A Living Organization
We spend a lot of time thinking about why Santropol Roulant feels so alive and engaging. What is it that gives an organization such a sense of vitality? What is it that makes the Roulant feel like such an adventure? There is no final answer to such a question, but here are a few of our ideas.
The Organization is for Everyone
A living organization is one in which everyone gives and everyone receives. No one is merely instrumental. No one is simply "serving" someone else. Volunteers, staff, and clients all contribute to the organization and are enriched by it. We don't look for ways to simply balance competing interests. We look for ways to integrate them, so a meaningful experience for a client becomes a meaningful experience for a volunteer or staff member - and vice-versa.
Purpose and Practice Need to be Coherent
No policy, program or initiative exists independently of the people who enact it. An organization's purpose can only come to life via the daily encounters and relationships that make up the organization. At the Roulant, our deep purpose is to connect and to nourish. We try to express this purpose not just in how we serve our members, but in how we all relate to each other. Similarly, an environmental organization whose purpose was to engender a sustainable, balanced, ecology, might also think about how to generate such a human ecology within its own organization.
People and Roles Are Not the Same Thing
Roles can be useful things, but we try never to confuse the role with the person. Armel is Armel before he is the kitchen manager. And he does not exist simply for Santropol Roulant. It is probably truer to say that Santropol Roulant exists for him. For an organization to feel alive, people need to be treated as whole people, not simply a collection of useful skills. This involves making room for interests and eccentricities that might not seem to fit directly into the organization's role structure. One result of this approach is that roles become more fluid, adapting themselves to the specific people who inhabit them rather than the reverse.
Boundaries Are for Crossing
We try not to take organizational boundaries too seriously. Meetings and other kinds of conversation tend to be open. Participation in tasks, activities, and projects is largely self-defining. Anyone is welcome to become a member of the Roulant, and what that membership means - the nature of the work the person will do and how they will do it - is aligned with the member's interests, passions, and personality.
Grow Where There is Energy for Growth
We tend not to start new projects based on strategic plans. Many of our most interesting and fruitful initiatives start simply because a group of people get excited about something. If the excitement and energy spread, the initiative springs to life. If not, we don't force it, no matter how strategic and appropriate the idea might be on the surface. Many great ideas may lie dormant until they gather enough energy to thrive. Many more are allowed simply to fade away. Discovering where the energy is in the organization is not as simple as it sounds, of course. However we cultivate a culture of open dialogue that gives rise to a kind of collective, organizational intuition about important challenges and opportunities.
A living organization must be nurtured and attended to. We pay attention to these themes, talk about them, change our practices, and experiment with new ways of working together. This openness and collaborative spirit is what brings our organization to life.
Our Living Labs project is an attempt to develop our understanding of organizational engagement even further and to share that understanding with other organizations. Click on "Living Labs" to get further detail on the project.
Click here to read The Southern Wall, a PDF document that explores our organizational culture in further detail. Hard copies are available in our office.
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