SocialFokus’ Collaborative Journey

I recently attended a workshop on collaborative decision-making at Enspiral Space. The facilitator, Chloe Waretini, did an amazing job introducing tools that helped us collectively decide the direction of the workshop itself.

Some of us were excited to learn about how to build a self-managing organisation, something similar to Enspiral. So we decided to explore that path, understanding the differences between shallow and deep collaboration.

Start Shallow

Matanovic understands shallow collaboration as recruitment.

“I have a vision, so come and help me execute it because you have the skills.”

Most existing organisations start their journey with shallow collaboration. At SocialFokus we did the same.

I had a vision: let’s bring the concept of social entrepreneurship to a wider audience in Hungary. I did my research and, once I had a vague idea, I started to recruit a team. I managed to find two co-initiators and inspire them to start putting energy into validation and ideation. We spent hours on Skype brainstorming and planning a brighter future where purpose-driven organisations are solving some of Hungary’s social problems.

Something didn’t feel right, though. The 18,000 km distance between New Zealand, where I was based at the time, and Hungary certainly didn’t help. But the real challenge we faced was how to move away from the ‘I’ and engage everyone in the team, so they can co-own the vision that originally brought us together?

Deeper Collaboration

After tapping into the collective wisdom at the Enspiral workshop, I now understand two crucial kinds of momentum to deepen our collaboration from recruitment towards engagement.

Recruit people who share similar values.

Most solo founders focus their initial recruitment on the skills that people can potentially bring in. Besides a visionary business builder, you often need people with various skills that you don’t have. Possibly a techie and someone who is an all-rounder in marketing, sales, and comms.

I believe that if you want to reach a deeper level of engagement, a shared set of values comes first and skills come second.

First and foremost you need to be able to create a space in which trust, honesty, and acceptance allow team members to tune into a common ground of collaboration.

Share knowledge as early as possible.

Once we created that collaboration space, it was easy for the team to speak up and share some of their concerns. One was that they felt that they were jumping into validation conversations about social entrepreneurship without understanding the core essence of the concept.

I realised that I not only have to download all my knowledge and transfer that to the team, but we need to consistently work together to share knowledge as it is developing. By creating a ‘system’ using existing tools, we started to share the nuts and bolts of our thoughts and the knowledge we gathered from different corners of the world.

We all knew going in that the premise was a potential a dead-end road. But without these realisations, we wouldn’t have been able to navigate through the initial ups and downs while still making some serious magic happen.

In less than six months, we have developed a 6-day social innovation camp that we ran in Budapest. Thirteen eager participants learned about tools that allow them to build the structure of their social venture — both from a business and a personal development perspective. We were truly buzzing after delivering the InnoCamp, and the trust we managed to build with the wider community has opened up some amazing doors.

We are proud and humbled that we were given the opportunity to contribute towards some great initiatives including a workshop with Unreasonable Institute, Kitchen Budapest’s Format project, the Global Social Business Summit’s Refugee Action Tank, New Zealand’s Live the Dream social entrepreneurial accelerator, and Engame’s educational service.

Engage

Working on these projects made me realise that I needed to step out in order for the team to step into an even deeper level of collaboration, which is engagement. I decided to come back to New Zealand for a three-month project, leaving the team behind in Budapest.

There were some clearly articulated concerns around the decision: ‘Who’s going to be initiating things?’, ‘Who’s going to provide inspiration?’, ‘Who’s going to take care of existing clients?’

Even though I heard those voices, I thought about this move as an opportunity for the team to step up and fully emerge into engagement. The result was amazing. Two months later, the team had successfully delivered workshops for high school students, initiated a wider conversation on impact investment, and kept continuously building the network across the country.

Moreover, we have expressed a deep level of commitment to answer some of the challenges that our organisation faces.

• How can we showcase the difference between non-profits and social ventures for Hungarian people?
• How can we create funding for that activity (socially and environmentally conscious projects) in a highly corrupt Eastern European environment?
• How can we satisfy our Millennial peers’ desire to work on businesses that focus more on people and purpose rather than profit?

As we step into 2016, we’ve identified like-minded individuals who share similar values, knowledge, and resources to work on problems that are holding back Hungarian society. We have also set our focus for the year, which is nothing but ‘doing’. And by that we mean that we all want to ‘do’ businesses that are socially and environmentally aware.

Visible conscious companies can provide practical examples for people. The profit made through these ventures can be channeled into mission-driven projects in which like-minded Millennials can experience a thriving working environment.

While at the Enspiral workshop, I realised that they are on the verge of cracking similar problems, with a structure that has been evolving for quite some years now. Enspiral is a virtual and physical network of companies and professionals working together to create a better society. They are using the ‘mechanism of business’ to build social ventures, without depending solely on corporate or private donations, or government grants.

At SocialFokus we are very curious whether our engagement is deep enough to implement a similar structure to the one Enspiral is building. We’re dying to know whether our community is ready to think and act collectively and start making Hungary happen together.

So 2016 is going to be an experimental year! The premise is a network that collaboratively builds conscious companies, shares resources, and distributes power and responsibility amongst its members.

Can you imagine yourself as part of the network? If so, get in touch :)