try? Name your best guess at a good
starting point intervention, based on looking at what others are
doing and what is your unique contribution.
• What will you track? Name how you might measure whether
the intervention is effective/impactful, based on milestones in the
210 short and medium term that you hope to see.
 Finding the stuff that matters

Do it.

The role of community in

amplifying impact
Communities can be very good platforms for shared action, but not
always the best format for focused work on issues out in the world.
Helping a community like Enspiral or LifehackHQ to focus on an out-
ward-facing impact strategy can be very hard. Communities are often
made up of people who want support emotionally or financially, and not
always folks who are committed to rigorously challenging and evolving
their belief systems to find solutions. Although communities make a
direct impact on the lives of those involved, they can be very self-ab-
sorbed. A demanding amount of discipline is needed outside your own
beliefs and stories of how the world works.
Enspiral itself is not producing deliberate external outcomes. The most
direct units of impact are the projects that people organise themselves
around. However, the community is a very important primordial soup
for increasing everyone’s capacity for impact. This is the essence of be-
coming a platform for impact: combine passionate people, a trickle of
money, high risk tolerance, and good intentions. If you can sustain your-
selves, have events, build relationships, and work together, then you’ll get
thoughtful, awesome projects. Humans are innately creative and across
our lifespan we iterate towards our highest calling. Wherever people are
at when they enter your community, if it’s diverse enough, they will find
their place and get busy.
Educating each other is a fantastic way to help a community achieve
more impact. How do you help people find impactful work? We ask
ourselves whether Enspiral should judge and measure if we were making
enough impact, or simply hold space for growth as people figure it out.
Perhaps we should just focus on building Enspiral itself, and have more
and more working groups that experiment with processes and a clear
value proposition for members? This is a constant tension.
If I could go back and do Enspiral again, I would institute more inten-
tional learning systems so we could constantly integrate new information
about the nature of impact. Most of the work of making a difference is
grunt work, implementing the vision one day at a time, but you’ll grunt
in the wrong direction if you don’t stay oriented on the map and adjust
the compass. The experimental nature of the Impact Canvas and the 211
 BETTER WORK TOGETHER

idea of setting up a hypothesis and testing it to determine what works is

the kind of culture I would implement if I could go back in time and use
it without community when everyone was just getting started. Events
held regularly enough to see progress could be places to challenge each
other to show what’s working and what’s not. This can be done together
and with feedback loops like this you can expose blind spots.
A lot of the work of making a difference is unlearning and reshaping
your ideas about how the world works. You need to allow your ideas
about what impact is to evolve with input from others. In Enspiral, we
have wondered if is not the splash of the rock being thrown into the
water that matters, but the ripple that shifts the water long after the rock
has disappeared.
Humans are not very good at understanding ripple effects, compound-
ing effects, and long lead times. That’s why we’re struggling with climate
change, lack of retirement savings, and health issues caused by short-
term lifestyle choices. But we can learn to see non-linear effects of in-
terventions. What better context for this re-education than a supportive
peer learning environment, like a chosen community of folks working
together to make good go faster.

Safe travels
There are no silver bullets. You need to start where you are, but invisible
assumptions can block you from creating the positive effect you want to
have. You can take a good first step if you start by examining your own
thinking and rigorously experiment using the Impact Canvas.
If you are part of a community, or building community, remember that
communities are two main things: cultural echo chambers, and accelera-
tors. What culture do you need in order to create impact? What culture do
you want to avoid replicating? What culture do you want to echo and mir-
ror to each other over the years to come? A culture where everyone is held
accountable for whether their ideas are actually creating good in the world.
A culture where people are willing to be proved wrong enough times to
find what’s right. A culture where you help each other find what matters.
What do you want to accelerate together? Stuff that matters.
Read the full E-Book filled with facilitation advice and deep
212
examples at IMPACTCANVAS.CO
 #ChangingTheFuture

Greed
is infectious.
Generosity

You are a virus.

Be a good one.
 essay.Eight

Out beyond consensus

there’s a field:
I’ll meet you there
by Richard D. Bartlett
 Out beyond consensus there’s a field: I’ll meet you there

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,

there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” -- Rumi

I’ve been relentlessly focused on one thing for nearly seven years now.
Since the Occupy Movement at the end of 2011, all the strands of my
life have woven together into one coherent rope. I’ve been participating
in, facilitating, studying, writing about, designing software for, building a
company around, and teaching methods for collective decision-making.
My thinking has developed a lot over that time, so I want to share some
of the most potent lessons I’ve picked up along the way. I’ll introduce
some cutting edge practices in group decision-making, and explain why
I usually focus on the subtle issues of culture, power, and social psychol-
ogy rather than the particulars of various voting protocols. But this is a
story, not a textbook, so I’ll rewind first and introduce myself…

Hi, I’m Rich

My name is Richard Dennis Bartlett. Born in 1984, raised on a farm in

the Wairarapa, a rural district outside of Wellington, New Zealand. My
family is Christian, and originally from Western Europe, but we’ve called
ourselves ‘New Zealanders’ for a couple generations.

Until I was 27, I never really thought about how decisions happen in groups. 215
 BETTER WORK TOGETHER

Growing up, the same decision-making model was in operation across

all the different aspects of my life, starting from my home, school, and
church, continuing on through university, and then into the workplace.
All these groups were governed by the logic of hierarchy, modelled after
theocratic dictatorship. Call him God or Dad, Teacher or Boss, at the
top of all these groups there’s a single source of all authority. If he (it’s
usually a ‘he’) is a benevolent dictator, he may parcel out some of that
authority to subordinates (‘priests’ or ‘managers’). But regardless of how
much power he distributes, as the ultimate authority, he always gets the
last word. Group conformity is maintained by the selective application
of his approval and punishment.

Because my experience was uniform across all these different groups—

my home, church, school, etc. I barely even noticed it. I was like a fish
who didn’t know the word for water. That all changed in 2011 when I
got swept into the Occupy Movement and caught my first glimpse of a
world without dominator hierarchies.

Turn on, tune in, drop out

I’ve been telling people ‘my Occupy story’ for seven years, but I don’t
think I’ve ever come close to expressing the significance of that brief
period of intense personal growth. It’s effing ineffable, like trying to talk
about an amazing psychedelic trip. I reach for words like ‘expansion,
awareness, interconnection, dissolution’ and most polite grown-ups gen-
tly back away. Indeed, for a lot of people these days, “Occupier” holds
about the same meaning as ‘tripper’: a kind of naïve optimist who wants
to change the world but can barely organise a picnic.

I’ll ask you to put those associations aside for a second, and just focus in
on one aspect: the method of coordination. Remember that for a couple
of months, there were nearly 1000 camps in cities all over the world,
extending practical hospitality to anyone who showed up, offering food,
shelter, and meaningful conversation, producing media and running li-
braries, medical centres, and universities. This movement emerged on
every continent, without a centralised authority or organising commit-
tee, and reached global scale within a couple of weeks. Inside each camp,
all the practical day-to-day operation of village life was organised along
216
non-hierarchical lines. Nobody was in charge.
 Out beyond consensus there’s a field: I’ll meet you there

We gathered each day to sit in the ‘general assembly’. This circle was
open to anyone who wanted to participate in day-to-day decisions about
camp life, or debate the more philosophical questions. This was my first
experience of collective intelligence, where the patient application of
deliberative process, empathy, and creativity brought us insights that no
individual could discover on their own. There were times when I felt
like a single neuron in a collective brain. In the bootstrapped collective
intelligence of the general assembly, I started to sense the enormous
potential we have when we’re coordinated in the right way. For the first
time in my adult life, I felt hopeful, like we might actually have the ca-
pacity to design solutions to the enormous challenges of 21st century
life. As my friend Lucas says, the climate crisis is an “all hands on deck”
scenario; we need collaborative methods that mobilise and harmonise
the creative capacities of all of us. We need groups that are greater than
the sum of their parts.
I’ll readily admit that it was flawed and messy and temporary, but the
Occupy experiment left with me with the conviction that mission-driven
decentralised organisations can vastly outperform profit-driven hierar-
chical forms.
Occupy also showed me that there’s a lot more to power-sharing than
simply saying you want to share power. Even with a shared commitment
to collaboration: we have to unlearn our hierarchical conditioning, learn
new habits, build new skills, invent new language and organisational
forms.
I guess the most honest way to put it is that Occupy gave me a sense of
personal mission. Now I’m like a dog with a stick, chewing on the knotty
questions of self-organisation:
What would it take for us to govern our shared spaces, projects, companies,
institutions, and countries without coercive power structures? Can we replace
domination with deliberation?

Or to put it more bluntly: Can society work without bosses?

The Occupy camp in Wellington’s Civic Square was my first laboratory
for exploring these questions.
Deliberating in the general assembly each day was such an intense ed-
ucation. Negotiating with other people, trying to find agreement about
217
how we should organise our little village, I learned that the most import-
 BETTER WORK TOGETHER

ant thing I could do was listen. Not just listening to rebut, listening to
understand, where are you coming from? what do you believe? what do you
value? why do you think like that?

When I truly understand somebody’s position, I can make a proposal

that they can agree with. It’s not about being clever, having the best
ideas, or being right, it’s just about listening, being flexible, and looking
for solutions that satisfy as many people as possible.
That listening skill is something I treasure to this day. Whenever I’m
confronted with an opinion I disagree with, if I can summon the energy
to take a compassionate view, I always find new insight. On my good
days, I tell myself, “assuming this person is not wrong, stupid, or bad, what could
I learn if I share their perspective for a moment?”
While I had this lovely inspirational time at Occupy, it was also kind of a
disaster. We discovered the limitations of the open-air general assembly
format. We learned how difficult it is to govern a public space, especially
when you’re making decisions with random people, some of whom are
drunk, or intentionally disruptive, or just passing through and sharing
an opinion without any commitment to the community. I learned that
consensus only works to the degree that people care about each other.
We tried to include everybody, which sounds good in theory, but it was
painful to discover that including some people inevitably excludes oth-
ers. We learned that community is defined by its boundaries.
As our camp disintegrated, a few of us Occupiers met with some of the
folks from Enspiral. In retrospect, it seems extremely fortunate that we
found another self-organising community experiment, at just the right
time, just a few blocks away. Pretty soon, we shifted our research project
from the open air lab of Occupy into the co-working space of Enspiral.

A club for pragmatic idealists

I found that Enspiral had a lot in common with Occupy. Both commu-
nities were obsessed with large-scale systems change, guided by the twin
motivations of impending collapse and utopian possibility. Both blamed
hierarchical domination as the root cause of the economic, social, and
environmental crises that define our century. Both emphasised partici-
pation, collaboration, collective intelligence, self-efficacy, and self-deter-
218
mination.
 Out beyond consensus there’s a field: I’ll meet you there

Enspiral introduced me to something new, though: instead of the pro-

test posture, I met a more subtle strategy, less like boxing, more like
martial arts. Acknowledging that business has an outsized impact on
society, they decided to use the tools of business to work for socially
beneficial ends.
Our little band from Occupy were welcomed with open arms (literally).
We were given space to work and encouraged to test our hypothesis that
self-organisation could be a robust principle for coordinating productive
groups. Our idealism was greeted with enthusiasm, and balanced with a
dose of pragmatism.

“Yes, your vision of changing all of society is really great...

and also, what little piece are we going to work on this week?”

The two most common phrases I heard in the early days were “that’s
a great idea!” and “how can I help?” The hospitality I experienced was
so extraordinarily open, it didn’t take long before I started referring to
Enspiral as “us”.

In retrospect, I see this as Enspiral at its finest: a patchwork community

with an enormous abundance of generosity and ambition far outstrip-
ping our material resources. These are people who have stared into the
void, acknowledged that civilisation may be approaching collapse, and
consciously chosen optimism, creativity, and solidarity as our best strategy.

The love child of Occupy and Enspiral

Having been equally inspired and frustrated by our experience in the
general assembly at Occupy, we started a software project to take the
pain out of collective decision-making. We call it ‘Loomio’, like a loom
for weaving the threads of individual perspective into a tapestry of
shared understanding.
The software is very straightforward: it’s an online discussion forum like
any other, enhanced with facilitation tools that support deliberative de-
cision-making. You can poll opinions and vote on proposals. There’s
nothing really hi-tech about it, no machine learning, or artificial intelli-
gence, or algorithmic genius. It’s a deeply human process: group mem-
bers come together to discuss shared problems, talk through options,
219
and collectively agree on the best solutions to try. It’s designed to be
 BETTER WORK TOGETHER

open and flexible, so it is used by people in all sectors of society, from

government departments, to cooperatives, NGOs, informal networks,
and decentralised companies. Wellington City Council, who wanted us
removed from their front lawn when we were occupying the city square,
hired us for our deliberation expertise a couple of years later.
As well as building software, we’ve also built a company structure that
embodies our values. We’re a worker co-op, which means the workers
have the ultimate say over the company direction. The software is open
source; we think of ourselves more as stewards than owners of this com-
mon resource. Our constitution prioritises positive social impact ahead
of profit, so we are legally locked onto our mission: to make it easy for
anyone to participate in decisions that affect them. We’ve still got a way to go
before the revenue model is really thriving, but with a couple hundred
paying customers we can see a path to economic sustainability in the
near future. I’m so relieved to say we’ve done it in a way that guarantees
our self-determination, and I’m so grateful to the crowdfunders and im-
pact investors that have supplied the million dollars in funding it’s taken
to get us here, and to the superhuman commitment of my colleagues.
It’s a great privilege to get to work on my guiding questions every day:
How do we work together as equals? How do we collaborate without
anyone being in charge? Can we run an effective enterprise without a
rigid chain of command? These are still open questions. On our 5th
birthday I sighed with relief, “Yep, we’ve survived at least”. I know we’ve
created a tool that supports the work of thousands of impact-driven
groups around the world. But our reach is still pretty insignificant com-
pared to the big digital platforms, so it’ll be a few more years before I’ll
be ready to claim with confidence, that yes, it is possible to out-collabo-
rate dominator hierarchies.
When you have a lot of ideas about how the world should be different,
building a company is a great opportunity to test your thinking. My opin-
ions about groups and decisions have evolved a lot since 2011!

Making the cut

Because I was so used to being bossed around in previous workplaces,
when I had the chance to set up our own company I was fairly obsessed
with the idea that nobody should be excluded from decision-making. So
220
when we started out, we did nearly everything by consensus. I believed at
 Out beyond consensus there’s a field: I’ll meet you there

first that it would always be worth the effort to negotiate and deliberate,
seeking the widest possible agreement: sure it takes longer, but I figured
we would always get better decisions by involving more perspectives.
I have to take a quick detour here, because ‘consensus’ is a very con-
fusing word. If you look it up in the dictionary, you’ll see ‘consensus’
is commonly used in place of ‘unanimity’. By contrast, if you read any
consensus decision-making handbook, they’ll be quick to point out that
you can make consensus decisions without reaching unanimity. Consensus
process is about including everyone and using dissent to improve the
proposal until everyone can live with it. That doesn’t necessarily mean
that the proposal is going to be everyone’s first choice. We’re aiming for
as much agreement as possible, but unanimity is not required.
These days, I think of consensus less as a decision-making method than
a bonding mechanism. I understand why Quakers regard consensus
meetings as a kind of spiritual practice. I treasure all that time we spent
listening deeply to each other, negotiating patiently, opening up to the
possibility that others may know better, letting go of the need to be
right, learning to put the collective good ahead of my personal interest,
and being reminded over and over that I can only ever have an incom-
plete understanding of any issue. These are some of the qualities about
myself that I value the most, and I attribute them mostly to the sustained
practice of consensus decision-making.
It was surprising to discover this irony: consensus brought us together,
but the more our team bonded, the less we needed consensus. Once we
built a foundation of strong relationships, we became much more willing
to delegate. I learned to trust that my colleague will do a good enough
job without my input.
The word ‘decide’ has Latin roots meaning ‘to cut off ’: it’s a process of
elimination, cutting off possible options until there is one left. You can
think of a decision as an exercise in simulation and prediction. It starts
with a problem: the office is too hot. Then you generate a list of possible
solutions: I could open the window, turn on the air conditioning, or close the shades.
Then there’s a simulation process “if I choose solution X, I predict the
outcome will be Y”. Finally, you evaluate these possible outcomes and
pick the one that looks most attractive.
When you run this simulation and prediction exercise in a group, com-
221
plexity rapidly escalates. More brains generate more interpretations of
 BETTER WORK TOGETHER

what the problem is, and more possible solutions to consider. Then you
have a bunch of different people each running their own simulation. All
our simulations all generate different results, and we all have different
values, so we’re evaluating the simulations against different principles: I
need to feel cool at work, so I can be productive. My sense of well being is tied to my
sense of productivity. So we should switch on the air-con. Whereas maybe for you, you
need to feel like we’re being environmentally responsible—it’s part of your identity. So
we should choose the most energy-efficient option.
You can see how this is a good way to get to know each other: even the
most insignificant decision can be a gateway to our deepest needs, values,
and principles. However, the important part is that, until the decision is
implemented, it’s all a simulation. We don’t know what’s going to happen
until it happens. It takes a lot of energy to get everyone’s simulations to
align, but all that effort might not get you to the right decision. We can
only know the outcome of a decision by observing what happens after it
is implemented. So these days, my focus has shifted slightly, from being
good predictors, to being good learners.
By the way, this explains the productivity gains of Agile management over up-front
planning. Agile focuses on rapid iterations: you get to action as quickly as possible,
and share the results. In this way, you improve your predictive capability by looking
backwards together, rather than putting a lot of energy into describing what we think
might happen in the future.
I’m still a big believer in consensus as a method for building collective
identity, personal development, forming a shared purpose, agreeing on
your principles and norms, setting objectives, and making significant de-
cisions, like who should join our co-op. I just don’t think it is the right
tool for a lot of tactical decisions. The cost is high, and the methodology
keeps you oriented to predicting rather than learning. In our context,
once we’d built a lot of trust and shared understanding within the team,
consensus seemed like a waste of those extraordinary resources. Many
of us felt we wanted more freedom to act without seeking agreement
first.
The good news is we’re entering a golden age of collective decision-mak-
ing: these days, we have a toolbox full of different methods. I’ll look at
just two of them here (advice and consent), to start mapping out the
space beyond consensus.
222
 Out beyond consensus there’s a field: I’ll meet you there

Advice process
In 2014 Frederic Laloux published an influential book, Reinventing Or-
ganisations, which popularised a decision-making method called the ‘ad-
vice process’. I usually paraphrase the advice process into three bullet
points:
1. Anyone can take any decision…
2. if they’re willing to be accountable for the outcome...
3. and they first seek the advice of people with expertise and people
who will be affected by the decision.
Notice it says “seek the advice of ”, not “get the agreement of ”. It’s
about gathering input, listening to diverse perspectives, and then making
your own judgement call. This gives you access to most of the collective in-
telligence of a consensus process for a fraction of the cost.
Personally, I would only rely on the advice process so long as there are a
bunch of other organisational mechanisms in place, e.g.:
• A firm agreement about purpose (e.g. quarterly objectives, or
principles of behaviour), so everyone is heading in more or less
the same direction.
• A method of evaluating decision outcomes together (e.g. regular
retrospectives), so there’s an opportunity to learn from good and
bad decisions.
• Pro-active measures to support relationships (e.g. one-on-one
meetings, peer mentoring, conflict resolution), so differences of
opinion stay within the bounds of healthy disagreement and don’t
mutate into unhealthy conflict.
If you have structural supports like these in place, then the advice pro-
cess can be a huge efficiency multiplier.
I was recently introduced to an extraordinary example: The Borderland
is a week-long festival in Denmark where everyone is invited to co-create
the event. All day-to-day decisions are made by advice. They’ve adapted
their own version of Loomio, so people can participate online, before
they meet physically. I met Hugi Ásgeirsson, one of the key organisers,
223
a few weeks before the 2018 festival. I was surprised to find him relaxed
 BETTER WORK TOGETHER

and happy, despite a major organisational crisis. Just six weeks out, it
looked like they would have to cancel the festival, as they lost permission
to use the original venue. But because they have the culture and the tech-
nology for decentralised decision-making, the whole community mobil-
ised to find a new location in record time, with specialised volunteers
completing all the bureaucratic hurdles to make it legal and safe. In a
traditional organisation where information is centralised, the leaders are
busy making decisions and mobilising people to respond, and their ca-
pacity is limited. In a self-managing network, decisions happen in many
different places simultaneously, while the leaders are busy maintaining
whole-system context and steering attention towards any gaps.

Consent
The second method that’s gaining popularity recently is called ‘consent
decision-making’. If consensus aims for maximum agreement, consent
is ‘no objections’. There is an enormous difference between those two!
I first encountered consent decision-making through Sociocracy, an
organisational philosophy with roots dating back to 1851. In more
recent years, it has been gaining traction as more and more organisational
designers, facilitators, and consultants turn on to the transformative
power of this simple method.
In a consent decision, you’re not asking everyone “is this the best thing
we can do?” Instead the question is, “is this likely to do harm?” Socioc-
racy people use this phrase “good enough for now, safe enough to try”.
For step-by-step instructions for how to make consent decisions in meetings, check Sa-
mantha Slade’s blog post ‘Generative Decision Making Process’ 1. They developed
this method with our friends at Percolab. It’s a remix of Holacracy’s ‘Integrative
Decision Making’, enhanced with some facilitation subtlety from Art of Hosting.

224
1 https://medium.com/percolab-droplets/generative-decision-making-process-cf0b131c5ac4
 Out beyond consensus there’s a field: I’ll meet you there

One of the common complaints against collective decision-making is that

it can quash individual initiative. Someone starts with a cool idea, but then
you have to make compromises to satisfy the most conservative group
members. By the time the idea has made it through the ‘design by com-
mittee’ process, you wind up with a mediocre proposal that nobody loves.
Indeed, I’ve seen the demotivating effect of this dynamic in play at En-
spiral. We have not fully developed the habit of distinguishing ‘consent’
from ‘consensus’, and we frequently confuse consensus for unanimity.
So when I have a new idea, I unconsciously slip into marketing mode,
aiming to convince everyone that this extraordinary breakthrough proposal
will solve all our problems overnight! This approach inevitably leads to one of
my colleagues adopting a critical posture: “yes but what about…”, and be-
fore you know it, we’re in a long-winded negotiation. By the time we get
to agreement, my energy is exhausted, before we’ve even implemented
anything.
Now we’re learning to introduce ideas in a different way, not with “does
everyone agree this is the best possible thing we could put energy into”, but “I want
to try this thing, does anyone think it will do harm?” The attitude shifts to-
wards personal agency over unity, and towards small iterative changes
over large-scale renovations.
Binary thinking is the enemy of collaboration. Consent decision-making
opens up space for creativity, by drawing our attention to the terrain
between ‘yes’ and ‘no’. When I work with in-person groups, we visualise
this terrain with a Venn diagram distinguishing preference (I love it),
tolerance (I could live with it), and objection (no way!).
You can immediately see that the space where everyone’s preferences
overlap is very small. If you’re aiming for consensus, it’s going to take
a lot of negotiation and compromise to get there. With consent, the
solution space expands to allow all the tolerable options, so there’s much
more room to play. You still pay attention to people’s objections; nobody
is forced to accept a decision that violates their principles. At the same
time, this method develops our capacity for tolerance, a value that can
only be strengthened with practice.
Crucially, we have noticed that people are much more willing to
make concessions after their preference has been acknowledged.
It’s common to see deliberations get stuck in a frustrated state, where
everyone is simply advocating for their preferred position. If the de-
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 BETTER WORK TOGETHER

liberation does not have enough structure, it can be very hard to keep
track of everybody’s position. We get anxious: maybe you haven’t heard me,
so I better repeat myself or raise my voice. First I need confirmation that you
understand my position, then I may be willing to put it aside and go with
your proposal. This can be supported either with a facilitated process
(let’s go around and hear what everyone thinks), or visual aides like the Venn
diagram, or software like Loomio.

How to change the world in three easy steps.

I wish I could tell you there’s a brilliant method or a simple technolo-
gy that makes collective decision-making easy, but after seven years of
searching, I’m convinced that we’re never going to get to ‘easy’. Humans
are hard! Most of us have so much training in individualistic, top-down,
authoritarian ways of working together. Our experiences in hierarchi-
cal dominance cultures have formed our core beliefs and expectations
in ways that are incompatible with collaborative environments. I don’t
believe there is a shortcut, a simple step-by-step manual for letting go
of ego, developing compassion and empathy, or a ‘how-to guide’ for
embracing uncertainty.
So I’m not aiming for ‘easy’, exactly, but I’m optimistic that we’re making
iterative improvements as a species. I think tools, methods, ideas, and
stories can function like prosthetics, helping us to walk with a little more
confidence, speed, grace, and strength. I’ve seen new decision-making
protocols help groups get unstuck. We have solid evidence that Loomio
users are more satisfied with the governance of their groups.
In my personal journey, my biggest breakthrough came with that first
consensus decision-making circle at Occupy Wellington. As I’ve ma-
tured, I’ve learned I don’t need to stake my identity on one decision-mak-
ing tool, any more than a carpenter identifies with only their hammer.
I don’t believe in a one-size-fits all decision-making method. Mature
groups define a set of different methods for different jobs. My favourite
example right now comes from Gini, a self-managing firm in Germany.
Their decision-making stack (mandate, advice, consent) is elegantly ex-
plained in Manuel Küblböck’s blog2 “How we make decentralised deci-
sions”. At Enspiral we have “4 different classes of decisions”, and the
expectation is this will change in time.
226
2. https://blog.gini.net/how-we-make-decentralized-decisions-ccd2de61b8b2
 Out beyond consensus there’s a field: I’ll meet you there

If I had to choose one decision-making technique or one technology

that’s going to change the world, I would guess we haven’t invented it
yet. These days I’m most drawn to what co-ops activist Doug Webb calls
“post-consensus cooperative decision-making”. Just the word ‘post-con-
sensus’ is awesome; to me it implies that yes, absolutely you should learn how
to do consensus, and have that personal development experience where you learn to
listen and negotiate and reduce your ego. But you can do better than using consensus
for tactical decisions!
What matters to me is that we try, we fail, we try again, and we fail better
the next time. The more we can share what we’re learning, the better our
failures will be. I honestly don’t know if we’ll develop and adopt new
collective decision-making infrastructure in time to avoid World War III,
but I got to tell you, it feels great to try.

227
 essay.Nine

Start with I
by Kate Beecroft
 Start with I

Start with I1
What does it mean to cooperate with other human beings? What does
good cooperation look like, how can it exist alongside competition and
what does it mean for us as individuals? Learning how to cooperate in
a way that feels good means we need to look at our different ego states,
neuroses, and funny little human traits that make sharing and cooperat-
ing hard. We need to do inner work. This chapter is centred in my practi-
cal experience of figuring out how to wind down my ego (read: how not
to be an asshole) in community.
This is an integral part of new organisation thinking and parallels my
own journey. I was going along a path that seemed perfectly normal -
trying to beat others in work and life, trying to compete in a system that
rewarded winners and made competition and coercion seem perfectly
normal. At school, at university, in my first jobs - oppressive hierarchy
and zero-sum behaviour was normal. These systems brought out some
negative traits that weren’t good for me or others.
Joining and co-creating a different kind of community in Enspiral al-
lowed me to bring out another side - one that could be compassionate
and empathetic, listen, cooperate, and share - while still building busi-
nesses and growing professionally. Over the past six years of being
involved with Enspiral, I’ve learned the value of working on and with
yourself. I’ve also learned what that looks like in community - and how
it leads to more collaboration, cooperation, and self-management.
1 The title of this chapter is partly inspired by a piece by my colleague Michel Bachmann called ‘Start
with Who’ https://medium.com/@michelbachmann/start-with-who-15b8857ed718 which was in turn
229
inspired by the Simon Sinek approach ‘Start with Why’ https://startwithwhy.com/
 BETTER WORK TOGETHER

Self-management is an approach to work that prioritises autonomy and

self-development alongside alignment with others. It allows a system to
operate without a command and control hierarchy. It is a vital compo-
nent in creating the caring and healthy work environments we need to
address the complex challenges we are all facing.
A key learning is that it’s not that easy to leap from an environment
and system that promotes antagonistic behaviour into a cooperative one
without making some effort to understand yourself. This is a process
everyone coming from hierarchy into collaborative community has to
undergo. We have to unlearn the coping mechanisms that served us in
competitive environments.
This essay explores the possibility that:
1. Healthy structural change might be possible if more work-based
communities begin, grow, and flourish.
2. Without individual level personal development, we risk repeating
the same unhealthy patterns, undermining efforts to effect change
at a system level.

System change? Sure, to what end?

Imagine, if by some precipitous opportunity, we suddenly found our-
selves in a social and economic system that, by design, enabled and pro-
moted cooperation, equality, and fairer access to resources for all.
What would happen? Would we immediately bring back zero-sum, an-
ti-cooperative behaviour? Has our neoliberal capitalist economic system,
built on scarcity and competition, bred this into us? Would we destroy
this new system?
This has happened before. Many well intentioned revolutionaries aiming
to overthrow sick systems quickly became dictators. Egos, political ma-
noeuvring, and competition to stay on top create black holes into which
would-be heroes quickly fall. The very notion of ‘smashing systems’ (of-
ten used in marxist and anarchist circles) brings with it a forceful kind of
change - setting the foundations for a forceful system.
Instead, we need incubators for people thinking about new systems to
first experience a culture of care where slowly their own personal trans-
230 formation can take place.
 Start with I

This is not some ‘New Age’ abdication of responsibility for class struggle
or a position that things are ‘not so bad’ and we just need to be nicer to
each other. Our global systems and structures need to drastically change,
but they cannot without change in the culture that sits beneath them.

Know thyself… in a community

In a crowded, rapidly urbanising world, many of us have lost a con-
nection with traditional, place-based communities. We are seeking new
‘communities’ where we can experience genuine belonging and care.
One place that these new communities are flourishing is in the world of
work. New constellations of relationships - centred around a common
theme, project, or interest - are emerging, connecting up the increasing
numbers of people working outside the traditional employer/employee
dynamic. Over the last ten years, there has been an unfolding of com-
munities and networks of this type around the world. Organisations
like Ouishare, Open State, Outlandish, SandBox, Impact Hub, SMart
are all great examples of people who are experimenting with new ways
of working together. At the same time, within many traditional compa-
nies there has been a flurry of interest in how to move beyond pyramid
structures that are reliant on command and control to get things done.
Emerging as a key tenet of this new approach of work are principles of
self-management and autonomy. Although there is much interest in the
tools and processes of how this is done, there is much less is said about
the personal development that must accompany it. Whether old or new,
individuals populate systems and companies - and the things we build
are reflections of our inner worlds. Therefore, while communities and
networks are indeed one part of a macro-level solution that can help us
tackle the enormous challenges we face, we must not forget to consider
the individuals within them. How we are in ourselves, and how we care
for each other.

Me - in the Enspiral world

Enspiral is a community and a network where people are building tools
and products with societal impact. We are trying to do this according
to principles of decentralisation, openness, transparency, trust, autono-
my, and without old-system hierarchy. There’s not a lot of money here.
There is not a lot of security. There is a lot of chaos. Everything is fluid.
231
Everything is in constant motion. There are no job descriptions or rules.
 BETTER WORK TOGETHER

There’s nothing really keeping us together. The choice to be part of the

community needs to be made again, every day.
I entered Enspiral when I was 26, after completing a Master’s Thesis in
Governance Theory and Political Science. I worked briefly in the public
sector, before starting a small business and foraying into business devel-
opment for one of New Zealand’s largest social enterprises. I was feeling
pretty alone and experiencing extended periods of ‘low mood’. I had
been steadily acquiring and integrating aspects of ‘zero-sum’ behaviour
necessary to get ahead in old system organisations and in the world out-
side. I was a bit tired of scheming and learning on my own and needed
a way to connect to other people outside of the options mainstream
society was presenting.
Luckily, in the same city were a bunch of entrepreneurs, ostensibly work-
ing on big structural problems by building apps and social enterprise
businesses. I thought that by applying my mind to these really hard prob-
lems with like-minded people I would begin to feel better about myself.
Until I encountered Enspiral, I felt like an outsider in most of the
groups I was part of. This isolation affected my ability to accept myself
and others around me. One of the key ways this showed up was that I
was angry that people couldn’t seem to understand there were absolute
wrongs that we all must accept and fight. Some of our worst character-
istics and behaviours are drawn out by a modern organisational culture
that makes it seem like the only option available to us is to compete, win,
and dominate.
If the drive to emotional growth continues to be unattended, and per-
haps even unknown to us, it can short circuit our whole lives in a bid to
be heard. Fed up with waiting, it may simply throw us into a paralysing
depression or lock us into a state of overwhelming anxiety. By breaking
us in these ways, the frustrated, stymied drive is trying to be interpret-
ed and accommodated. What it lacks in eloquence and focus, it makes
up for in persistence and strength.2

In many ways, the totally confusing nature of Enspiral, and my inability

to ‘master it’ (e.g. quickly accrue social capital and power) spun me into
a very hard journey of self discovery. I came for the ‘structural thinking
and entrepreneurial approach’ but I was not showing up with the be-
haviours. Nor, I came to realise, was this the name of the game. I was

2 The School of Life. CHAPTER 4.SELF: EMOTIONAL SKILLS The Drive to Keep Growing
232
Emotionally
 Start with I

initially attracted to the idea of doing business for good, but I found a
much more challenging, rewarding, and transformative journey than I
ever imagined.
As dryly eloquent Enspiral Member Teddy Taptiklis famously put it at
the Enspiral Retreat of 2017, we are a ‘pack of strays’ who have some-
how found each other. This is a feeling shared frequently in Enspiral - it’s
a bunch of lost souls looking for others thinking and acting in a different way.
The people I first met were a curious mix: entrepreneurs, activists, and
professionals who were asking big, ambitious questions. They were
thinking at a level I had never encountered before, both structural and
systemic. People were confronting questions like, ‘How might we change
the way we make decisions?’, ‘How might we change the food system
and make it more local and sustainable?’, and ‘How might we improve
youth mental health in New Zealand?’ It might seem ludicrous, but the
attitude was: “Yeah these are big problems; let’s just get started and see
what we can do.” The mixture of naivety and bravery was refreshing.
To me, it’s linked to an attitude New Zealanders have for giving things
a go. That Enspiral started in Aotearoa New Zealand, and specifically
Wellington, is not a coincidence.
“It’s true you cannot live here by chance, you have to do and be, not
simply watch or even describe. This is the city of action, the world
headquarters of the verb.”
Lauris Edmond on Wellington, The Active Voice, 1994
One of the biggest lessons I learned at Enspiral was how to better inter-
rogate myself and my work. When I first joined Enspiral I was working
with Joshua Vial and Rohan Wakefield, the co-founders of Dev Academy,3
doing public relations and marketing. Every time I wanted to do some-
thing, or write something or even when I had ‘an idea’ I would check
with them first.
The feedback was a pretty consistent “What do you think?”, often fol-
lowed by a the ‘Five Whys’ process, one of Joshua’s favourite techniques
for helping people think for themselves. This experience gave me con-
fidence, as well as useful tools for interrogating my work. Over the
next couple of years I went from being unsure about my own abilities
and skills to embracing a ‘lean and entrepreneurial’’ approach - trying
things and being ok if they failed. I also learned a lot about sharing my
3 An Enspiral venture - a training school for developers with a focus on diversity and communication
233
(devacademy.co.nz)
 BETTER WORK TOGETHER

my full self. The first few ‘Check Ins’ I took part in brought up feelings
of deep anxiety at the thought of telling all these people what was truly
happening in my brain and body. I thought it was essential to prove I was
competent by seeming strong, secure, and unruffled in order for them
to trust me enough to work with ‘serious stuff ’. In actuality, when we
connect with the ever-changing, irrational, emotional inner worlds of
ourselves and each other, it is much more likely that we can trust each
other to communicate what we need and how we can help.
I went on to work with several Enspiral initiatives. As well as Dev Acade-
my, these included Bucky Box (software for food cooperatives), the Low
Carbon Challenge (an accelerator programme for low carbon business-
es), Lifehack (tackling youth mental health via digital technology and im-
mersive programmes), EXP (an agency for experience and programme
design), and Cobudget (the Enspiral built-tool for collaborative resource
allocation). A few of these system-changing ideas have made a small rip
in the fabric of society - most have been marginal. But over the years,
the long game of Enspiral has begun to emerge: a place to prototype
experiments in self management and the collaborative, participatory po-
tential of groups.
When Susan Basterfield, an early influencer of the Teal movement4,
joined Enspiral in 2015, it became clear to me what Enspiral was all
about. It was a petri dish for behaviours, practices, tools and process-
es for self-management - potentially far more important and systemic
than building software applications or a boss-less freelancers’ collective.
Self-management brings depth to our work. Rather than merely sharing
ideas, we reflect and model practices that enliven our theory of change.
There is nothing particularly magical about the Enspiral community or
the people in it. Nor is the concept of ‘community’ anything new at all.
That humans need to be surrounded by others, to survive, grow, and
flourish has been proven again and again by people all around the world.
Groups anywhere can do this. Being in community is something that we
all know as humans. Our work now is to bring it back into our produc-
tive workspaces.
In a system where relationships are primary there can be no hiding. Lis-
4 When applied to organisations, this paradigm views the organisation as an independent spirit with
its own purpose, and not merely as a vehicle for achieving management objectives. Teal organisations
are characterized by self-organisation and self-management. The hierarchical ‘command and control’ is
replaced with a decentralised structure consisting of small teams that take responsibility for their own
governance and for how they interact with other parts of the organisation. Assigned positions and job
descriptions are replaced with a multiplicity of roles, often self-selected and fluid. People’s actions are
guided not by orders from someone up the chain of command but by ‘listening’ to the organisation’s
234
purpose. See Reinventing Organizations Frédéric Laloux, 2014
 Start with I

tening, compassion, a well-tuned sense of how people are feeling, and

an ability to ask for what you need are essential to self-organisation.
Our existence depends on relationships. When we admit we don’t know
something, or that someone’s else’s idea is better, or that we’re scared
and in pain, or that we feel alone, we start to create the conditions where
trust can grow. Moreover, at Enspiral many of us rely on each other
for livelihood as well community relationships - we are in this business
for the long haul. If humans really, truly need each other they will build
strong and flourishing communities5.

Practices for the challenge

of dealing with yourself
Inner work and individual practice
What does it mean to do ‘work on ourselves’ or ‘have our personal prac-
tice’? To me, a starting point is understanding how we react to different
phenomena or situations and what we do about it. Individual self aware-
ness and ongoing development is not new. The ancient Greeks at Delphi
inscribed ‘Know thyself ’ in the Temple of Apollo.

No one else is responsible for your experience

One of the hardest parts of being in of a self-managing system is the
realisation that no one else is responsible for your experience. Accepting
this is as refreshing as it is scary. It means walking away from being the
child in a parent/child dynamic, which exists when you think someone
else is responsible for what happens. You cannot have a temper tantrum
- you need to grow up and be an adult6 - I came from an environment
where you ask permission before taking any action. At Enspiral, the re-
verse was true: think for yourself, seek advice if necessary, act, measure
the outcome, repeat.
This position helps adjust to whatever life throws at us - we are respon-
sible for how we choose to react to any situation.

5 Charles Eisenstein compellingly makes this argument in his book Sacred Economics, 2011. ISBN:
1583943978
6 For theory on ongoing development Robert Kegan is a great gateway. See: The evolving self: Problem
and process in human development. (1982). Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard
235
 BETTER WORK TOGETHER

Figuring out and sharing your boundaries

Knowing your boundaries is essential to being part of a fluid system. It
involves spending time figuring out what drives you, what triggers you,
what enlivens you, what you avoid, and what leads you to shut off or lash
out. If you spend some time figuring this out, and learn to work with
what you find, you’re off to a good start. When boundaries are contin-
ually eroded or crossed there is a high risk of burn out or frustration.
An example: I have a strong resistance to late night calls, and an even
stronger resistance to early morning ones. I will take one late night call
a week, and in my team we are making a collective agreement only to
work with people based in time-zones that suit our working patterns.
I’ve learned that I need to be clear about this in order to bring my best
self to my work.
Putting forward boundaries and calling out when they’re crossed is still an
ongoing struggle for most people, particularly those who have worked in
systems where those boundaries are often eroded by someone with more
power. It’s also hard in a self-managing system. Requests can come with
an urgency that can railroad boundaries. For these reasons it’s worth sup-
porting this practice with team retrospectives and tools like the Colleague
Letters of Understanding7. It requires an ability to state needs and to listen
to others’ needs as well.
Having boundaries is crucial for working in a self-organised, collabo-
rative way. This goes all the way to boundaries about who we are as
individuals. I haven’t lost the innate ‘Kate’ things. I still have a penchant
for sometimes saying exactly what I think, telling unenlightened jokes in
meetings, and holding strong to my absurdist life philosophy that flows
into making work as unserious as possible. But I am more aware of it.

Group practice
Collective intelligence and ‘getting out of the way’
Across Enspiral, we have a strong commitment to hearing all sides. The
behaviour of deeply listening and honouring all voices means that more
stories and ways of being are present in the group. This is what builds
collective intelligence and makes creative solutions possible. People see

7 Colleague Letters of Understanding were prototyped by The Morning Star Company - a fully self
236
managing tomato processing plant in California.
 Start with I

that their contributions are not just welcomed, and listened to, but are
actually a fundamental part of how the group makes decisions.
For this to work everyone in the community has to go through a process
of learning how to truly listen. This is hard. This is where modelling and
leadership comes in. I have been guilty of not truly listening and riding
roughshod over someone by ignoring their contribution and skipping
to the next point. I have been in tense situations with colleagues where
I have not deeply heard their perspective or tried to understand what
they were truly saying. I have also experienced being called out (in a gen-
tle way) on this type of behaviour. For instance, when someone circles
immediately back to the perspective that I just ignored to ensure that
person knows they were heard, I learn something.
Another important part of valuing all voices is addressing privilege - the
systemic ways that some voices are heard more than others. Men like
Sam Rye (a community builder and designer) and Mix Irving (an educa-
tor and open source software developer) have been leaders in demon-
strating how to ‘get out of the way’. Under patriarchy, men and peo-
ple from privileged cultures and backgrounds can take up more space
because cultural patterns support this. Getting out of the way means
acknowledging when our privilege allows us the stage, and using this to
invite other voices in. Strong, explicit social contracts or ‘Agreements’8
enshrine the importance of prioritising diversity. At Enspiral, other ex-
amples include Māori scholarships to Dev Academy students, childcare
at retreats, funding for mental health counselling, work on conflict reso-
lution processes, and asking people exhibiting sexist and racist behaviour
to leave the community.

Giving and receiving feedback

In my experience this is the hardest part of being in a self-managing
community and team. Opinions and theories on how to do it (or wheth-
er to do it at all) vary.
Personally, I think some of the best ways we learn about how we are, and
how we’re impacting others is by deeply listening - tuning in to ourselves
and the reaction of those around us. If you’re going to do a formal
feedback process - ask for consent and whether the other person is ready
for it. My colleague and cofounder Francesca Pick pointed this out to
me once. I thought I was practising radical candour by calling out a be-

8 Refer to the diversity agreement in Enspiral Handbook https://handbook.enspiral.com/agreements/

237
diversity.html
 BETTER WORK TOGETHER

haviour that really triggered me as it happened. She was not in the mood
to receive my feedback. We agreed that if I was going to give feedback I
would check in first on whether it was a good time.

Throwing in the spanners

If Enspiral were a place of groupthink, I wouldn’t have stuck around for
long. There are some champions of honesty and divergence in our midst
who encourage us to bring our best game, not rest on our laurels, and to
keep pushing for a new level of quality.
Sometimes a Loomio conversation is seemingly going smoothly and
everyone’s in ‘convergence’ (or agreement), and then someone like the
wonderful web developer, systems thinker, and anarchist Craig Ambrose
throws in a challenge or direct disagreement. In doing this, he helps us
see the big gaps in our thinking, and elevates the discussion to a new lev-
el. This takes both individual bravery and group trust. Divergence helps
integrate differences and weave coherence. It’s hard. We haven’t always
done it well, but it’s critically important.
Culture is the behaviour that makes up the day-to-day. People who may
think that Enspiral is a big lovefest, where everyone is nice to each other
all the time are wrong. If they could join one of the meetings of our
team, mouths would drop at the hilariously straight-up way we get to
the point. At Enspiral, people are respectful, kind, generous, and often
quite silly, but people are not always ‘nice’. This mode of communicating
is codified as ‘radical candour’. It needs to be modelled, respected, and
practiced all the time. To be challenged is healthy for development of the
self and ideas. And learning that your own truth is welcome (as long as
it’s presented in a non-violent way) creates confidence.

Taking off the masks

A core practice across Enspiral is the ‘check-in’ - instrumental for col-
lective vulnerability. Checking-in is like breathing at Enspiral - every
meeting or gathering at Enspiral starts with a check-in, which is a specif-
ic question like ‘What surprised you in this last week?’ or a more general
‘What’s on top?’.
The first 20 ‘check-ins’ I participated in brought up feelings of deep anx-
iety in my stomach. I thought it was essential to prove I was competent
by seeming strong, secure, and unruffled in order to be trusted enough
238 to work with ‘serious stuff ’. In reality, when we can connect with the
 Start with I

ever-changing, irrational, emotional inner worlds of ourselves and each

other, it is much more likely that we can trust each other to communicate
what we need and how we can help.
Enspiral Dev Academy lunches are a practical example of continually
taking the mask off. Everyone (25-30 people) is invited to take one min-
ute to say whatever is most important. This could be sharing the pain
and heartbreak of unrequited love, a tale about the annoying logistics
of moving, or an amazing anecdote about a customer or user. Anything
goes. The challenge it to show up and be seen as a whole human. The
purpose is to deepen relationships and trust.
“Some of the the greatest intimacy and community we have or fail to
have is with our colleagues at work. And because we spend so much
time at work and it so defines us, our souls, the light and darkness of our
souls, is on display at work.” ~ Krista Tippett https://onbeing.org/

Facilitation and hosting

A practice and pattern that cannot be overstated in helping groups to
function and individuals to thrive is facilitation. It’s a pretty crazy thing
that in any given call, or meeting, or at a retreat, a majority of Enspiral
members can facilitate the meeting or gathering to a very high standard.
A high standard means the meeting flows, people are heard, no one per-
son dominates, divergence is handled well,, decisions are made, actions
are noted, and people connect with each other and have a good time.The
facilitator is an ‘unopinionated space holder’ - facilitating an outcome,
but remaining unattached to what it might be. .
As Joshua says in the first chapter of this book, a lot of what happens at
Enspiral is copying, changing, and sometimes improving existing prac-
tices. With facilitation and hosting, we draw use, and copy a lot from
many forms of group process, including Māori kōrero, Art of Hosting
Conversations That Matter, Non-Violent Communication, Theory U,
Liberating Structures, and Open Space Technology.

Agreements and social contracts

Self-management does not mean anarchy in the workplace. In a self-
managing system, a group of people who want to get something done
together need to co-create a series of social contracts to commit to how
239
 BETTER WORK TOGETHER

they show up. Known at Enspiral as agreements, (available online at

handbook.enspiral.com) these provide the scaffolding for the base level
values or principles of any group. Agreements define boundaries. If a
contract is co-created within the group and collectively agreed upon, it
ensures the group has a way to call out and address transgressions.

In here, with us
Humans thrive in community. In light of the dissolution of many old
forms of social and religious organisation, workplaces have emerged as a
dominant organisational structure. The workplace is where many people
meet their need for the continual presence of other people - to learn
with, to build things with, to be challenged by, and to love and trust.
Self management is an organising system for autonomy and cooper-
ation. A crucial part of self management is moving from a a system
where zero-sum behaviours offer the biggest payback to one where we
can simultaneously act in our own best interests by acting in the best
interest of others.
My own experience of adult personal development, and community
development at Enspiral speaks strongly to me about the potential for
self-managing communities to be the place where people can grow and
flourish, and learn how to move past damaging behaviours. Since I joined
Enspiral, I have worked on my tendency to be judgmental. I have been
challenged on my privilege, being unkind (sometimes being sarcastic and
trying to get a laugh at the expense of others) and my lack of generos-
ity (looking how to achieve my own ends at the expense of the group).
Through feedback mechanisms and learning to show up as person full
of broken bits, idiosyncrasies, and sometimes irrational reactions, I was
able to see how I let myself be triggered, selfish, uncommunicative, and
sometimes mean. I learnt how to listen. These learning opportunities
have been essential to my self-development and ability to collaborate.
On the face of it this ‘looking inwards’ is not radical. On other levels
it really is. It’s refusal of the notion that the problem is ‘out there’ with
‘them’. An image that often comes to my mind when thinking of ‘them’
is a circle of men in black suits in a boardroom on the 23rd floor con-
ducting the dark arts of neoliberal crony capitalism. Let’s think instead
of ourselves and the people in here, with us.
If organisations big and small adopted this way of being, and many in-
dividuals could undergo this journey, we might start to make the world
240 anew. Perhaps it sounds crazy that this is my theory of change, but I
 Start with I

believe this is part of a bigger paradigm shift. One where we build sys-
tems that nurture our ability to cooperate, collaborate and aid our devel-
opment. Perhaps we can find a better way than command and control
systems for building amazing things that may actually help us solve some
of the deeply scary challenges on our doorstep.
“Being human is not about individual survival or escape. It’s a team
sport. Whatever future humans have, it will be together.”9

The opportunity we all have, regardless of the work we are doing and
where we do it, is to take up the forever unfinished work of being our
best selves in service of our communities, and to find our pack of strays
who can do it alongside us.

9 Douglas Rushkoff, Survival of the Richest, Medium, July 8, 2018.

241
(https://medium.com/s/futurehuman/survival-of-the-richest-9ef6cddd0cc1)
 #ChangingTheFuture

anyone
can...
Two of the most dangerous and powerful words
in your organisation, and in our world.

These words have the power to enable.

These words have the power to transform.

How do you use these words in your organisation?

How do you use these words in your world?
How do you back them up with action?

...get involved ...decide their

in setting own working
the budget hours
...contribute to ...directly
our strategy contact
anyone else

...join the board ...start a new

meeting project

...recruit new ...select their

people own salary
 #ChangingTheFuture

anyone
can...
somebody
should...
nobody
does...
 essay.Ten

21st century
leadership
by Silvia Zuur
 21st century leadership

The world of work that I entered in the 21st century looked very differ-
ent to the world my parents entered in the 20th century, or my grandpar-
ents before them. I didn’t embark on a one-career life like my Granddad,
who was a veterinary surgeon for his whole professional career. I’m not
going to progress in a linear fashion up the ladder of one organisation—
assistant, manager, executive. My world of work, and how I work, looks
very different.
At the same time, the organisations I have worked in also look differ-
ent. They are not ruled by command and control. Money is not the key
motivating factor. A job title that has the word ‘leadership’ in it does not
bestow that automatic right upon me. In these organisations, leadership
is about who I am and what I do, rather than a role that I step into.
I’ve been navigating new organisations and new ways of working for the
last 10 years, and I’ve learnt that they require a new type of leadership
for both the organisation and people to function and thrive. This is my
reflection that those who step into this form of leadership cannot
rely on the tools of the past.
This chapter is for those of you who are trying to solve big problems,
perhaps by building organisations. More specifically, organisations with
non-hierarchical ideals exploring new ways of working, looking at prob-
lems that may not have existed before, and solving them in ways that
have not been tried before. This means the type of leadership you are
required to step into is also new.
This is leadership in amorphic contexts; where the organisational in-
frastructure of the 20th century is not (your) reality. You are stepping
into unknown territory. Looking to the past gives little guidance for the
future, because the landscape and paths in front of you have not been
explored before. The organic structures around you are fundamentally
different to the pyramids of the past. 245
 BETTER WORK TOGETHER

This leadership of the 21st century arises out of you

and grows out of the respect of your community.

What qualities make a new leader?

Who are these new leaders? What are they like? Reflecting on my own
experience the number one quality is to be curious. An innate inquis-
itiveness is needed to do this work. A wish to know why things are the
way they are and an unwillingness to accept the status quo, or to accept
the current reality as a given.
We grow in the direction of the questions we ask
~ The Appreciative Enquiry process
I’m talking about a form of curiosity that goes beyond what you can Goo-
gle. It’s a type of thinking which learns how to ask non-Googleable
questions. It invites innovation and encourages growth. It’s a form of
innocence and playfulness that we knew as children but seem to lose as
we grow older. It’s a willingness to meet another human where they are
at, and get to know them beyond how they first present. It enquires into
why people show up for work, and what actually motivates them beyond
the surface appearance. An effective leader of the 21st century is able to
see others around them as experts of their own experiences, and help
people to grow into their own power.
A curious leader also needs to manage their supply of empathy. Em-
pathy gives an ability to step back and not judge instantly. Empathy, in
this style of leadership, is about asking: What was the context that made
someone act in a certain way? What is their story that has given them
this worldview? This can be tough on those Friday afternoons when the
world seems to be conspiring against you!
Colleagues have pointed out to me how often I ask the question: But,
what about the humans? The reason I ask this is it’s crucial to understand
how decisions affect people, especially those on my team and those I am
trying to serve. What might be the unintended social consequences of
my behaviour? Leading in an emerging paradigm means you don’t know
the solutions, but it also means you might not know the negative ripple
effects of your work.
When I stepped into co-leading Dev Academy, a web development
246
bootcamp, a bunch of change was needed. Neither the organisation nor
 21st century leadership

the people working on it were thriving. Unfortunately, in retrospect, I

forgot to ask the ‘what about the humans’ question enough. Lack of
time and resources put pressure on the situation, and even though I feel
like we made the best decisions in the moment, if I could do it again I’d
ask that question more often.
The last quality is a leader’s ability to give and receive feedback. Feed-
back is about being willing to reflect and accept being wrong, as well as
a deep curiosity to learn more about oneself. I can recall two impactful
times when I’ve received feedback that was less a critical analysis of my
behaviour and more a reflection on my patterns of being and working.
Firstly, a colleague Bart once told me: Silvia, you have an incredible network
and bank account in the trust economy. Your bank is overflowing. It’s time to cash
some of that in. He woke me up to the unsustainability of my excessively
altruistic behaviour. I needed to give and receive, deposit and cash out, in
equal measures, or I was going to burn out. This was an uncomfortable
truth to wake up to. I’ve never been that good at asking for what I need,
and my need for independence can make me fearful of asking people to
support me.
Secondly, at a retreat, a group of women reflected to me how much of
my entrepreneurial work has been tidying up after other peoples’ ideals
and false promises. I knew I had done this one or two times, but having
it named and fed back to me made me reflect on my deeper pattern of
behaviour and the anxiety I sometimes feel working in the entrepreneur-
ship space. Learning the art of receiving feedback is hard, but so is the
art of giving it, so I felt proud when an Enspiral contributor recently
posted this: Much appreciation to Silvia for your mastery of the art of feedback.
So specific, insightful, and useful. Your feedback has stuck with me over the years,
and it matures with time.

Enspiral: a mixed leadership journey

Enspiral was my leadership initiation experience. But no one in Enspiral
ever gave me the title of ‘Leader’.
Enspiral both accelerated my leadership and dampened it. It provided
opportunities and encouraged me to really ask myself what work mat-
tered to me. Enspiral allowed me to experiment, and it was a place to
247
play. The unformed chaos called on my creative problem solving skills.
 BETTER WORK TOGETHER

I could stumble into a meeting of the Board of Directors and ask myself
“What might a new way of being a director look like?” Enspiral encour-
aged me to dream of a better world and supported me to work in service
of creating it.
So, how has it stopped me? There were times when I wanted to step
into leadership, but I was confronted by a culture of everyone needing
to have an equal voice that everyone had to listen to. This tended to
dampen my own voice at times, because I was unable to stand in my own
expertise and trust myself even if we were exploring a topic where I had
the most context or skill.
There’s also the paradox of working with people who knew me so well.
Sometimes people saw the old me, the administrator and facilitator,
when it was actually time for me to lead. There was no clear way to step
out into a new role. With no clear rhythm nor hierarchical process to
navigate, it was hard to change my identity and share how I had grown.
I encountered an assumption that non-hierarchy is always a good thing.
Non-hierarchy can both build or squash leadership. When unhealthy, it
can cause us to get mired in grey, rather than enabling a spectrum of
skills and possibilities. In non-hierarchical spaces, leadership needs to be
earned, claimed, and sometimes even fought for. And then, after claim-
ing it, every single act needs to renew your leadership on a daily basis.

The leader’s journey

In Joseph Campbell’s book, The Hero’s Journey, he describes the arche-
typal journey of leaders through the ages. I’ve found it useful to help
make sense of my own leadership journey. Nicanor Perlas refined this
journey into a four step process: The Call, The Trial, The Illumination,
and The Return. These four steps form the foundational arc of how
one might embark on this new leadership journey. I’ll share some of the
insights and tactics I have gained, and reflect on the journey.

1. Call: how it all begins

As Perlas suggests, everyone’s leadership journey begins with a Call.
What was the Call that woke you up? That you could no longer ignore?
What was the experience that altered your biography forever? It might
248
have been meeting a person, reading a statistic, or hearing a talk.
 21st century leadership

Was there an injustice communicated to you that made you wake up to

realities beyond your lived experiences?
Sometimes it comes as a knock on your door from Gandalf, or being
offered the red pill or the blue pill in the Matrix. But more often than
not, it’s less clear. Something happens that makes you realise there is
potential inside yourself that has not been awoken, which demands that
you answer the Call.

It’s 3:23 in the morning

and I’m awake
because my great great grandchildren
won’t let me sleep
my great great grandchildren
ask me in dreams
what did you do while the Planet was plundered?
what did you do when the Earth was unravelling?

surely you did something

when the seasons started failing?
as the mammals, reptiles, birds were all dying?

did you fill the streets with protest

when democracy was stolen?

what did you do

once
you
knew?
~ Drew Dellinger

When this shift occurs, there is a tilt in the Universe that means you can
never go back. You cannot go back to not knowing. No longer can you
ignore the need that you have woken up to. These moments that call us
into action, when we step into leadership, are often unexpected. Instead
249
of doing what you want, you now do what needs to be done.
 BETTER WORK TOGETHER

You may only recognise that moment when you look back. That was the
case for me. Enspiral was my leadership journey, and it’s only now, when
I look back, that I realise this. I did not enter Enspiral with leadership
ambitions. They unfolded through a suite of experiences and events that
I woke up to and stepped into. For example, every Enspiral retreat has
been such an opportunity and invitation. It’s an opening to serve the
community in a tangible, practical way. Over the last seven years I’ve
co-organised six of the retreats and helped with five others, and each
time my sensitivity for the leadership required in this space has increased.
Conflict in communities like Enspiral are another clear call on new lead-
ership. As someone who actively avoids conflict, it has been moments
of conflict that have propelled me into leadership more than anything
else. The art then is to work out if it is a conflict that only hurts me, or
something that is damaging the community.
The motivation for stepping up is different for everyone, yet I am sure it
has nothing to do with a new job title, pay band, or permission bestowed
upon you by a manager. It’s an awakening inside yourself, a realisation
you can, and must, do something.

2. Trials: the challenges of organisational leadership

Leadership is not easy, so often the moment you commit yourself, you
realise: “this is a way bigger problem than I ever thought.” Stepping into
leadership is like opening a Pandora’s Box that you can’t close again. As
Perlas says, it’s the Trial that comes after answering the Call. The core
Trials I’ve faced while building new organisations have been within the
themes of compromise, power, health, responsibility, and relationships.

Compromise
Ideas are great, but reality is never that simple. Leadership often
requires creating a new reality, and accepting its imperfections.
As soon as you begin to turn ideas into reality, the compromises begin.
The marketing budget is not quite big enough. The week is just not
long enough. Your team has its own ideas and implementation strategies.
Reality has a rough way of chiseling away at the perfect idea.
Through the concessions inherent in compromise, it’s easy for organisa-
tions and leaders to lose integrity. The million micro-decision made daily
250
can lead us down an unintended path.
 21st century leadership

Suddenly, you find yourself publicly standing for something that is no

longer perfect. You need to represent the imperfect reality that you have
created.
In the second year of leading Chalkle, the startup I co-founded in 2012,
I received a nomination for the Women of Influence awards. This was
a surprising and wonderful honour, but it came at the time when my
original co-founder had left the business, I did not have a strong team
around, and I was starting to have doubts if I even had a business model.
I discovered how sometimes the external image displayed has a discon-
nect to the internal experience, which gave truth for me to this quote:
Don’t compare your insides with other people’s outsides.

Power
These compromises often apply to the ideals of non-hierarchy, which
can look great on paper, but in reality may be quite a different experi-
ence. The disconnect is around power. Power is like dust in a house:
it settles and accrues in the corners. Power is never spread evenly in
an organisation. If Power is not addressed or named, it will gather in
unnamed places. An explicit dictatorship may be better than an implic-
it power structure. Hidden power may invite a perception of equality,
where you can sit around a table with a verbal agreement of all being
equal, but a newcomer may notice that everyone seems to listen to one
person more than others. This creates a confusing situation for any-
one trying to join, and a frustrating situation for anyone trying to
lead.
The clearest example I could think of here was my experience of being a
director of Enspiral Foundation Ltd. The community agreement is that
this role does not hold additional power, except in exceptional circum-
stances. Yet I found the experience to be quite different. We were not all
equal sitting around the table. If a decision involved a brand risk or a fi-
nancial risk, I could not help but have the director voice on in the back of
my mind. I know that impacted my behaviours. Negative legal or financial
consequences, would land in the directors laps. How could I ignore that?
Name power. Address the power. It is never equal.

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 BETTER WORK TOGETHER

Health
Budgets, payroll, employment contracts, strategies comprise the back-
bone of a traditional organisation. As leaders try to improve how
these elements are implemented in the 21st century, it’s easy to ignore the
positives as you eliminate the negatives. This can lead to idealistic new
organisations being more unhealthy than more traditional, pragmatic,
ones. New organisations may throw out perceived bureaucracy, but also
the useful structures and systems.
Often in these unhealthy organisations, the most pressing symptom
might appear to be the balance sheet, but I’ve found that the true illness
is likely to be much deeper in the core of the organisation. Keeping an
organisation healthy is much like keeping a human being healthy. It is
our responsibility as leaders to ensure the health of all these systems. An
organisation needs a heart beat and a rhythm. Money should flow like
blood, not bleed out through cuts and wounds. Communication needs
to circulate through the nerve system and keep the toes and fingers in-
formed. An immune system needs to maintain integrity, of the mission
and the people. A skeleton, a structure, needs to holds it all together.

Responsibility
In an organisation I fundamentally believe that if everyone is responsi-
ble then no one is responsible. In organisations with goals of non-hi-
erarchy, I’ve found that you need to spend more time understanding
power, accountability, and support, when you cannot rely on a hierar-
chical structure to provide these. Fluid, forming systems may be all well
and good while the sun shines, but what about those rainclouds? It’s
those stormy times, when ‘everyone’ is responsible for the overspend on
the budget, or ‘everyone’ was meant to look after that person who had
a tough time at the retreat, or ‘everyone’ was meant to deliver on that
contract, where I have struggled the most to navigate leadership. It’s the
times when a sense of responsibility is not matched by explicit mandate
to act.
In Enspiral, this has been the hardest in terms of caring for people
and managing the Enspiral brand. When we worked on removing the
hierarchy in Enspiral, we originally removed the structures of care and
“everyone was responsible” for caring. This meant that I found myself,
252
initially unconsciously, feeling responsible for all of the caring for the
 21st century leadership

community. If someone was unhappy, I took it personally. At the same

time, if I heard complaints about Enspiral rumouring through the Wel-
lington ecosystem, I took them on as my responsibility to fix. But, for
both of these situation this was not the community agreement, nor my
role. Two interventions solved this situation; developing a stewardship
system and the Catalyst roles.

Whose Job Is It Anyway?

There was an important job to be done. Everybody was sure that Somebody
would do it. Anybody could have done it, but Nobody did it. Somebody got
angry about that, because it was Everybody’s job.
Everybody thought Anybody could do it, but Nobody realised that
Everybody wouldn’t do it. It ended up that Everybody blamed
Somebody when Nobody did what Anybody could have done.
Author Unknown

3. Illumination: what have I learnt?

I’ve spent a lot of the last seven years “doing what needs to be done”.
I could weave a narrative about fixing organisations, solving problems,
and tidying up other people’s messes, a story of serving the community
and building the commons. But is that the only story? Was I truly self-
lessly serving?
I could tell a different story, about gathering social capital. Maybe I do
the work because I’m ‘Little Miss Fix It’. Maybe I like to feel important
and be in the middle of everything. Enspiral created opportunities that
fit my skill set and helped take me where I am today. In other words, it
served me.
The former is about an individual serving a community, and the latter is
about a community serving an individual. Both narratives are true. It’s in
this paradox where the true art of navigating self-leadership and com-
munity leadership emerges.
Enspiral has been built by thousands of acts of leadership by hundreds
of people, and it has created new opportunities for all of us. This work
was never a logical decision for me. The hours spent, the tears cried, the
words written on Loomio never made sense in isolation. Yet I helped
create an ecosystem for hundreds of people to find the work that mat-
253
tered to them. We built a network that now serves beyond us.
 BETTER WORK TOGETHER

Those that build the house are built by the house

~ Koro Bruce, Tapu Te Ranga Marae

Tending my relationships
Relationships are not an infinite resource; they need to be cared
for and fundamentally respected to be sustained. An organisation
of five people is a web of 20 potential relationships. This can be tended
to simply, but grow to 10 people and you suddenly have 90 potential
binary relationships. It is your role as leader to tend that web, and under-
estimating the complexities will ultimately belittle your work.
It’s not paychecks and job titles that hold the new organisations together.
Money and status were the currency of 20th century; in the 21st century
it’s relationships. Yet so many of our ‘heroes’ appear to pay little atten-
tion to relationships. So many idolised people seem to have forgotten
their families, and so often the work gets hidden behind egos. The hero
story misses the relationships, where their power is actually manifest.
Campbell might talk about a hero’s journey as a path to be traveled, in
the stages described by Perlas, but what I’ve realised it that it misses
the complexities of the relationships that propel each leader forward.
A leader does not journey alone.

Staying balanced and grounded

On my 33rd birthday I got a lemniscate, also known as the infinity sym-
bol, tattooed on my ankle. It’s a symbol that represents the two most
important things I’ve learnt: balance (both sides of the lemniscate are
equal) and groundedness (reminding me to keep my feet firmly on the
earth).
As a leader, ‘balance’ for me has many different facets. It’s about main-
taining integrity so that your head, heart, and hands are balanced. Bal-
ance is when your body feels healthy, when you have had the amount
of sleep you need, and eaten the right food. Balance can be found in
conversations—am I truly listening or just waiting to speak? So often
leaders spend their time talking, but talking and listening needs to come
in balance. Balance is about finding the stillness in the storm. It’s about
walking the tightrope of expectations and pressures.
Groundedness is about coming back to reality, not floating off into an ego-
254
tistical hyper-competitive world. Groundedness asks you to come back to
 21st century leadership

yourself, and constantly be present to why you do this work in the first place.
For me to be a leader in any context, I need to work hard to hold my-
self to account and stay grounded. I’ve gone through extreme waves
of workaholism—living and working with your co-founder and moving
your startup office into your home is not a good way to create balance!
Happiness is when what you think, what you say,
and what you do are in harmony.
~ Mahatma Gandhi
I have found a good way to check in on remaining
grounded and balanced is:
1. Head - How much time do I spend thinking? Did I join the last
strategy meeting? Have I spent some time on a whiteboard with a
colleague recently?
2. Heart - How much emotional labour have I taken on in my com-
munity? Did I host the last community potluck? Have I had a
coffee with one of my colleagues recently and asked how they are?
3. Hands - When did I last physically create something? Have I
gone for a walk or a hike recently?

Personal well-being
On this journey of navigating leadership I’ve had some critical learnings
about my own wellbeing.
I am part of a group of nine women who are my core colleagues in life
and work. They are not my direct co-founders or business partners, but
we work in similar ways, in similar contexts. They are people who em-
pathise with me on my journey, but have enough distance to be objective
and bring me perspective. We have made a commitment to each other
to meet every three to six months to share our challenges, our joys and
our learnings.
Having a home base is crucial for me. I need to be able to potter, make
bread and kombucha, clean a cupboard, or sit on the couch and knit for
a whole afternoon. Home is the place where I can selfishly be me. When
your leadership is founded on service, it is crucial to have a place where
255
your only concern is your own wellbeing.
 BETTER WORK TOGETHER

It’s been pivotal for me to find moments to clear my head and not think
about work. When work is not just a nine to five job, it becomes harder
to turn off my brain and allow perspective to bring me fresh courage.
This might be a 30 minute walk around the block, a whole afternoon at
the beach, or a month in the Alps making cheese! No matter what I am
doing, I have never regretted a wander in the woods.
Finally, my mental wellbeing has a very strong correlation with my inbox.
I’ve realised I need to set aside a decent amount of time to clear it. In
busy times, this takes the form of a daily calendar slot.

Community navigation
Alongside commitments to myself, I also need clear strategies to lead
organisations and communities sustainably.
Clarity is my most important tool. As soon as something feels unclear,
my alarm bells go off. Clarity is needed in tasks, responsibilities, relation-
ships, and accountabilities. It’s not just about needing to lock everything
down. Clarity can also be gained by acknowledging that something is
unclear. Just as long as we are all on the same page! Lack of clarity about
my responsibilities leads me to worrying about everything!
I’ve spent a lot of time learning how to create organisational systems
that help hold people to account. On a basic level this looks like clear
weekly rhythms, names associated with tasks, monthly retrospectives,
and transparent budgets. The goal is to not centralise information in my
brain. I love setting up external processes because they hold people to
account better than me turning into a human task tracker.
Lastly, what are the ‘No’s’ you need to voice to empower your greater
‘yes’? Finding these help me stay true to my commitments and maintain
my integrity. A friend once gave me the feedback of feeling frustrated
at me for saying yes to the things that are shiny. She asked me if I was
being strategic, or just opportunistic? I realised that the more I grow, the
more opportunities come towards me, and the more I need to learn to
say no. It all comes back to finding the balance that allows me to thrive
and therefore the organisation to develop.

256
 21st century leadership

4. Return: bringing it all together

The way I show up and strive to lead with integrity probably looks dif-
ferent to your leadership. But there are some things all leaders of the 21st
century have in common.
We need to look forward to define the leadership of the future, instead
of perpetuating patterns from the past. No matter the context, I encour-
age all leaders to foster curiosity and empathy inside of themselves. They
need to ensure the Integrity of their own deeds and those of their or-
ganisation. They need to learn the art of giving and receiving Feedback
in a way that furthers learning and relationships.
I once read that: Courage is acknowledging fear, but acting in spite of it. Those
moments when we step forward as leaders are acts of courage. We
shouldn’t idolise courageous leaders, but we do need to acknowledge the
fear that they have overcome, even if we can’t see it.
Leadership is hard work. There are so many challenges, in the world and
within our organisations. The organisations we build will not be perfect.
Along the way, we’ve all had to make a million decisions, some of which
may have led to something suboptimal.
But perhaps the hardest task, and most important, is simply recognising
each other on our unique leadership journeys. We are all at different
stages. Some of us are just starting, awakening to a Call. Some of us
are confronted by Trials, tripping up and falling, stumbling into hidden
power structures, or navigating the complexities of people and relation-
ships. Some of us may have just had that ‘aha moment’ of Illumination
we were waiting for. As each of us move forward on our ever-unfolding
paths, we need to remember to see each other, recognise the journey,
remind each other to stay balanced and grounded, look after ourselves,
and not to say yes too often.
Enspiral has been my context for the last seven years. It has represented
the deeper ‘why’ of my work. It’s provided me with colleagues, friends,
flatmates and co-founders, and a place to stand and grow. It gave me an
opportunity to answer a call.
My journey has been an experience of leadership in the 21st century,
where leadership is not assigned by authority. Leadership in the pres-
ent century arises out of individuals, and grows out of the respect
of their community. 257
 essay.Eleven

In service of
change
by Damian Sligo-Green
 In service of change

This is the story of how we built a worker-owned ecology of profession-

al services businesses. With a background in business development and
sales (financial services for mom and pop businesses and SMEs) I joined
Enspiral early on in its evolution. I didn’t set out with the intention to
build community-orientated business but I always had the drive to effect
positive change in the world. Enspiral is the place my real learning jour-
ney began. What follows is an outline of that journey, and of some key
phases in Enspiral’s story so far.
The Enspiral I joined was mostly made up of programmers, activists,
and early stage startups. The majority of the livelihood in the community
was (and still is) drawn from professional consulting work - mainly soft-
ware development and programme design/facilitation. The challenge of
working out how to structure and support multiple freelancers work-
ing together as a distributed, self-governing, and autonomous agency
was central to the formation of the whole Enspiral system. Over the
past five years I’ve been developing, iterating, and evolving the model
alongside others. While lots has changed over that time, the same central
questions have persisted:
How do we do interesting, meaningful work as peers?

What are the patterns, skills, tools, and structures that allow us to do this
while continuing to progress individually and collectively?

How do we grow resilient, effective, and sustainable organisations, anchored

259
to strong social purpose?
 BETTER WORK TOGETHER

Enspiral Services - connections,

contracts and co-evolution
I worked in a corporate for a few years, before the mind-crushing ri-
gidity, lack of growth opportunities, and absence of purpose led me to
self-employment and managing a small business. This was just after the
Global Financial Crisis and it was a challenging time to learn the basics
of business. While finding some commercial success, I quickly became
lonely, and found that my work wasn’t delivering the positive change I
craved. I was ambitious, searching for purpose-driven collaborators, and
hungry for meaning in my work. As it happened, so was Enspiral.
At that time, Enspiral Services was the economic heart of the communi-
ty. In short, it’s where the money was made. It played a pivotal role as the
feeding and breeding ground for new relationships and opportunities to
emerge. It came to be within Enspiral Space, a shared co-working space
with accessible pricing and professional meeting rooms. Inside this
space, collaborating freelancers, activists, and entrepreneurs were drawn
together to work, share, dream, and scheme on new projects, tools, and
new possibilities. Enspiral Services facilitated meaningful value exchange
- contracts and collaborations. These were the bundles of energy that
bootstrapped the community. Without these, we wouldn’t have gathered
the financial wherewithal that allowed people to stick around and culti-
vate deeper interpersonal connections. It was these deeper connections
that enabled us to develop the collective problem-solving capabilities
that made so much more possible.
Legally, Enspiral Services was a Limited Liability Company with no spe-
cial constitution and a single director/shareholder, Joshua Vial. It was
founded as Josh’s private consulting agency and as the kernel of a bigger
vision developed, he began to invite other developers and later, proj-
ect managers and salespeople into the fold. All of these professionals
shared the intent to make a positive impact in their work. With the magic
ingredient of facilitation added to the mix, this technically proficient
head and hands gained a heart. Many freelancers were used to working
on their own or with small groups of trusted collaborators. Enspiral
Services played the role of ‘the agency’ which was able to project a larger
presence, tell a common story and win bigger jobs. It accrued a surplus
of money in a common pool instead of diverting that surplus to share-
260
holder owners or directors.
 In service of change

Viewed through an evolutionary lens, it’s important to note the environ-

ment in which Enspiral Services formed. Enspiral Services came to be
in Wellington, Aotearoa/New Zealand. Wellington is a densely packed
(but small) capital city with a population of around 150,000 people. It’s
easily walkable and has a highly connected, educated, and relatively mo-
bile labour pool. It’s the seat of central government and key government
agencies, host to two universities, has a progressive city council and is
home to a diverse mix of corporate, IT, and creative organisations. Wel-
lington is a highly connected hub in a nation of five million people,
with a relatively strong social safety net, low corruption, and a culture
that encourages humble self-starters to ‘make a go of it’. Thanks to the
openness and support of Wellington City Council, we were able to gain
access to meaningful, innovative work - even without much of a track
record. Having the backing of a Council that was willing to take small
risks and committed to creating opportunities for cross-sectoral collab-
oration was a massive boon.
Like Enspiral, Enspiral Services was never one thing. It evolved in re-
sponse to its changing environment and underwent several distinct
phase changes. With my own distinct bias, I’ve attempted to give colour
to these phases and their attributes in the tables and commentary that
follow. Its first iteration can be best described as a Freelancers’ Collec-
tive. Initially, Enspiral was mainly made up of programmers (Ruby on
Rails and PHP), project managers comfortable with technical projects
and sales & customer development people. Contracts were developed
for clients near and far (thanks internet!) and with a good market price
for skilled programmers coupled with low operational overheads (lap-
tops and wifi) we generated a good surplus. As time and Wellington spun
their magic, a wider set of professionals were drawn into the Enspiral
vortex. Lawyers, accountants, designers, and activists joined and wove a
more diverse and dynamic community.

Enspiral Services 1.0 - The Freelancers’ Collective

(circa 2010 - 2014)
A loosely held group of freelancers handpicked and organised by a
hero-leader, but over time, increasingly self-selecting. In Enspiral’s own
words (circa 2010):
‘Enspiral isn’t a regular sort of company... You call the shots...
We offer opportunities, not jobs... We look for people who can be
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world class... Changing the world is our passion’
 BETTER WORK TOGETHER

Ownership Single Director, Single Shareholder

Structure Hero-leader: charismatic salesperson who leads

business development and internal talent recruit-
ment - was also the sole company director and
bore the legal risk of the enterprise.
Operational Conductor/s: Internal administra-
tor/s making sure key systems work (accounting,
invoicing, and freelancers getting paid) was done
and that contracts etc were in place.
Contractors The individuals or teams designing,
programming, or coordinating the specific proj-
ects and contracts.

Governance Governance was lightly held and somewhat

opaque, resting mainly on the shoulders of the
sole director.

Business model 20% of invoices billed to clients went to the middle.

This covered insurance, accounting costs, core
operations and began to generate a collective sur-
plus. Deciding what to do with it then became
part of the challenge.

Pros & Cons of the Freelancers’ Collective model

What was great

● Community building
○ Bootstrapped an economic community and kickstarted the whole
network.
○ Fostered new working relationships and opportunities.

What was difficult

● Accountability and transparency
○ A resistance to developing fixed roles and structures meant poor
262 individual and organisational accountability.
 In service of change

○ Operations and decision-making lacked transparency - power lived in

informal silos, slowly building wider uncertainty and distrust.
○ No processes for due diligence around proposals, contracts etc.
● Strategy and systems
○ No clear strategy beyond, ‘do good work, do it well’ - the system
was trying to be everything to everyone.
○ Work was often high value but short term.
○ The 20% rule wasn’t well suited to all circumstances. Some people
could bill less for their time, some projects were for organisations doing
meaningful work with small budgets.
● Delivery
○ Heavy reliance on key salespeople to develop leads. Relationships and
context lived with those people - not with the organisation.
○ Increasing variety of services being offered (software development,
design, facilitation, event planning etc), which made communicating the
offer a huge challenge.
○ Lack of ownership and a shifting labour pool meant less consideration
for continuity of service and prioritising long term customer needs.
● Professional and personal development
○ Adapting our mindsets and approaches from working in hierarchical
(agency quashing) organisations to this new environment.
○ Inadequate focus on behaviours, relationships, and systems that enabled
individuals to grow professionally and personally.

Outcomes
● People developed a new appreciation of the challenges presented by
‘flat’ organisations and the myriad challenges associated with collab-
orating in a non-hierarchical way - especially those of governance,
self-management and accountability.
● For most, a long journey of personal awareness and growth was kick-
started - building new capacity to listen to and understand our own
needs, limits, and edges along with those of our peers.
● People left to pursue more time-tested organisational models and
ownership structures that separated ownership and risk from security
and a paycheck.
● An appreciation of the need for clearer boundaries and systems for
263
easier coordination and collaboration.
 BETTER WORK TOGETHER

One size doesn’t fit all

It’s worthwhile reflecting on some of these challenges: a resistance to
developing fixed roles and accountability structures and the mind-
sets and approaches adapted for working in hierarchical organi-
sations. As the number of people working through Enspiral Services
increased, working out who was doing what and for whom became less
clear. This increased the need to create standards and accountability
structures - which led to some resistance. I believe this resistance re-
flected an aversion to roles-as-hierarchy arising from time spent in hier-
archical organisations or under the thumb of horrible bosses. These en-
vironments also bred mindsets that rewarded measurable execution and
for the most part, discouraged organisational innovation and change.
This created an awkward paradox as people didn’t want the fixed roles
and accountability structures, but they also didn’t know how to operate
effectively without them!
Other challenges presenting in this phase included:
1. People weren’t invited to Enspiral to be told what to do.
2. Enspiral Services was a simple system with a simple story which
worked well when it was small and closely knit, but became more
difficult as it all became more complex
3. The system was still working itself out - making parts of it rigid
seemed like an impediment to evolution or change.
Whatever the reasons, a wider cultural aversion developed towards at-
tempts to standardise or homogenise anything. As you can imagine, this
meant change was slow, messy, and painful. The pain of this slow mess-
iness, coupled with the growing body of freelancers and breadth of ser-
vices being offered, allowed small teams with more specific propositions
to naturally coalesce and this catalysed the next phase of evolution, teams.

Enspiral Services 2.0 - Teams (circa 2010 - 2014)

Teams formed as the whole collective grew too big and unwieldy. Natu-
ral collaborations began to emerge between small groups of freelancers,
coordinated around their own vision, brand and group processes. The
‘one collective’ model evolved to enable more variety in the organising
forms and services on offer in the market. This allowed different teams
to form and set their own course, with eyes and ears open to opportuni-
264
ties for collaboration with other teams.
 In service of change

Ownership Single Director, Two Shareholders

Structure Different teams formed with different core val-

ues, offerings, internal agreements, and member-
ship protocols

Governance A ‘Core Group’ was formed which included rep-

resentatives of each team and the company direc-
tors. The group coordinated important decisions
that affected all teams, including decisions around:
● shared services
● financial flows
● accounting, risk mitigation, and governance issues
● individual and community needs
● the coordination of collective activities
A process for light quarterly reporting was also
established but not always followed

Business model The percentage contribution to the centre became

increasingly variable, from 20% down to 0% in
some circumstances. This depended on the scope
of the project, the health of the team, and increas-
ingly, the perceived value of Enspiral Services.

Pros & Cons of the Teams model

What was great

● Teams differentiated their offerings, building their own brands and pres-
ence in the market.
● Both teams and individuals developed a greater sense of collective need,
intent, and the sustainability of their venture.
● Teams prioritised the internal health of their members, seeking ways to
support each other financially and professionally.
● Some collective costs were shared, including accounting and legal fees.
● It was easy for teams to form because freelancers were already contracting
through the parent company.
265
 BETTER WORK TOGETHER

What was difficult

● The complex structure
○ Like a bunch of new startups, except it was easier for people to walk
away due to lack of rigour around ownership, legal responsibility, and
continuity of service.
○ More murkiness - it was sometimes hard to see where the responsibilities
of a team ended and those of the parent company began.
● Finance
○ Collective investments didn’t have a commercial edge, and sweat equity
didn’t translate to viable livelihood.
○ The differing value of services and varying contribution to the centre
saw a gradual decline in collective funds. This ultimately diminished the
sense of abundance and had an effect on participation in the network.
● Communication - internal and external
○ Often difficult internally between teams with so much time spent winning
and delivering work.
○ Customer care was under-resourced and some relationships were neglected.
○ Some freelancers continued to operate independently - a challenge for
internal visibility and risk management.
○ Higher barrier to entry for new people - existing working relationships
were already well established and context increasingly expensive to
communicate.

Outcomes
● People took real ownership for their own needs, becoming more aware
of their own strengths and weaknesses and gaining a sense of what
they needed to learn/develop.
● Many also got pretty fed up with the constant change. Not everyone
had the patience, stamina, or life circumstances to support variable
incomes or working on stuff that matters but doesn’t pay.
● Many individuals opted to leave and work with more traditionally
organised companies

266
 In service of change

Small parts, loosely held

What followed was a stage of collective inertia. As a ‘fix’ we didn’t go
far enough to deal with the challenges of our collective operating model.
We weren’t prepared to make the hard breaks and new commitments
necessary for an alternative - so we formed teams inside the collective
but kept the same underlying infrastructure. This was intended as a tem-
porary measure to keep things streamlined, while retaining the benefits
of shared overheads and collaborative budgeting. However, many of
the challenges outlined above persisted. Furthermore, the wider Enspi-
ral network and its diverse body of ventures had begun to grow - excit-
ing, but a challenge in itself. We had also moved into a new co-work-
ing space that didn’t have the same good vibes as the original Enspiral
Space, which had a negative effect on the overall culture.
There was a gradual decline in rhythms, energy, and enthusiasm for En-
spiral Services and what it had once represented to the community. Too
many people had spent too much energy for too little reward, trying to
innovate something that was no longer fit for purpose. The business
was in decline and in early 2016, we began winding down the collective
consulting model. Instead, we began to move towards something new
that better served the many talented consultants and their multifaceted
offerings. We called these Livelihood Pods.
Pods1 have their own lineage. They were prototyped within Enspiral
Dev Academy (EDA) based on the lessons learnt within the larger net-
work. Within EDA2, self-managing teams had control over their own
budgets and managed their own capacity. While it was a good idea
in principle, this specific implementation lacked the transparency and
sense-making mechanisms to operate effectively. Co-dependent pods
can’t operate in silos but independent pods can. They can also connect
up with each other for mutual benefit and meaningful value exchange
given the right circumstances.

1 ‘Pod’ is just a made up word for a small, member owned company

2 EDA is an Enspiral venture that trains junior programmers with workplace ready skills using a boot-
267
camp model
 BETTER WORK TOGETHER

Enspiral Services (is dead)

- Long live Livelihood Pods (2016 - current)
No two pods are the same, but there are commonalities. Within Enspiral,
we’ve identified two distinct varieties of pod: Income-pooling pods
and Eat-what-you-kill pods. Both varieties share the following attributes:

● Companies with few people <12 (that intend to stay small)

● Intended to serve the human beings within them and operate as a
high trust ‘professional family’.
● Have a sense of longevity beyond just a contract or project.
● Operate in a high trust environment, aiming to cultivate a healthy
ecosystem of complementary collaborators (pods, ventures and
freelancers) in their neighbourhood.

Ownership Different arrangements across different pods

(companies). Many look like worker co-opera-
tives with member-directors and equal sharehold-
ing. Most are Limited Liability Companies Some
contract or support non-members to deliver
specific work or projects.

Structure Most pods are small consulting companies selling

time, and consist of three to eight people. Many have
suggested pods could support up to 12 people.
Income pooling pods

● One created a hybrid remuneration system that

pays members a basic income, a daily rate and a
percentage of hours billed.

● Another agreed on a set monthly rate for mem-

bers regardless of individual consulting income
generated.

Eat what you kill pods

● Share overheads, a brand, and run different virtual

accounts for directors and projects.
268
 In service of change

Governance Governance tends to be separate from operations

and is divided between directors. Often delegated
to those who are best suited or inclined to dealing
with the specific domain based on skills or interest.
Business model Varies according to pod. As above most of these
are consulting companies, selling labour and mate-
rials at a professional rate.
The modes and methods of pods differ significantly
here.

● Some require that members do all of their con-

sulting through the entity and use a percentage
of sales to pay for common tools and marketing.

● One works like a professional membership or-

ganisation and charges members a monthly fee
for professional support and shared services. It
also operates as an entity-in-waiting for projects
that don’t have another natural home.

● Others are shared consulting vehicles with a vari-

ety of revenue share arrangements but may also
incubate early stage products.

Pros & Cons of the Livelihood Pods model

What was great
● Variety. Pods enable a wide variety of forms and configurations that suit
the needs of those they serve (clients and members).
● Adaptability. Because of their size and the lower cost of communication,
disseminating information can be faster and cheaper.
● Security. Smoothing off the financial highs and lows of boom and bust
freelancer work.
● The development of deep interdependent working relationships with a
small group of peers sets the foundations for high-trust working rela-
tionships.
● Safe environment to develop the direct and considerate communication
skills.
● Increased resilience across the ecosystem and siloed business risk.
269
One failing pod won’t drag the others down with it.
 BETTER WORK TOGETHER

What was difficult

● Less easy to collaborate ‘internally’ as agreements between pods become
agreements between legal companies, rather than between individuals.
● Requires more effort to maintain collective rhythms, culture and com-
munication between the pods. Each pod tends to focus on its own world
rather than the wider community.
● Harder to keep collective intent aligned and translate it into clear strategy.
● More difficult to support personal development - small companies can’t
facilitate the needs of juniors as well as larger companies can.
● Reliance on on self management and the professionalism of the mem-
bers involved.

Outcomes
● Members take greater ownership for their own work and how it im-
pacts collective outcomes - the potential risk and reward are greater.
● Some pods have wrapped a significant portion of their unique offer-
ing around tools and methodologies that have been developed within
the network (eg Loomio, Cobudget) and continue to live in symbiotic
relationships with those tools and ventures.

The journey continues

If I was to plot my professional journey (along an emotionally charged
timeline) it would look something like this:

Corporate Self-employed Self-employed Freelancer Livelihood

(the beginning) (Part II) Collective Pod
“Man, “Woo! “This is hard “Wow this “This is
this sucks” This is great!” and I’m lonely” feels better amazing and
but is hard hard but totally
and confusing” worth it”

270
 In service of change

I’ve come full circle from working in a complex, specialised hierarchical

organisation to working in a complex, specialised member-based organ-
isation. From the outside, it might not look that different, but on the in-
side it’s made up of peers who support and respect each other as equals,
hold each other accountable and actively cultivate shared ownership and
responsibility.
In a similar way, from the outside, an interdependent group of ‘Liveli-
hood Pods’ might look no different from any other group of ‘normal’
collaborative small businesses that align strategically to better serve their
clients and build opportunities. Organisations that value the whole by
considering and aligning to the needs of all their stakeholders are the
kind of entities we’re fostering. We’re not doing this just because we
want to do great work, we’re driven to create a more abundant, kind, and
considerate way of doing work that matters.
So much of my own journey has been facilitated by the gifts of peers and
mentors who knowingly and unknowingly have shared their hard-fought
insights and skills with grace and generosity. I don’t think Enspiral would
have persisted without the ethos of gift-sharing at its heart. Whether
it came packaged as open source technology, retrospectives, facilitated
group sessions, or a hug at the right time, this makes up the abundant
and generative interpersonal commons that underpin our community.
The future of this growing ecosystem of Pods looks bright. Talented
people are showing up, giving their all and sticking around through the
hard times. We’re getting better at doing what we do and we’re cultivat-
ing a healthy culture of mutual support - balancing explicit value ex-
change with a genuine intent to see each other succeed. As connected,
self-governing, worker-owned teams with deep trust and aligned intent
we stand on solid ground. From here, we can do better work, together.

271
 Where to from here?
by Lucas Tauil de Freitas, john gieryn,
Charley Davenport and Phoebe Tickell

Lucas is sailing with his 13-year-old daughter just off the coast of the
Coromandel peninsula in New Zealand. He is suspended perfectly in
the present moment and knows that he’ll relive this again and again. The
scent of garlic and fennel waft from a big wok in which john’s cooking
cabbage to add to a big soup he’ll share in a Food Not Bombs vegan
community meal in Portland, Oregon. In Barcelona, Phoebe’s got a glint
in her eye as she facilitates a group of people from across Enspiral, Ou-
ishare and other sister networks, in the first manifestation of a ‘network
of networks’. The sweet and dry smell of pine rosin permeates Charley’s
cello from a hillside house overlooking the airport in Wellington, New
Zealand. The music of a Bach cello Suite dances through Charley’s mind
272
as he responds to messages in Enspiral’s helpdesk.
 Where to from here?

Across the world, Lucas, john, Charley and Phoebe share a hopeful smile
as the newest Enspiral Members.
Two weeks later they gather at Enspiral Summer Fest in New Zealand
along with about 60 others. The four of them discover a bonfire still
burning after wandering out of a deep dive group discussion. Topics
such as “what does it mean to enspiral?” or “what could Enspiral look
like in five years?” are not unusual in these annual meetings.
Charley comments: “I love hearing this conversation unfold with new
folks and the warmth of understanding that is reached.”
Lucas chimes in: “Yes, I do too – having these conversations is one of
the best ways we let people into our practices – open-sourcing them as a
number of other communities do – and cross-pollinating.”
Charley adds: “We don’t fence ourselves off being in Enspiral. One of
its design features is that it interacts with other circles and parts of your
life.”
john says: “In Whitman’s words, “...I am large, I contain multitudes.”
In bringing our whole selves we each show up coexisting across many
circles and interpersonal relationships.”
“For me,” Phoebe adds, “it’s like a lens through which I interact with
reality. The ways of being and doing I practise in this community inform
the way I show up and work in the world.”
Charley throws another log to the fire, which emits orange sparks –
dancing and disappearing into the night sky.
john says: “Thinking of new folks, though, you can’t change someone,
nor can you really help them; rather you walk the journey with them in
mutually transformative and adaptive ways. That is, solidarity – not char-
ity. Everyone has a unique voice and gift to add to the whole if we can
see them as peers, as we do when seated in circle.”
“Beautifully said john,” Lucas replies. “This really resonates with me.
It impresses me that for 40 years I had never thought of charity or
transformative reality. I was part of a fast prototyping workshop for
Auckland Council. We invited local communities together to rig pop-
up workshops out of scaffolding and help people fix things – electrical
work, plumbing, crafts – and we would invite people in to help each
other. This was my opening door to Enspiral, eventually meeting Rich. 273
 BETTER WORK TOGETHER

My main takeaway from this was that no one likes to receive charity: they
like to work together to solve problems. They said ‘only the hood can
help the hood.’
Phoebe, john and Charley are listening intently as Lucas continues: “Not
just experts should be heard here. Close-knit teams perform much better
than a team made up of experts.”
Charley says: “Yes, this is one of the main things that brings us together
at Enspiral: the vision of the future. Contributors, Members and others
here, there’s no distinction between us in this respect. We’re all focused
on placing that first brick of utopia.”
“The idea of Enspiral triggers people’s dreams.’ Phoebe adds. ‘I’ve seen
Enspiral inspire belief in a better future, one where we get to solve our
own challenges. This is one of our biggest assets: a living idea. The work
is what we do from the realisation that another future is possible. And
manifesting that future takes working together in a completely different way.”
Lucas says: “I’m fascinated by utopia. Some people think it’s a no place;
a place that doesn’t exist. Some people see it as a place yet to be discov-
ered or an ideal. My favourite understanding of utopia comes from an
Argentinian filmmaker Fernando Birri. A student asked him: “what pur-
pose does utopia serve?” Fernando responded: “In order to understand
the purpose of utopia, you have to understand where it is: it is in the
horizon.” It’s the nature of utopia.”
Phoebe adds: “Yes – we walk ten steps towards them and they move ten
steps further away. The role or purpose of utopian ideas like Enspiral is
to keep us walking. To give us a course to steer. Enspiral is like the north
star. It guides people through the night.”
Lucas concludes: “It’s like a lighthouse. We get excited by these ques-
tions and in the pursuit of reaching utopia, we realise the questions and
answers have changed.”
“What do you hope Enspiral will be like in the future?” Charley asks.
“For me,” Phoebe responds, “Enspiral represents both the future, and
the present. It’s the future in that anyone can make Enspiral into what
it will be – it is a living lab for new ways of being, doing and working
together. It’s the present in that being part of Enspiral calls me into deep
presence and awareness – of who I am, how I want to be with people,
274
 Where to from here?

how I want to show up in the world. It’s the power of an idea. It’s the
power of a shared intention. It reminds me that the quote by Margaret
Mead is in fact real: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful,
committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that
ever has.”
Phoebe continues, “it’s a reminder that a more human world is possible.
It’s a rebellious ‘no’ to the status quo. It’s an earnest attempt at hacking the
normal way we work in society. It’s a prioritisation of the important parts
of being human. And it’s a reminder that together we can create islands
of sanity, networks of trust and hope, and new organisations that prac-
tise what they preach. In Enspiral, it’s the being, and not just the doing,
that is important.” john adds another log to the fire and says: “I agree. I
think there’s an opportunity for purpose-driven communities like Enspi-
ral to create conducive space for people to unfold their unique gifts – to
develop their capacity in relation to others, to a wider community, and to
a purpose that transcends that community. In courageous spaces we can
better support people to see the potential that resides in our differences,
and the value of others. This capacity will support us to hear and tell
new or ancient stories that are currently marginalised by the hegemonic
narratives. These shared visions may be one key in moving our com-
munities towards change that is sustained and longed for, collectively.
Lucas, Phoebe and Charley get in closer to the fire.
“I love the idea that we’ll be more diverse and have deeper connections,”
Charley agrees.
Phoebe reflects: ‘“I think that if in five years, Enspiral were still nour-
ishing all of us and nourishing us to do our best work, that is “enough.”
At the same time, we can continue the work to make more spaces that
are not echo-chambers. Could we push towards engaging with the bot-
tom billion? When do we have a responsibility to recognise “the world
is burning,” and look at how we act in response to that? As we look
into the future, we’re going to be seeing more and more chaotic and
uncertain situations. How could networks of resilience help prepare and
respond to disasters? How could the Enspiral model be used more by
the disenfranchised?”
The four of them are now holding their hands up to the fire as they try
to balance the heat and the cool night air.
Charley bounces off, “This is really interesting to have your and john’s
275
 BETTER WORK TOGETHER

perspective here, side by side. It seems in our future vision of Enspiral

there’s two different patterns of change: deepening and scaling.”
Phoebe says: “Yes, maybe we don’t really need to get any bigger but at
the same time there might be replications of us – Enspiral circles in San
Francisco, Europe or elsewhere – and ways of sharing resources and
know-how between those circles.”
Charley says: “Exactly. And john, it seems your aspirations and hopes for
us in the future are about the deepening: being more inclusive, having
better connections to different areas and with each other. Doing more
of our best work.”
Phoebe adds: “Sometimes I notice people seeing Enspiral as an “elder”
– a network with a rich history of stories, artefacts, and tools. How can
Enspiral mentor new and fledgling networks? How do we make sure that
we document our stories and tools well?
“I think that’s one of our roles as Enspiral members, and something we
need to be aware of,” Charley says. “Stewarding how these stories are
told and preserving the integrity, while at the same time observing and
accepting that evolution and change, itself, is one of the features in our
way of being.”
Phoebe says: “Something else to consider is: what if Enspiral came to
an organic death? What does graceful death look like in Enspiral? What
could emerge from the decomposing soil of Enspiral if we did let it go?
And… if “Enspiral” died, would what Enspiral really is disappear? It’s
the relationships, and they live on, the seeds continue to be sown, the
spores continue to spread.”
Silence. The fire flickered as the four looked to one another for a deep
moment.
After consideration, Charley spoke: “I think I would be okay with that.
This is one of the things JV has said that stuck with me: if we disband-
ed the formal company and took away the digital tools, systems, and
our collective practices, what remains is our relationships. For example,
when you look at something bright like this fire or our faces and look
away: what you see is an afterimage. What would be left of Enspiral is
memory and knowledge. Perhaps that’s the acceptance you have to have
coming in as a new Enspiral Member. It’s a pattern of living, which
276 means that it could die – or not, while you’re here.”
 Where to from here?

Phoebe concludes: “Maybe that’s a new pattern we could take forward,

regularly asking ourselves: “Does Enspiral still feel alive to you?”
Further silence. They have a collective yawn, which is followed by laugh-
ter at their shared sentiment during this time: full of warmth, trust, and
invisible nurturing. Off in the distance other bonfires burn, emitting
streams of changed matter, and sparks that dance into the night sky,
indistinguishable from the distant stars.

277
 Our buzzwords: Unpacked
by Susan Basterfield,
Hannah Smith and
Anthony Cabraal

When groups of people work, live and grow together they create lan-
guage. It happens organically. Jargon is something that helps people be-
long; adopting the lexicon is part and parcel of adopting a community
identity. It enables ‘the in’ to feel ‘in together’, but for those who are
‘not in’, it can be a barrier to understanding, suggest an exclusive, insular
culture or simply be really annoying. Enspiral is no different, so we’ve
had a go at creating a guide to some of our (currently) most commonly
used ‘buzzwords’:
Buzzword How you might hear it
What it means
Bootstrap
“Let’s just bootstrap this until we’re confident it works.”
Not sure what it’s got to do with boots, but essentially this means fund-
ing a new business or initiative using internal resources. Often used to
describe the process of earning money from one client or venture and
then spending the surplus on new ideas.

Catalyst
“She’s a great catalyst, so full of ideas, and excellent at seeing connections
between things”
A nebulous job title covering a broad spectrum of leadership activities
that serve the greater good. May include starting new initiatives, con-
necting people and opportunities, coordinating and codifying things that
need doing, and supporting those who are doing them.

Check-in
“Let’s all check in quickly before we get started. What’s on top for everyone
just now?”
Inviting everyone in the room to speak at the beginning of any meeting
or gathering. Brings all the voices in right from the get-go and makes it
OK to talk about anything going on that might affect how we are ‘show-
278 ing up’ (see below). See also ‘check out’.
Check-out
Let’s do a quick check out - how is everyone leaving the session today?
As with ‘checking in’ (see above), a process that invites everyone to say
whatever they need to say before a ‘container’ (see below) closes and a
meeting or gathering comes to an end. Often quick and lighthearted.

Container; create a
“You need a strong container to have that conversation properly.”
No, it’s not a small box. But it kind of helps to picture one. When we talk
about creating a container we mean demarcating safe, comfortable, and
productive conditions for a particular conversation or activity to take
place. Closely aligned with ‘holding space’ (see below).

Cross-pollinate
“I love how much cross-pollination goes on at Enspiral between all the teams
and ventures”
Copying the bumblebee (sort of), cross-pollinating is taking ideas from
one team or group and sharing them elsewhere in the eco-system (see
below). Often occurs at gatherings when multiple groups are having
connectable conversations in close proximity.

Eco-system
“They aren’t really in the community, but are definitely part of the
eco-system”
Borrowing from nature again, this is used to describe the whole land-
scape of interconnected people, projects, and companies relating to a
specific community, idea or conversation.

Followership
“We don’t celebrate followership enough!”
Less talked about than the act of leadership, but no less important. Best
described as offering active, visible support to someone who is taking
a lead on something eg agreeing to show up to a first-time event and
making it known to others. Something we love to practise and encourage
at Enspiral. 279
 Harvest
“Who’s up for harvesting everything we’ve discussed today?”
No, it’s not picking apples from a tree - ‘harvesting’ generally means to
collect and write up all the big ideas or actions from a discussion, work-
shop or gathering. A harvest might look like mind maps on big pieces
of paper, photos of post-it notes on windows, or notes on an online
document to be shared. No Enspiral gathering is complete without a
harvest of some sort.

Hold space
“Thanks for holding space for us so beautifully on this retreat.”
The act of creating and maintaining the optimum physical and social
conditions for other people to do what they need to - to meet, con-
verse, decide, debate, explore - without seeking any specific outcome.
Space-holding is a key skill amongst Enspiralites.

Land
“What she said really landed with me.”
When a statement or articulation of an idea hits home, and feels newly
meaningful. Often accompanied by a sense of relief and/or new energy
- like an aeroplane touching down at the end of a long flight.
“How did that land with you?”
Inquiring into someone’s well-being when presented a new or surprising
bit of information or feedback.

Retreat
“I’m really looking forward to the retreat and to chilling out together for a
couple of days”
A few days when a group intentionally spends time together away from
the work environment. With Enspiral this usually involves good food,
great conversations, a fire and, at some point, dancing.

Sense
“My sense is we’re really close to something here”
Something unnamed, a thought or process that hasn’t quite landed (see
above) yet. Something being sensed is still a bit fuzzy; sometimes an idea
or insight that’s not quite fully formed.
280
Sense-check
“Can we all just stop and do a quick sense-check on this?”
To interrogate an idea or proposition in a different way or from a dif-
ferent perspective. Sometimes articulated as “what are you noticing?”
Surprising how easy it is to overlook this one.

Show up
“We need to keep asking ourselves how we want to show up”
Showing up at Enspiral doesn’t just refer to going along to meetings or
parties - although we do plenty of that. It also refers to being conscious
of the mindset we bring to a project or activity - being open-minded,
reflective, gentle, or considered for example.

Stewardship, stewards
“He seems to be struggling. Let’s check he has a steward to help him through
the bumps”
This is a big warm blanket of a word that covers a range of supportive,
peer-to-peer behaviour. Normally established as a formal connection be-
tween two people who are also part of a larger group.

Surface
“In this session let’s try and surface what’s really going on here.”
To voice assumptions, tensions, ideas or feelings that might be present
or underlying but not clearly expressed. Better out than in might be an-
other way of putting it.

Unpack
“Sounds complicated. Let’s try and unpack it a bit”
Sometimes it’s not just suitcases that are heavy. Social tensions, compli-
cated pieces of work, and confusion in teams often need to be broken
down and discussed. ‘Unpacking’ looks like pairs or small groups talking
through challenging situations with care and consideration.

281
 It takes a village...
Enspiral is the collective force behind Better Work Together.
The thinking and efforts of this community over years of hard work and
learning together is the reason this book exists. It has been shaped by
many minds along the journey and grew from ideas on a whiteboard to
the book you hold in your hands.
We are deeply grateful for the invisible support from everyone who
helped champion and nurture this work, both within the Enspiral com-
282
munity and from our friends working alongside us all around the world.
Production team
Anthony Cabraal had the original vision, and together with Susan Bas-
terfield coordinated all the content as producing authors. Natalie Sisson
joined as the third member of the core team to kickstart the project and
drive a successful crowdfunding campaign. The deft editing support of
Alanna Irving and Hannah Smith stripped away the noise and sharpened
the language. Creative director Renato Inácio went above and beyond
to express the collective, creative spirit of this work, and together with
illustrator Mukund Iyer transformed text into a wonderful piece of art..
Co-authors
Nine long-time Enspiral members took time away from busy lives build-
ing companies, growing communities, and delivering impact to step into
the role of co-author, writing the essays in the book.
Contributing authors and supporting forces
Enspiral is a community full of supportive, talented, proactive people
who are open to experiments. The following humans contributed to the
project in various ways: leading pieces of content, contributing time,
ideas, providing critical eyes, and perspective or financial support.

Billy Matheson Mary Jo Kaplan Lani and Hugh Evans

Gina Rembe-Stevens Nati Lombardo Ronan Harrington
Doris Zuur Sarah Houseman Dominique Snyman
Lucy Carver Charmaine Myers Lisa Gill
Nick Laurence Sandra Otto Joriam Philippe
Nanz Nair Mario Kaphan Douglas Rushkoff
Theodore Taptiklis Manel Heredero Doug Kirkpatrick
john gieryn Albert Cañigueral Colin Basterfield
Phoebe Tickell Miki Kashtan Hannah Smith
Lucas Tauil de Freitas Manuel Küblböck James Mansell
Charley Davenport Marty family Helen Sanderson
Mix Irving Zuur family Frederic Laloux
283
Anake Goodall Nadine Isler
 Catalysts
Six organisational catalysts backed this project with funding and made
the whole thing possible. These organisations actively contribute to
growing the power of community in our world.

DAOstack
DAOstack is a platform for decentralised governance that enables col-
lectives to easily self-organise around shared goals or values. DAOstack
is sometimes called an operating system for collective intelligence, or
a Wordpress for DAOs – ‘decentralised autonomous organisations’ -
which use blockchain-based governance protocols to convert human
input into efficient, effective decision-making.
The Genesis DAO (funders of this project) represents an experiment in
allocating resources using decentralised governance protocols that have
the capability of scaling to organisations of infinite size.
https://daostack.io

Namaste Foundation
Namaste Foundation exists in service of a peaceful, just, and regener-
ative world. The organisation is an expression of solidarity with many
movements. They serve the common good through understanding, col-
laboration, and relationship.
https://www.namaste.org/

Space Base
Space Base is co-creating a global Space Ecosystem to serve entrepre-
neurs in emerging space industries - starting in New Zealand.
Their goal is to provide access to training, networking, technical services,
and investment opportunities where they are needed most.
http://spacebase.co/
284
Bamboo Creative
Bamboo Creative is a digital agency based in Wellington, Aotearoa and
a part of the Enspiral network. We help develop good ideas into great
ones and design engaging, meaningful experiences for end users. A di-
verse team of designers, developers, storytellers and product strategists,
we’re committed to working as peers on projects that help people con-
nect with themselves, each other and the wider world.
http://www.bamboocreative.nz/

The Philtech Initiative

The global open Philtech Initiative was established in May 2018 to cul-
tivate sustainable and efficient purpose-driven organisations aimed at
solving root causes of world problems by prioritising their social and
environmental impact over the traditional ‘increase profits at any cost’
approach.
Philtech Initiative originated from Rybakov Foundation, a private phil-
anthropic organisation founded in 2015 by Igor and Ekaterina Ryba-
kov with headquarters in Moscow, Russia. It’s supported by hundreds
of entrepreneurs, philanthropists, futurologists, researchers, visionaries,
creators, and journalists around the world.
http://philtech.global/

Peerdom
Peerdom offers a curated marketplace of collaborative tools, business
models, legal structures, and best practice recommendations from which
teams can pick and choose to craft fulfilling, engaging workplaces found-
ed upon integrity.
The Peerdom model is easily applied to founding new or transforming
existing companies, as it simply describes a procedure for how peers
work together in a financially sustainable and fair organisation that is
owned, operated and managed by its own workers.
https://peerdom.org/ 285
 Co-authors profile

Richard D. Bartlett has been cultivating the Enspiral garden since

2012. He co-founded Loomio, an open source software tool for col-
lective decision-making, and The Hum, offering practical guidance for
decentralised organisations. Rich is passionate about co-ownership,
self-management, collaborative governance, and other ways of sneaking
anarchism into respectable places.

Susan Basterfield is catalyst and convener, helping individuals and

organisations release potential through participatory organising, explor-
ing her hypothesis that our transition into what’s next will be brought
about by and through community. She is a prolific writer and speaker,
and has shared her experiences from India to Korea, Canada to Chile,
Sweden to Australia, and most places in between.

Kate Beecroft is a strategist, facilitator, process designer, and busi-

ness developer who has been launching trainings, designing, and hosting
events and consulting with companies on the principles of self manage-
ment. She is based in Europe and is co-convenor of Leadwise Acade-
my and co-founder of Greaterthan, a venture in service of people and
organisations at the forefront of radically new organisational models.
Her dream job is to be a bibliotherapist.

Anthony Cabraal is a creative producer, writer, and business owner

who has helped many Enspiral initiatives start and grow since 2012. He
serves as an advisor to several startups, and loves to get new ideas off the
ground - including driving the creation of this book. He is based between
Wellington, New Zealand, and Melbourne, Australia.

Sandra Chemin has been passionate about innovation, experimen-

tation, and learning by doing all her life. She is the co-founder of the first
digital agency in Brazil, sailing around the world with her family, co-found-
ing a school designed for social inclusion and as the founder of futureyou.
be, helping organisations and individuals create the future of their work.
She is a sought-after speaker and is based between New Zealand and Brazil.

286
Alanna Irving joined Enspiral in 2011. She was co-founding execu-
tive director of the Enspiral Foundation, and co-founder of Loomio, Co-
budget, and other open-source technology tools for deep collaboration.
Alanna is an expert in bossless leadership, deconstructing and reconstruct-
ing money, governance, and ownership for a radically cooperative future.
She lives in Wellington, New Zealand. More: https://alanna.space

Joshua Vial is the original founder of the Enspiral collective and has
worked on many ventures and projects since then, most notably Enspiral
Dev Academy. As a programmer, entrepreneur, facilitator, and educa-
tor he works in the space where technology, deep purpose and systemic
change meet.

Francesca Pick is a driving force in several international collectives

such as the Ouishare network. Her work is focused on community build-
ing, new organisational models and participatory governance. She is based
in Europe and is the co-founder of Greaterthan, a venture in service of
people and organisations at the forefront of radically new organisational
models.

Chelsea Robinson is a systems change strategist who has been in-

strumental in building and leading organisations including GenerationZe-
ro.org, LifeHackHQ.co, and Loomio.org. She lives in San Francisco and
continues to expand her impact and influence with a focus on philan-
thropic strategy and non-profit strategy. More: chelsearobinson.me

Damian Sligo-Green brings a living systems lens to his work,

paying special attention to the deeper needs of people and planet. He’s
energised by working with others on projects that shift mindsets and
behaviours and ultimately facilitate action. He’s based in Wellington and
works through Bamboo Creative, a digital agency within the Enspiral
community.

Silvia Zuur brings people into the heart of all organisational change
work. She has been growing Enspiral with a focus on educational ven-
tures, transformative events, and healthy organisational strategy since
2012. With more than a decade of facilitation experience, she is comfort-
able pacing the main stage of an event, sorting logistics out the back, or
scheming and dreaming new ideas. An adventurer at heart, she has based
herself in Wellington. 287
 References
We’ve made every effort to acknowledge sources and provide links to
original work, and the original sources of the thinking that we build
on in our work. Below you’ll find a generalised list of websites that are
referenced throughout this work. Our intention is to continue to grow
this list of resources on the website: betterworktogether.co

https://handbook.enspiral.com
http://loomio.coop/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_circle
http://greaterthan.works
https://teamhuman.fm
https://shareable.net
https://forumforthefuture.org
https://amanitas.cc
http://theleanstartup.com
http://www.reinventingorganizationswiki.com
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Space_Technology
https://onbeing.org
https://www.holacracy.org/governance-meetings
http://www.ottoscharmer.com/theoryu
http://www.morningstarco.com/
http://www.artofhosting.org/
http://www.liberatingstructures.com/
https://www.cnvc.org/
https://devacademy.co.nz/
http://www.lowcarbonchallenge.nz/
288 http://www.exp.agency/
https://cobudget.co/
https://lifehackhq.co/
http://futureyou.be
http://thehum.org
http://www.impactcanvas.co/
http://www.generationzero.org/
http://www.self-managementinstitute.org/
http://www.reinventingorganizations.com/
https://www.ehf.org/
https://www.newfrontiers.nz/
https://www.ouishare.net/fest
https://www.ouishare.net/
https://holochain.org/
https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/

289
 #ChangingTheFuture

The permission to create

You have the permission to imagine a new world.
You don’t need approval.

You have the energy to kickstart experiments.

You have what you need.

You have the courage to share your thinking,

inspirations and learnings.
You are not alone.

You have the focus and motivation

to defy challenges and blocks.
You can make it happen.

You can start a movement.

This can be your work.

Call it
social
entrepreneurship. Call it
good common
Call it
sense.
entrepreneurship.
Call it
whatever you Call it
Call it damn want. corporate
activism. citizenship.

Call it
Call it business
innovation.
for impact.

You were born with the permission to create a better

future for everyone and everything on this planet.