Designing LIDN’s enabling environment

Our latest thinking on how to make sure the way LIDN operates is participatory, inclusive, volunteer driven and sustainable.

Simple mission, complex organisation design

LIDN’s mission is simple: to connect the London international development community to ideas, opportunities and each other for a strengthened, more impactful sector.

But we also have some key values that guide how we approach our work:

• Participation
• Inclusion
• Bridge-building
• Impact
• Constructive disruption
• Agility

And we are a volunteer-driven organisation, led by a group of core team members running meetups, events, our online presence, communication and our mentoring scheme with a network of 14k+.

So, whilst our mission is simple, achieving it whilst sticking to our values and being volunteer-led presents a number of problems that require some creative approaches to organisation. Problems such as….

• How can we be agile as an organisation whilst leveraging the participation of the thousands in our network to achieve impact?
• How to support volunteers to deliver, whilst providing the autonomy and freedom for our network to achieve the constructive disruption we value?

This year the Core Team has been working on LIDN’s strategy and organisational design going forward. This is a timely piece of work given the stage of LIDN’s evolution: the Founder, Jamie Pett, recently moved on from his role at LIDN in the Core Team to become a member of the network he started (congratulations Jamie!). This itself presents an additional challenge, often faced by start-up organisations: how to transition organisational processes and culture created by a single entrepreneur to more sustainable and organisation wide adoption?

We’ve drawn on a number of existing models from the volunteer-driven to develop an exciting draft blueprint for how LIDN could operate — what we are calling our ‘enabling environment’ — that we will be testing with the Core Team and the wider network over the coming months.

We should make clear that our ideas draw on lots of existing ideas by inspiring and creative individuals and organisations such as Enspiral, Holacracy and Chayn.

Participation and leadership

Our current thinking is that LIDN will have three levels of participation:

LIDN’s enabling environment: three levels of participation

1. The Core Team made up of those leading work on the Priority Areas, ‘Leaders’, and ‘Enablers’, who coordinate the infrastructure (inductions, modelling team culture, monthly catch ups and quarterly reviews; initiating planning).
2. Contributors to the activities taking place in each Priority Area. Contributors’ involvement is ‘plug and play’ on a quarterly basis, inspired by Chayn’s model. Contributors can, for example, attach themselves to a project or activity for a three month period, step back for the next quarter, and then rejoin the following quarter. and
3. Network Members who are part of the broader community joining events, meet-ups etc. They are simultaneously the participants of LIDN’s activities, as well as co-creators as potential Contributors to LIDN activities.

We anticipate this will allow for fluidity between levels of participation and emergence of new ideas, whilst achieving the stability needed for direction and impact.

Making decisions

Once decisions on strategy and objectives are in place for the year, Leaders of each Priority Area will have autonomy on how they deliver, unless it affects the work of another member of LIDN’s work. As the structure above has no single point of leadership, both strategic decisions and decisions affecting others require a process of democratic decision making.

We plan to adopt the ‘integrative decision making’ model used in Holacracy, which follows six stages:

1. A proposal is put forward
2. Anybody can ask clarifying questions
3. Each person gives their reaction to the proposal
4. The proposer can amend & clarify their proposal further
5. Objection: two questions are asked here: “Do you see any reasons why adopting this proposal would cause harm or move us backward?” And/or “Is it good enough for now, and safe enough to try?” Objections are captured without discussion; the proposal is adopted if none surface.
6. Integration: If an objection is raised, the Enabler facilitating the decision making tests the objection for validity, and lead a discussion to craft an amendment if valid.

Our rhythm for planning and reviewing

We also require a cycle on which to plan, so the Core Team, Contributors and Members of the network can identify when to participate, as well as how. We have broken this down in a fairly conventional way to keep it simple:

• Annual: LIDN’s priority areas are agreed on an annual basis in a meeting facilitated by the Core Team — Contributors and Network Members will be invited to attend.
• Quarterly: Each Core Team member outlines activities for the next three months. These are shared with the rest of the Core Team, Contributors, and Network Members/potential Contributors for them to join activities.
• Monthly: The Core Team reviews and updates on activities. These are open meetings, with Contributors and Network Members welcome to join.

Next steps

We will start testing these models and processes out over the coming months — hopefully we will be able to update on our learning. In the meantime, we would love to hear your thoughts on everything above, or if you have any other ideas that you think we should know about.

written by Ben Webster, member of the LIDN core team