Better Work Together: How The Power Of Community Can Transform Your Business

Better work together How the power of community can transform your business Producing authors Anthony Cabraal Susan Basterfield Published by Enspiral Foundation Forward by Douglas Rushkoff The future of working together has arrived. A radically different workplace is possible. We can build organisations that change lives, and grow resilient, committed, self-managing teams. If you are curious about how the power of community can transform the way business works, and has the potential to change the world, this book is for you. Enspiral is a community of entrepreneurs experimenting at the edges of ownership, governance, decision making, resource sharing, and organisational design. This work illuminates the power and potency of deep care for people and planet, radical ambition for systems change, and the commercial drive to get things done. After nearly a decade of testing and growing ideas, we’ve collectively written this book to share vision, reflections, and insights. This practical resource will help you create radically collaborative, innovative, and caring workplaces where people thrive. Better Work Together How the power of community can transform your business betterworktogether.co Copyright © 2018 Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International Public License Producing authors: Anthony Cabraal Susan Basterfield Design and layouts by Renato Inacio. Fluency Design Brazil. fluencydesign.com.br Published by Enspiral Foundation Ltd All Rights Reserved ISBN: 978-0-473-46036-5 Producing Authors Anthony Cabraal Susan Basterfield Preface Douglas Rushkoff is an educator, media theorist, and author: Most recently of the book Team Human and host of the Team Human podcast. (https://teamhuman.fm/) I receive over a hundred emails a day from people with great ideas for social change, new democratic platforms, eco-villages, and alternative currencies. Some of them have already written eloquent white papers, created gorgeous renderings, or plotted out cyclic revenue streams that seem to challenge the laws of perpetual motion. These are well-meaning people, with great educations and skills, turning their attention to the most pressing “wicked problems” of our age. Yet almost all of their ingenious blueprints for the salvation of humanity have been conceived and generated alone, in a room, on a computer. Yes, they want to find the others now - people and organizations who share the same fundamental values, and will recognize the wisdom of their master plans. But no matter who I try to connect them to, it never quite works out. That’s because they’re reaching out to the other people much too late. Solidarity is not the result of world-changingly good ideas, it is the cause. There’s no paucity of solutions to our collective woes; from permaculture and the commons to consensus building and platform cooperatives. What we too often lack are the communities of people to organize and apply these solutions in the real world, from the bottom up. It doesn’t have to be this way. 5 The Occupy movement has long been criticized as lacking substance or purpose. As if it were just a bunch of idealistic college students and dropouts with great motives but no plan. But to me, this was precisely their strength: a willingness to gather together with no particular expectation other than to forge solidarity, and model a new approach to social change. Less a demand or a eschatological goal than a process: a new normative state, and a new way of occupying reality. This may not have been Adbusters’ intent when they called for a protest against Wall Street; it’s simply what happened when people came together with a determination to engage in the long game of social change, one collaborative step at a time. No, Occupy didn’t achieve some landmark concession from government or t