Going solo isn’t the answer. We need a business revolution

On re-awakening the collective imagination

Death for civilisations, tribes, nations, doesn't happen at the moment of battle.

It happens way before that : when they've lost their sense of shared purpose and excitement about their future. The unraveling is then only a matter of time.

It feels to me that businesses are at that juncture.

The business system has failed us, and no-one is excited about the world of employment anymore.

Solopreneurship and freelancing seem to be the trendy alternative to the typical 9-5. And it HAS been successful at ridding us of the shackles of corporate authority, bureaucracy and office politics while giving us a fair shot at making a decent, even great, living. 

Even the harcore business execs, deluded and burnt-out after years of climbing the corporate ladder, are going solo. Turns out the world of professional glory and shiny titles isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

But not everyone wants to become an IC (Individual Contributor) or a solopreneur turned digital nomad or a one-person media empire or whatever the cool guys are calling it nowadays. 

Even the entrepreneurs, the feisty visionary ones, seem more cautious and uncharacteristically down to earth. They want to get rid of the start-up playbook : the going big or going home mentality that fuelled so many entrepreneurs over the past few decades is slowly getting upended. To be replaced by what, no-one is entirely sure.

And then there's the rest of us : those who don’t want to go down the solo or entrepreneurial path. Who just want to wake up, go to work with a group of great people, find purpose while making the world better, and collect a paycheck.

It's brutal to wake up to the reality that work has contributed not to making the world better, but to enriching a small group of people at the expense of most, and that the collateral damage might lead us to extinction.

We're not entirely sure how we got here, but we seem to agree that 'here' isn't what we imagined it would be.  

So how do we make work better ?

What's missing now is a narrative for what comes next. We seem to have lost the capacity for collectively imagining a better future where business actually helps us thrive as humans.

Perhaps the culprit for this lack of imagination might be found in the myth of the ONE savior. The ONE entrepreneur who has a brainwave and manages to change the world. The ONE leader to emerge out of the ashes and lead us to salvation. 

And so we sit patiently, feeling powerless and useless, waiting to be saved. But the only place where saviours emerge out of a vacuum is in history books. Real life doesn't work that way. It never did.

The Enlightenment, which paved the way for radically new ways of seeing the world, didn't emerge from the heads of individual intellectuals sitting by themselves in their bourgeois apartments, plotting to take the world by storm with their controversial ideas.

The works of Hobbes,Voltaire, Descartes, Spinoza, Locke and the rest were distillations of a wider collective thought process already taking place over heated discussions between people of all walks of life in cafés, intellectual circles, and public and private groupings.

In other words, the Enlightenment was a collective undertaking. Some notable names did emerge, but the unsung heroes were perhaps even more active behind the scenes, weaving together the stories that would later be told.

The wheel has turned and we need another revolution. One that is able, yet again, to tap into our collective intelligence in a way that's current for our times.

The emergence of a new form of organisation

Picture this :

a group of capable individuals coming together to problem solve, ideas flying around.  

Someone with the right expertise takes the lead on the best idea and will relinquish that leadership once the  project is done to become a follower again.  

Leadership rises and falls organically, is entirely contextual, expertise and experience based. 

Everyone is both equal in each others' eyes and different in that they have different takes to bring to the table. 

Best practices are the result of small experimentations locally, and spread to other teams as successes are emulated. 

This is how self-organised businesses work. Solutions don't come from a small group of out of touch C-Suite executives, but from the people who are closer to and more knowledgeable about the problem. A project isn't killed because the manager didn't like it, but because the team didn't back it. Decisions are made in the interest of the collective, simply because the collective IS the one making decisions, not the few. This is how a future can emerge that serves all of us, not just the few.

It's not a perfect system. But it's in my eyes what's needed right now to unlock the innovation that business badly needs if it is to successfully revert course and get us on the right track.

This model exists. I have first-hand experience of working in one. There needs to be more of it out there in the world.

If even a tiny part of you agrees with what you’ve just read, or want to believe that such businesses can exist, then welcome to the party. 

Let's take the narrative back into our own hands and get excited again about the future of work.