It’s a rainy day and I keep hearing the same old story from different friends ☕. I try to be empathic with my friends and it starts to feel almost like a distant dream. Their story goes something like this…

I’m part of a team/organization/company and I want to improve our overall agility. I believe that more autonomy for teams and individuals is the way to go. My industry’s success stories I’m constantly hearing about are around empowerment, transparency, engagement and new people centric management techniques. I want to evolve towards that!

So I start thinking that I need to try something new. I start researching… holocracy, sociocracy, teal, liberating structures start popping up in my tabs but I soon find myself lost in a sea of opportunities. I’ve tried couple of different approaches before but failed. I start deeper research and stumble upon holocracy consultants, sociocracy change agents or teal agencies that promise to bring my company to the next level and magically remove missed deadlines, toxic meetings, 80-hours work weeks and to extinguish all burning fires. I haven’t signed up for this. I just want to start small and iterate my way out of this managerial rat race.

I’m listening and listening but then a thunder ⛈️ snaps me out of my trance. “Hey, you know what?” I say. “It’s very hard for me to comprehend what you’re going through right now because I’ve never experienced it! In Camplight we don’t have such problems because since day one we’re building a culture around transparency, freedom, autonomous and self-organized teams relying only on collaboration instead of delegation of work. Also we are not using any of the mentioned techniques.” Then I always get a blank stare and a follow up question to reveal the magic. My mind begins to wonder where to start from so I’m trying to collect my thoughts and funnel my knowledge:

Co-create empowerment

You cannot empower people. This implicitly means that there’s hierarchy and that you can disempower them. This creates doubt. That’s why you need to co-create a culture of fearless superheroes with growth mindset.

In your organization/department/team everybody has some motives for being there. Channeling that into day-to-day operations can fuel a wonderful way for thriving.

People are talking. Whether you like it or not the operational excellence is constantly being discussed in the corridors or chat rooms. The cool thing is that everybody has ideas on how to change things around. Clearing any obstacle to share those ideas is the first step of creating initiatives suitable for collaboration (conitiatives). People should feel psychological safety when they share their ambition to grow in the organization.

Making it easy for everybody to share ideas in one place can facilitate the process. In Camplight we call this place “initiatives pool”. We don’t have boundaries about what kind of initiatives we add there. Camplighters self-regulate and we have all kinds of initiatives like podcasts, organizing retreats, literature clubs, donations, creating sustainable villages, creating a co-working space, etc.

Conitiative flow

We know that ideas are cheap. That’s why ideas should evolve into something actionable. How you might ask? By helping people discuss, upvote, consult, converge, consent, advice their collective ideas. Clouds of interests will form organically. Destructive topics will be ignored. Disruptive potentials will spark interest. Teams will start to emerge and gather around actionable points. Unblocking people to collaborate and take ownership of their commitments is a great way for self-organization to develop.

Individuals will start making progress on a conitiative. Supporting that as a hospitable leader is very inspiring. Alignment of purpose and values will naturally siphon worthy conitiatives.

In Camplight we structure our conitiatives in lists (columns). In order to have better visibility we also use columns for marking the phase of a specific conitiative. We have phases like ‘Pool’, ‘Doing’, ‘Feedback’. The flow goes Pool <-> Doing <-> For feedback.

This is the core of the methodology 🎉 Of course, you can expand this simple thing and transform it into a powerful method for sustainability. We can further discuss how we’ve expanded it within Camplight. Some of the things that we can show and tell, built on top of “Conitiative” methodology, are fractal or long term conitiatives, roles, interlinked systems, emotional group theory, communication channels, host leadership-as-a-service, masterminds… Feel invited to improvise and share your ways of doing things!

Here’s a little present for getting through this story 🎁 Conitiative trello board template. Why we’re sharing this? In Camplight everything is a conitiative and we’ve been running like this for 7 years already :) Around our software development practices we’ve build 200+ projects with partners from around the world and witnessed how teams were able to structure their mindsets around conitiatives. We think it’s a fun way to start a self-organizing adventure.

Are you having troubles with sharing ideas in a decentralized way, turning them into something actionable and collaborating on their execution as a team? Then don’t expect that heavy-weight methodology like holocracy/sociocracy/liberating structures/etc. will be an easier journey. The essence of becoming self-organized is about handling entropy derived from human interactions and a collective of people needs to smooth that out first.

Have fun exploring your potential!

Thanks to all Camplighters for proofreading this, especially Todor Petrov, Ilko Kacharov, Naska Yankova, Marta Kostova and Tsvetan Tsvetanov. You’re amazing! This blog article was a conitiative as well so your feedback was very valuable.