Why do we do it? Re-fuelling the Spaceship.
I am sitting on a train slowly pulling its way towards Budapest; leaving the deep Hungarian countryside behind it, windows fully down, a soft warm breeze cooling my skin.
I have just spent 8 days in a remote village, on Lake Balaton in Hungary, with a global network of stellar entrepreneur-consultants who represented countries from India to New Zealand, the USA to Portugal to Denmark, and of course, Hungary.
Between us, we represented about 10–12 companies, networks, communities and experiments. We’re all working in our different parts of the world, on specific projects, working to keep global networks afloat, communities thriving, organisations changing, people transforming. In our various ways, we are leading approaches to more human workplaces.
So what are we doing hanging out and creating a pop-up village together on a lake in Hungary?! Shouldn’t we be back home, our noses to the grindstone, working hard?
Well, funnily enough, we arrived on Day 1 and started asking ourselves the same question.
Why are we here? What is the attractor that brought us all here?
The conversations were extensive, and we made a lot of headway (important here: headway) in getting to the ‘crux’ of what connects us all and our work. At the core lies a whole field of questions — which is where the aliveness of our work lies.
Couldn’t this be done another way? Isn’t another world possible? Couldn’t we be learning all the time in our work?
It seems to me one important metaphor arose from those conversations, which helps understand why we were taking this retreat together (credit to Susan Basterfield for inspiring me). And that is the metaphor of the spaceship.
One commonality of everyone at the retreat was the impulse of ‘leaving behind the old way of doing things’. Each of us had a moment of realisation, a ‘wake up’, a turning point, where we broke out of the shared common reality that made up ‘normal’ in terms of the way we were working. Many of us were (in Meg Wheatley’s words), people who have ‘walked out and walked on’.
That moment of walking out and walking on is akin to taking off into space on a spaceship, which has been built to explore, to carry humanity into a new way of being, doing and living. The work is in an unknown territory, and we’re not 100% sure what we’ll find when we finally land.
The work lies in actually testing, embodying, experimenting with and sharing with the world these new ways of working, collaborating, structuring a company to provide more participatory and non-hierarchical organisation.
The work is in pioneering something different.
That might sound arrogant — but we’re pioneering something without knowing for sure whether it is necessarily the ‘best’ or ‘right’ way of doing things. In the complexity of the current global situation we live in, there is no real ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. But we do have a shared belief, trust, sense, or even intuition — that we might have part of the answer.
Take Kristof, Hungarian socially sensitive entrepreneur and former CEO of Digital Natives (DiNa), a digital product development agency. DiNa is experimenting with all sorts of wacky organisational infrastructure: for example, transparently sharing salaries with everyone in the company.
Or using an algorithm, created by developers in the company, to calculate a salary which is independent to the usual politics and negotiation abilities of the employees — instead representative of skill, years of experience, and years spent at the company.
DiNa is also co-owned by all of the co-workers — with shares proportional to a peer-reviewed and calculated ‘value’, which dilute on leaving the company, proportionally to the number of years spent there. Supercool!
Or Samantha, co-founder and mischief-maker of Percolab, who along with the others of Percolab has developed a participatory infrastructure that they use themselves. Finances in Percolab are completely transparent — everybody in the company knows how much money is coming in each month. This is crucial, because every month each Percolab human needs to understand the financial situation when explaining the logic behind their earnings each month — and setting their monthly salary.
Things like salaries, who works on which project, and which projects to take, are decided using collective decision-making, with the commons in mind. Everyone has total autonomy over where they work and when they work. Percolab is truly ‘walking the talk’ — and is one of the most extraordinary organisations I’ve ever heard about.
So the spaceships are in orbit. But where do they go to re-fuel?
We came together for 8 days to remind each other that perhaps we are sane, in a crazy world, instead of vice versa, and actually all just a bit bonkers. To share practises, ideas, inspiration, support — and unite our work in various connected ways. New projects were born, old projects were revived, and failed projects were mourned.
We designed our own retreat together and used the challenges met as routes of learning. We shared our ‘learning edges’ with each other and made silent vows to support each other in recognising our repeating patterns and striving to be the people we want to see out in the world.
If capitalism, hierarchy and patriarchy have their own powerful communities that help each other out, lend each other a hand and give each other tips and pro-advice, then we at the fringes need to create that for ourselves, for a new way of doing things. That is why re-fuelling the spaceship is important.
It’s important to remember we are not alone. And that we were not completely crazy when we left that safe, mapped-out career that would have secured us a steady salary, recognition, and a huge web of support from the system-as-it-is.
There’s something to say here about privilege too; surely this opportunity to walk out and walk onto a new way of doing things is only available to the privileged few? I agree that there is certainly a privilege, if not financially, then emotionally, socially, physically, and in many other spheres, that allow for those of us who take a different path, to do so.
I also see a lot of people with all sorts of privilege who continue to stay in jobs that make them miserable, and cannot allow themselves to take the risk of doing something different, and creating a new way of doing things.
Those of us who are able to take the risk, for whatever reason: we have a lot of work to do. Perhaps our work is in using our privilege to take on the risk of trying a new way of doing things, on behalf of the many who don’t have that same opportunity. That way, we can strengthen the alternative reality until it feels stable enough for others to stand on it, without fearing that there’s nothing there.
So — back to the rocket ship. These retreats, in-person, are where we land, re-fuel, and touch base before going back to orbit, often for months without seeing each other, or others, again.
To take the metaphor a step further, it’s not just where we re-fuel the spaceship.
It’s where we get our astronaut training too.
How are we going to “be” in this new way of doing things — where do we get to learn that?
By living together, doing dishes together, sitting in circle together, cooking and eating together, solving conflicts and small frustrations — this is where our ego is getting the training to go and do the ‘being’ differently too. And that’s also important. In fact, it’s probably more important.
If we are to create ‘more human’ organisations, we are to become ‘more human’ too. The work is not just in the dynamic equity models, the transparent salaries, the tools and technicalities we usher in with our work. It is in the listening, the empathy, the decision-making under pressure, how we handle our stress, and what we do to unwind.
Crazy enough, that is the astronaut training.
Re-connecting with our kindness, our patience, our whole-ness, our intuition, our confidence, our leadership, our ability to step aside and let someone else take the lead.
May we start explicitly identifying these invisible technologies as something important in their own right — the human technologies we are in the process of re-discovering and learning.
And let us not forget the opportunities to train in these human technologies happens when you least expect it: doing the dishes, taking your plate out, offering a group exercise, and staying present in a longer-than-usual circle together.
See you all in a few months.
