Wellington
Wellington’s Enspiral is a difficult beast to describe intraditional terms. For a start, there’s very little to compare it to.
The two-year old collective of developers and designers and other connected people, is a work inprogress, which its founder Joshua Vial considers to be more closely akin to an organic network thana regular business.
What it isn’t is a hierarchical company model of being. Decision-making is very flat andinclusive, and the Courtenay Place based business (but going global) has even released an‘alpha’ version of software to help develop consensus conclusions. (See
From half a dozen people, it now has over 40, and Vial’s yet to find a similar overseas modelfor how it works and operates.
Vial’s been an independent contractor (back end web development) himself, and was influenced bythe thinking behind Richard Semler’s book, ‘Maverick’ and ‘Seven Day Weekend’ (see aWikipedia version here ).
“Part of the ideas there is that if you treat people like children, they’ll behave likechildren,” he says. “If you treat them like adults, they’ll behave like adults.”
“From that, we figured we wanted a business in which there was no distinction between who worksand who owns.”
Hence Enspiral’s model, in which members share the same information and have the same level ofautonomy as a business owner would have.
Enspiralites also set their own salary – what they think they’re worth – but have to bringin work and show they’re justified in receiving it.
For Enspiral to achieve its ongoing success, “we’ve had to evolve a strategy that involvesall, for which we have an emergent shared values and vision,” he says.
“That’s why it is as important how we get to a decision [bringing on new members orcompanies, spending shared resources] as to what the decision actually is,” Vial says. Also,hence, the development of loom.io – loosely derived from loom as to weave.
Along with the extensive use of work-focused intranet ‘Yammer’ and Google Docs, loom.io hasbeen developed “because it would be impossible to run Enspiral without it. There would be too muchnoise to make decisions.”
loom.io is built around the concept of a motion or proposal – should Enspiral do this orthat?
The participatory process seeks to build consensus. “It forces us too to front load thedecision-making with conversations to get everyone onboard, obtain perspectives from differentpeople.”
“It also forces a level of trust and communication within the teams.” Under this model, aperson may not necessarily agree with the final decision, but can generally run with it saysVial.
He’s also the first to admit that Enspiral’s very much learning about the process of how tomake decisions, and how people engage with each other and their level of contribution that“isn’t normal in an ordinary company.”
Part of the non-ordinariness is how Enspiral has organically grown, and acquired much of its workand clients.
Much, if not most of this has been through word-of-mouth and social networks. That is, peopleknowing people, businesses knowing about Enspiral through other businesses, and a general awarenesswithin the community of what Enspiral offers.
“Every time a new person comes into Enspiral, they release untapped potential within theorganisation and their own networks,” says Vial. “It is one of the laws of networks; if youdouble the size of the network you haven’t doubled its value, you’ve increased it by much morethan that.”
“When you envisage a company as a network then, you have more value as the sizeincreases….though you do have a natural ceiling.”
As Enspiral has increased in size, Vial’s also noticed that smaller groups are naturallycoalescing into their own teams. This too requires a balance between Enspiral’s role and theindividual’s autonomy and freedom.
“We are mostly learning by doing,” Vial says.
From Enspiral’s point of view, ‘growth’ sees new Enspiral entities springing up in Aucklandand Hong Kong (already 30 people under its banner) and a soon to be established node in Berlin (asformer Wellingtonians set up shop in the German capital).
Using a network analogy, this will expand Enspiral’s ability to “do things”.
Because though the collective is partly a business play in the traditional commerce world, italso has a larger purpose.
Some of the biggest issues of our time – think climate change, environmental degradation,poverty, food security – have only had a trickle of human energy thrown at solutions.
“Enspiral’s as much a capacity play, where people, having provided for their own livingrequirements, have the skills and time to work on some of the biggest issues of our time,” Vialsays.
“Our people tend to have a much deeper purpose, want to make a tangible impact on the world andmake it a better place. The only rational strategy for the world, is to increase the resourcesallocated to finding solutions. What holds us back in a global sense, is not a lack of good ideas,but a lack of people working in those spaces.”
From that point of view, Enspiral is a resource play, and more specifically a human resourceplay. Its strong sense of looking to provide better social outcomes and making the world a betterplace is THE underlying ethos.
This is part of the reason that the Enspiral developed
As an organic network, Enspiral is and will always be a work in progress.
“We have no perceived perfect model,” says Vial. “The world’s always changing, and sowill we.”