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Connect with Etienne Salborn and Tonny Wamboga
Episode Transcript
Lisa: Okay, welcome Tonny and Etienne. Thank you for being on the Leadermorphosis podcast.
Etienne: Thank you for having us.
Lisa: So I thought maybe we could start by educating listeners a little bit about SINA. What is SINA? How did it begin? So maybe I don’t know, Etienne, if you want to start and share something about the beginnings of SINA and what it looks like today.
Etienne: Yeah, sure. So SINA stands for Social Innovation Academy, and it all started in Uganda, although today it has already spread into many other African countries. And it all goes back to me, originally, coming from Germany, starting to be for the first time in Uganda in 2006 as a volunteer. Instead of joining the military service in Germany, back then obligatory, I looked for an alternative, and saw that as an opportunity to work in a community in Uganda.
I was living and working in an orphanage for one year, and there saw that the children after finishing primary school, couldn’t continue going to secondary school. No one was there to support that, and so I started a sponsorship program, more traditionally. Families in Europe would support the kids to go to secondary boarding schools, and so a sponsorship program was born.
And over the years, the first generation, or every year, new kids would join the program. And in 2013 the first generation had finished high school, had grown up, but then weren’t able to find jobs because there’s a high youth unemployment rate in Uganda, and also weren’t able to go to university because tuition fees are very expensive compared to the income.
So that posed the initial challenge to actually sit together like an open space and discuss, what can we do now? And an idea came up, why don’t we create a space where young people create their own jobs if there’s hardly any jobs available. And that’s basically what we did to found SINA together and build the first community, which is called Jangu International, where we established a SINA model and were able to find an effective way to enable marginalized people from disadvantaged backgrounds to unleash their potentials and become basically the change they want to see through social entrepreneurship.
So people go through a journey of self-discovery, of finding their own purpose, aligning to that purpose, but then also gaining the skills and experiences needed for their own social enterprise by actually taking up roles and responsibilities through, for example, the system of holacracy that we have adjusted and becoming a leader and a follower, and are able to then find new ideas, try those ideas, and in the end, solve local challenges and transform, sometimes their own difficult stories, from their own backgrounds, into a social enterprise, and leave when the social enterprise is established.
And yeah, that’s kind of a quick run through of SINA, what it stands for. And Tonny came along the way in—was it 2015, or 16—as a scholar, and from there, has evolved to become a key member and is now one of the circle leads. I think that’s a familiar term for the self-organized system of that community, whereby I have no more kind of formal roles anymore. I still live in the community, but I have kind of withdrawn to really give local ownership to the whole community, and now working more with the replication of the model into other communities.
We have currently 12 existing communities and three more upcoming and collectively formed like a community of communities, all practicing the same approach, the same model, and trying to evolve it collectively to the best possible model it can be.
Lisa: Yeah, that’s awesome. It’s—every time I’ve been researching SINA, it seems like new communities are popping up all the time. It’s so exciting that it’s expanding. I’d love to hear from you, Tonny about your experience when you joined as a scholar, and then now you know as a key member in the team. Can you share a bit about how your journey has been with SINA?
Tonny: Yeah. Thank you so much for the opportunity. I joined here in 2016 June, as a really young boy who did not know what’s going to happen next in life. I had finished my high school, I had lost my dad, and it was only my mom who was taking care of the five of us. I have four other siblings, and she had no money or enough income. She’s a primary school teacher. I had no hopes for university—that was out.
And coming from the traditional school background here, they always tell us once you are out of formal education, there is really no hope for you, which is something I’d debate a lot lately, because through SINA, that’s different. I actually, when I arrived here, a friend had tipped me off that there is a place that supports youth like me and I ran for the interview.
I came here. We had about 80 youth that arrived in Mpigi for scholar selection. I think I looked at how others are putting on and how I am putting on, and I thought, maybe I stand no chance for joining. But after the scholar selection, and the following day, I received the phone call that you have been accepted to join this community. And that’s where my story turns around.
It begins to turn around when I joined here. I have explored—I think I came as a scholar who was in exploratory mode. I did not have any ideas for me when I came. I arrived, took up roles and responsibility, grew in them, and my goal was to discover myself. Why was I born? Why am I on Earth? And through that journey of exploring, I have had the opportunity to work with different startups. To be specific, I have worked with one in recycling, where we wanted to recycle plastic waste to make plastic lumber that we could assemble into plastic school desks for rural primary government-aided schools.
I have now co-founded a startup which is Our Roots. So it was the journey of trying different things. And now I have co-founded Our Roots Africa, which is an enterprise association, enterprise that is providing plant-based alternatives to single-use plastics. We started out with straws that are 100% biodegradable and compostable, and we have even sold through SINA our products on Amazon. So that’s something I am really proud of.
And on the other hand, I have been a scholar, and now I am on this other side, part of the team that is running Jangu International, the main SINA community. And I am privileged to have experienced both sides, as someone who was here, receiving the service, and now someone who is supporting others in going through the SINA model. So I am really privileged. I empathize. I look at the scholars when they come in here. I can relate to the positions where they are at—the fears, the struggles they are going through in life.
And really it’s exciting to watch someone arrive here when they don’t know what’s going to happen next in life, and through the mindset change, the sessions we hold, self-organization, participating in role-filling, delivering on projects and identifying a problem, doing customer discovery, prototyping, and eventually being able to come up with a product or service that they can sell and generate revenue from it. It’s a really fulfilling journey, and I am privileged to be able to see that.
Lisa: Thank you. It’s amazing to hear your story and how busy you’ve been with all these different startups and roles. And I want to talk a little bit about self-organization, because that’s something that listeners of this podcast are really interested in. And I guess you know, you could have created SINA and the curriculum of SINA in a traditional way, but it seems like self-organization is quite an important part of the journey in terms of empowering people and learning through doing, taking on roles. So I wonder if you could say something about the role that self-organization plays.
Etienne: Yeah, self-organization has been key for us since the beginning. In the first few days, we had some input from different people from within Uganda, but also internationals who came on board and left their fingerprints, and we kind of collectively quickly developed something that was clear. It needs to be community owned, community led, but also not telling people what to do, because that’s what people have been—from our target group, people from different disadvantaged, marginalized backgrounds—been used to all their lives, in school, in families and everywhere else.
And to help them become the change they want to see and create their own enterprise, you cannot tell someone, because the answers don’t exist yet. You have to create your own answers, right? So that then kind of became the framework as well that allows people to be able to take up roles and responsibilities.
And that’s how self-organization came into the picture, because then everyone is a follower and a leader at the same time, and we hold each other accountable. And people naturally grow, because someone takes up a very small role in the beginning, a few couple of roles in the beginning. If they do that well, and we call that “free responsibility”—the more responsibility someone takes, the more freedom he or she gains. Then the person is invited to bigger roles and bigger roles and bigger roles, and after maybe six months, is in charge of quite larger budgets and creates solutions to problems and does a lot of things that also a social entrepreneur will do, hands on.
So creating your own enterprise becomes then almost a logical next step, because you’re already leading part of the community and the program, from the finances to the trainings to the logistics—everything is basically in the hands of the students who we call scholars. And then creating your enterprise out of even sometimes a role is almost a logical next step. So that has really worked for us.
Lisa: Yeah, I wonder, Tonny, if you could share something about how it was for you to learn holacracy, for example. Was that very strange and challenging, or did you find it interesting, easy, you know, how has it been?
Tonny: Yeah, I think it has been a very interesting journey for me. There are a lot of misconceptions about it, which really make the adaptation hard for individuals, depending on where you’re coming from, especially from the hierarchy world, where we have grown up from schools where teachers are in charge of everything.
So coming here and being told that there is no boss, sorry, it’s even interesting. In Mpigi, people come and then ask “Where’s the office?” We only show them the reception, which also is our shop for the products that the entrepreneurs produce here. So it’s always hard. That’s the first challenge people from the other world hit when they arrive here.
So it has been an interesting journey. It takes time to really understand what self-organization is about, overcome the misconceptions about it. One which I really had from the very beginning was that now we are equal, now that there is no boss, we are equal, which is a notion I was holding because of where I come from, my background, but I have learned that it’s not about being equal, it is rather—how can everyone be powerful?
So once we overcome all those misconceptions, it really becomes easy to work on your heart and how you perceive it and really grow and evolve with the system. So I am glad to be on this journey and looking forward to how it continues to evolve.
Lisa: Yeah, like a million different follow-up questions I want to ask now. I guess one thing—so listeners of this podcast will mostly be familiar with holacracy, I think, and the idea of having circles and lead links and how you make decisions and roles and things like that. And when I was reading your handbook, I thought it was really interesting learning about all the capacities that scholars develop and that I guess you also develop in the kind of SINA team as well, like non-violent communication and how you deal with conflicts. So I’d love to hear a little bit about sort of this, the soft skills, the human skills that you found are really necessary to learn and work in a self-organized way.
Etienne: I think one learning over the years was also from failures that perhaps in the beginning, some enterprises, social enterprises coming up quickly and were quite successful for a short time and then collapsed also as quickly as they were successful, basically, and we realized the problem was the basically personal development of the founders, or the founding team.
Which also sometimes you can understand if someone comes really from marginalised background, never really had much in their life before, and now something is working out, and they hold on to it. And some even got potentially scared that someone else comes into the enterprise that knows more, that can do more than I, then they will steal my business, or they will take it away from me, right?
So that kind of led us to realize that we have to focus much more on personal development first, and that’s where we have something we call the confusion stage, which takes three months about to really focus on yourself. What is my purpose? Why am I here on this planet? How can I also transform, potentially, some of the difficult experiences I had in life, and maybe even make an enterprise out of that, because then I can find meaning, sometimes in my own suffering.
And that’s really one key component that we have seen that works really, really well to have this transformation that sometimes is almost like a caterpillar becoming a butterfly, like the caterpillars, the scholars that don’t potentially even have in their mind, that within them, they have the capability to transform and one day fly, and the circumstances maybe they’re living in has never really enabled that. And then they come to SINA, and this transformation happens. They find their own purpose, they align to it, and they start flying basically.
And from there, they align to find the roles that make sense to them, that they want to grow in, that is in line again, with their purpose, and everything else kind of falls into place afterwards, because social enterprise will also go in that direction. So it’s, I think, really key to align to yourself and your purpose and then build your life around that purpose.
Lisa: Yeah, thank you. I remember when I was watching you give a presentation on the Corporate Rebels Academy, at the end, you were describing one of the kind of latter stages of the program where scholars take on a role, well, they kind of run the canteen, basically. So it suddenly becomes very real. You know, you have a budget to manage. You have supplies to order and stuff.
So I really love this idea of learning by doing, because I think so many organizations that I speak to kind of approach it as self-organization theory, you know. And not everyone learns from reading a book. And you can only learn so much from reading a book. So I really like this approach of really trying things on and taking on roles and making it real and kind of solving real challenges as they happen. I think that’s something very impressive in the model.
I’m wondering, like for you, Tonny, when you were taking on roles, when, back when you were a scholar—you know, what kind of roles did you take on? Just to give listeners an idea, what kind of responsibilities did you have?
Tonny: I took over the SINA phone. This is where I receive and respond to phone calls for people who want to come and visit us, for those who send an email and they follow up with a call. There I learned a lot on how to handle and respond to people.
Another role I had was I was in charge of electricity, so I had to budget for electricity for the month, and also really track how it is being spent. Who is using what, inform people what we don’t have budget for, like, if someone wants to cook off our budget then we risk running without power at the end of the month. So I was filling the electricity role.
I also had another role, which was ambassador. Ambassador we give to scholars. So once we receive a visitor here, we show them around, tell the SINA story and how scholars from marginalized backgrounds become social entrepreneurs. So that’s another role I had.
I had another role where I did facilitation in holacracy, facilitation and secretary. I’ve been a circle lead for many circles. So I started with filling roles within the different sub-circles. And then from there, I was assigned the circle lead role. And I have been growing over time.
I think it’s—when scholars come, the first thing you have is like, maybe there are some roles I cannot fill because I am young, I am new in the organization. And then while you’re there, you hear another scholar has taken up a role, which you were saying, that one is not built for people like me. And then you’re like, hey, so if he can take it up, even me, I can take it up.
Lisa: Yeah, that’s interesting. I guess you’re learning, not only by taking on roles yourself, but also seeing other people take on roles and how they fill them as well.
Tonny: And also what you mentioned on the theory—for us, the goal is really to make someone a beginner. Once they are beginners, only practice can drive them to mastery. So we give input on what this whole holacracy says about how do you run a tactical meeting? How do you run a governance meeting? And then we encourage people to take on roles, and then there you learn language of spaces. You speak from role, address a role, raise process tensions, be able to hold arguments, because also that’s not something we are learning in school.
So those what happens in a tactical and governance meeting, how someone is able to sense a proposal and be able to present it and argue through it, it’s—you need that to run a social business, because you’ll be able to present, respond to questions, and even present your case to potential investors, or people interested to come into your social enterprise.
Lisa: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I’m curious to hear about, like, what are some of your biggest challenges at the moment in the SINA community? Like, what are some really juicy things that you struggle with, or big questions that you have that you don’t know how to solve yet.
Etienne: Maybe I would love to add one more thing in addition to what Tonny said. Also, from an organizational perspective, kind of what we have created is like a regenerative cycle, almost, that scholars come in as learners, as beneficiaries, then they start taking up roles, so they become team members, and then they go out as social entrepreneurs or with other opportunities. And that’s a continuous cycle, which one keeps the organizational running costs quite low, because people learn and contribute, and it’s a win-win situation, and doesn’t have a fixed time frame. Some people have gone through this within nine months and left with their own social enterprise. Others have stayed like Tonny for many years. And that also makes a lot of sense, because we need that stability.
But it also means that there’s always, at any given time, probably about 1/3 of members of the community who don’t understand self-organization yet at all, because they’re still quite new or getting into it. There’s maybe 1/3 who kind of start to understand it, and then there’s 1/3 who understand it quite well, but they’re always trying to transition out with their own enterprise. So that is always a continuous struggle for the organization, which sometimes has felt a little bit like a miracle over the years, that it has always worked out because someone is in charge of the trainings for the new group coming in, and then they’re doing well, and then the person leaves, and the next group, again, has a new trainer that is coordinating with everyone, and so on.
But for some reason, it has always worked out, and it empowers everyone to really be part of it. Ownership is high, and people feel that this is theirs. And you can feel that also when you come on the ground.
And maybe also hitting on your question of some of the challenges—that’s definitely been one, but it has somehow worked out. And overall, I think challenges over the years have transitioned quite a lot. I think in the earlier years, it was a lot more about, how do we foster the mindset for making this possible? Because scholars typically come from a very hierarchical society where—for some years, we asked people in the application forms—most people come from referrals, but we also have open online applications, and in them, we ask people like, what are your most important values in life? And by far the most common answer was obedience. Not so much that I think people really valued it to the highest, but maybe that’s what they thought others want to hear because the society values it.
It’s so much so coming with that obedient mindset into a structure where it’s kind of free responsible initially led a little bit to potentially sometimes some people just waiting and waiting and waiting to be told what to do, and no one came to tell them what to do. But then we became better at really selecting the right people that are these kind of caterpillars that are hungry, they want to grow, they want to make something out of their life. And now I think that problem is not so much there anymore.
We also had maybe some in the beginning who took the opposite extreme. Now no one is there to control me anymore, so I can do anything. I’m free, and sometimes that also led to harmful behaviors. But also, I think that one the power of community has put that in a healthy perspective now.
And now, maybe challenges have shifted a bit more over to how can this model, this framework, scale and replicate? Not so much by having one huge organization that has many branches, but again, more self-organized, like nature is replicating itself. You have a seed from a tree that has everything it needs to grow in another location. So we have been working more and more with teams that wanted to replicate the model and make that their social enterprise in refugee camps in Uganda or East Africa now as well—we have two communities in Kenya, one in Rwanda, two in Tanzania, two in Congo, one even in Cape Verde. And others are upcoming.
So new challenges emerged. How do we support these teams best to be great seeds that can adapt locally? How do we find the best practices from all the communities and collectively improve the model? And each community is locally owned, locally self-organized, locally run, but we are using the same model, so creating this kind of community of communities that has been still a bit of a challenge to make that a sense of belonging for everyone and collectively steering that model forward.
Lisa: And what about you, Tonny, what would you say are some of the biggest challenges at the moment?
Tonny: I think what Etienne has highlighted—the misconceptions. Like when people come and we tell them we are self-organized, they assume there is no structure, no management, no leadership. But self-organization has structures, processes and practices that inform how decisions are made, how roles are defined and distributed.
So until they really practice it over time, they start to understand how everything is interconnected and continuously evolves. Coming from a background where you have a lot of control, and then there is someone who is directing you—do this, now it’s time come for sessions, now it’s time go, go do your roles, go for a tactical meeting—to where we are saying, plan your day, use your time responsibly. And no one is going to come and say, go for the tactical meeting. Or what am I going to do next now? Rather, you have to plan that on your own.
That’s really hard for coming from a school background. My school background—they used to wake us up at 5am. We have to go for what they call morning preps, and then we return around 6:30, take a shower and leave for class, and there is always a teacher who is there to see that that’s actually happening.
So moving out of that to a place like SINA is hard, but over time, people start to learn that I am not doing this for anyone else, but I am doing it for myself because I have a vision. I have a goal, that is something I wanted to achieve in life, there is a change I want to see, and therefore I have to drive this forward myself.
Lisa: Yeah, I was just, just before you said that, Tonny, I was thinking—I wonder what it is then that helps people kind of shift. But that self-interest, then, is very strong, if that’s strong enough—my purpose, why I’m doing this, what this is connected to—and it sounds like some patience, too. It sounds to me like you give people time and space, because you’ve seen many different groups of scholars, I guess, go through this. So, you know, okay, this is part of the process. This is the confusion stage, right?
Etienne: Yeah. And we also had some scholars who really had almost the worst possible, imaginable experiences you can think of. And many of them are also caused by, especially in this part of the world, by people abusing power, struggle for money and prestige and all these things.
And so like, I have one quote that one of the refugees who came to SINA said, because he experienced, really, the worst you can imagine, because he came from South Sudan and had spent like two weeks in the bush, fleeing and coming to Uganda and all that. Because when South Sudan became independent, there was the struggle over who was leading the country and how, and so on. And he said, like, how I wish, for example, the government of South Sudan would be running on holacracy, which is a very interesting question.
And now he’s also one of the leaders of one of the SINA communities that is working with South Sudanese refugees. So maybe, step by step, in a few years, maybe that will even trickle back into South Sudan, and you never know where this can go to.
Tonny: And the other part, which I think Etienne touched on as well—the aspect of being a leader and a follower at the same time. Sometimes we receive scholars who enjoy being followers. I think that’s the obedience part of it. They just like to follow others. And then there are those who want to be at the front. They are leaders, and they are really strong personalities.
So through taking on roles, when it’s my role, it’s time I am taking lead, and when it’s another role that is at play, I become a follower. So it’s always hard for either side, even those who are like they always want to follow others. We challenge them to take up roles and take lead in those roles, and in the end, they get to experience what it means to lead and be in charge.
And if you are in charge of water, and you don’t plan how we are going to be supplied by water, that means there will be a time where the community will be without water. The same with electricity or food—if you don’t ensure that the food suppliers are supplying high quality and good quantities, that means there will be a time where the community goes without food.
So whenever people are in such positions, it supports them to really grow and shift from either being only a follower and become leaders, but also being comfortable at either side, understanding that we are all powerful and we are all working towards the same purpose.
Lisa: Yeah, and do you give each other feedback? You know, if you see that someone in a role is being like a real tyrant, and, you know, being too strong—do you give feedback about that? Or do they sort of learn by consequences?
Tonny: We do give each other feedback. Feedback is one of the tools we use here. So consequences come in, but feedback is really a great tool, and the community is really lively. They speak up. They express themselves. They will guide each other on where they see they could have done better, and that really helps, especially the peer to peer.
When a peer comes to you and is like, you are doing amazing work, and I really appreciate how you have been growing over time. And I believe if you improve in this aspect and this aspect, this will make you even a great leader. We always appreciate that. And everyone is really happy if a scholar does not receive feedback, that’s also feedback. So they are questioning, why am I not receiving feedback? Because they see everyone else is receiving feedback on their personal growth and professional growth.
Etienne: And there’s something that has been key also to the first confusion stage—we call it comfort zone challenges. So helping people to really understand learning happens outside of your comfort zone, and there’s some activities they have to do to really go out of their comfort zone and that helps them a lot.
And also for the new ones typically, because traditionally, people would see me more because, one, I’m from a different background, but also kind of the founder, so people from the traditional mindset would see me kind of on top of the hierarchy, which I’m not. But then it’s hard for the new ones to—I’m also older than them—speak to me and so on. So in that first few months, there’s always a few that come to me as part of this comfort zone challenge to really say, give me feedback. I want to get feedback. And that stays.
And also some keep on doing that for years, which is great, not just with me, but with anyone really, to have this mindset that feedback is not something that other people tell me what I do wrong, but feedback is a tool that helps me to grow. And so people start appreciating it and wanting it and seeing the benefit in it. And it’s also practice, and we have some sessions around that, really giving a gift. I can give you feedback, and my intention is to help you to grow, and maybe you have that gift that I’m giving you already, and that’s fine, or maybe it is something that really is helping you to grow. But feedback has been really a tool for empowerment.
Lisa: I love that. I guess—like on that note, I’m thinking, you know, both of you have been and are founders. And I find that when I interview founders on this podcast, usually there’s, there’s quite a learning journey there too, you know, and how to get the balance right between, you know, being the founder, having some kind of vision, or, you know, wanting to support something to flourish without being too much—so not kind of abdicating completely and at the same time letting go to a big extent. So I’d love to hear from both of you, you know, what has your personal transformation journey been like? What have some of the key lessons been for you, maybe painful lessons, and how do you see your role now in terms of, you know, leadership, I guess.
Etienne: One learning or one fear that I had a few times, and looking back, I always see that maybe that was unnecessary. And so I would encourage others maybe to also think about that—when you have a role that is maybe kind of an important role, or there’s others that have an important role, and maybe a circle, you don’t want them to step out of that role because you’re afraid that someone else will not do it as well, and maybe someone else will not do it as well. But in that case, so many examples where someone then went out of the role, and it’s almost like in a forest, maybe there’s a big standing tree that just stands there for a long time, and because of that tree standing there other trees around it never get the space to grow.
And maybe when that big tree falls, because it’s old and has maybe had its time, it really gives space and nourishing ground for the other trees. And maybe there’s something new emerging that even is more powerful and better than that old tree. And that has happened a few times where maybe I was worried, oh no, cannot get out of this role. How are things going to work? And then someone else took it over and maybe did it even much better, or in a different way that never was expected, that works even better than before.
And that kind of letting go potentially as a leader or as one of the key role fillers in the system, is not always easy to do, but just thinking of what else can emerge if that space is there, or maybe what is not emerging because there’s no space, is a key question to ask. And with our regenerative cycle, I think that has become much more within the system, that this shift of roles is always happening in a regular time frame. And sometimes it means that some things that actually work quite well somehow fade away. But it also means that new things emerge that collectively, I think, over the years, have made SINA so much better than anyone could have ever imagined, or anyone could have done on their own, or in a traditional hierarchy, where others could not bring themselves in and just drive things forward without needing permission, but you have the role, you have the autonomy. You do it, and we see if it works or it doesn’t.
Lisa: Yeah, there’s that saying, isn’t there that we shouldn’t be—we shouldn’t be like the ruler or the leader of anything for more than, I can’t remember what the time frame is, one or two years or something like that. So that there is a, I guess it also helps you avoid the danger of being corrupted by power, becoming power hungry. If there’s like kind of regeneration of who is filling a role. What about you, Tonny?
Tonny: Yeah, I hold, I hold the same view. I believe what makes a great leader—and also it’s really typical here that once, if someone leaves an organization or a leadership role, and then everything collapses where they have left, people are like, oh, we really lost a great leader. And I hold the view that, for me, that one is not a great leader, because if you are a great leader, you need to be able to recreate yourself in some way.
And self-organization offers really a great way to do that, because you have distributed authority, you have opportunity to allow others to grow, give them feedback, because leaders emerge. And if founders, leaders really arrive at that understanding that you are not one soldier, one army, there are so many others who hold the same purpose. They will make decisions. Yes, there will be times when they make great mistakes, but mistakes only make them better. They learn and continue to evolve, and there is an opportunity that they can even do better than you have done in that role.
So maybe also some of us fear that if we let go, if we give space for others to grow, they might even outshine us and that’s why we want to stay there, so that we don’t allow for that. But if we step out and allow others to grow and build on the vision, it’s even possible that on most of the examples we have here, that you always have something better than what was there even.
Lisa: Yeah, well said. Maybe I can ask, kind of looking to the future, what is your dream now for the next kind of phases of SINA? What would you like to see happen?
Etienne: We are currently having 12 SINA communities in five African countries, and we have seen already that there’s a trend for more interest in this framework model that we have. Three new teams are starting in the next few months, and we have already three more teams coming in June to start that replication journey.
How we define it, and so now I think we’re also working towards how can this even more be that we don’t have to scale an organization, but we scale the impact and maybe having enough well-skilled, experienced team members of all the different communities who could form a small team, for example, and go to a new location if they’re interested in having them, and work together with the local community from day one to have the first confusion stage, and from there, the self-organization starts, and out of the first scholars, the first participants, some will start becoming core role fillers and keep the system running. And then the team that kind of was there to start can pull out, and the community continues in that same spirit.
And that’s something that we’re working on towards achieving by the end of this year, whereby, for now, teams come to the main SINA community, spend about a year there to go through the model, and then go back to start. I think that system of almost like a flying replication team that can go work with the local community and then pull out while the team continues, has the potential for almost like an exponential growth, meaning that this can happen in 5, 10, or however many communities at the same time, if the interest is there.
And overall, I think, with one more SINA community just upcoming, it’s showing that maybe an educational system that typically is quite expensive for people to pay school fees for, and they don’t know what to use that afterwards, whereby the SINA model allows people, 50 to 100 people, to self-organize, be in charge of their own education, take up roles, practical implementation and growing, and in the end, coming out with their own enterprises and leaving the SINA community once the enterprise is actually self-sustaining at the fraction of a cost of potentially a school.
It’s interesting to see if many more SINA communities are upcoming, what potential shift that can create more on a systemic level. To see, is the traditional model of education, especially in Africa, still the right model, or are we on the way to create a global movement of self-organized spaces where people become the change they want to see, and are in charge of themselves and create their own future. And maybe that could be a better or complimentary way for people, instead of paying high school fees and not knowing what next.
Lisa: Yeah, maybe then to wrap up our conversation, and I could talk to you both for hours, but since we have to wrap up, what advice would you give to listeners who are interested in practicing self-organization themselves? What tips would you give them?
Etienne: One tip I would give for anyone new into the self-organization space is to basically don’t overthink it. We kind of never did that, and it has worked, nevertheless, in terms of we just created, in the beginning, our own kind of self-organized system, which kind of was similar to what holacracy is offering, but it wasn’t clearly defined in the process and in the Constitution and so on.
And then one day we came across holacracy, and then just by ourselves, introduced it and learned about it from all the resources available, but without any kind of formal training and going through it. And I think from there, it started working already well. And then we started to adjust it and add more elements to it, of community, well-being and people living together. How do you solve conflict? It’s not just about organizing the work, but also, how do you organize the collective?
So I think sometimes organizations adopting some kind of self-organization, hire expensive coaches, and then kind of over engineer it, and our experience has been more it can be an organic flow, and people can be also having the autonomy to really feel the ownership and make it theirs. It’s not just a system from the outside that now is going to be implemented, but we can create it also together.
Lisa: Thank you. And what about you, Tonny, what would your advice be to listeners?
Tonny: Just begin. Become beginners. Learn the basics and start playing. It’s like football. If someone comes and teaches all the rules of football—I play football, I have never held a rule book of football, but over the years, I have learned what to do, when I’m in an offside position, and even lately, they have made so many changes I don’t even know about but I am still able to play.
And as we play, we learn and continue improving. So I want to advise that let’s be beginners, be organized to solve the current tensions that we have in an organization, and you keep evolving. It’s a journey, and really understand that we are all going through it. I think acknowledging that we are all weak at that point and we need support to grow and evolve, and the more we practice processing tensions, the better we become at it.
So like swimming, if you spend all of your time watching videos of people swimming, that doesn’t mean you are as good as they are in the videos. If you actually go out and start learning how to swim through doing the actual swimming, practicing, making mistakes and then coaching each other, that’s the best way. That’s how we have done it.
And even the new scholars that come, we do an introductory session. We talk to them, but most of it is through experience, because then they hear the scholars who are here before them, processing tensions, speaking from role to role, raising tensions in the gatherings from a role. And they’re like, that language is interesting. We also want to learn that. They hold organic conversations. They run the canteen, and that gives them a time to really practice what they have learned in the introductory sessions, and over time, they can hold the same conversation we are holding here about self-organization because of practice.
Lisa: So thank you so much to Etienne and Tonny for that conversation. If you want to learn more about SINA, I’ve put a bunch of links in the episode show notes, and if nothing else, I definitely recommend checking out the SINA website, which is SocialInnovationAcademy.org, where you’ll find videos and information about the SINA communities and the social enterprises.
There’s a great video where you can see a kind of drone shot of one of the SINA communities—I think it might be Jangu International—and the buildings that are made of recycled plastic bottles, and it really kind of brings it to life. And if you’re like me, I think you would really enjoy diving into more information about the SINA model and the curriculum and all of the pieces that make it up. It’s really thoroughly designed—I loved learning more about it, and we couldn’t have covered all of that in this conversation. So if you want to learn more, then check out the links I’ve shared in the show notes.
Thank you, as always, for listening. If you have a moment, it would be really helpful for you to rate this episode, review it, subscribe if you haven’t already, share it with someone who you think would enjoy it. Subscribe to our YouTube channel, where we have many video versions of these conversations—there’s always a nice dimension when you see people, brings like a different quality to the conversation, I think—so if you haven’t checked out our YouTube channel, do have a look, and I hope you’ll tune in for another episode soon. Thank you and have a great week.
