An ongoing theme of EE Magazine is “little personal seed stories from the future of organizations.” Here is a description of the larger project this theme is contributing to. And here are some essential thoughts from that, to guide you:
A “bayechka” is the Russian word for an anecdote that also has the connotation of a “vignette with a soul.” EE is contributing to the collecting of first-person bayechkas from companies in Russia and the West, companies that look more like a living organism than a machine.
Those little stories are the harbingers of the future already present. There are people who not only share a common yearning for more soulful and more democratic workplaces, but are presently creating them. They are the pioneers, and our project is a form of “Action Research” to support and spread their experiences.
We’ll use a bilingual Russian-English website for collecting and swapping stories, and blowing them in the wind to fly off like seeds of a dandelion, to sprout new possibilities elsewhere.
That’s why we call the website and the research “Seeds.” The progenitor of the project, Philipp Guzenuk says, “a ‘seed’ is a unit of sense plus a unit of action. A short history of practice that conveys one thought and encourages someone to act in a certain way. Behind each seed there is a living person and a living company. We want to make their stories available to you, so we give links to the videos and the texts of the original interviews.”
The website for this project is http://seeds4future.com/about/. Enlivening Edge is a proud sponsor of this project, both contributing to, and spreading, the seeds.
The seed stories that you submit to EE, we’ll consider for our Magazine, and with your permission, we’ll send them for republication on the Seeds Russian-English website.