Enspiral

This feature only applies to episodes with transcripts, which is a small number at this time.

Alanna Irving on leadership, decisions and money in bossless organisations

...w we can start to cultivate that in organisations. Alanna Irving: I started thinking about how to grow distributed leadership when I was working with Enspiral, which is a non-hierarchical network of social entrepreneurs. At the time, there was a cohort of us around the same age who would come up together fo...more
...Lisa Gill: Yes. You've mentioned power dynamics and, and coercive power a few times. And I know through your experiences at Enspiral and beyond - and in the work that you're doing currently - that's something that you look at. What have you learned about power and the nature of pow...more
...n attracted to in these few years has been around this theme'. So that was interesting to notice. I think it, started with the work we were doing at Enspiral. Money was naturally a part of it, because we were running businesses. And that was just inherent to the work we were doing. So we were thinking abou...more
... about generosity and helping each other out. Money is a natural way to do that. So we started doing a lot of interesting experiments with money and Enspiral. What emerged was the whole collaborative funding Cobudget thing. Cobudget is a tool for making a budget together. Essentially, you put up projects a...more
...u want to spend on different projects? So Cobudget is a software tool that helps groups do that. And that came out of how we were doing budgeting in Enspiral. We needed ways to involve large numbers of people transparently in budget setting. So I did a lot of the behind the scenes sort of work figuring out...more
...ally time consuming, expensive and requires talking to lawyers and asking accountants questions and so on. I remember, luckily, we had accountants at Enspiral who were totally aligned with us because I was asking them questions like, 'Can this company just give money to this other company?' And they said 'O...more
...g. So I got very interested in that. Open Collective is basically a tool to automate all the things that was super hard that I was doing manually at Enspiral. So when I heard about what they were doing and they reached out to me, I was just like, 'thank you - somebody is building a software tool to do this...more
...of this stuff, what has been the most challenging or painful learning moment for you, do you think? Alanna Irving: Wow. I think my experience leaving Enspiral was pretty challenging. It was a big combination of me burning out after many years of stretching myself too far and not having enough balance. And j...more
...nd I never completely left because, I still love all of those people and work with them and support a lot of those projects. And I went to the recent Enspiral retreat and it was great. So I guess I still feel like I have like one toe in. But it has been healthy for me. Important for me. Also, as you know,...more
...over here kind of worked a bit, you might want to try it'. And I think that was a really cool opportunity for reflection for me. There were times at Enspiral where people were very excited about, 'oh, can we bottle this thing up and export it?' And can we copy and paste this into other cities? And what I'v...more

Lisa Gill and Mark Eddleston celebrate 50 episodes of Leadermorphosis

...ion Rebellion - fantastic, and Miki Kashtan, Margaret Wheatley, the creators of Liberating Structures and Holacracy, Corporate Rebels, Aaron Dignan, Enspiral, Ouishare: anybody who's anybody in the world of progressive organisations and self-management. Have you celebrated that? Lisa Gill: Yeah, I think I ...more