 So and welcome back to the final keynote It's with a gentleman who you met in the panel. So I think he deserves a lot of attention But not necessarily a big big introduction because you already met him. So Joshua Vale, please join us big hand, please and I think I'll leave the floor to you. You have an exciting story And and reading up on you before joining here today As I said before you you are a programmer and you have a very diverse background You also decided you wanted to do greater things and and adding good in doing good in a sense So you started to doing a lot of work a few days a week So you could free up some time to contribute in other ways and then that grew into Companies and a movement you'll be sharing some of it today. Yeah, all right. Well, the stage is yours. Thank you All right. Good afternoon everybody I hope you enjoyed the the conversations as much as I did over the coffee I found that was quite the outtable wanted to talk about accelerated learning. So I had all of my intention and it was very exciting And this afternoon I'm just going to share some of the story from Inspiral and what we've learned building this community So it's very much a case study and something I know really well, but it's Hopefully there's some lessons for all of you from it and I'll definitely leave some space for questions at the end so I If you look at most people's careers, it's quite typical you often have about 80,000 of hours that make up the whole lot of it and I find even just that number or thinking about it It just puts a bit more perspective on it and I know for me that straight away it invokes a well What do I want to do with it? What do I want the outcome of my 80,000 hours to be and For me I started to you know I started my career as a programmer and as an entrepreneur I ran a small business mostly focused on business and success and those sorts of things and then I had an experience in Paris where I saw this art exhibition and it really made me think a lot more about the state of the world and if you were like me then you Probably got a sense about climate change and global poverty and energy systems and decarbonizing the economy and it's sort of this vague sense of unease that hey the world lots of bad things are happening and You know you might know about them But it was the first time for me that I really felt those things and what it prompted was to quit my business Leave and to start to say I think you know, how can I make a difference in the world? And this this number here 80,000 hours was my way of rationalizing They're coming to grips with climate change because if you start to think about big global Systems and problems then it's often hard to know what to do about it and I'm an engineer at heart So this became an optimization problem. I have 80,000 hours. What's the best way to spend them? And as a very practical thing is like let's take a hundred hours. Let's spend them. Let's see what happens Let's rinse and repeat and that was the approach that I took so I found that for me just the thinking about 80,000 hours Made me feel heaps better about the world going to hell in a handbasket because I can't change that all I can do And all I have to do my job is to spend those 80,000 hours the best way I can and I found that extremely Comforting often in a way of responding to something which is can often be so big and debilitating so I did lots of things for a couple of years, this is about 2008 and This is I worked on the no plastic bags campaign and I worked with the 350 movement around climate change and I built planter boxes and I was a programmer as well So I was able to support myself a couple of days a week where I just do some contracting and had low cost of Living and then the rest of my time I was just a self-funded volunteer trying to make a difference in the world and I tried lots of things for two years didn't make much change, but I learned a lot and One of the things that I really learned was that there are many people out there who would love to have a different career and That most for many people that if they can use their skills and get paid Well working on the biggest issues of our time They absolutely will and the reason they don't is because those opportunities don't present themselves And there are many people who are like well I have to work for company X Y and Z because it pays well or I'm going to take a pay cut and work for charity and have some Kind of impact, but when you can give people the option of hey if you spend all of your career all of your working life Using your skills getting paid well and working on the biggest issues of our time many people would take that choice And so the core idea of Inspire was just to help people mostly quit their jobs become freelancers Become self-funded and then to create jobs for other people and so it's like I don't care What you want to work on climate change global poverty whatever issue most speaks to you? But we just want to see more people spending all of their life working on those things because if you look at the data around Global poverty for example It is a trivial amount of money money to remove global poverty from the face of this planet It doesn't take that much money It's like tens of billions or hundreds of billions of dollars much less than we bailed out the banks for The reason we don't do that as a global civilization is a systemic failure of how that civilization is designed Not because we don't have the resources of the skills or know how to do it and so for me global issues It's just we just need more energy going into it so We started out so I turned my personal consulting company into a freelancers collective and often I found freelancers who are value aligned or I help people quit their jobs and we just started to do Programming contracts together so essentially I started to learn about cooperatives I started to learn about how can we work together and become a network of freelancers and pursue bigger bigger projects It was definitely a peer-supported network So you know it's a case of if you're a good freelancer often you'll have more leads than you can follow up on And you're on a particular contract, but you'll hear about others if you share those leads with other people That's incredibly value for people with valuable when people are looking for work That alone was an incredible value creation in a peer-to-peer freelancers network And there were lots of other things about training or often when you're going out on your own It's just about learning from other people about what contracts to use and how do you do things? So this is where we were in about 2010 Programmers, so we started to build software that thing about when all you have is a hammer Everything looks like a nail that was definitely us in those days It's like let's build software for the food system or for decision-making or lots of other things We had lots of retreats together and I found that the you know It's very easy to take an engineer's view to read designing systems and organizations We were definitely very inspired by let's do an organization without bosses We don't like bosses We just want to have peers and relationships between them non-hierarchical organizing building decentralized organizations And we just started to copy things that worked and you'd read about SEMCO and you read about this and you read about that and you try things out And and we just you know tried lots of things, but one of the things which surprised me and Which I discounted at the time was the value of the human connections the relational organizations and that one of the thing which worked the best for us was every six months we would get everyone together and We would hang out for four days and we just have a retreat and live and work together and have a residential retreat together And that is what built the heart of the community and it was those those relational skills those facilitation skills The human side of it meeting the technical side of it, which really created a possibility space for us We rented a small corner of a co-working space over time it got bigger and bigger and we started and we took over the whole space And this became a real hub for us and so that was one of the the businesses that we started and Then we this transition happened in the network and we shifted for being essentially a cooperative of freelancers to becoming a Cooperative of entrepreneurs because often, you know, we had a big philosophy of use the tools of business to make change in the world And if one of the best ways to help make changes if you have a big company Which can employ lots of people and have a social mission then you can infect quite a lot of change And there are lots of people who are taking all the lessons from the commercial world and from the business world and saying Why don't we put these to a purpose which is above and beyond making money for investors and shareholders? And so that's the whole social enterprise scene and impact driven businesses and that definitely inspired a lot of us So we made the shift which you'll see a lot of entrepreneurs make from moving from service-based businesses to product-based businesses And we've launched maybe 25 companies together Maybe a dozen of them are still active in the network and there's a lot of things we've done there But this was the big shift for us as we move from this freelancers cooperative to a entrepreneurial cooperative So one of the ways to think about in spiral is that we're not a big company It's essentially a member-funded Company so all the money for in spiral is contributed by the ventures We've started and the individual freelancers who chip money into the middle So it's a very small amount of money But it's a cooperative which is owned by the some of the core members of the community So it's maybe at the moment Maybe 150 people who are part of in spiral maybe about 25 or 30 of them are core owners of the cooperative And they're the ones who govern and work on it together So and there's lots of different ways that people contribute and we've sort of you can think of in spiral as a little commons That we built a little brand a little organizing system Which we all put money and time and thoughts and energy into and it's a way that we organize around not organize under so some of the projects we did in this would have been occupied 2012 or so and the People started to be part of consensus-based processes So the idea of how do you actually involve everyone or give people the right to have to part be part of making decisions together And if you look at the process of making decisions often the people who have the most time who can go to the most meetings They'll have a louder voice Well, the people who are more comfortable speaking in front of groups and there's lots of ways where people are prioritized or De-prioritized in decision-making and being software engineers and with our big hammer We thought let's build software to the lower the cost of participating in decision-making So we can have more participatory decision-making For on a wider scale of decisions So we built some software to work on that and it was definitely one of the defining I guess parts of the organization was how can we build Use the tools of software to lower the cost of organizing so you don't have to rely on old ways of organizing so if you have the key idea of you know Most organizations look like pyramids And if you believe Clay Scherke and other theory theorists that is because the cost of organizing of Transacting information is very high a pyramid is a very effective tool for organizing Then if you have to write letters or send people on horseback or phone people up or even use email Then delegating power to a few people and having them make directions to lots of people make sense in a stable world Whereas if you're working in a very fast changing world where you can't actually make good decisions at the top Having decentralizing your decision-making structures and building more network based organizing in theory should be optimal And we sort of like liked that theory and we built it and practiced with this for the last seven years We also did a lot of work around budgeting together So we built a tool called co-budget which was essentially about if you think about Budgeting or think about taxation for example everyone pays taxes It goes to a central body and then you might exert some decision-making or some pressure in their decision-making processes through Consultations or proposals or maybe even voting who gets to choose the big directions of it But mostly you're excluded from that budgeting process being a member-funded organization We started to say well why can't we make an internal crowdfunding process where when you contribute money to the organization? You choose where that money is spent and if you have an idea to spend money in the organization You make a proposal and everyone's votes with their money and maybe some portion that money goes to a centralized group who make Decisions on your behalf, but most of it you get to keep in control And so we ran to put ran this on a spreadsheet for a couple of years and use software for a couple years after that But the whole idea of how can you redefine your relationship to an organization? So it's something that you create. It's something that you shape It's not something that's done to you and I found that that process of redefining people's Attitude and engagement with an organization from something which is here's a game someone else has built Which I'm gonna come in and do what I'm told and navigate this system to being something that I can shape It's a commons It's like a open-source repo where you can make pull requests to it and having a process to be where you create the organization You're part of rather than you consume the organization the movement from consumers to producers of our organizing systems There's a lot of the reboot. We were doing as new people would join the network So that's the short version of in spiraling where we've been and it's just a little bit of a snapshot and Normally I'd stop and ask questions here, but I think I might just do that at the end We'll go there now. I want to talk about what were the lessons like what did we learn from this big experiment? Because it's you know, it's a fairly radical small organization And but hopefully by hearing about some of the lessons of things that I think worked or things that didn't work there might be nuggets of of Information that you can copy and replicate where you are because I think that for me we patched this together by copying lots and lots of little things and We live in a mix and mash society where if you want to do something new It's really good just to find other bits and pieces and copy the nuggets of change not the whole pattern of change So small copyable pieces is a good philosophy for software development and organization design all right so one of the things that worked really well for us was we were a bunch of programmers and This is where it was one one of the things that worked really well with this was Programmers can often make a fairly decent income that it's very easy for them to generate surplus in their work So we had a bunch of fat in our organizations in our economies in our systems Which we could then waste on all these experiments So if we had have been in a lower paid economic niche It would have been much harder to start this kind of organization because over the last you know Seven years we've had a lot of people come up to us and say wow in spiral. So we're indifferent I'd like to start one where I am they like some bits of it and then but if you're not in a high-paid world It's often really hard to self fund that or if you're not in a world Where you've got some seed capital to build it So one of the things that worked really well for us in our unique situation was a bunch of programmers made more money than they needed and they could spend that surplus building things and often when you look at some of the most inspiring companies around the sort of The valves or the Spotify's of the world their companies who have done really well financially and have the end the money To spend on quite radical new things So that was one thing that worked really well for being a bunch of programmers The other thing that worked really well here is that I've met many groups who have tried to do Decentralized companies from the ground up and I would say some groups would be the blockchain world Where you have highly proficient programmers. This is unfair to categorize the blockchain world in that way I'm sorry blockchain world, but I see many groups of very technically proficient people who say let's build a decentralized Organization and they have very light human skills They'll have very light skills of facilitation of understanding psychology of really human connections and transformational engagements as people and That they often have issues on the human side of things even though they've built a very elegant and perfect game theory for building a decentralized Organizing system the other type I see is people with amazing facilitation skills amazing human skills are really what deep way of connecting and transforming as people and technology is hard and we were really fortunate where those two skills came together because when you can go from not just proficiently using technology to actually Hey, there's a gap. We want some technology that doesn't exist Let's build it together and let's use that technology to change the game of our organizing system You can have a very different experience of building an organization. So that worked really well for us One of the things that didn't work well for us would be just our biases and I'd say that on one level we had quite with a when a lot of the people moved we had a lot of people coming in from the Activist community so deep senses of social justice deep understandings about diversity about the patriarchy about exclusion about all the Ways that biases emerge in our systemic levels. I'm not talking about those biases like we definitely had our issues with them But overall let's say many people deeply value building inclusive spaces Understanding about gender and racial diversity and building inclusive and safe spaces for people We did okay on that but one thing that I think I've noticed upon reflection was that we all had these biases about what work is valued and what work is not valued and I think that a lot of these came from what does our economy value? So for example, you'd have lots of programmers who might be able to make lots of money as programmers when it came to doing Programming work for the collective they might give it away or they might charge lots of money for it But they wouldn't do much in between Whereas if you had people who are doing facilitation work or people who are curating spaces or people who are doing lower paid work Financially often it would be really that have less surplus in general But our community would devalue that work in general because we had this idea of things that you can make lots of money for You tend to value more highly whereas things that you can't make as much money for it's easier to take for granted It's easier to take for granted emotional labor caring for people because it's quite common and because that skill is widely spread among society And I found that time banking Edgar Kahn Wrote a book called no more throwaway people and this was this book really taught me that the things which our economy values It doesn't value them because they're valuable it values them because they're scarce in our financial economy things Which are scarce are valued it does and so if there's something which is common which is common But extremely valuable being kind caring for people then it will be devalued financially It won't be as important as something which is rare like obscure financial or technical skills So that switch that understanding really helped me understand how deeply my worldview had been colonized by the economy I participated in and so that was the one of the things which took a long time to learn about I Think that The whole thing about building for intrinsic motivation that that worked really well Designing jobs which are meant to be fun and gamifying and copying all these different things Building things which people love to engage with because it autonomy mastery and purpose and reputation all those kinds of things That was something where building this big choose-your-own-adventure playground Lots of people retracted to that like in the early days Inspiral was just a hope like it was just a hey Do you think we can build businesses and change the world and no we didn't have any evidence that we could actually do that But lots of people hoped for that enough they quit their jobs and jumped in and gave it a go and hundreds of people have been part of the inspired community over the years and There's something about that narrative of spend your career changing the world have a lot of freedom and autonomy while you do it Work alongside people that you love where you have a whole of human relationship as opposed to just colleagues based off their skill portfolios and that that invitation was extremely Attractive to lots of people so I found that that's something that worked really well for us But one of the things that didn't work well was that this culture of volunteers in that culture of complete freedom to do what you want Let has led to a lot of people burning out in the network that idea of people who get so passionate or so excited and they jump all in It's really easy for people in the middle to be consumed and people on the fringes to be underengaged And so I think there's a when you have a complete freedom or when you have a lot of autonomy It's really easy to be burned by that and it's really easy to when you're trying to build Decentralized organizations or remove bosses and management structures You can often lose some of the safety net that we take for granted in more traditional organizations where you often You sacrifice freedom for safety or you track say or you have different things in there So I found that we've had lots of issues with Individuals burning out because of their perceptions of what they needed to do in the network And we didn't have good enough safety nets that we built some over time So that that culture of volunteering in that culture of freedom definitely had a some consequences for us I'd say this one is Something which worked well and didn't work well And we had as developers a plethora of software tools and ever-growing complexity in the group So who's had like software tool fatigue in their work where it's like oh not another thing. Oh Susan from Inspiral has that's great One of the things that I've definitely learned is that when you're continuously Optimizing when you're continuously looking for a better way of doing things that means a high rate of change and people get very Fatigued when their tools change It's like not like we started to use Yammer and then we use this and then we use Lumio and Slack and lots of things and I found that There is a real cost of change when you're talking about changing your organizing system and learning how to have an Appropriate rate of change so that we're actually adapting and we are innovating and trying new things But people aren't getting burned out in the process was a real art to learn how much change of people up for in many different ways So if you if you like go to Google images and use type in evolution You'll see lots of pictures that look like this like people growing in a complete linear thing And I think there's something of that which is deeply misleading where innovation is evolution it's all these branches and things going sideways and That it's only in retrospect when you start to say oh, here's a causal chain of events We pick one tree of a branch rather than seeing the whole web of it I remember reading some great research where if you interview success successful people about what made them successful Often they're just completely wrong They just have a narrative of a few points which doesn't truly encapsulate the whole picture and for me We've we've been experimenting and innovating and like just trying so many things where we've had the practice of evolution Where lots of things you try whereas if you and you throw out so many things in the process So I think that there's For me there's a whole process where I feel like we tried lots of things and we found some things We were really useful and a lot of patterns which were quite novel and a lot of people have looked at and said That's really new that's been quite novel and they like to copy and look at different things But there is a cost to doing that and learning how to experiment Well has been I'd probably need to give ourselves a cross and take on this one that the learning how to run Experiments in a safe way where people can where you can fail and the consequences of that failure are constrained as opposed to never experimenting and never moving or as opposed to experimenting too much and people feeling the burn of an ever-changing process and the this for me is a Very much a felt sense about what is the appropriate level of innovation? What's the appropriate level of experimentation which people can tolerate and be part of I think it was Mark Twain who said something along the lines of sorry. I didn't Sorry, I wrote you a long letter. I didn't have the time to write you a short letter and Again on that theory of evolution is that it's often harder to do something simple It's often only after lots of iterations that you can distill my understanding or distill our practices or our processes To something which is short enough and simple enough that it's really powerful So for as an entrepreneur and when I'm training entrepreneurs often It's very much like you've got an idea great have a hundred conversations Go and pitch that idea to a hundred people and talk about it and bounce it off and see what works and goes there And if you do that you'll finish with a really sharp idea You'll finish with something which is quite tested and ready to actually start investing some time in money to seeing if it's worthwhile Doing you get a lot of feedback from all those hundred conversations. You do But if you think to the first person you have a conversation with it's probably a crap Conversation compared to the hundredth person like there's something where the people who are part of the early stages of iterations The early stages of trying things out. They have a very suboptimal experience and so I think there's something around learning how to innovate learning how to be agile learning how to change things up where it's around how can we Have the first iterations be contained in some way So this is something where the complexity of the system Was it started out very complex and hard to change and it changes again and it changes again And people keeping a sustained mental model of what is in spiral how does it work and how do we do things was a real challenge over time So we had a blog where one of the things one of the attitudes I found really useful in this work is Okay, we're trying things out. We're trying to share things. We're trying to copy things Is that we're actively as entrepreneurs or people building businesses? We're actively playing the part of researchers in the field and having that attitude of my job is to find something that's useful and If you don't publish your research is useless So inviting all of our friends and colleagues to say you should be publishing if you find something that works for you If you find something useful publish it and so we've had a medium channel and we had in the co-budget funding rounds Rich Bartlett from Lumio started a fairy blog mother bucket So he raised money and then just had to pay people to blog So it's like hey got a blog idea and they nudge them and they pay them And I think the encouragement I would say to everyone is that if you're actively on the edge of something you're actively working on how you Build new companies together you need to tell your stories and that you because if you don't tell your stories It's so much harder for people to copy them So find the things that work or find the things that don't work and publish them and even if it's not great and so on it's You know learning how to do content production is a challenge and can be daunting But everyone has a voice and if it's just one other person who reads something from you it can have quite a big impact The other thing I found was that by having a handbook and publishing it online and building using that as a source of truth Through the organization it became became much easier for people to copy individual bits that they like and to learn about how the organization worked So as you're building your companies and as you're building your organizations Starting to actively create artifacts which you can share with the world and they're great companies where of examples are doing this But again, it's a different it's that when your Internal documentation starts to become your external communication to the world a different layer of engaging happens and I found that you know as as Pitiful as our handbook and our medium channel is it's quite amateur and put together and so on It's still been useful for other people who are trying to do similar organizations So in our own modest way We've contributed to the body of knowledge and the engagement and the people experimenting on new forms of organizing And if we all did that like this is the secret of why the open-source movement progressed so well It's like someone writes something so I'm built on top of it And we all start to mix and mash together and you see a revolution in technology and what we need to see is a Revolution in our organizing systems, so I would again encourage everyone about find the things that are working And there's a narrative form of logs. There's also the procedural documentation which we do in our handbooks So that's that's some of that's that's my cursory reflection on these are some things that I think worked for us and see There's some things that didn't work for us And now I want to talk to you about the experiments that I'm thinking about and that we're thinking about and how we're you know, what are we working on at the moment? so for me one of them is this idea of transnational collectives because if you look at the way that Companies work is that often there is a fairly fixed boundary around an organization where there's a whole bunch of ecosystems There's a financial system. There's a social system. There's probably an information system in there There's a legal framework of contracts and you're usually in all of those systems or you're out of all of those systems Whereas if you can imagine organizations where they become more blurry Where you might be part of the social system and you're on slack and you're conversing with the employees of the company But you're not on payroll or you're getting paid to do things But you're not in it with a legal contract like you can start to have these more fluid systems and frameworks And I don't want to advocate Uncontracted labor in a way. I think it's very good to have clear agreements like James was saying but when you start to conceive of organizations where the edges are blurry and it's less about being part of an organization As about collaborating on projects together I think that we can start to explore a possibility space which is very much along the lines of Imagine if uber instead of scaling with billions of dollars of VC money and an app and a Stampout process and let's go grow up a massive business in that way What if uber had scaled through hundreds of cooperatives? Sharing a model with each other in an open-source commons based way because they're like Airbnb and uber and many of these technological innovations They've discovered something new they've discovered something that people want and it's being grown in a way Which is going to keep giving us the status quo in the economy Whereas if you start to look at the opportunity space of small businesses and lots of them Fair forming alliances with each other and we're if one organization in the world says hey I've got a business model looks like there's something promising here and Starts to share and say let's put this into a commons Let's all gather around this commons and govern it together and then let's start to share the fruits of it I think you can have a very different story of how successful companies form and grow and so a lot of the work I'm doing as I'm traveling around and talking is building relationships and social Connections with people so that there's a net growing network of people saying who's who's got a good business And who wants to share that business where we're optimizing for impact We're optimizing for participation of the people inside of it in a way where that business doesn't have clear owners and boundaries And looks much more like a commons commercial process together And so this is something which is an area of interest and I think that when you look at what's happening in the blockchain space and the emergence of Things like they're they're not physical things. They're digital things They're brands their agreements which start to have a massive value and all these people are gathering around and depending on that value For different parts of their businesses and how do we govern this together? They're innovating in a huge amounts of ways And I think that there's a lot of rich lines to take the legal framework Which transnational corporations have developed and built and to start to apply a cooperative and a generative and impact driven Focus to and to see what can emerge. So I call that transnational collectives for short another one that very much interests me is dynamic assemblies, I think this is occupy in London or something and The idea of because for a long time We've had this consent-based process for making decisions This is probably the thing I love most from James's thing is to copy all of those ways of getting agreements in a community Because we found that we had a massive amount of decision fatigue So lots of people be oh another decision and now you have to do all this political and social work to get all these people to buy into it And you don't want to delegate it to someone else because you won't have people's engagement And we definitely had even with Lumio a lot of fatigue from making decisions and a lot of people being burned out by the Social cost of making decisions together and so one of the experiments that we're running next year We're looking at running is how do you batch together your governance decisions? So you do them four times a year rather than whenever anyone wants to and where you can start to have a process where instead of Everyone being engaged in the decision-making process everyone having the option to engage in it where it's like cool for two weeks I'm gonna join the assembly and I'm gonna be part of thinking about our decisions and engaging in the process to resolve the conflict and So this idea of how can you spontaneously build dynamic assemblies of people to engage in governance together? and then disperse and you have the option to engage or not as you choose and Creating that at an appropriate rhythm where it's not too fast and it's not too slow So you're starting to think about because if you're thinking about software You won't have API's which change at a very slow level You won't have API's because the cost of them changing lots of people need to change the way they do things Whereas you want to have some things which change really quickly and learning which ones change slowly and which ones change quickly And how people have the option to to have a conversation and be engaged if the big ones are changing Then that's what I'm sort of thinking about with these dynamic assemblies approach. So the the governance side is quite interesting So I think this was the the title of the talk was around livelihood pods and this is definitely one of the Experiments that we're forming around how can you build a company which is a small cooperative of people which is capped in size so six people seven people and it's a company where everybody owns a share in the company and Instead of because when we were free freelancers cooperative We had lots of people where it was 80 odd freelancers one company it became quite complex for us to manage that and it became a lot of complexity and a lot of cost to organizing all those freelancers and When you start to have lots of small little companies, there's a bunch of duplication there There's a bunch of different accounts and different things that need to happen But they're all simple and the overall cost of managing lots of simple companies becomes less than the cost of managing one complex company So this idea of a network of small cooperatives where people are selling their time for money But doing it together in a way they support each other is one of the experiments that we're running in the network So this is a case of helping freelancers band together and form their own cooperatives their own companies And then start to trade with each other and support each other as these little companies And if you think about if you've been part of a small team of like six people And then you go to 20 people and you have to reinvent everything and you have to change your whole system of organizing And then your 20 people becomes 50 people or a hundred people and again You need to go through completely different restructurings and ways of organizing those people together a lot of what I'm interested in now Is how can we keep a pattern of small companies and as we scale you bring in more small companies and you split them up? And our bigger ventures start to become collaborations of lots of small companies contracting together to build an Product is rather than building it into a whole company together. So this is a lot of the things around livelihood pods that we're exploring and and The final idea for me is one that we've been playing with and this is long-term experiments around How can we build a more, you know, ethical generative version of the economy? Because I think before the gentleman was referring to quarterly capitalism and if you look at the commercial world Every company wants to grow like there's this growth imperative behind All the for-profit companies you see in the world and if you are a publicly traded company It's not enough to make profits. You have to make growing profits or you're punished and other people would invest in your competitors And I think that the process of how can we realistically look at something which is so endemic in our economy and The consequences of this are that you see the money starts to trump the environment money starts to trump society And you start to see this runaway ship of a growth at all costs economy starting to eat the world Because if you look at climate change the biggest reason climate change wasn't addressed was because of the commercial interest involved that the cost to those companies of dramatic of Radical Adaptation to climate change would have been significant. So there was a lot of people who resisted fast action and if the so the cause of that was companies needing to keep returning on their growing their profits and What would it look like instead where if a comp if you how can you build a steady state economy? And one of the things that we've been looking at and researching on this is copied from the impact investment world is If you think about when you invest in a company, you usually invest to have returns forever You expect to have dividends paid you expect to have perpetual claim on the profits of that company If you had a different contract, which was you get fair returns for your investment But one day those returns stop and one day the returns the founders stop and then the returns of that company the surplus that company Goes towards the social commons. It would look like a very different economy if that were true Making that true is quite a hard thing to do but that's the experiment with the West starting to do is how can you start to fund startups and fund ventures where investors get a Fair return entrepreneurs get a fair return but the destination or the refactoring target of that organization is to become a Charitable organization where most of its surplus gets spent on its social mission And that's a long-term experiment that we're running around capital returns So those are the sort of areas that that sort of of active research that I'm playing with and a bunch of us are Playing with it in spiral and those are some of the lessons that we've learned from the group. So that's the Short story on what we've been learning over in in New Zealand for the last sort of seven years And hopefully there's some nuggets there which you might find useful for when you're looking at designing your own Organizing systems or orientating your own work. So that's us Coming on just now perfect timing All right. Thanks a lot. I was thinking about why listening, you know So if I'm if I'm trying out the same experiment or I'm running your way in a sense, where will I Hit the biggest pain So I'd say the the biggest pain that that I've seen would be that Most of us are conditioned to a certain way of working in organizations and I'd say that it's very much a parent child Relationship we're either in a childlike stance looking for a parent looking for someone to take Responsibility looking for someone to tell us what to do to provide constraints and we like to defer to them And you get a lot of benefits from engaging in an organization in that way Not my decision ask daddy for money ask someone else for care Like there's a whole whole way of engaging which is often it means you can get away with not doing stuff you can get away with not being as responsible you can have a lot more freedom you can just do your job and clock out and off You go and that that's that's one way people engage Where's and there's another way that people engage where it's like where can you shoulder responsibility? Where can you act like a parent and you're starting to reason about other people as children where you're starting to protect them from the consequences of their Action you're starting to take responsibility for them without consulting them And it's quite a common way of the burden of leadership where traditional leaders will often start to engage in a very parental way With the people that they're working with and I'd say this is a deeply held cultural norm That we're kind of used to and we very unconsciously fall into when we when we try and work with each other Learning how to engage with each other as peers where we ask consent to do things to each other Where we start to trust people to work with peers and we start to give away some of the benefits from engaging as a parent Or as a child is quite hard work and it's quite there was a lot of personal transformation But when you can do that it opens up a possibility space which is very different from traditional organizations And so I'd say I'd describe helping people go through that journey of Engaging as true peers rather than parents or children with each other would have been the biggest challenge of the experiment Okay, so then we all know what to expect. I am Open up for questions, but I'd like to ask you. Do you have something you want input on from the audience? Yeah, absolutely. I'd love to know the things that are working best for you and how I can copy them It's like it's flat out. It's like the request for you to blog and to make handbooks was Partly altruistic. I think the world will be better if you do that But I think my business will be better as well because I can just copy the stuff So I can learn to do it So I think that I'm very interested in anything that works anything which is exciting or dynamic or making a new thing I'd love to hear about it and I think that when you start to invoke people to say How can we all share our best things with each other and I think this is often often in a commercial space You kind of want to keep your best things for your company or yourself And you don't want other people to copy them and that scene is you know You're trying to restrict access to your best ideas Whereas how can we start to engage with each other where let's actively and generously share our best ideas with other people And let's copy the things that work and if we can engage in that way I think we can see a massively rapid increase in the rate of innovation in any sector So in terms of the whole business of building organizations I'd love to hear about your best work and I'd love to copy it and I'd love to share things And if we engage in that I think we can have a massive a very good mutual relationship Well, they're all yours Anyone has something that really works that you'd like to share? Pass on to it Joshua You'll be staying for the agile as well. Yeah, all right, but so let's do it the other way around then questions for Joshua, I mean we have time so Several minutes actually. Yep So the question is how do you handle this organization at global scale and how do you run? these gatherings To keep it So I would say that yes, we still run gatherings as the organization's grown We can have less whole organization gatherings So it used to be every six months now We do them every 12 months But then you start to have smaller sub-sector gatherings where it might be hey There's a retreat in Europe or there's a retreat in San Francisco or there's a retreat in Australia and a section of the network goes to that So fewer gatherings where everyone goes to though We still do that once a year and the way and that's just lots of people flying to New Zealand at the moment But then having smaller gatherings where people can opt into them or themed ones You can still get a lot of the benefits of the that we used to get from the other ones And I'd say that the other the other idea would be that it's not enough just to get a whole bunch of people together And to figure out what what happens that we were really fortunate to have some great facilitators from the beginning and Often when you go to different events It's really critical the tone that set from the facilitators learning how to build a participatory event together is It's an art form and it's as hard as many other ones So I think that the the gatherings definitely, but it's how you gather as much as gathering at all All right, and more questions There we go Also Relationships So it was about loomi and how you're changing it them progressing it Yeah, and I just respond to the yes we use open space, it's fantastic. If you want to learn more about how to convene groups in different ways, then I'm sure you've got a lot of practices, but I found the art of hosting community as well, has a lot of skills around how to help build rich connections with people. And one of the principles I found quite useful was establish connections in person, or establish relationships in person, maintain them remotely. It's much easier than trying to build meaningful relationships remotely first. So the question on Lumio and where it's going and how it's working, one of the key ideas is just when you start to have a group of people who enter into a social contract, which is, hey, we've got these rules or these agreements about how we work. Anyone is free to propose a change to these rules. Just that one there where it's like, anyone has the power to publicly say, hey, everyone, I'd like to have a discussion on this, or I'd like to make a decision about this, and I'd like to amend it in a certain way. It gives quite a lot of power to people already. And it's very different, instead of just a certain number of people are allowed to, socially or culturally or actually in your information systems. So providing the social expectation of you are free to do that is one of the key benefits we got from Lumio. Another one was how can you actually have productive conversations about meaningful constitutional things and by having a different information system for it, as opposed to having it over email or Slack or other places, meant that you could basically evoke oh, actually we're coming here to make a decision together. We're coming here with the expectation of listening to people with different opinions and presenting my opinion and working together to resolve them and to reach a solution which is what was it, safe enough to try and good enough for now. And it was like, so great phrase, I love that philosophy of the type of agreements you wanna aim for, but how can you start to get that, invoke that space? By having a dedicated tool to this, people start to engage in that tool differently than they engage in different spaces. One of the ways that's changing for us is that having the concept of a group, all the people in this group, get to be part of this decision or see a notification, then it's starting to move towards, okay, start a conversation or a decision and invite anyone you want to be part of it. So instead of reasoning about an organization as a membership-based thing, these are the members of the organization, these are the members of a team and so on, and putting the decisions in the appropriate spot, by reasoning about it as saying, what are the decisions we wanna make? Let's put them up and let's do it and let's bring people wherever they are, regardless of their department or company or whatnot, into that decision and doing that in a way which makes passwords and membership and access and all of that quite easy, that's been a lot of the ways that it's been going. So it's a case of if someone wants to make a decision, they create a new proposal, they post it on Slack and they start to invite people into it, and it's a different way of people coalescing. So the idea of, instead of having static roles or static groupings, you can start to have a bit more of a swarm, something happens and the people who show up are the people who show up. So it's very similar to how you do open space to how you start to do other processes. All right, I think we need to take the rest of the questions during the mingle. So a big hand, thank you very much, Joshua, for sharing. And we have the chocolate and the gifts.