Contributing to the Greater Good

I am a Happy Melly Funder. Many years ago…2010 I think…I attended a Management 3.0 workshop that was facilitated by Jurgen Appelo and decided to become a facilitator myself. Since I joined pretty early, I’ve had the benefit of watching a global, networked business grow right out of Jurgen’s head. Ouch, must have been painful!

Seriously though, it was a treat to watch new facilitators come onboard, to see the growing pains, and moving from Google Drive, to Dropbox, to Google Groups, to other tools when it was necessary. Agile Management seems to be getting more popular as we move into the early majority wave of applying Agile to management, but Management 3.0, in my opinion, is the only knowledge base that gets it right. ‘Better management with fewer managers‘ is the line you’ve probably read or heard Jurgen say in all the M30 videos. Other ‘Agile Management‘ programs, and training seem to focus on reinforcing the status quo by focusing on helping managers cope with working in an Agile organization. Sorry, not all organizations need managers and not all teams in all organizations need managers.

Then, Happy Melly (HM) was born with the purpose of helping people be happier at work and I jumped at the chance to be part of it. My book helped move Happy Melly Express forward and I benefited from the HM community which now has Learning 3.0, Collaboration Superpowers, ImprovAgility, and Kudo Box under its umbrella.

Even better is the Slack community where over 300 HM funders, members, brand owners and facilitators all over the world collaborate daily.

This is starting to sound like a HM commercial so I suppose I’ll get to the point.

I should be finishing my preparation for the workshops I’m running next week but as I was preparing, I started pouring through the new Management 3.0 content, and coming up with new exercises, while leveraging all the content from the HM ecosystem. I get to combine my stuff with all the other HM brands to help people become aware of just how much great stuff HM has to offer.

If M30 is missing something that is specifically related to distributed teams, no problem, Collaboration Superpowers has it covered. If the people in the workshop want more about creating a learning organization, no problem, I’ll reach into the Learning 3.0 bucket.

Simply stated, being part of this ecosystem has been fantastic! I have 15 Lean Change Management facilitators and huge network of people I can reach out to. The best part is, as an introvert, I can work by myself when I feel like it, or I can collaborate with others. Either way, I personal learn and gain support from the network and I can help others advance their own brands or learning.

We have enough structure to operate effectively, although there is more co-ordination needed now that there are many more people in the network, but it’s all growing with a common purpose: Helping people be happier at work.

More-so, we’re proving that a different organizational structure is possible, gulp, at scale. I despise that ‘at scale’ term because ‘scale’ is nothing more than having lots of people who are grown up enough to self-organize around a common purpose. We’re also proving an organization can run like a city where teams or departments can buy services from each other or exchange ‘goods’ (by that I mean software or services).

The funny thing is, Happy Melly has employees. I’m not ‘an official’ employee, I’m just a funder, but the feeling of having these connections is much stronger than the bureaucratic bullshit I’ve experienced while actually being a “valued employee in traditional” organization.

Culture follows structure, and I think we’ve setup the right structure that lets those who are intrinsically motivated by our purpose to flourish and those who don’t, well, they just don’t contribute and that’s the best outcome an organization can hope for.