Learning How to End Well
Composting our Networks when it’s Time
My clearest memory of closing is that of a small enterprise my family stewarded for over a hundred years. The process was steeped in bureaucracy and shame. As a child, I remember my parents talking about the different challenges of the business — buying new machinery, dealing with unpaid invoices from clients, etc. One of my greatest fears was that it would fold. So when it actually happened, I felt I was living in a nightmare. While I wasn’t involved in any practical way, my family was. Witnessing their pain and seeing such a beloved organisation die has been one of the most painful experiences of my life.
Every time I go by where the shop used to be, I still hear the metal warehouse door rolling up or down. It’s just behind my family’s home, and as a child, I would hear that sound every night. I’d peek through the curtains to make sure my dad was getting safely home. It was an ironmongers’ and iron warehouse, nothing fancy, but an entity to the family members. We spent hours and hours talking about “the shop”. Every time we bought a pretty decoration item, it was not for home, it would be for “the shop”, we had ideas for “the shop”, hopes and dreams. Our future was projected through it. It was a hard business to be in, very sensitive to market fluctuations. Like many others, it got cruelly wiped out with the 2008 financial crisis. I felt I had lost a loved one. The shop.
The shop closed when I was in my late twenties, and I needed seven years to feel that the wound was starting to heal. But it’s still open. I didn’t know how to say goodbye or to express this pain. During all these years I barely ever had an opportunity to talk about it. I made the story small, like it hadn’t impacted me, like it hadn’t happened to me. Up to some extent, I still do the same thing. Death is not talked about in our society. Furthermore, I didn’t feel I had the right to cry over something like that. I had a lot of shame around this story, but I wasn’t aware of it. I knew that it was a loss and, as such, it needed grieving. But how do you grieve over a closed family business you are not working in? I didn’t know how. I wasn’t able to process this loss like I had with others. This brought me to Tashel Bordere’s concept of “disenfranchised grief”, when our losses are not acknowledged or are invalidated by the social norms we find ourselves in. I didn’t have space for grieving because I didn’t know I was allowed to. Now that I have a name for it and I’m writing about it I realise that I might be processing this closure right now, as I am writing these lines.
I’ve worked on a few other organisational closures since then, all of them in networks and communities. Sometimes, the energy would start dissipating, people would join other projects and find new professional homes, and spaces of belonging. I think that some networks fizzle out or “naturally” integrate into others, partially because of their light structure (and maybe lack of accountability, unclear leadership and others). It might seem that “it happened by itself” so there is nothing to take care of. But that’s not closure.
In other situations, we decided to stop the activity, but without a final reflection or ritual to honour all the hopes, efforts, joy, pain and connection those initiatives had given us. I documented some learnings of a women community a friend of mine and I started in Barcelona in 2016. I am happy to still count most of those colleagues as friends, so I want to think that we did our best back then.
A specially challenging closing was a little over two years ago, my colleagues and I decided to end what we called the Tetrapod experiment, a livelihood pod consisting of four people. I wrote about its creation, but I couldn’t get to post about its end. It’s not that I didn’t write about it. I wrote and rewrote, trying to make sense of things, trying to understand why. This tetrapod represented my hope for the first one-and-a-half covid years. We would work like crazy, we would check-in with each other several times a week, work on strategy, narrative, and reflect on our needs and wishes. It’s one of the things that gave me hope through the toughest times of the pandemic. It was a dream that ended suddenly. We gathered to capture the learnings and understand why we were parting ways. I said I would share our insights in an article, but I felt everyone else had moved on, I couldn’t share my grief and so I couldn’t process some of what had happened.
But from all of these experiences, I and we learned something: the need to compost, to work on intentional endings. These days, a few colleagues and I are working on the composting of the network that attracted and kept many of us in the world of purpose networks. Yes, we’re working on composting our network. We want to organise the knowledge we’ve gathered for over a decade, a last act of generosity.
Networks have a high degree of self-organising, so closing a network is very different from closing a traditional organisation. In the latter a few people at the top make the decision, which has consequences for everyone else working there. It’s not possible to just shut networks down. When power relations are not based on hierarchy, the sticky question quickly becomes “who has the right to make the decision of closing?”. That’s a whole process in and of itself. During my first years in this network I wouldn’t have been able to imagine that one day I’d be involved in its composting. I can’t write about it, at least not yet. We’re still working on internal alignment, trying to come up with a narrative that works for most of us.
The choice of words is deliberate; “composting” is about channelling what the network was, liberating energy and making space for whatever wants to emerge after. Composting opens the door to cyclicity; it invites us to abandon the westernised idea of success where everything grows endlessly, merges, or exits. Composting surrenders us to the need for rest. Furthermore , composting allows us to let go of the idea that the network might miraculously come back to life.
A former colleague asked me if closing was really necessary, or if we were doing it to feel in control. Instead of letting things take their natural course, we determine what happens with the network. We decide when and how to end it. I’ve struggled with the illusion of control often enough, so I had to think whether there was a kernel of truth in this. But I don’t think the “controlling” part is relevant. I know I want to feel more coherence between what we say and what we do. I think that arises not from wanting to control things, but from the desire to acknowledge what is happening, and address it accordingly. Letting things fizzle out is not a dignified way to end something so important in the lives of many people. So we compost.
We have so much to learn about the liberatory power of processing grief so that we do not take our traumas to our next endeavour. Composting can help us with this. Brené Brown quotes Robert A. Niemeyer: “A central process in grieving is the attempt to reaffirm or reconstruct a world of meaning that has been challenged by loss”. We need grief to make sense of our new life without what we lost.
Earlier this year, in September, my colleague Lena and I hosted a session on grief and composting networks. Our guests were Louise J. Armstrong and Sophy Banks. Here you can find the recording. You can also find lots of resources on better endings through Louise’s endeavours Stewarding Loss and the Decelerator.
One of the things I take with me is Sophy Banks’ model of healthy human cultures, which gives an explanation of why grief has no role in our society. We live in a culture that pushes us to keep doing and to move on, which leaves us disconnected from love and sensitivity. Those in power build systems in ways that insulate them from shame while pushing the shame and suffering onto those that are less privileged. That’s why, feeling pain is not integrated in our processes; we can’t make sense of it, we can’t integrate it in our feedback loops to correct the system and heal.
Composting our networks and initiatives is a counter-systemic practice, no wonder it’s so challenging. Purpose networks, communities, and collectives touch the lives of a large number of people. We learn and practise self-organising, commoning. They play an important role in prototyping new types of organisations that we, as a society, need so badly to stop engaging in destructive attitudes towards our planet and each other. Engaging in composting networks is essential to help us show up and act differently.
Edited by Zarko Palankov. Thanks so much! This wouldn’t have been possible without your help! I re-wrote a few parts after the edit, so I own all the mistakes in this text :)
