Reinventing Work: Handbook
Our handbook aims to guide all those involved in the Reinventing Work movement. It's written in pencil and will be ever-evolving. You can suggest edits and additions over on Slack.
About us ✏️
Our purpose
Reinventing Work's exists to provide a community & playground for #newwaysofworking
Our why
Reinventing Work recognises that the dominant ways humans work and organise themselves has brought about disengagement, inequality and unhappiness to billions.
We also recognise that this has driven dangerous exploitation of the natural world, and the resulting human threats of resource scarcity and climate change.
Humans have huge amounts of untapped energy and creativity, and by better organising and directing our work, we can overcome the great problems of our time.
Reinventing Work aims to realign our organisations with the needs of people and planet. We do this by empowering people to think boldly, embrace diversity, act intentionally and create collectively.
Our how / values
We value the following practices for improvement:
We work together
We collaborate, work transparently and share ideas freely. We do what we say we will, hold each other accountable, and learn together. We don't coerce people into decisions, tasks or teams.
We support each other
Often this means listening, trusting and speaking kindly to each other. Sometimes this means calling out bad behaviour. This always means helping each other. We don’t expect perfect, point fingers or punish.
We lead (when needed)
If we notice a problem or opportunity, we act. This means making decisions and leading experiments. Leadership is shared, and guided by our purpose. We don’t expect others to lead on issues that we notice.
We act autonomously
We seek projects that energise us, networking and collaborating freely. We choose when to use our intuition, and when to seek advice. We don’t wait to be told what to do.
We learn and grow
We are curious, seek many perspectives, and are open to feedback. We are committed to being better humans by regularly reflecting, adapting and evolving. We are not tied to any one way of doing things.
Things we’re doing right now
Reinventing Work is busy working on the following projects:
Planning and organising a Reinventing Work: Retreat / Global Gathering (check Slack)
Climate (on Zoom/Slack - #climate-emergency channel)
Exploring Mindset (on Zoom/Slack)
Growing and strengthening our movement (reach out to Mark to help)
Working on our governance (such as this doc)
No permission is needed to work on these projects, just your time and your energy. Ask on Slack to see who is working on a project that you are energised by and would like to help with.
Volunteer to get involved ✋
Roles you can play
If you’re energised by our purpose - to make work better, one place at a time - then welcome, no application necessary. We'd love your support in organising, growing, and strengthening the Reinventing Work movement, and you can volunteer to fulfil one or more of the following roles:
Reinventor - joins local/online meetups and/or contributes to our projects remotely.
Co-organiser - helps to organise meetups and bring reinventors together, either locally or online.
Catalyst - helps to grow and strengthen the global Reinventing Work movement.
Brand Steward - ensures projects and ideas looking for Reinventing Work brand alignment are considered thoroughly, are a great fit, and are mutually beneficial.
Collaboration tools we use
Our primary written communication tool is Slack. To collaborate we like Google Docs so that everyone can contribute. To store and organise our docs we have a shared Google Drive. To speak together we like Zoom, Google Hangouts, Whereby etc. When setting a time, remember we span multiple time zones! To organise meetups we like Meetup and some chapters use Eventbrite too.
How we decide stuff
Our purpose is our boss so decisions must seek to help to meet our purpose. Reinventing Work uses the advice process to make decisions. This means:
“Anyone can make any decision, so long as they are willing to take responsibility for the outcome, and they have first listened to input from anyone who will be affected, or who has relevant expertise. Notice it says listened to, not agreed with. If your relationships are good, this gives you most of the benefits of consensus, at a fraction of the cost.” Richard Bartlett, The Hum & Enspiral.
The following steps outline how decisions are taken using the advice process:
Take initiative — having noticed an issue or opportunity you have a responsibility to take initiative or, if you feel you are not best placed, to alert someone else. If a decision doesn’t affect other reinventors then you needn't seek advice and can decide and act in line with our purpose.
Gather input — prior to proposing a decision you may opt to gather input in order to hear perspectives on the issue or opportunity.
Propose your decision & seek advice - you should seek advice on your proposal from: i) those with expertise on the subject matter; ii) those who will be meaningfully affected by your decision. If you are unsure who they are then ask around.
Make and communicate your decision — having taken all advice into account, which we are all obliged to do, you can make your decision and inform those who will be affected by it.
If this method of decision-making is new to you head here to read a few pointers to help it to run smoothly.
Principles 📑
Profit & Promotion
Nobody gets paid for supporting Reinventing Work. Our generous Co-organisers, Catalysts and Reinventors volunteer their time to organise meetups and to grow and strengthen our movement because they are passionate about our purpose. We are very lucky to have them 🙏.
When it comes to making money, we’re happy that ‘new ways of working’ is a source of income for some. We are not okay with the Reinventing Work brand being used for profit or promotion (personal or business) without agreement from the Brand Stewards (Mark Eddleston and Mike Dunn). As a rule of thumb:
Profit: if money generated from Reinventing Work activity covers costs, that’s cool. If money goes in your pocket/your businesses pocket, then there would need to be something really, really great in it for us too (such as activity that reaches a huge audience or loads of new engagement with the movement, for example). See 'Brand & Collaboration' for info on how to enquire about this.
Promotion: if you are seeking to engage in Reinventing Work activity for the purpose of promoting yourself and/or your company, this is not cool.
We hope you understand our position. Co-founders Mark and Mike began building the Reinventing Work movement and brand in their own time for no fee. We have been supported enormously by many generous people who have given their time because they are equally passionate about our purpose. We are grateful to all - thank you. Collectively, it has taken thousands of hours and some money too. We do not ask for a return, only your help to make work better.
Reinventing Work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. If you need any clarification on this please reach out to Mark or Mike.
Brand & Collaboration
Do you have an idea for a mutually beneficial project or experiment you'd like to collaborate on? Awesome, we'd love to hear about it! To explore aligning your project with the Reinventing Work brand you'll need to fill out this form.
The purpose of the form is to ensure alignment with Reinventing Work's purpose, values, and principles on profit and promotion. Also for us to ask some questions to help us understand your idea, to assess risk, and to ensure really great work is aligned to Reinventing Work.
Your responses will be reviewed by Reinventing Work Brand Stewards. It is their role to ensure projects and ideas looking for Reinventing Work brand alignment are considered thoroughly, are a great fit, and are mutually beneficial. On issues relating to brand, the decision lies with the Brand Stewards.
Inclusion & Exclusion
If you notice that someone is having difficulty listening, speaking or behaving kindly to others, or if they are acting in a way that may undermine our purpose, values or principles, then it is your responsibility to feed back to that person and to let them know that their behaviour is causing a problem. Or, if you are not comfortable doing so, alerting another Reinventor and ensuring that a conversation takes place. If this does not resolve the problem then we might ask them to leave.
We recognise that giving feedback can be challenging, so here’s an article on what good feedback looks like.
Links 🔗
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