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Episode Transcript
Lisa: I’ve been a member of OuiShare for the past five years and so I actually came to this profession or this organization because I was doing my bachelor’s degree in southern Germany and it was a very general interdisciplinary studies about communication and cultural management. That’s actually when I really started getting interested in organizational theory and network theory, motivation of employees and companies, and also Systems Theory. Because of that I heard about the book “Collaborative Consumption: What’s Mine is Yours.” It was really defining for the first time the sharing economy and what collaborative consumption is. That’s why I decided to write my bachelor thesis about that topic.
Francesca: To do that I was looking for different people to interview and so I stumbled upon some people that were in the process of creating this new community/nonprofit/distributed network called OuiShare. The moment I got in touch with people I got super excited and really interested and then pretty much joined right after I finished my thesis. That was in 2012, and then started getting involved as the editor of the OuiShare magazine.
Lisa: And what does OuiShare do?
Francesca: So it depends who you ask what answer you get. I would say at the moment the way I like to describe OuiShare the most is actually as an incubator of people and a laboratory for new ways of working and experimenting with new forms of governance. OuiShare really started as a think-tank but one of the things that’s really been at the core is it brings together people that are really interested in how technology and business can help transform society and the environment, but specifically how we can actually start with ourselves as individuals to be able to achieve that change.
Basically creating this shared community and platform that helps all of us as individuals get the resources and the support, also socially speaking, to be able to grow and develop and sort of discover what we want to do in our life and how to basically become more entrepreneurial and then get access to all of those things that we need to be able to have this personal development.
OuiShare has really proven to be sort of an informal incubator in that way. It’s not like “I arrived, I’m signing up for this program.” It’s just that in itself the way OuiShare has emerged, it has that tendency because it really gets people to step out of their comfort zone and challenge a lot of their beliefs or the way they’ve been used to working. It really pulls you out of your day-to-day and enables you to try new things.
Lisa: So a lab for new ways of working—how have you evolved ways of working at OuiShare? What’s the journey been in terms of practices and working together?
Francesca: It’s been quite a journey because we’ve all been learning together and there’s really been a large evolution which makes it so interesting. Basically in 2012 when we started, OuiShare was always very distributed. There was a sort of group of different people, they were all freelancers or consultants in a couple different countries that just got connected especially also via Twitter. A lot of them were working very remotely.
There was a group of a few more people in Paris that had met regularly very informally. I think the two characteristics of the way we started working was very informal—based on being with your friends and just hanging out, let’s say—and secondly super tech-based and distributed, not based on necessarily always being physically in the same place.
That evolved over time and we actually have sort of this moment of more centralization one could say because we actually really needed to develop a core before we could continue to distribute. We actually had a team in Paris that became a lot bigger proportion to the rest for a certain amount of time. That was especially around the first OuiShare Fest which is our annual flagship event that we now have in many countries, but especially the biggest one is in Paris.
Basically we shifted a bit from very online-based work to more personal contact and smaller teams. From there, this has really sort of been the emergence of stronger hubs I would call them, which is different cities where we have larger OuiShare teams that work physically together, but still with a very high use of lots of digital tools to be able to connect with people around the world.
We really try to navigate the offline and online in terms of finding the best of those two worlds because we have many people, including myself, that are always travelling around, that are working from all kinds of locations, and that really doesn’t matter to be able to do your work. I think many of the people that join OuiShare, they really want to get out of the traditional work system and they want that autonomy and total flexibility—like I can take vacation whenever I want or I can go to a place where people would do vacation and work there and mix vacation and something else. Being just really independent about that, I think that’s something that people value really highly.
Basically now we have OuiShare in many countries around the world, but specifically we have a few larger hubs. The biggest team is in Paris, in Barcelona, in London and Munich, and we have a couple different places in South America and Central America and also Montreal. Those are quite a lot of teams that meet also every few months. We try to meet physically because that’s a really important piece for all of us to work well, but then we have a whole suite of different online tools and collaborative decision-making tools that we’ve been experimenting with to make it easier for us to still have this continuity of working together.
Lisa: Great, so could you give an example of how you make decisions, for example, at OuiShare and some of the practices that you’re working with currently?
Francesca: That’s definitely a practice that has evolved quite a lot over time. I would say we’ve sort of been learning by doing and really adding new rules and practices as we go. Our general principle is “minimum viable bureaucracy.” What we’ve been doing is trying to create this process of letting a behavior or practice emerge and then writing it down, documenting it, and then letting it be taken again to practices and then get updated again.
What we did do one or two times is we tried to sort of design the organization. We had two different processes. It was like “Oh guys, we need governance, what should we do?” A few people sat down and did this organization design and it really didn’t work very well because it led to a lot of this sort of creative energy and spontaneity sort of disappearing or getting a lot smaller because there were too many rules that had come quickly.
What we have today is a structure that’s really based actually on the role of the connector. An OuiShare connector is one of the most active members of the community—not necessarily the people that work the most but it’s people that are interested in the organization as a whole, in what’s happening in other places, and that also care and want to participate in the governance and also be sort of ambassadors or representatives of the brand and of the organization.
We have 80 OuiShare connectors now in different countries, and so that’s really our decision-making entity. When it comes to finance and budget and brand decisions, these are the ones that can do it. But in addition, we have the important principle of autonomy of projects and of local communities.
This whole connector group of 80 people, they only decide on things that someone in a local group actually believes are relevant to be discussed with everyone on the map. We really have the principle: always use the smallest common group possible to make a decision, to not add huge amounts of complexity.
That means that, for instance, the community in Spain has a group of OuiShare connectors and they make pretty much all of the decisions around brand and finances in Spain locally, the same in France, the same in Canada. Only when it really seems like “Wow, this is a key topic that everyone needs to discuss”—like should the OuiShare brand be associated with Company X that’s a bit questionable, for instance—then we discuss it with everyone.
There’s sort of a process for how you become a connector and that’s really a key important factor. It takes a few months because it’s important that you know many other people and you have social ties and that there’s three other connectors that invite you in and basically accept you. I really believe a lot in that process—that is what enables us to then create this really strong circle of trust among those connectors where then basically we can say we trust you as a connector to judge: can you make this decision just with two or three other people or does this actually need to be discussed with more?
For the decision-making we use this tool called Loomio, which was developed by a network called Enspiral, which is a collective of social entrepreneurs from New Zealand that I’m also a member of. I’ve really been learning many things from Enspiral and trying to also do a lot of cross-pollination between the governance practices that Enspiral has been learning, that OuiShare has been learning, and seeing how we can share all those insights.
This tool enables groups to make decisions online in a really easy way. Maybe one other thing that’s quite interesting to know is that we use something called “lazy consent.” Since we’re a quite large group and there is a lot of trust, we generally really prioritize agility and ability to react quickly and not having these slow processes where everyone needs to have given their opinion.
That’s why lazy consent really enables you to say okay, there’s a group of people, there’s a vote, whoever votes cares and expresses themselves, and whoever doesn’t, that’s fine. If you don’t express your opinion, that just means you by default trust the others to make the decision. Therefore you totally don’t need to have a majority of people that participate in a decision.
Lisa: And you mentioned that you have a mix of online and offline interactions. Could you say something about some of the practices and the ways of being that you’ve evolved when you meet face-to-face?
Francesca: One of the key moments that we have where we meet face-to-face are the OuiShare summits. Those happen every six months on an international level, but also we have local summits now. So if you’re in one local community, you’ll have four summits a year probably. If you’re in multiple, it might be even more, it can be quite a lot.
Those kind of events are very focused on two different things: on the one hand really just getting to know each other better and building stronger ties, because I really believe that afterwards just makes it so much easier to continue working online. So it’s good to just focus on getting to know the person.
Secondly, it’s a lot focused on knowledge sharing and exchange because at summits we definitely have people from many different backgrounds in many different communities. It’s not about deciding things together and saying “This is what we’re gonna do, here’s our plan,” but it’s about community X saying “Look we did this thing, this is really successful, this worked really well. We did this, this didn’t work at all” and to then actually just be able to give those learnings to other groups and build on that together. That’s something we do a lot when we’re offline.
We also have regular team meetings in different local communities. In Paris we meet every Friday, which is sort of a moment of update where people share different things that are going on, especially their needs and their blockages and things that they need support with.
There’s a lot of face-to-face meetings in projects. For instance, the OuiShare Fest, the conference we do in Paris—there’s many people that have regular meetings all the time together around that. These Friday meetings are definitely important and I think we have different practices that other groups like Enspiral use a lot as well, like the check-in to be able to see how does everyone in the group feel, what are they bringing into the day, and doing a lot of things that make it more easy for people to express themselves.
Lisa: Things like check-ins and talking about needs and stuff like that—have there been people in the network that have found that strange or difficult to adjust to, or do you think there’s something that people can do quite naturally?
Francesca: I think that people are actually pretty open to it. I think for sure for some people maybe it’s unusual at first, but I must say it’s really hard for me to tell by now because you get so deep into it that it’s like “this is how we do things.” Then new people come in sometimes and they say “Wow, this is really different,” but I think the whole thing is so different, it’s not necessarily that element that has stood out as being confusing or something like that.
I think that’s also something that’s quite characteristic or useful, which is that most of the things of how we’re working are not really that traditional in the sense that people don’t have titles. It’s for the good and the bad—sometimes not so easy to figure out who is doing what and what are these people working on.
What’s actually quite funny is in this new office space that we’re in where there’s many different organizations, there’s this one guy who just saw in the back corner there’s the whole OuiShare area and he’s like “I see you guys working there and I just don’t understand what it is you’re doing.” He felt like it was this whole mystery somehow.
I guess it’s obviously because a lot of it is happening online and new people keep joining and coming and doing things, and it’s not always—you don’t always know why someone new is getting on board because someone else invited them in or whatever. But that’s sort of just the nature of the thing. I think it just really helps people go completely into a new context, and so when everything is different then it’s just like jumping into a new space.
Lisa: You mentioned that sometimes it can be difficult to know what people are working on and who’s doing what. Have there been—can you say something about some of the challenges that you’ve experienced at OuiShare and how you’ve responded to them?
Francesca: There’s many challenges of course. Basically in terms of knowledge sharing and what’s going on, I think there’s a very common problem that these types of groups have, or also in general organizations more and more, which is overflow of information. We have all these different technology tools that make it easier to see things.
I think the problem is that they officially give you access to something, but that doesn’t mean that you actually see it. People need to have this ability to be able to filter massive quantities of information, and that gets really overwhelming and sort of in the end leads to people actually becoming more isolated and not even knowing what’s going on. That’s a pretty important skill that you need to be able to navigate.
But we’ve also really made an effort to try to train our collective muscle of getting better at condensing information for groups, figuring out “OK, who do we need to communicate what to? What do we need to communicate to whom?” and to sort of provide more pathways to be able to navigate all of this information and knowledge. That’s something that is totally still a work in progress, and in many ways it’s not clear how people actually get through all this chaos.
I often use the word “chaos” because in the positive and negative sense, I think that’s also really what spurs a lot of the creativity and the spontaneity, but people really need to be able to navigate that. I think it also means that there are a good amount of people for whom that just is not the kind of environment that they want to be in. This really can’t work for everyone, but there’s a specific personality type or a spectrum of people that really thrive on that. I think you need to be able to sort of make your own sense of it to be able to know how to navigate.
Apart from that, there’s definitely been a lot of challenges around clarity of decision-making and structure and how things get done. We have the tendency that the wheel gets reinvented a lot because new people join and they ask the same questions, and it’s been hard to find good ways to actually formalize and communicate the way things work because it’s usually just been “you come in and then you sort of experience it and then eventually you sort of know.”
We’ve tried a couple different things also to be able to make it more clear what people are working on. For instance, we have this thing called OuiShare Job Board (jobs.ouishare.net) where people can create profiles and show what they can do, what their skills are. But I think the real challenge there is that things are always emerging and changing all the time, and so because of that usually as soon as you’ve created something, it’s outdated.
That’s really something we have to struggle with, which I guess is what happens anywhere, just that we’re very aware of that fact. It’s really hard to pin things down because they’re changing so quickly.
Lisa: I first came across you because I read your blog, which I really enjoyed by the way. I think it was called “Cut the crap: Why there’s no such thing as no hierarchy,” and it was really interesting to read the sort of debate that was happening in the comments. What’s your take on why you wrote that article and what the response has been?
Francesca: I wrote that article out of a frustration a little of many people joining OuiShare, especially in the beginning, getting on board and having a sort of very idealistic view of what it means to be in a flat organization. In many cases, at least from my part in the recruitment processes or if we’re getting someone new on board, I really don’t say anymore—it’s been a long time that I said “Oh, we have no hierarchy, you know, everyone can do what they want, this is complete anarchy, let’s say.”
But people nevertheless often just arrive with a certain expectation that everyone is equal and that people can pretty much do whatever they like without necessarily asking. This is definitely not something that everyone does, but I guess there’s a specific number of people that sometimes have come with that.
I really wrote that article because I just wanted to sort of clarify something around what it actually means to work in this kind of organization, and just my observation of human behavior and the fact that we always interact in relationships to each other, which involves hierarchy in some form or another even if it might just be actually ever-changing and dynamic.
I guess the main point that I wanted to make in that article was really that we can’t get rid of hierarchy completely, but we can make it more flexible to be able to adapt to different moments. Maybe in one moment you’ve had more history in the organization, so then actually maybe you’re the person who is at a higher level of hierarchy. And on the other hand, in another case maybe someone else has a really strong expertise and therefore should be the person that can actually decide.
That sort of connects a lot with the “advice process” concept, which is a type of decision-making that a lot of teal organizations use to be able to enable anyone who has expertise or anyone in the organization to actually make decisions. Overall, I chose a very provocative title to see what that would stir, but overall it’s also a lot about semantics, I think—the words we use that others wouldn’t describe as hierarchy.
I think a lot of people get quite hung up on that concept and say “Oh, you guys are imposters, you know, this isn’t really non-hierarchical. I see here that someone is telling someone else what to do.” But at least for me personally, I don’t believe that we can have organizations without people telling others what to do at some points in time, or giving advice and support in that direction, and leadership being absolutely necessary.
I think that leadership definitely is in the process of being redefined or it needs to be redefined—what that means—and that was really the main thing that I was talking about in that article, in terms of leaders needing to take on roles of more being facilitators and stewards and people that hold space for something to emerge. That’s sort of a longer ongoing process and I’m curious to see what others also contribute to that.
Lisa: You mentioned before you said that you went through a bit of an evolution process at OuiShare where you were very distributed, and then at a certain point you recognized there was a value in centralizing things a little bit more, and then you grew the team in Paris. It sounds a little bit like that was maybe part of that kind of tension between flat and hierarchy perhaps? Or what was the process behind making that decision?
Francesca: Actually, you can’t really say that it was a decision, it was something that emerged. Different people decided to put their energy towards growing a stronger team in Paris. That doesn’t mean that the other places weren’t active and there weren’t things happening.
For instance, for me personally, I was living in Germany at the time and I’d gotten involved in OuiShare, I’d been doing it for one year, and I decided “Okay, I really want to work with a physical team, this is important for me. If OuiShare is gonna work for me, I need to be part of a bigger group that sees each other regularly.” So I decided to move to Paris and to put energy towards creating a team, and there’s a couple other people that did that as well.
I think in that way it’s sort of reflective of what decision-making sometimes is in this emergent type of organization, which is just that different individuals decide things for themselves and then shift their energy towards that, and that sometimes steers direction. But it’s like the sum of many small movements that actually create that, and it’s not like one decision “Oh, we’re gonna build a team in Paris.”
But I would say for some of us in Paris, there were moments where we were doing trade-offs and it was like “Okay, either I put some energy in building more here or I travel around the world and help other communities grow.” So there was a phase where me and some other people were making the decision to focus in Paris, but those are personal decisions in a way.
Lisa: It reminds me of Margaret Wheatley’s book “Leadership and the New Science,” and she talks about in the kind of world of quantum physics and self-managing systems, there are lots of small things that—and when they reach a bifurcation point, I think it’s called—it becomes like a tipping point where the system has to change, it can’t stay the way it was anymore. But there’s kind of a series of smaller events or disturbances or disruptions that eventually end up with the system changing. So it sounds a little bit like that, like there were lots of little small events and decisions and activities happening that then culminated in creating the Paris team.
Francesca: And it’s sort of that process I was talking about before that something was happening and then afterwards—so that evolution I can only map that afterwards. That wasn’t beforehand “Oh, we’re gonna go through these steps,” but you can see now that that’s what would happen—happened.
Lisa: Do you think hierarchy then—and I agree with you it’s a really challenging thing about semantics and about language, and on the one hand you want to be understood by people and have a common definition of something, but on the other hand so many people get provoked by using certain words—but if we use the term hierarchy for argument’s sake, do you think that’s something that happens naturally in groups of human beings and that therefore it’s something to acknowledge and be clear about so that you don’t get the kind of tyranny of structurelessness or the kind of dark hierarchy, if you like?
Francesca: Yeah, I totally agree. I think in groups those kind of dynamics always emerge, and so it’s much better to name them because then you actually can do something about them. I think one of the issues in many organizations today is that these hierarchies, they get so ingrained and they get really stiff and they just can’t move. I think they need to be able to continue to change, and so that is only possible if you’re actually talking about it or showing that it exists.
I’ve definitely seen how when you don’t create any structure at all, that these informal structures, they emerge so quickly and that leads to huge amounts of tension because people can sense it, and that has a much more negative effect than being able to openly actually discuss something.
Lisa: What would your dream for the future of work be like? What would you like to see happening in the world of organizations?
Francesca: I think my dream is really focused around people because what I love is seeing individuals grow and learn and sort of explore their potential. I really hope that work can be a place where that is possible—where people can be creative, where they can discover their strengths, and where they can really bring their full selves, so not hiding a part of them but showing up as who they are and really bringing that to the table to help solve problems and really use their common sense.
I think one thing that really frustrates me is when I see systems that are somehow broken and that are smothering the people inside them and not enabling them to solve problems that they see and actually do something about it. We know that things don’t work all the time, right? So to me what’s so important is just enabling all these smart people, they’re everywhere around the world, to be able to actually do something about it.
That’s actually why I’m so interested in all these different practices and collaboration tools. At the moment I’m really focusing even more on working on a couple different technology tools to make it easier for people within organizations to be able to take action to solve the problems they see and really be able to also allocate resources to that.
I think that’s one of the big challenges—there is definitely human—that is like one of the number-one difficulties. That’s why it’s so important that we do more of this work of education and cultural transformation and helping change organizational culture towards more collaborative behaviors.
Lisa: What do you mean by education and helping people? Do you mean like training people in skills?
Francesca: Yeah, on the one hand personal development, so providing people space for personal development. And then also—I guess maybe education isn’t even quite the right word—it’s sort of training.
One of the things that I’m working on right now is actually a collaborative funding tool. It’s called Cobudget and it’s basically about enabling people to allocate funds and resources collaboratively in organizations and also in a very transparent way.
One thing that I’ve seen a lot in managing different teams is that people often don’t want to take responsibility for these types of decisions, but also because they don’t understand the whole system and they weren’t trained—they didn’t train the skill of allocating budgets and making financial decisions and things like that.
I really believe that it’s just a question of practicing that and that anyone could actually do it. That’s why with this new project we’re basically exploring how we can educate and train more people to be able to make financial decisions in organizations and give them the tools to do that, because I think that’s a really key point for enabling this more collaborative behavior and creating this ability to distribute more decision-making.
Lisa: There’s something that’s emerging for me in what you’re saying in terms of themes. You mentioned before about information overflow/overload and how learning how to filter information is really key, and then having the right tools and skills to be able to make decisions about it—so giving people the tools and the know-how to be really involved and having a say in how things are done and how things happen.
Francesca: That’s totally the key because it’s obviously very hard to make decisions in these environments where there’s so much information, and I feel like it’s getting more and more difficult because the complexity keeps increasing.
That’s why what I’m really trying to work on with some other people and these tools is how can we really condense information or create the right context for anyone to sort of find agency? Because I think the tendency there is just we’re getting completely subdued in so much information, so many things happening that we lose our agency and we just feel overwhelmed.
So how can we create really simple tools that make it really fun and easy to actually be able to make these decisions? I think it’s a huge challenge, there’s no question, but we’re really trying to figure out how we can help advance that.
