How we organize changes everything

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. We’ve also seen a growing number of bold organizations and groups leading the way in this field.

Yet all around us we see our institutions, organizations, and governance failing us, often worsening the complex problems our world faces. Is the future of work just going to be another one of those management trends that ends up being nothing but a cosmetic makeover of business-as-usual?

As a society, we can’t afford that.

This is serious; it’s time we leave behind the organizing structures and cultures we have trapped ourselves in.

It’s time we shift the tide and fundamentally change how we organize.

This isn’t work for the faint-hearted, and it’s not work we can do alone. But if we commit in the here and now to continuous practice with others, we can become greater than the sum of our parts.

We’re writing this now to (re)introduce you to Greaterthan, a collective we have been quietly building for the last 3 years to work on our mission and to be in service of the individuals and organizations driving it forward. We’ll talk about how we got here, our approach to changing how we organize, and what’s in store for the future.

How we got here

For many of us, new ways of organizing have been our professional reality for a long time. We have been working in entrepreneurial networks such as Enspiral and Ouishare since as early as 2012, where we have been able to experiment and learn at an incredible pace.

Growing collective work cultures that (as we have often been told) feel alien to people from the “normal” working world, we have learned to navigate how to be a network, a community, a collective and a business. All at the same time.

Working in this way has not been easy. We’ve all had moments where we have been close to giving up.

But we’ve also had a taste of what is possible. We know that to really shift the tide, we need to craft the conditions that allow us to be collectively committed to this work for the long-haul. This is why we created Greaterthan, our professional home where we can grow and tackle some big challenges together:

• How do we break free from a deeply embedded culture of freelancer precarity and scarcity mindsets?
• How can we redefine our relationship to money, avoid burn-out and do work we love?
• How do we balance autonomy, mutualism and commitment in order to pursue our ambitions and take bold risks?
• How do we balance belonging to multiple networks while maintaining clear commitments to each other?

We don’t have all the answers…but our journey is about experimenting with ways of approaching them. And as devastating as 2020 has been for the whole world, what has unfolded feels like a strong signal that we are on the right path.

Full stack organizational change

In 2017, Greaterthan emerged from working on our personal and collective relationships to money and supporting groups to make more collaborative and transparent financial decisions together.

Today this has expanded beyond money to support others to create, scale and transition to new organizational forms: self-managing and teal organizations, networked communities, platform cooperatives, DAOs, purpose-driven networks, collectives and movements. What do all of these have in common?

At first glance, they may seem very different, but we see these models as being part of two key trends:

Organizations are becoming more networked

Organizations are becoming more open, connected and less boundaried. Many are building platforms that create value by connecting their users, customers, suppliers, and partners. They are fostering the development of internal communities and cross-organizational networks.

Networks and communities are becoming more organized

There is a surge of networks all over the globe that are getting better at effectively mobilizing and making things happen in a highly responsive and dynamic way. Technological infrastructure and growing knowledge on self-organizing enable these groups to reach new levels of maturity and professionalization.

We see a huge opportunity in cross-pollinating learnings across these emerging models to help them mature and become viable alternatives to business-as-usual. What they share is a tendency towards less top-down and more participatory dynamics.

More networked. Better organized. Greaterthan the sum of our parts. ;)

To thrive in such environments, we need new skills sets: navigating complexity, collective leadership, facilitation, sense-making, process design, fostering relationships, listening and communication capacity, self-awareness, self-leadership and self-accountability.

Though we can practice these new skills on our own, or create innovative organizational structures without changing the culture, we don’t think that goes far enough.

To significantly change our organizational landscape, a “full stack” approach is needed: you work with all the elements in the organizational system, rather than tinker with individual parts.

That’s why our approach is to focus on the intersection between personal and organizational change, going all the way from shifting mindsets, introducing micro-practices and growing new work cultures, to developing the new organizational (infra)structure: processes, tools, governance and ownership structures.

What’s in store for 2021

After a thorough season of preparing the ground, we are excited about 2021. With 18 partners and associates and a growing ecosystem, from Wellington to Vancouver to Barcelona, we’re currently supporting a variety of organizations, spanning crypto networks, health support services, NGO’s, all the way to a Buddhist meditation community headquartered in Nepal.

We’re helping groups do collaborative budgeting with Cobudget, supporting teams shift to remote working, and training people through our academy, with courses such as Practical Self Management, Thriving Networks, Liberating Structures Studio, Full Circle Leadership, Designing and Facilitating Online Workshops and Trauma-Informed Collaboration.

The work we do in the world starts with applying our principles to ourselves and using our organization as an experimentation ground. We regularly share resources and guides in our toolbox, and have been documenting our evolution in our public handbook since the beginning. If you are curious for more, stay tuned here for an upcoming series of articles to highlight more of our practices and lessons learned.

Thanks for reading!

If you would like to meet us live, join us for one of our upcoming free online sessions:

• Freelancers Against Precarity | February 16
• Thriving Networks: The Money Problem | February 25
• Pitfalls of Self-Managing Teams | March 23
• Join the age of participation | April 6

Thanks to Elena Denaro Kate Beecroft Susan Basterfield Stefan Morales who all contributed to this article.