[Music] [Applause] when you hear the term the Commons what comes to mind for some it's water forests seeds for other it's the Internet Wikipedia open source code for others its knowledge customs the happy birthdays on the thing is when we talk about Commons we need to talk about community community is what manages a Commons a commons is managed is a resource that's managed by a community for collective well-being for now and into the future without a community there is no Commons so how does this relate to business what's the connection so where I work the
Commons is a foundational principle and we believe that should be true for all businesses and I know that's an abstract concept so what I'm gonna do right now is I'm gonna share three very concrete ways that a business can function as a Commons the first compensation as conversation so where I work we don't have fixed salaries instead what we do is we negotiate financial agreements amongst colleagues on a project-by-project basis how does that work people say I'll give you a concrete example so the other day a new contract came in for a strategic planning process
on that project I was working with a colleague of mine we know the budget one part goes to the company and one cart part goes to the people who are working on it so we need to figure out how to divide that money and agree on it in a way that feels fair for everybody it's always a different context in that case he sent me an email saying I don't want anything for the planning process you took care of that let's talk about the report later but for the workshop here's my proposal this is the
amount that I think would be fair based on this logic and that idea I respond okay for the for your logic okay for the reasoning I'm happy with it all I would however like one adjustment on your calculation for the workshops based on this fact and that fact he responds oops I completely forgot about that it's good for me for us it's just another day just another agreement my annual salary is the sum of all the financial agreements I make in all the projects I work on all year is that fair people ask me are
you fairly played with this matter absolutely I say it doesn't mean it's easy it takes a long while to start figuring out how to work like this some people overestimate their value and other people underestimate their value we need to learn to start talking about our own value owning it explaining it to others and challenging other people about their value what I do know is that since we've been functioning like this I am currently making the most fairest salary I've made in my entire career self-determined salaries are not new here's three companies who work with
self-determined salaries around the world we have Morningstar as a food processor company and it works in the food processing industry it's the biggest tomato processing plant in United States works with self-determined salaries we have Semco which is in the works in the financial industry in Brazil and fabbi produces automobile parts in France what's interesting about all these three companies is they've been working with self-determined salaries for decades with self-determined salaries people are less demanding and more collectively caring in fact what we're seeing is that by functioning with open salaries employees are managing a company's finances
as a Commons we social practices of reciprocity of fairness and collective well-being in fact there there are huge advantages to functioning with self-determined salaries we're getting data on the positive impact on employee attraction employee retention and employee engagement fantastic the second way a company can function as a Commons is collective decision-making so where I work you can guess the employees manage the company anyone can change the way the organization functions and its rules we have a practical decision-making process that helps us it's both collective and efficient it goes a little bit like this so I
wanted to update the onboarding process I work with some colleagues and we map out a new onboarding process I take it to a company meeting as a proposal at that meeting people ask questions about the proposal does it include this when is this gonna start what about this my job is to answer from a factual basis either I know the answer and I answer it or I don't and I say not specified no justifications no explanations just the facts from there everybody shares what they're thinking about this proposal and I listen very carefully because once
everybody's finished reacting to the proposal I will have an opportunity to update and improve the proposal everybody knows it won't be perfect it can't be but what's interesting is every perspective in the room has been heard we then move on after I update it we move on to the objection round now the objection round what that's about is this idea is if the proposal was enacted could it bring harm to the company so it's not a personal opinion has to do with collective one of my colleagues raises an objection it's a concern for the company
not a personal opinion and so it's accepted as valid and integrated and the proposal is iterated forward with this this notion integrated from there no further objections and we have a new proposal that's adopted good enough for now safe enough to try is what we say so this kind of decision-making is going on a lot it's part of a whole movement called self management maybe some of you have heard of it there's a post the internet shoe retailer in the USA 1,500 employees functions completely horizontally there's in public administration the EU agency for small and
medium enterprises in Brussels there's an entire division that's functioning in self managing ways with shared decision-making and there's Bert SOG which is a Dutch company with 14,000 nurses supported with a small administrative staff of 50 people currently spreading to USA UK etc what we're starting to learn is that all this management has a price to it in fact we even have some data from Garry Hummel the management expert he's put a price on it he says that each and every year in the USA alone excess management is costs three trillion dollars everything changes when we
stop trying to manage each other and we start together holding an organization people need to create the rules by which they are governed Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize for economics in 2009 her life's work was dedicated to revealing eight design principles for sustainable Commons one of those principles relates to this she calls it collective participation in decision-making it's critical and now the third way an organization can function as a Commons not everything needs to be transactional so where I work we sell services that help companies become more participatory and co-creative we give them away
entirely for free also deliberately so one of the ways we give them away for it but for free is to have open company meetings what that means is anybody can join a company meeting be you a client view the competition maybe you're part of the wider international community that works in our field maybe you're a researcher wanting to understand how this kind of organizational culture works maybe you're somebody curious to know if you're a match for the company whatever it is you're welcome and on our end we promise to make sure that the meeting is
a meeting about our work and to carry on as usual how does that work people say so let me give you an example of a recent meeting so the meeting started and we had a brainstorm session on positioning of a new product the guests they partake in the in that and it was almost as if we had an impromptu feedback session on it next we moved into branding of the company one of the employees had prepared these little index cards with new terms that all of us should be using to talk about the company everybody
particular and we had huge insights from our guests third after that we moved into having a sharing of the end of a project and we wanted to have the learning spread out into the organization by having guests we also learned the value of this information beyond our organization and into the community and finally we finished our meeting by having a moment where everybody shared some projects that they were working on that were inspiring for them you can imagine the value when we're learning not only intern in the organization what's inspiring people but we're hearing from
outside the organization what's inspiring them it's like we have an ear to the ground the premises there's value in having different expertise domains and disciplines in the room it increases the collective intelligence that's contributing to the company we have more innovation more strategy more creativity more information we're not the only ones been sharing sharing goes on all over open source developers have been sharing for a long time they manage their code as a Commons and build business models on top of it Drupal is but one example the recent update was done by a community of
4,000 people nobody's trying to monetize the platform itself or make it propriety or enclose it everybody is maintaining it as a commons we can also share our ownership and our profits and I've shown stocks he is a Canadian company that sells stock images and stock videos and they share their profits back to the content producers themselves and the final one I'd like to share is this new idea called platform cooperativism it is socially responsible business using digital technology in the example I've named here is fair B&B which is offering an alternative to extractive business by
offering generative business models in this case they take the hosts the guests and the neighbors work with the municipalities to establish the rules that will be used for this tourism local tourism in the local municipality and they will also figure out together how the profits will be re-injected into the local community that's sharing what becomes possible if we start radically sharing like this we know the planet is finite we know the situations we're facing are so complex it seems we can't afford now to be hoarding our ideas our profits our impact to ourselves in fact
we can say that the old employee-employer system and the traditional organizational models are no longer working we have the signals according to Gallup across the planet 85 percent of workers are not engaged in their work it's like we're slowly killing ourselves the extractive business models are killing the planet it's the end of an era it's the end of an era where somebody have other some other ofor Authority gets to determine the value of my work it's the end of a paradigm a vertical decision-making that excludes the person who's affected by the rules it's the end
of an era of hoarding ideas and profit and impact to ourselves the future of business it will be purpose tourism driven it will be triple bottle bottom line people planet and profit the future of business will be commoning we can start practicing now because this is not fiction we can start practicing social practices of fairness we can start practicing Co governing and participatory decisions we can start practicing contributing beyond our organizations because if we all care about the future collectively the future is in business as Commons thank you [Music] you
