Do you want to work on stuff that matters? Since 2010 a group of people in Wellington, New Zealand have been organizing themselves to do just that. Now you can read how they did it!
Their organization is called Enspiral and stories about their amazing journey so far has been documented in the cleverly titled book “Better Work Together“. I have been following Enspiral for years and pretty much devoured the book. It was such a joy to read the personal stories and I am inspired to explore “reinventing Enspiral” (as they call it) here in The Netherlands.
Please go read the book! For free! It is shared under a Creative Commons license, so here is a link to a free and gratis download of the book Better Work Together. Of course, do give some of your money to support the authors if you like what you read.
However, you are probaly super-busy and do not have time to read all the books in the world. So, to help you a bit there the rest of this post is “Better Work Together in Quotes”: a selection of the quotes that resonated a lot with me and that give you an idea of what Enspiral and the book are all about.
If these quotes resonate with you as well, I recommend you to pick up the book and invite you to contact me to see if we can exchange ideas or even join forces to jointly work (more) on stuff that truly matters to us!
Here come the quotes, boldface added to the ones that especially stand out to me:
“Solidarity is not the result of world-changingly good ideas, it is the cause.”
“The work itself – the process of collaboration – ends up as important as whatever product or service is being delivered.”
“If you are sincere in your desire to make the world a better place then your personal success is our number one priority.”
“Thank you for your attention”
– As a species we have never been so powerful.
– With this power we’re changing things.
– We are reaching limits we haven’t encountered before.
– We have the potential (and the urgent need) to change everything.
– What do we do?
– Where do we start?
“Our attention is our power. It is the invisible, constant force that ultimately determines our individual and collective potential.”
“I don’t care what you work on, whether it’s climate change, global poverty, self management, social enterprise, planting trees, gender equality, decolonisation, or steady state economics. If your primary mission is to make the world a better place, your personal success is the reason Enspiral exists.”
“There is a trickle of human energy going into the most important issues of our times. Enspiral exists to help turn that trickle into a river.”
“We organise differently: No one should lead all the time and everyone should lead some of the time.”
“Get paid well to do work you love, with people
you love, while working on a systemic issue you care deeply about.”
“It isn’t easy, but it is possible.”
“The only way to understand Enspiral is to listen to many peo-
ple, which is why many of us are contributing to this book.”
“Either they were working full time on something that wasn’t aligned with their purpose or they were struggling financially as they put all their energy into volunteering.”
“It occurred to me that maybe the best way I could contribute was to help people who wanted to change the world get highly paid contract work.”
“A culture of experimentation”
Managing the cost of failure:
– Respect the status quo
– Copy patterns that work
– Start small
– Let things settle
– Deliver value early
“Distributing leadership”
“We got by, but we never managed to achieve abundance.”
“The dream lives on, continually emerging.”
“We discover the path by walking it together.”
“We tend to follow that paths we can see.”
“Enspiral is agnostic about individual purpose, supporting anyone to do meaningful work – or ‘stuff that matters’ – no matter how they define it. There is no adherence to dogma about specific ways to change the world, other than to help one another.”
“We value the person over the product, the flowering and unfolding of the person over profit. And we’ve created a place where these are not mutually exclusive.”
“Capitalism bombards us with messages of unworthiness and pejorative definitions of success and advertising manipulates our will. Even if we are aware of this, it’s not easy to articulate an alternative story.”