By George Pór for Enlivening Edge Magazine
Do you know what a “bayechka” is? It’s an endearing Russian word for an anecdote that also has the connotation of a “vignette with a soul.” I’m on the editorial team of collecting first-person bayechkas from companies in Russia and the West, companies that look more like a living organism than a machine.
I want to share with you why I am so thrilled by this project, at several levels. I see in those little 300-500-word stories the harbingers of the future already present. To me, it’s also exciting to know that while the political climate between Russia and the West is growing increasingly acrimonious, there are people on both sides of the fence 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 site is not live yet, but will be soon, and if you express your interest in learning about it, in the comments section below, you will be among the first to get its URL. Enlivening Edge is a proud sponsor of this project, both contributing to, and spreading, the seeds. If you would like to write a seed story, here are some possible (and optional) tips, and where to send your story.
Enlivening Edge Magazine announced the Russian edition of the Reinventing Organizations book that came out under the title “Discovering the Organization of the Future”, two years ago, and we shared Frederic Laloux’s story of how it came into being. Since then, the Teal movement in Russia went from strength to strength and, as of today, their community on Facebook of which Philipp is the admin, is 2457-strong.
Philipp will co-lead a workshop about this project, in the Teal Organizations track of IEC 2018 where
you will have a chance to directly experience the power of small stories from the future-in-the-present, and through them find new, inspiring ideas and connections.
Watch this 4-minute video to find out what Philipp has to say about all this:
As a participant in the workshop, you will learn the main practical difficulties, needs and questions that companies exploring future ways of organizing face in Russia, and reflect on how this relates to the experience in different countries.
You will use story cards, become familiar with the multi-log advice process, and work with real challenges that companies are facing on their Teal journey. You will work in dynamic pairs to distill the practical meaning and explore the use of these methods in your own work context. You will discover what ideas, initiatives and partnerships want to happen, once we tune into this “field of bayechkas” together.
To learn more about the whole Teal Organizations track of IEC 2018 that will take place in Hungary (May 22-27, 2018), visit its site. Clicking on the “Register” button of its upper right corner, you’ll get to page where you can select your ticket for the conference.
After that, on the actual registration page please be sure to mark that you have been invited by Enlivening Edge, to help create the best possible experience of the track that includes this workshop.
George Pór is an evolutionary thinker and a strategic learning partner to visionary leaders in business, government, and civil society. He is the originator of Enlivening Edge, and has been publishing the Blog of Collective Intelligence since 2003. A select list of his articles and book chapters on the fields of collective intelligence, organizational and social renewal can be found here. More about George’s work on the enlivening edge of planetary transformation is here.
I’d like to learn more!
Here is the website now live on which the stories will be found. http://seeds4future.com/about/
Here’s the page on which you can actually write and share your story of an organization from the future showing up now as a seed! http://seeds4future.com/send-a-seed/