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<aside> 💌 *A boring revolution in governance. A slow shift from one-to-one to many-to-many, a behind the scenes crafting of rules that transform what we can make. Relationships, agreements, contracts, and gifts towards shared intentions - time, money, attention, care.
Humanity in conflict, love in expulsion, art in the rules, boundaries and consent that uphold life and our space for dignity. Emotional labour, contractual terms, difficult conversations, new pictures of the world. A possibility to move together within complexity, in the face of global entangled layered crises, through hope, grit and beautiful admin.*
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Imagine your family have agreed that what they all need is a group family holiday. You need to decide where to go, the exact dates, where to stay and get group buy-in for a hundred other significant and micro choices. Your aunty wants a summer holiday in Ibiza, your cousin wants a canal boat in Bath and your nana hates holidays and isn’t afraid to tell anyone who will listen. You also need to be conscious that not everyone has as much disposable income, some family members have children, and one has recently had health challenges. Plus there are many many other considerations to take into account, many of which you don’t even know about. Don’t forget, the only ‘tool’ available to you is WhatsApp in which dozens of messages get posted daily, none of which seem to be particularly helpful for getting you all to a wonderful holiday.
This scenario is broadly what governance stewards face at scale, and with higher stakes at play - bringing different people together with different views, backgrounds, goals and ideas to achieve important things, and differing ideas on how to do so. The challenge is made significantly more difficult when multiple organisations want to come together, especially where they are seeking to create or bring something new into the world. It becomes harder still when the tools, processes and rules which dictate our ways of working together are not really fit for this purpose and cause more frustration than function.
Despite all of the challenges, we know that the complexity of the contexts we are in means that the easy way out (getting heads down in our siloes) won’t create the approaches that we need; and we also know this can be a life-giving, connecting, deeply human way to govern together when done well. Meaningful and impactful collaborative initiatives are trying to achieve many great things all over the world (and some are very much succeeding) - people and organisations persist to form groups, alliances, partnerships, associations and collaborative spaces - the challenges they face are much like trying to organise the family holiday, only on a bigger and more complex scale. Crafts of how to do it are, through practice, being revealed.
This has been the space of enquiry in the Beyond the Rules initiative over the last 3 years. We have increasingly focused on what we refer to as ‘many to many’ governance: multiple actors contributing their attention and time toward intentions, in collaboration with multiple actors contributing money and skills to the same - in a shared space of governance together.
[coming soon]