By Ants Cabraal for Enlivening Edge Magazine
Enspiral is a global community of entrepreneurs, systems thinkers and impact-driven professionals that has been growing quietly and slowly from Wellington, New Zealand, since 2010.
After 8 years of building community, launching numerous projects, partnerships, products, and companies, the community is co-authoring their first book.
Their pre-sales crowdfunding campaign is live and the project promises to pull together a valuable resource from 11 co-authors who have spent several years establishing themselves and innovating around the future of work and organisational design.
Many of the core principles and processes of Enspiral will be resonant with people familiar with Teal, Holacracy, co-design, and the open source and peer to peer movements.
They have been ‘living the theory’, and this book promises to reflect back on several startup journeys and share practical processes for launching, failing, growing, changing, and building purpose-driven companies employing new ways of organising.
It will include short essays from each author, acting as deeper reflections about how and why Enspiral got started, giving some of the initial inspirations, and describing what actually happened and how they have continued to grow and change over the years.
There will also be practical guides, processes, rants, and collective reflections about growing leadership, community without hierarchy, collaborative finance, shared decision-making and about how we built a culture of peer support and self-development in service of designing livelihoods around positive impact and purpose.
The Enspiral mission hasn’t changed.
“to support more people to spend their lives working on stuff that matters.”
As we all participate so that this growing, global movement of purpose-driven entrepreneurship, systems-change activism, and new ways of building global socio-economic community builds, the Enspiral community are committed to continue to serve this work. The book project is part of this service.
“We want to level up how we share our learnings and raise the potential impact of this type of thinking in the world. As with so much of our work, it’s learn by doing, and start by starting, so that’s what we’re doing here.” say Anthony Cabraal, one of the producing authors of the book and a long-time Enspiral member.
The team describe the project as a “creative field guide for organizations who want to embrace the future of working together.”
They suggest if you’re interested in these kinds of questions, then you’ll enjoy this book….
- How do you support people to bring their best selves to their work?
- What does the future of working together actually look like?
- How can your business transform your market, your industry, the world?
- What is the magic that actually keeps a high-functioning team thriving?
- How do you meaningfully include people in decision-making?
- How do you use collaborative financing to spur innovation?
- How do you safely share ownership to maximise everyone’s benefit?
- How do you build a genuinely collective vision for an organization?
- What are the best legal and financial structures to adopt to do this work?
Whether you are a freelancer, running a team of 10 people, a company of 100 people, or an organisation of 10,000 people…. if you’re interested in exploring the edges of the emerging future of work, then supporting the book’s crowdfunding will help turn some hard-won learning into a resource for people all over the world—especially effective before July 10!
You can support the campaign here: https://www.pledgeme.co.nz/projects/5665-better-work-together-the-book
Check out this video about Better Work Together – The Book
Better Work Together – The Book from NatalieSisson on Vimeo.
Ants Cabraal is a creative producer, writer and business owner who has helped many Enspiral businesses start and grow since 2012. He serves as a director and advisor to several startups, and loves to get new ideas off the ground – including driving the creation of this book. He is based between Wellington New Zealand, and Melbourne, Australia. Contact him through enspiral.com.
