Lessons learned from a business initiative
Camplight is currently at a stage where we try to create other income streams besides our outsourcing initiatives. It’s an exciting journey and a place where we have a lot to learn. Some of our current endeavors are developing and selling our products, being part of a conference about better organizations, developing a consulting branch of the business and partnering with businesses and investors. It’s a lot of stuff, but in business, you never know which initiative will bloom, so you have to experiment. A lot.
In this post, I’m going to share what we’ve learned while trying to join an association which would give us exposure to some big industries where we could help with our software expertise.
At first, this initiative didn’t receive any feedback for about two weeks. Just when the participation deadline was about to come people suddenly got active and wanted to invest. We managed to gather the needed co-budget and even go above it in about 4 days. Everything happened seemingly in a hurry but given the fact that the initiative was there for about 3 weeks, it seemed that we just needed some time to think it through.
The big turn of events happened on the day we had to sign the founding treaty. Just after we signed it, one of us had just found out about the initiative and wasn’t happy with it. This caused, softly speaking, a bit of turmoil. Comments started raining in Trello, there was a meeting, even a not so small amount of feelings got into it. In the end, we decided not to be a part of the association because of ethical and moral concerns.
The rest of the story isn’t something unexpected. We dropped the agreement, had some relationships burned a bit and continued forward. The important thing was that we proactively found a way out of this, respected our views and started thinking about what had gone wrong.
Our first after-action was another initiative. We suspected that the main cause of the problem was miscommunication. For some reason, one of us hadn’t heard of our plans to join the association. So we created a card in our Camplight — Organizational Trello board which was about improving our internal communication at Camplight.
The result of the initiative were several “common-sense” points which were made clear so we don’t get into this situation again. In brief, we decided:
- When we’d just like to inform everybody, to mention @board with a message beginning with “FYI”
- When we’d like to have everybody’s feedback, we should state that explicitly and provide clear action steps. For example, we can say that if someone is okay with a given statement, they should react with a 👍, otherwise they should comment with their arguments against it
- We’ll use a 👀 emoji to show that we’ve seen a given piece of communication
- When we’d like to have everybody’s feedback in a given time frame but not everyone provides feedback, we would proactively search for their feedback by personal messages, phone calls or other means
This list sounds templatish and cold but actually, isn’t something that’s stated as a rule. It’s just a guide which should be ignored if necessary. It states our internal communication common-sense clearly, so we are more aware and mindful of our communication. This guide could be ignored, for example, in an event where rapid action is needed and the person doing the action has enough experience to act appropriately.
Apart from this initiative’s results, we made some profound conclusions for Camplight as an organization. Most of these conclusions were related to the fact that we weren’t sure whether the intentions of the association’s participants were good.
First, we saw that we shouldn’t always follow the potentials for making money and connections. Sometimes, there are moral, ethical and cultural objectives which should take precedence and we should drop the business-making opportunity if it’s against those objectives.
Second, if part of us see an opportunity, this doesn’t mean that they see the whole picture. For this, each of us must look at the picture critically and with enough attention, so important details can emerge in time.
Third, these kinds of situations make us understand more about ourselves and what’s our understanding of reality.
Fourth, our Camplight — Organizational Trello board is the most visible place for us to discuss important initiatives. Everything that concerns the whole cooperative should be noted there and we should make sure that everybody has seen it and has commented on it.
Of course, these conclusions aren’t final or complete. I’m sure that in the process of reflecting upon this and other initiatives we’ll evolve our understanding of human collaboration and Camplight’s values and principles. That’s a never-ending process.
Have you had similar experiences? We’d love to hear about them =)
