A Week of Social Enterprise in Aotearoa / New Zealand
The drive for purpose and meaning in work is alive and well in New Zealand. As practitioners develop more experience, common themes are emerging around the importance of providing long term support for the well-being of social entrepreneurs and their communities.
I’m on a plane back to Melbourne after a hectic week of conferences and retreats in and around Wellington, New Zealand. I’ve learned a lot and met many inspiring people, and I’ve captured some lessons here which I hope will help in the work I do with my startup clients at Cogent.co, and in my own small social enterprise, Pod. This trip was part of the learning and development program provided by Cogent for all it’s staff, for which I’m very grateful.
The goal of social enterprise is to further a social impact mission while having a financial model to ensure ongoing sustainability. It’s not the only way to make the world a better place, and doesn’t replace the need for charities and non-profits, but if most of our life is going to be spent working for a living then finding a way to use that time to improve the lives of others then helps us to be a more positive force in the world. As a member of Enspiral Foundation, it’s part of my mission to help more people do this sort of meaningful work.
The Social Enterprise Unconference
Two of Aotearoa’s better known social impact businesses, Pledgeme and Thank-you Payroll brought us together for three days of workshops and conversations at Matau Marae. People came from a huge range of backgrounds, from small businesses run out of their lounge-room, to large established B-Corps, or from non-profits using lean principles to increase their impact.
An unconference is made up of whatever activities, presentations and discussions the attendees choose to present, structured using a social technology called Open Space. Sometimes I go to these with particular goals in mind, but this time I was happy to wait and see what I’d find valuable at the time.
I’ll discuss a key theme of the week below, but the biggest takeaway for me from this particular event was the tremendous value we got from being hosted on the Marae and incorporating aspects of Māori culture into our experience. I don’t mean this in the sense of enjoying the tourist-like experience of sampling another culture, I mean that when it comes to forming community and having deep and productive discussions, those of us with western individualistic cultural backgrounds lack a lot of the necessary tools to do it well. Māori are simply better than us at social practices like the welcome to a new space. After we waited for everyone to arrive, we participated in the Pōwhiri (welcome ceremony) and greeted everyone we would be spending this time with through a hongi (sharing of breath and touching noses), we all strongly felt the transition from a bunch of idealistic strangers to members of the whanau (family).
Maori culture is also better at mutual support, at multi-generational involvement, and at deep listening and discussion in large groups. It was a delight to see Pip (my 9yo) flourish in this environment, make friends, run around, help in the kitchen and enjoy the closeness of all sleeping in the wharenui.
While this was was my biggest takeaway, I noticed the thing that I was best positioned to bring was actually my technical skills as a geek and programmer. That’s not what I always like to focus on, but there weren’t a lot of technical people present, so I ran a session on how to get your tech product built. I spoke to some really inspiring social entrepreneurs for whom the software or web application they relied on to have impact was often an area that felt the most outside their control. There’s a huge amount of room for computer programmers to get involved in impact projects, it’s really important that they network with non-technical people to do so, otherwise, each group ends up only having half the puzzle pieces. I also gave a short talk on the value of optimistic science-fiction as a guidepost for our future, and since I had a lot of requests for a reading list afterwards, you can find that here.
The Enspiral Summerfest
Enspiral is collective of people and businesses with the shared mission of helping more people find meaningful work. I’ve been a part of it for about seven years, during which time I’ve helped create a non-hierarchical freelancer collective, helped out a number of social enterprises, and I’ve learned through trial and error a lot of useful processes for building community. Community that’s strong enough to talk about difficult subjects, like money, privilege and environmental collapse.
The first two days of the Summerfest was just for Enspiral members, those of us who hold a voting share in Enspiral Foundation and make an opt-in commitment every six months to steward the network. Most of these people I know well, and I’ve been with them through many retreats, and we’ve seen each other both in excited success and crippling vulnerability. Our theme as members this time was to discuss a longer view into the future, imagining where we’d be in ten years time. Discussions around structure and commitment didn’t quite sit right with us there, until we re-framed the dialogue as being about care, and what care we needed and could offer each other in order to support meaningful work in the long term.
For the final two days, the summerfest became another large unconference, with Enspiral contributors and other inspiring people we’d invited coming from all around the world to co-create a diverse array of sessions together related to this year’s prompt of “Mutual aid for meaningful work”. We’ve been doing this a while now, and the processes for this are starting to feel very polished, with experience design and facilitation from Rich, Nati, Sandra, Lucas and many helpers creating space for easy collaboration by the attendees.
I deliberately didn’t run any sessions, and instead attended interested sessions and heard about building ecosystems of rural entrepreneurs, peer to peer social networking, microsolidarity, self-care, and many others.
This summerfest also marked the release of Enspiral’s new book, “Better Work Together”, which is an attempt to package up some of the secret sauce so that our processes can be used and built upon by other businesses, communities and networks.
Caring for each other in small groups
One of the main themes of the Enspiral Summerfest, and indeed the entire week for me, was the idea that it’s caring for our well-being that provides the greatest ability to enable people to tackle big challenges. While there’s a lot of value in one-on-one relationships, and in larger communities, nothing beats the value of a group that is small enough to all really hear and support each other, or to learn by working on a project together.
At the social enterprise unconference, this idea was seen in the “home groups” that were formed to support us in our journey through the event, as well as the temporary groups that came together for each discussion. I first saw this process used at an Enspiral Summerfest about three years ago, and now it’s a key process of any unconference experience, and I think should be used in many other settings too.
We used this same process at the Summerfest too of course, but we’ve been evolving it a bit and Enspiral now uses small groups in a large variety of ways.
- We’ve experimented with groups called livelihood pods, which are small groups of people (often contractors) who share risk and provide financial mutual support even though they may not work on the same thing or under the same brand.
- The Peer Incubator is an attempt to help change-makers support each other through regular check-ins to discuss emotional needs, showcasing successes, and swarming around challenges.
- Care Pods are replacing our previous buddy system of one-on-one support because we’ve found that meeting in small groups has much better staying power.
- Ventures and projects at Enspiral are typically the result of small teams forming based on value alignment and trust.
As I mentioned earlier, I attended a great open space session at the retreat to reflect on the lessons learned from these experiments, and there’s already a good list of patterns emerging that help us do small groups well. Enspiral is now embarking upon a more concerted effort to experiment further with these processes, and build up a really detailed library of what works and what doesn’t.
Rich Bartlett has come up with a synthesis of this small group thinking under the term “Microsolidarity”, and his writing on the subject has really resonated within Enspiral, and many other groups who notice the same patterns occurring within their own members. The Microsolidarity website already includes a number of recipes you can use right now to start your own small group (a “crew” or “pod”). Rich has committed to collecting and analysing notes for all the small group experiments that are being run to expand this library.
Most of us left the summerfest having joined at least one crew, so I imagine there will be a flurry of video calls and coffee chats over the next few months and we all learn more about how to support each other in small groups. For me, this couldn’t be more timely, as our new founding team for our startup “Pod” has just kicked off, as described in this great blog post from Lina, our collaboration designer.
Pod will be a digital product to help people support each other in small groups. There are many areas where small group support will not need to be done through software, and having just had a week of deep in-person connection with other humans I’m not about to devalue that. I feel certain though, that we can use software to help make the process easier so that effective communication doesn’t have to start with nearly a decade of muddling through different approaches, and also that there are many times when the remote nature of our relationships are best served by help from software.
For me, working on Pod is part of my current theory of change, and I see small group work as being vital to some of the areas that really matter to me, such as supporting the hard work of activism in the face of climate crisis and many other changes. It’s been great to feel so validated in this thinking, with so many other people having similar stories of the powerful impact of the pods or crews they’ve been a part of.
Quick Ask: To help us built software to allow people to peer support each other in small groups, I’d love to hear from anyone who organises an online community of at least 1,000 people in any sector, which might benefit from some small group work. Contact me at craig.ambrose@enspiral.com.
