Emergent Co-Leadership and Movement Building

Organisation: Shared Assets

The project: As a Non-Exec Director at Shared Assets, this project was a little different and a little special as I’ll be sticking around to work alongside the team as new ways of working become embedded. Transitions were a theme even at my NED interview a year ago. The Co-Founders had been planning a careful and thoughtful exit and were in search of people with experience of supporting Founder transitions. A few months later, we were ready to explore practically some of the conceptual changes we’d been talking about for some time. My role was to design and facilitate a ‘transformation’ process – a sort of mini-design sprint over a 3 month period – working with the team to surface all of the outstanding uncertainties and co-create an emergent co-leadership structure. To ensure that our direction of travel was rooted in the needs and wants of the land justice system, and our emerging role as movement infrastructure, we hosted a partner workshop bringing together 25+ practitioners and funders. And to help us make organisational decisions stemming from what we heard, we drew on sociocratic consent-based decision-making. The team made this really easy for me as they were already familiar with this way of working, enabling us to get some tricky decisions made and start to plot out the roadmap ahead.

Impact:

As a result of our work together, we were able to:

• Bring together partners and collaborators to explore and better understand Shared Assets’ position and potential future role in the land justice ecosystem as we shift towards movement infrastructure, bridging between systems as we nurture the green shoots of a just transition.
• Co-design a shared leadership structure and functional ‘circles’ to lead on different organisational workstreams
• Develop processes for sharing power, enabling self-managing teams and rotating responsibilities for governance, strategy, people, culture and finance.
• Initiate an exploration of what employee ownership means for a social enterprise embracing non-hierarchical ways of working.

I also wrote about this transitional work for the Shared Assets blog: Bridging between systems as we nurture the green shoots of a just transition and Organisational design as an embodiment of collective power.

“Thank you for facilitating this ‘transformation’ process. We’ve been talking about this stuff for a long time so it was great to have some support to move it forward in practical ways. You held us lightly and gave us the space we needed to explore but made sure that we got some tricky decisions over the line. Looking forward to continuing this work together – putting it all into practice will be the next challenge!” – Mark Walton, Co-Founder