Trip to New Zealand Blog 1

I’m on my way. Right now in Heathrow airport waiting to board the next plane to Sydney, with a ‘stop’ in Dubai; to finally end up in Wellington, New Zealand. No, I have never been there; and no, it is not a real vacation. It is quite a mix of things.

I would never make a trip to the other side of the globe ‘just’ for holidays. I hardly ‘do’ holidays at all. I rather stay at home, have a very slow rhythm of life and do whatever I like and what seems needed in the garden. That’s my kind of holiday. A long trip like this one takes a lot of energy and a lot of money, without specific invitation I would never go.

Wellington is the centre of a very inspiring network called Enspiral. I have been following some founders online, via talks and videos and reading some of their handbooks because my sense is they are really on to something — about the future of work, about the power of networks, about solidarity, about governance, about IT tools and more. Over the last years I have co-hosted and co-organised a talk and a workshop when Joshua Vial, the founder of Enspiral, came through Brussels and shared many ideas on how they are working. The people of Enspiral, sometime called Enspiralites, put a lot of effort and energy in building, supporting and maintaining a network of people working in different businesses or ventures, either working as cooperative or not, with a lot of experimentation around shared ownership and distributed leadership. Their tagline is: More people working on stuff that matters. And the sub line: Powerful things take place when like-minded people connect.

In the meantime… I have now some lay-over time in Sydney, waiting for the fourth and last leg of the journey on this early and sunny morning. This afternoon starts the yearly Summerfest that I will join later today! It is one of two retreats they organise in their network every year, in order to hold the network together and let it evolve to its next steps. It is a time for retreat, play, serious conversations, party, collaboration and more; and also a possibility for friends and contributors to meet and enjoy each other for a couple of days. I had been looking in previous years if maybe I could join — but too far and too costly — and now I am very curious about what I will learn and what kind of inspiring conversations I will be part of.

My coming over this year became possible because I was invited, together with Samantha Slade and Paul Messer from Percolab Montréal to host a 3-day basic Art of Hosting training, near Wellington. That was the original reason for me contemplating to make this long, long, very long journey. (12 hours straight in a seat in a plane is really something! — but I am doing quite well actually)

Actually, within the Enspiral network, there is already quite some hosting and facilitation qualities present; as they use circle practice, use Open Space Technology when appropriate etc. Still there was a need felt to dive deeper in the hosting practice as a whole. The guiding question of this particular training will be: How can a deeper understanding of facilitation & hosting allow us to lead more intentionally?

It builds on the idea that the leader for the future is more a host of conversations, of networks, of people etc. The definition is moving on from the hero-leadership — the one at the top — to the leader-as-host. The real innovation and potential is, I think: what if we are all hosts? What becomes possible if we all have the capacity — and continuous practice — to host each other, to host the difficult conversation, to host the inspiring conversations, to host the collective sense-making etc.?

What I find particularly inspiring is that at the centre of the Enspiral network is the Enspiral foundation. Receiving money on voluntary basis from the different ventures, they have put a mechanism, and a software program — Co-budget — in place to jointly decide which projects can get funded. It is mainly used to support people to run projects or experiments, and maybe create some meaningful and paid work out of it. It links pretty well with this quote from Douglas Rushkoff, describing one step towards more sustainable businesses:

“In all decisions, optimize for the velocity of money over the accumulation of capital.”

By now, I am flying over the big, big stretch of water between Australia and New Zealand. It is the perfect summer weather; the blue sea below me, some nice fluffy white clouds here and there… curious to what lays ahead!

Here is the next blog!