What new forms of collectives could teach us about organisation design.
Back in 2017, I had an opportunity to work with MakeSense. First, here are some key take away about the Volunteer journey through their collective. Then, as you’ve noticed for sure, ‘collectives’ are everywhere these days, and often praised for their “shapelessness” as new form of organisation. But while “shapelessness” is unsustainable, what is there to learn from these agile organisations ? Toward a new Social OS.
Earlier this year, I had a chance to work with some MakeSense people (Solène, Coralie & Vincent) in Paris. This is the place where that vivid community started 6 years ago, fostering social entrepreneurship worldwide ever since.
In the past years, they have gone through a rapid growth momentum, and the community developers are facing some challenges related with growth issue, such as how to scale from a crafted movement up to a global network, without losing the human aspect that made it agile and unique so far.
In March and April, I have joined the MakeSense core-team people working on the “volunteer journey”, or how do volunteers enter, learn and develop themselves within the organisational layers and groups MakeSense is made of.
1. A brief overview of MakesSense organisation
As a quick introduction, here is my understanding of MakeSense organisation after meetings with Solène & Coralie at first. The founders and first core-team members have set up and kept on nurturing a system that connects different sets of people : social entrepreneurs, volunteers, corporations and MakeSense staff. (It is a bit of a simplified vision though, MakeSense encounters a larger amount of actors and activities within its ecosystem.)
In that simplified system, Social Entrepreneurs (SocEnt.) bring along causes, links with local communities, actionable projects and the possibility to have impact. Volunteers mainly bring time and skills, and Corporations/institutions bring money and some sort of notoriety. The MakeSense team produces articles, set up events, meet ups, organise training, knowledge management & distribution, innovation methodologies, aside of other communication and administrative tasks.
Moreover, the MakeSense team stewards the community rules and directions, by embodying MakeSense values in every aspects of their tasks, spreading contributive ways to work with each other, connecting people to what they are looking for, etc. The MakeSense team’s role is to make sure the value each one brings in the system flows to the ones who are looking for it. And that ability to distribute one’s value to the one who needs it is what make that system consistent and valuable. Almost like a platform.
2. Questions & objectives
In the past years, the community of SocEnts, Volunteers, Corps as well as MakeSense Staff has grown rapidly, reaching a stage where interactions among them all cannot be any more managed by hand and/or reinvented each time. And in terms of volume of people, Volunteers play a large part of MakeSense community worldwide, may they be SenseMakers, Gangsters, Ambassadors or alumni.
Questions : So the question Solène, Coralie & Vincent were assessing was « how to structure the Volunteer journey, for them to grow and bloom, while making it easier for the MakeSense team to better ‘manage this ressource’ ». Using some UX design know-how, here we started “crafting a relevant Volunteer Experience” (VX design, which is slightly different from an Employee eXperience, because Volunteers don’t operate under contract).
On top of that, being dependent on online tools MakeSense organisation doesn’t « own » — such as Facebook groups, Slack threads, Google Drive, Loomio, etc. — the team also had in mind the question « how to sustain as an organisation and deliver that VX in this moving milieu while not having (yet) the fundings to develop their stand alone tools ? ».
Like in many other organisations, these two parts of the questions (the experience & the tools) have been elaborated together, step by step, through time by the few who have built MakeSense since the beginning. As for new comers though (and it is particularly important in the case of Volunteers), an effort needs to be made to break down the current organisation structure, history and network, in order to then make sense out of the given situation and find out how one could contribute to it.
Objectives : From the previous experiences of collectives I joined (OuiShare, WoMa), the founders often express their willingness to shape an organisation in order to grow out of this ‘amateur-ness’. From amateurism (enthusiasm but energy inefficient) and professionalism (productive but potentially boring), all organisations look for their unique path and appropriate pace.
But the new comers (Volunteers in this case) envision their investment as entrepreneurs would, making the best out of a given environment (MakeSense in that case) and bringing in additional or missing values. From this point of view, that initial ‘messy-ness’ often represents more gains (not everything is set, without a defined structure there are some opportunities to contribute to it, …) than pains (“where the F*#k is that file ? Who have decided it had to work that way? …”). This messiness is first seen as ‘informal’ (see here).
3. The Volunteer Experience research & some learnings
As I wrote in my previous post, when assessing capacities of a crowd, part of the work may have to deal with agents’ literacy & feelings of ownership.
- literacy : in the case of MakeSense, how to make Volunteers knowledgeable about the current organisation for them to find their place and pace, about the organisation history and decision making process, or about all the people out there, all the talents and all the topics and causes been worked on worldwide, or later in their experience, about the skills required to run hold ups (MakeSense meet up format) or even the Volunteer’s own abilities.
- and ownership : how to make Volunteers feel empowered and free to act, how to keep the system/structure open for them to feel part of the community, and responsive enough for them to be able to have an impact on it, in order for them “not to feel used by” but “become a participant of” the community.
1. Before I joined in, Solène, Coralie & Vincent had already started to build up rough persona and write down a general overview of the current Volunteer journey. From their first findings, they could draw the assumption that the main “reasons to join” the community were : have impact through action x learn & gain skills x develop an empowering network.
2. Secondly, through out collective discussions, we identified from Volunteers paths history that the VX was actually an ‘open path’, meaning one could join in, opt-out, redo the same level and come back later. Or that the way forward within the community was not necessarily moving up in the structure, nor devoting to that one expertise useful to the community. MakeSense is a community building upon a sense of involvement rather than obligations. A Volunteer may remain volunteer, MakeSense will not force to become a ‘pro’ nor engaged. Engagement takes time and is on a voluntary basis.
3. Thirdly, we worked from the different persona and listed all the existing touchpoint along their current journey, and then imagined additional possible ones that could improve or enrich those journey. This visual material was tested during one-to-one interviews with volunteers (some fresh, some experienced, some in France, some in other countries) and community developers, in order to evaluate what moment and touchpoint had the most value to them. (And what touchpoint/moment need to be responsive)
Part of the learnings helped to craft a typology of Volunteers (with their needs and expectations) and highlight a Curriculum (the learning curve and reward process).
a. Typology of Volunteers : mapping of different needs & expectations.
Why get involved ?
Different needs & expectations
Some additional conclusions around the team were :
- A reconciliation with diversity. Like in UX design projects, we — wrongly — tend to aim at one single experience that fits all, while the relevant goal is one system of touchpoint that supports different possible experiences. Diversity doesn’t mean incoherence or inconsistency.
- A rediscovery of MakeSense organisation through the eyes of the Volunteers and an opportunity to assess what MakeSense was already good at.
- A confirmation that Volunteers aim at impact x network x training
“Diversity doesn’t mean incoherence or inconsistency.” Solène.
b. Curriculum : different tempo in the learning curve.
Looking at paths expected by Volunteers, there seemed to be a distinction between :
- time for training : quickly acquiring skills and knowhow, a moment of gaining literacy, doing first exercices and build on collective empowerment, immediate return on experience to validate one’s literacy, and reward of having invested time and effort in the training. At first, Volunteers seems to rather look at being connected to the local team members only, to keep things clear.
- and time for practice : having time to practice several times by running workshops for MakeSense, giving time and feeling of integration, a time for growing ownership, collecting feedbacks, gaining self confidence, maybe giving a try to alternative ways to run workshops and sharing one’s feeling of improvement. The more the feeling of ownership grows, the more Volunteers seemed to be eager to take part in the MakeSense global discussions and communities.
One interesting point here, that may sound obvious though, is that the learning curve is not only about learning and/or acquiring knowledge. From an organisational point of view, it is to say that allowing peers to gain confidence by practicing and collecting feedbacks on the long run is as important as the training program itself. MakeSense then becomes a learning platform, sure, but more interestingly a platform to test and prototype oneself.
“MakeSense is a hub where you can prototype your future.” Coralie
c. Two short digressions : the Fog of War & the evolutionary fitness
Before continuing with the learnings, I would like to share 2 images that could help to visualise what is at stake.
First, the initial conditions in strategy games (like Civilization for instance) known as the « fog of war », a limited viewpoint that the player enlarges his scope and reach while playing.
Similarly, the Volunteer first faces something like a Fog of War. And you would agree that even if one were given the full scope at once (the full MakeSense knowledge and skills in a wiki for instance), it would not help much. Too much information may equal a fog condition too…
Indeed, one always needs time to go through a large amount of data, time to explore, practice and incorporate the know-how. In this sense, while the community is the playground for Volunteers, it is useless to provide full knowledge available in plain sight at once, but rather nurture over time one’s literacy and his/her feeling of ownership.
The central concept of natural selection is the evolutionary fitness of an organism.
The second image is the notion of fitness in Darwin’s Theory of Evolution : successful species are the one remaining fit to their environment over time. From a UX design perspective, the objective of VX is not about making an organisation fit to Volunteers’ needs at a specific moment in time, but instead, finding ways to train and develop the Volunteer’s fitness to the organisation over time. This required fitness lead us to envision the system — volunteers + collective — as a responsive system.
Out of these two images, you will have noticed that the experience is time sensitive (#ofcourse), and so has to be the organisation enabling it, and that the Volunteers is the player in charge, not simply a resource nor a free labor commodity.
4. Some outputs
I cannot disclose all the findings here, but the projects outputs we ended up with enabled the MakeSense team to identify the first touchpoints required to support the expected Volunteer experiences (related to IT topic, but not only), and the community members’ roles required at each steps for the system to sustain (mostly a HR topic).
The collective discussion did then focus on :
- identifying what should be the relevant data to monitor at each step of the Volunteer Journey (CRM & data crunching)
- defining the roles of each level people regarding -1 level Volunteer’s needs.
- assessing the size of expected organisational needs, in order to look for fundings/investments and bring the organisation to its next stage (for IT x HR aspects)
So, if I were to draw again the organisation overview from a Volunteer perspective — i.e. a subjective & dynamic view point of the player — it would eventually ressemble this scheme at time T0 (1), T+1 (2), and then T+2 (3) — or the evolution of the Fog of War through time. And at each stage, the VX should focus on how to enable the Volunteer to become fit to the organisation at that specific level.
5. Discussion : out of this Volunteer Experience usecase, could there be a way to design a responsive organisation that would last ?
“I want to professionalise without becoming a professional.”
Volunteers confirmed to be interested in gaining know-how x growing network x having impact. But as we saw, what makes the MakeSense system valuable to them also resides in the ability to enable a personalised and evolutive open path, not a linear skill development plan. In other words, the ability for someone to ‘professionalize’ — to grow skills and gain experience — without ending as a ‘professional’ — defined by a specific occupation or a specific profession. (For few volutneers, ending hired by the organisation might be a goal though)
As some Volunteers said to us, MakeSense is a hub to develop oneself and build expertise (know-how acquired by experience) without necessarily aiming at becoming a professional (a specific profession defining a social identity). In that sense, the organisation doesn’t have to quit ‘amateurism’ for ‘professionalism’, nor the collective has to remain ‘unstructured’, but there may be a third way along ‘how informality may fuel expertise building’.
In the world of cooperatives, it has become comon to see coop members giving 3h every 4 weeks to get the coop running. During these hours, members train and develop skills, without aiming at making it a profession. On Blablacar or Airbnb platforms, it has become comon to see ‘professionalisation tools or services’, to set the best pricing, get the accurate picture, develop driving or hosting know-how. Again, contributive peers professionnalise without aiming at making it a full time profession. (in Airbnb and Blablacar, peers don’t get access to governance nor platform shares, no ownership)
Organised people have more value to me than random experts.
When a Volunteer enters the community (#1), he/she first has interactions with mainly local groups and projets. But from a Volunteer perspective, knowing that the local entity isn’t all what there is to see (#2 & #3), and acknowledging that knowledge is shared among different groups, it feels like joining « people + a system ». Which is to say, « more than only a bunch of people ».
Note also that, looking back at the Needs & Expectation mapping, ‘people’ themselves did not appear for Volunteers as the reason for which to join in. The organisation members do something one could not by him/herself, assess his/her own level of ‘expertise’.
Thus, this idea of « system » carries an important value by itself : over the fact that an individual may surpass him/herself, or may achieve things he/she is not able to deliver on his/her own, it means that the value of an action or an expertise only resonates through the system. The collective works as an enabler (the organisation aspect) and a developing bath (the environment aspect).
If I stay in charge of my path, you’re the playground.
So, unlike pure Service Design outcomes, the Volunteer is not only the ‘recipient’ of a service. Instead, he is offered an opportunity to contribute to the collective activities. Yet, unlike Platform Design, the Volunteers are not only ‘contributive peers’, but may be part of local groups and/or cause governance, if not take charge of projects.
In the case of a collective like MakeSense (which is more than a ‘service’ or a ‘platform’), gaining literacy without owning the community, it would mean that the community would own them, as a free labor force. As a commodity in a way. And one of the key aspects of the work we did with MakeSense was about “how not to patronise nor commodify Volunteers”. Indeed, it would be easy to implement quick and efficient traditional human resource schemes, but it would mean the end of the MakeSense community liveliness.
Remember also that while Volunteers are not bound by any subordination contract to the system, the community organisation remains porous ; over time, Volunteers will come and go, moving in and out with knowledge, network and projects. They are in charge of their own path. What they may own is eventually their evolution first, then their achievements, and later their role helping/leading others within the MakeSense community. It sounds close to HR thinking, but without the framework of profession, production efficiency, nor individual protection.
How to design such an ‘open path human platform’ ?
When we think of mesh structures, we usually refer either to computer or the web infrastructure model, linking resources and distributing information by copying it over and over. There, growth is about expansion.
But the blockchain technology nowadays leads us to reimagine yet a different way mesh structure could be distributed, based this time on each agent of the system. Here, growth happens as structured history (i.e. neg-entropy would state B. Stiegler).
Or take the concept of Machine Learning as an other example (and read this inspiring article from HBR) : today already, when the machine learns, it means it is not explicitly programmed for a particular outcome. This is an important break from previous practice of coding, and represents a fundamentally different approach to creating software.
Building up on that idea, it then means that the organisation doesn’t have to pre-fix a defined goal for its Volunteers to fit in, but instead make the environment explicite (by literacy) and responsive (by ownership) to develop Volunteers’ fitness to this agile organisation.
In other words, what if we would design organisation by distributing agency, with built-in literacy providers and ownership at the core ?
Following that scheme, I wander if instead of drawing the links in-between people (organigrams), designers could envision building such a Social OS by fuelling each participant’s literacy and ownership, their ability to learn & take responsibility in a responsive environment.
6. Last word
I have to say that MakeSense is a refreshing kind of organisation to work with. As their feeling of ownership grows, people I had a chance to work with were very concerned and responsible (unlike employees of large corporations I sometime work with, who feel owned instead of owning). Among the small MakeSense team I worked with, there was no hard organisational restrictions, no boss who states the direction to follow, but collective decision making and shared responsibilities. In other words, a bottom-up organisation and not top-down for sure.
An other learning for me was that MakeSense looks like an organisation of short term concrete projets. Teams are in a rush to find solutions, quick fixes and bring answers to keep moving on. There is always time for questions, but not always enough time to investigate those. Although, after taking the proper amount of time — to run over 10 one-to-one interviews with Volunteers for instance — the small team I worked with did appreciate that time to take a step back and put thing into perspective.
On my side, I enjoyed having the opportunity to connect and experiment with Solène, Coralie and Vincent, and learn about all the amazing achievements happening worldwide thanks to the community.
Thanks to Justyna Swat for reminding me of the Fog of War concept.
