Our Ecosystem Principle
A tribe that succeeds with collaboration by creating a community of nodes – not just end points.
Leadership is not how many followers you have but how many new leaders you create.
We have been moving further and further towards the “I-generation”. Almost as a paradigm, the “WeWork” model was very much a highly visible illustration of this. It was promoted as “we this” and “we that” but actually there was little community merely groups of individuals collocating. And we can see where that is leading. How should we be different? We should welcome distinctive culture variants and their own experts with their own version of altruism and competitiveness, however we should connect with other parallel communities and together with each of these communities form a whole. Whilst everyone is an individual, most people are part of teams, have their own desires and goals and are not part of a contrived homogenous society. But together as individuals, as teams, and communities, they form part of a network and can create way more than they can ever imagine alone. This is the essence of our ecosystem.
Such a community limits the chance of over investment in individuals and ensures more emphasis on teams, pulling back on the worst excesses of the “go crazy” atmosphere of the last few years. Ecosystems like this provide an ever-present, on hand OODA loop (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) so its members can act quickly from constant and rapid feedback and questioning. It is a commercial axiom that preventative maintenance saves significant costs and downtime[1]; and a great ecosystem will provide the same preventative maintenance for the decisions and operations of its members. Taking advantage of the “Nothing Is Ever As Good Or As Bad As It Seems” maxim, ensures its best parts become sustainable and do not get carried away; and those temporarily facing challenges have the positive support and expertise they need to excel. These communities also create a level of preparedness individuals might not normally consider[2].
The greatest assets of teams are the people, because when they succeed they need to keep level headed and build, and when they run into trouble they need help to refocus. A supportive ecosystem and community is there to help with both. An Alumni programme where all the members of a community have the ability to stay part of and continue to benefit from and contribute to the community if they move on will strengthen this. It will increase the network enormously and also provide a huge pool of expert to help grow and maintain ecosystem and a network of communities.
Adam Grant (Professor of Management at Wharton) who specialises in the transformation of work identifies the two biggest challenges facing organisations as the need for organisational fixers[3] and the need to solve procrastination[4]. Most small teams are not big enough to have these; and so a community will be the early stage fixers for them. They can also provide the oversight to help identify procrastination.
[1] poorly managed maintenance schedules can result in accounting for as much as 40 % of the operational budget,
[2] for instance whilst most startups write a SWOT they overwhelmingly only prepare for positives and forget to prepare for the W&Ts.
[3] Fixers are the “go to” people in big organisations that a person finds that they like and are approachable. Fixers are not necessarily the expert and a lot of them are women.
[4] Procrastination is s a delay to something that has some cost to delay and we procrastinate tasks for which we have negative emotions.