Bold ideas to catalyse 21st century organisations
[Below are the notes from a talk I gave at the Perth Social Impact Festival]
Kia ora! Ngā mihi nui kia kotou.
Ko Aotearoa te Whenua,
Ko Enspiral taku iwi,
Ko Silvia Zuur A hau.
My greetings to you all. It’s a privilege to be here tonight.
My land is Aotearoa New Zealand,
Enspiral is my tribe,
My name is Silvia.
Tonight I would like to briefly share three ideas that I think are needed if we want to shift our society towards a more positive future for ourselves, and for the generations to come:
- We need to create businesses that are founded on the goal of creating more value than they extract.
- The way we organise ourselves within these businesses needs to fundamentally shift.
- We must remember to value the humans and the relationships that bind us together.
Value filled businesses
Since the Industrial Revolution commerce has transformed our planet and our society. Our economic systems are shaped and ruled and created by market forces. The global reach of food corporations — like Coca Cola, Nestle, and Unilever, media corporations like Disney, CNN and Fox News, and financial corporations like Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase, and Bank of America — shape the lives of billions of people.
But what if rather than trying to ignore (or fight) this unprecedented historical force — we embraced it, and applied it to the creation of positive social and environmental impact?
I’m not talking about just having the occasional organic burger and wearing fairtrade shoes. Imagine if our businesses were designed, built, and implemented from the beginning to create more value than they extract, both from the natural world and from the humans they employ.
I consider myself really lucky to be part of Enspiral. Enspiral is a bold idea, and an innovative experiment in action.
For Enspiral this means being more than just a community of friends and changemakers. It means creating a network of social entrepreneurs and businesses — who use the tools of business and commerce to create social impact. At the core of this network is the Enspiral Foundation, a Limited Liability Company with Enspiral Members as shareholders and a charitable constitution to guide our action. About 17 companies make up the network and these were all founded with the purpose of creating more value than they extract. All our ventures are autonomous and can join and leave the network as they please.
We have slowly grown Enspiral using company structures and entrepreneurial talent. We do this to improve the wellbeing of our shareholders, who are also our community, and who own the community they are part of.
This question of ownership issue then brings me to my second point.
Ownership and organising structures
Philanthropy is great. I like seeing wealthy people doing good things with their money. I also like the idea of Corporate Social Responsibility and big companies giving something back to the communities they operate in. But neither idea lights me up, and neither philanthropy or CSR is going to make the changes we need to survive and thrive.
So imagine if we could create positive social impact while we conducted our business, not as an afterthought or a byproduct of being in business.
I don’t believe it’s enough just to have more business with social values — how those businesses operate, how they are organised, and the culture they promote needs to change.
- What if we organised our commercial world around collaboration and mutual benefit, instead of the usual cliches about competition, competition, competition?
- What if we went to work and treated each other as adults, rather perpetuating the parent-child relationships we learn at home, and at school.
If you are interested in transforming how you organise your business, I suggest you explore the following four elements in your organisation:
1) Ownership. Within the Enspiral Foundation our ownership (our members) don’t get a financial return. They earn a living from the ventures (business units) they are part of, but they are the stewards of our greater organisation.
2) Governance and Leadership — Enspiral Foundation does not have a standard board. We still have Directors (the law says we must) but we have chosen to have what we call a Minimal Viable Board (or MVB). We don’t have a traditional CEO either — we have a team of people who act as Catalysts across the business. They are funded by ventures and have a maximum term limit of 2 years. This way we distribute power and share the burden of being a leader.
For example I am a Director of four businesses:
- Enspiral Foundation Ltd — complete liability and almost no control.
- Lifehack Ltd — founded on a 1.5 million dollar contract to improve the wellbeing of young people in NZ. Now a LLC with a not for profit constitution and non financial shares.
- EXP Ltd — an event management company that was built to support events that have social impact at their core and which primarily pay out any profits to the staff who run the events or invest in future events.
- Chalkle Ltd — a tech start up founded as a social enterprise with a core mission to change adult education.
3) Finances — We organise our budget within Enspiral through collaborative funding — we have created our own software, called Cobudget, which enables anyone in the network to propose a bucket (a project that needs budget allocation to proceed) and also allows everyone in the business to fund buckets which make strategic sense to them. This bypasses the usual decision making and resource allocation drama in most organisations. Vote using dollars. Simple, easy, democratic.
4) Decisions — We make all our decisions in Enspiral though a consensus based online decision making platform called Loomio. Loomio is a cooperative business and with support from a global community of contributors the platform has been translated into 20 languages and is used around the world.
If you want to know more about Enspiral and how it works — our organising model, our six agreements, our architecture — is all available publicly to the world and written in a format that anyone can fork and change and edit it on platform called Github. You can see these at handbook.enspiral.com
But enough about Enspiral. If you want to know more come to the Open Source // Open Society conference in August in Wellington!
People Centric
To finish up I want to talk about reality and about humans.
He aha te mea nui o te ao?
He Tangata, He Tangata, He Tangata
What is the most important thing in the world?
It is people, it is people, it is people
It’s easy to get visionary and idealistic and want to build alternative systems and new structures, but we need to make sure that our dreams actually serve the people who have to live and work inside our dreams.
Until we well and truly put people in the centre of our organisations we will continue to build structures which are based on self serving, patriarchal systems, that are fundamentally coercive in nature.
Three weeks ago Enspiral held our first Stewardship retreat — a time to explore that concept and how we might apply it to our organisation. For me the most simple and (at the same time) complex thing that came out of it was — the importance of relationships.
You can build multi million dollars companies and organisations — but if you are fueling your growth by burning relationships and ignoring the well being of your people, your organisation will fail.
Enspiral’s core mission is “More people working on stuff that matters”. And to be honest it’s the thing we still need to work on the most. The difference is that we know it, and we are working hard to do it better.
So to sum up, my key ideas are:
- Create businesses that create more value than they extract.
- Organise your business in ways that foster actual innovation, transparency and collaboration. Use your current structure to innovate now. It won’t be perfect — but you’ll be underway and you can take small steps to make it better.
- Create opportunities for more people to find the work that matters to them. And as your systems and processes grow — don’t forget the human beings in the middle.
I look forward to connecting with many of you over the coming week.
Tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou katoa
[Huge thanks to Billy Matheson for helping me craft my thoughts into words, and to Katie Stubley for the invitation to come to Perth and share a few thoughts.]
