One baby step to transform your organisation
Very frequently we talk with companies who wish to change how they work, empower their teams and foster a culture of collaboration. Many of these organisations struggle to do this, for a variety of reasons. One common problem is to get carried away and to engage in an over-ambitious initiative. It goes without saying that cultural transformation is a long distance race.
There are a number of initiatives that are small in scope and have a high potential of success. Collaborative funding is one of those initiatives.
Cobudget is an online platform where teams can propose ideas, explain why those ideas provide value for the organisation, and colleagues can fund those proposals. It is as simple as it sounds, it is a bit like an ‘internal crowdfunding’, but much better. I work at Ouishare, a decentralised networked organisation (are we a Decentralised Autonomous Organisation?) and, as it says on the tin, we do not have a centralised management structure. This has a number of implications, one of them being: how do we fund activities?
“Technology for fairer, better world” Outlandish has funded 200,000 GBP collaboratively
Example of how collaborative funding works
Alicia is a OuiShare connector based in Austria. She has been working with a German company, a client if I may, doing a number of workshops and developing a collaborative governance framework, which is one of her favourite topics. She got paid 10,000 EUR for this work. She keeps 9,000 EUR (Vienna is an expensive city) and she gives 1,000 EUR back to OuiShare, to our commons. But here is the thing, since we are a decentralised organisation and there are no bosses, there is no CEO or COO or anyone in particular making financial decisions for the rest of us. So, how do we spend that money?
The 1,000 EUR she is contributing to the community stay in her account at Cobudget and she gets to decide where it’s spent. In the meantime, Esra, who is a connector in Brussels, wants to do research on new governance models, interviewing a number of organisations and writing a report. She goes on the Cobudget platform and creates a ‘bucket’, where she explains why this is valuable for the organisation, asking for 2,000 EUR. Alicia thinks this is a great idea and decides to invest 500 EUR from her account. As simple as that. As powerful as that.
There are three key benefits from allocating resources in this way:
#1. Empowering and Engaging
Every single one of us can propose directly to the rest of us. We feel empowered to propose and execute, we feel responsible for the projects that our colleagues have funded and we gain a ton of reputation when we deliver.
#2. Oriented to Value Creation
There is no chain of command. We don’t have to propose an idea to our line manager. We don’t have to seek consensus from the community. We are all in the periphery of the organisation and we propose activities that we believe provide value. We only need to convince a small number of our colleagues to fund the project.
#3. Discovery
When we propose ‘buckets’ in Cobudget we are gaining exposure. We have to make a case, explain why our proposed project matters, why it provides value. This in turn generates debate and people discover people, which is always important, but more so when we are distributed as we are. With platforms like this one we increase the degree of our network. We strengthen our value-creation structure.
In short
Going back to my original point, doing a round of collaborative funding is an excellent way to start the transformation of any organisation. For instance, many companies have a budget for Training and Development and often the T&D plan is developed by HR together with some managers. Why not take that budget and let the employees figure out what they actually need?
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For some context to this article: Organisational Transformation by Design and Four Ingredients for Organisational Transformation
About me
I’m an organisational transformation facilitator who works with organisations seeking to empower their teams to innovate and transform business strategy. My focus is on collaborative and agile practices, knowledge management and collective intelligence. I’m fascinated by networked organisations, distributed leadership and innovative governance models, and their ability to transform traditional companies into adaptive and purposeful organisations.
You can contact me at manel@greaterthan.works or simply check out our work at Greaterthan.
