I’m listening and listening but then a thunder ⛈️ snaps me out of my trance. “Hey, you know what?” I say. “It’s very hard for me to comprehend what you’re going through right now because I’ve never experienced it! In Camplight we don’t have such problems because since day one we’re building a culture around transparency, freedom, autonomous and self-organized teams relying only on collaboration instead of delegation of work. Also we are not using any of the mentioned techniques.” Then I always get a blank stare and a follow up question to reveal the magic. My mind begins to wonder where to start from so I’m trying to collect my thoughts and funnel my knowledge:

Co-create empowerment

You cannot empower people. This implicitly means that there’s hierarchy and that you can disempower them. This creates doubt. That’s why you need to co-create a culture of fearless superheroes with growth mindset.

In your organization/department/team everybody has some motives for being there. Channeling that into day-to-day operations can fuel a wonderful way for thriving.

People are talking. Whether you like it or not the operational excellence is constantly being discussed in the corridors or chat rooms. The cool thing is that everybody has ideas on how to change things around. Clearing any obstacle to share those ideas is the first step of creating initiatives suitable for collaboration (conitiatives). People should feel psychological safety when they share their ambition to grow in the organization.

Making it easy for everybody to share ideas in one place can facilitate the process. In Camplight we call this place “initiatives pool”. We don’t have boundaries about what kind of initiatives we add there. Camplighters self-regulate and we have all kinds of initiatives like podcasts, organizing retreats, literature clubs, donations, creating sustainable villages, creating a co-working space, etc.

Transparently adding stuff to the initiatives pool is key for synergy.

Conitiative flow

We know that ideas are cheap. That’s why ideas should evolve into something actionable. How you might ask? By helping people discuss, upvote, consult, converge, consent, advice their collective ideas. Clouds of interests will form organically. Destructive topics will be ignored. Disruptive potentials will spark interest. Teams will start to emerge and gather around actionable points. Unblocking people to collaborate and take ownership of their commitments is a great way for self-organization to develop.

Individuals will start making progress on a conitiative. Supporting that as a hospitable leader is very inspiring. Alignment of purpose and values will naturally siphon worthy conitiatives.

In Camplight we structure our conitiatives in lists (columns). In order to have better visibility we also use columns for marking the phase of a specific conitiative. We have phases like ‘Pool’, ‘Doing’, ‘Feedback’. The flow goes Pool <-> Doing <-> For feedback.