Meet Enspiral, with the inspiring purpose of “More people working on stuff that matters”. This autumn I finally got to meet Joshua Vial from Enspiral when he and his colleague Susan Basterfield visited Stockholm for keynoting at the Agile People Sweden Conference. This was the first time Joshua visited us but Susan, I had already had the privilege to get to know last year when we hosted a workshop at Crisp on the Enspiral European tour.
After the conference, I had a chance to sit down with Joshua and Susan to chat about Enspiral, social entrepreneurship, doing things that matters and the future of work. As we sat down and chatted and realized that we are a tribe of changemakers separated at birth, or at very least sharing latent strands of DNA. How else can you explain the exquisite similarities of two entrepreneurial collectives from the polar opposites of the planet? Crisp and Enspiral are like long-lost cousins. We are both two companies with a belief that there are better ways of organizing and leading work than the traditional way.
These new ways are based on principles of self-management, agility, openness, and participation. We believe organizations like this are more rewarding and purposeful for the people working in them. This will lead to that people’s potential are freed up to do more good and impactful things in the world.
For example, we Crisp and Enspiral do a lot of work that is aimed at making the world a better place. One initiative at Crisp is, for example, the Climat Crisplet which is an open community where we collaborate and share ideas on how we can all contribute to reducing global warming. Enspiral has several ventures which are directed to have a positive impact. One of the Enspiral ventures is Coobudget aimed at collaborative budgeting. I think this will be really interesting for companies looking into creating more participation. Another example is Loomio used for collaborative decision making.
We also realized we have many more things in common. We are both very community oriented. Both internal as well external. At Crisp we are very active in contributing and sharing materials, books, blogs, videos, events, and conferences. Many of the practices we have developed are the same for Crisp and Enspiral but some are still different. One similarity is that a Crisp, we have documented our inner ways of working in our DNA. And Enspiral has their published in their Handbook. Both organizations want to share and inspire others to set-up similar organizations.
It was great to sit down to share and learn from each other. We recorded our chat and you can watch it below (9 min).
If you want to learn more about the story of Enspiral and Joshua’s view on The Future of Work, I can really recommend Joshua’s keynote at last years Agile People Sweden Conference (45 min)
And in conjunction with the conference, Agile People also had an extra community event in collaboration with Stockholm Engineering Leadership, which we called “Noble Minds” where Joshua was accompanied by Susan Basterfield, Doug Kirkpatrick, Bonnitta Roy and James Priest. In short, it was all the keynote speakers from the conference sharing perspectives on The Future of Work. You can watch the full event here, Noble Minds on The Future of Work (2 hours)This year’s Agile People Sweden conference will be October 25-26. It will be packed with the latest in Agile organizations, leadership, and HR. Doug Kirkpatrick and Dave Snowden are already signed up as keynote speakers. If you are interested to know more you can go to AgilePeopleSweden.com
