Going Horizontal

One of the most common questions I get asked is “What do you do for a living?” On the surface, it sounds like an easy enough question to answer. Underneath, I’m never quite sure how to start. I often envy those who can answer this question easily by saying, “I’m a teacher, “a doctor”, “a lawyer”. When someone says they’re a teacher, you have a good enough understanding of what that entails. Sure, we make a lot of assumptions about what being a teacher means, but we still get the gist of how they spend their time at work. When I say that I work for a social innovation lab, most people ain’t got no gist. Social innovation labs bring multi-stakeholder groups together to work on complex social problems. The details of how an individual lab works depend on the lab itself. At NouLAB, we combine systems thinking and human-centred design, with iterative prototyping and testing.

To make it even more confusing, I don’t have a clear job title or description that I can fall back on; I have a collection of roles.

In February of 2019, in an effort to align our work practices with our values and principles of questioning and being a continuous learning organization, we decided to try Going Horizontal, a collection of tools and practices to create a non-hierarchical organization. In a horizontal organization, power is distributed throughout, rather than directed from the top down. The framework that we used was developed by Samantha Slade, who is the co-founder of Percolab, an international cocreation and innovation firm based in Montreal, and the author of Going Horizontal.

As part of Going Horizontal, we shifted from traditional job descriptions and titles to roles. We work in a creative space, so you’ll see that we had a lot of fun coming up with names for our roles. We have 5 team members and 14 roles divided amongst us. Some of our team roles include:

Action Reporter: Records, documents, and shares the NouLAB story so that people know about the type of work we do and the ways in which we do it.

Business Grower: Maintains quality client relationships to enhance current and future work contracts so that we know how to work with other organizations and stakeholders to help minimize duplication of work.

Organizational Systematizer: Creates and maintains systems (Google Drive, Slack, Asana, etc.) to support team members in their work so that everyone has the support and structure in place to work efficiently.

Ethics Attendant: To create and demonstrate a safe space for NouLAB team members, workshop participants, and research participants so that the people we engage with feel safe and secure.

Care Bear: Promotes a healthy team culture within which the team (collectively and individually) can thrive.

Role Zero: Things that everyone is accountable to do (facilitation, lead generation, represent NouLAB at events, maintain a learning edge, etc.).

The thing to keep in mind is that whoever holds a particular role, stewards the role. If you steward a role, it doesn’t mean that you have to do all the tasks related to your role like you would in a traditional job description. You just have to make sure the tasks get taken care of. For example, as Action Reporter, I do more heavy lifting on the marketing and communications side of things; but, I also rely on my team to provide me with suggestions for blog posts, to write about events they’ve been to, or to share with me new learnings they’ve observed. In other words, I as steward, act as project manager to make sure tasks get done. I might do them myself or invite others to help me get them done.

To help with stewarding, we’ve created indicators for each role so that the steward knows what they are accountable for. The indicators act as metrics to let us know if we are accomplishing what the role was created to do.

Another thing to keep in mind is that stewarding roles isn’t set in stone. Every few months, we do a role revisit where we talk about the roles we hold and how it’s going. It’s also a good opportunity to talk about the roles you want to let go of and the new roles you want to take on. For a learning organization, it’s been a tremendous opportunity to learn and practice new skills.

Although we’ve only been working this way since February, we’ve been seeing results in the following ways: greater accountability to our work as well as to the team/organization, greater autonomy, increase in co-creation and collaboration amongst ourselves, and a deeper sense of what it means to be part of a team.

So, how do I answer “What do I do for a living”? Well that all depends on the nature of the conversation and how much time I have. More often than not, my go-to is: I work for a social innovation lab. We bring together folks from various groups (government, community organizations, researchers, and people who have insight on a particular issue) and we provide them with the tools and structure to work on complex social challenges.

It’s far from perfect; It’s still confusing for some, simplistic for others, and too wordy for everyone. But, as social innovation labs and the work we do continues to grow in impact, one day I’ll say I work for a social innovation lab and people won’t think I’m a scientist, they’ll just get the gist.

We’d love to hear how you describe your work to family and friends with us! For more information about NouLAB and how to get in touch go to www.NouLAB.org.