What is this?
This site is open-source and describes how Organa works and why. Think of it as our DNA, or, our manifesto.
The way we work and why, is so important to us that we wanted to describe it in detail. In the process, we discovered Crisp, an extraordinary company in Sweden. The content here comes largely from Crisp documenting the way they work so please see below for our acknowledgement of them.
Organa is a home for experts who provide a range of services such as coaching, facilitation, training and advising.
- Because none of us are employed by Organa, we call ourselves Members.
- We have no managers, no admin, not even a CEO. Instead we rely on self-organisation and transparency. Almost everything is bottom-up, and anyone can drive any decision.
- Members are 100% autonomous. They can do whatever they want (as long as they don’t hurt the brand or our Home), and work as much or as little as they want, for who they want.
- Organa’s main purpose is to enable Members to be happy and the Happiness Index is our driving metric. Solid revenue and happy clients are a side effect, not a goal.
- Organa doesn’t earn money from its Members. It is, in practice, a non-profit company (although not legally so). Members keep most of what they earn. Gold in, gold out for those that work at Organa.
- Our ownership model is designed to keep our stock financially worthless. There is no incentive to “cash in”. The company isn’t worth anything, financially speaking.
People are intrigued when we talk about this and are curious as to how it works in practice.
Between what we’ve learned from Crisp and our amazing mates at Nomad8 in New Zealand, we’ve converged on a model that works well for us. And that’s basically the sweet spot between being an independent adviser and being an employee.
Want to start a similar org? See How to clone the Organa DNA. Or if you like, go back to the source and clone the Crisp DNA.
Why open-source the Organa DNA?
- To make the world a better place :) The model has helped us be happy and make a positive impact in the world, and publishing it may help others do the same.
- Open-sourcing it is a fun social experiment, we’re curious about what’s going to happen :)
- Open-sourcing suits our values around sharing and power. It makes us happy to share this.
- By making our model public, we’re more likely to keep it up-to-date and improve it as we learn.
- Putting it on GitHub makes it easier for others to clone and evolve the model, and in turn, we can learn from them.
Acknowledgements
What’s described on the following pages are values we’ve held for a long-time; they just didn’t have anywhere to be expressed until Organa came along.
What we found when we sat down to articulate and express who we are, how we work, how we want to be, and how we want our company to be, we realised there are others out there who feel the same way.
Spending time with our mates Nomad8 in New Zealand, we realised they run the way we want to. We’ve had lots of drinks and dinners with these folk and they’ve been super helpful. We also learned that they learned off their friends, Crisp, in Sweden.
When we poured over the Crisp website we came across their DNA, a detailed expression of who they are. And they encourage others who are interested, to copy their content from Github. So we did :)
Whilst much of it has been morphed into our language, Crisp have done the heavy work to document it.
So we’d like to thank them both from deep within our hearts because a lot of what we say here, is what they say and think too.