Networks based on self-organizing principles have come a long way in recent years to becoming true alternatives to working in more traditional organizations —from locally based or online communities, coops, freelancer collectives, “Neo-Guilds” or DAOs. …

It’s time to get our shit together. For years we’ve been hearing and reading about the future of work and organizations for the 21st century that are “future proof”, “resilient”, “human” — you name it. …

Reflections from the Practical Self Management Intensive, on Deliberate Development. In the last few months, I have been reading and learning a lot about the impact of individual and collective trauma on our lives, and how we deal with it as a society. In these explorations, I’ve been thoroughly enjoying…

When developing collaborative decision-making and governance, we often get distracted with shiny tools, rather than developing culture and practices first. — Prompted by the topic of Week 2 of the Practical Self Management Intensive, “Deciding how to decide”, I would like to share a pattern that I have observed time and time again when it comes to collaborative decision-making and adopting new practices as work: too often, we start with the…

A key characteristic of self-managing organizations is replacing job titles and descriptions with granular roles. Rather than having one fixed job description that comes as a “package” of tasks and responsibilities, working with roles is like having a dynamic portfolio of activities, responsibilities, and even identities at work. The reason…

An introduction to Greaterthan’s 5-step guide to collaborative funding. For any group or organization to be effective, it needs to be able to make decisions about how to allocate its resources. Especially for organizations aiming to be self-managing, participatory, or ‘teal’, collaborative decision-making models for allocating funds are not very…

Enspiral is a network of entrepreneurs and freelancers whose mission is to help more people work on stuff that matters. Since 2013, we have been practising collaborative funding to allocate collective funds through a participatory process. …

Reflections about a nascent movement, from Better Work Together — Last March I was sitting at the dinner table in Wellington with Susan and Anthony, two fellow members of the New Zealand-based collective Enspiral. “We are starting a book project to share stories and learnings from 8 years of building Enspiral with the world,” they said. …

Stats & insights from one year of private beta — For the last 12 months, the collaborative funding tool Cobudget has been in private beta. After one year of learning about who, why and how groups are engaging with the practice of Cobudgeting, here’s a snapshot of key usage stats. To join our private beta, everyone interested was asked to…