Webinar: The RCO (The Regenerative Business Transformation)

We completed the first module on work and business in the Regenerative Business Transformation series with a focused webinar on the RCO (Regenerative Community Organism). A toolbox for regenerative business.

The presentation included descriptions of the three main parts of the RCO: A sourcecode, the dialectic use of two organisational forms and the life cycle. The full webinar is attached below. For more information please visit rco.life

The parts of the RCO

Sourcecode

The sourcecode is the backbone of the RCO. The horizon towards which we are looking. This where you formulate your purpose, your key guiding principles and basic processes of governance that will be popularised throughout the entire organism. The Sourcecode is recommended to be kept short and readable. Free from legal jargon and focused on the essentials.

A strong recommendation is to formulate your purpose in the form a question. Questions are powerful because they draw us in, they invite further and deeper exploration and it allows you to imagine an answer for yourself. The question should be relevant for the whole RCO as well as the company or companies affiliated with the association. This is a nudge away from the certain, solution orientation of business towards the more inquisitive fundamental promise of the scientific (or artistic) method where the journey is the where the main share of the value lies.

Organisational dialectic

The RCO is modeled after life and a common trait in life is self balancing or recursive systems. This type of “opponent processing” is incorporated in many parts of life, like our own left and right hemisphere. Different purpose, different strengths, different operating logics. The RCO consist of a company - directed, project oriented, for profit and an association - purpose driven, relationally oriented, not for profit.

One could express the relationship as the company employing the association to keep it on track towards its purpose by offering it 10% of shares. These are preference shares that come with the right to appoint 50% of the board - this ensures a strong for-purpose orientation on the board - and a right to VETO a change of purpose in the company as well as any new founders should their terms or profile not match what is stated in the Sourcecode. This way the association becomes a co-creator with insight but not with too much power. The association itself will focus on the non-profit side (e.g. building the field, public opinion, events, awareness raising etc.) except its duties in terms of heading an election committee and being a good owner for the company.

These two entities are different, should be different and individuals can participate in both of them. When they do the are also invited to shift perspectives. Keeping both the directed operations and the purpose in one’s attention is an invitation to resource the potential of diversity and complexity to ultimately lead to better solutions. This is a crucial practice in the complex and perhaps increasingly chaotic world we are facing.

The life cycle

The final part is the life cycle. An organisation is a living system. It consist of a large part of living things. What if we started treating it as one? We propose that companies also sprout, mature, might need a succession, decay and die. That they have different needs in different parts of their life cycle. What if the legal form evolved with the company?

It is healthy for living things to be able to develop and evolve their focus. Initially it is likely healthy to grow. What the right size of the venture is for your particular company is between the association, the company founders and the investors. They negotiate when the company will stop growing and move into a complexification or maturation phase. In that phase the priorities are different. The RCO allows a differentiation of a company without having to grow the company in itself much larger. Instead building other entities, connected to the same question and affiliated (and funded) through the association might be a better way of doing it. Research shows that around 150-200 people is when a company’s governance systems begin costing more than the actual value creating operations themselves. What if you would build a string of 150-200 people companies that gradually cover different aspects or hypothesis of your purpose? Each very clear and efficient in their own operations. Each contributing to the value creation of the others and the ecosystem as a whole.

There might be need for companies to go through a succession depending on the nature of the business. Either founders have had enough or the nature of the business requires a different context. There is a possibility to sell the company.

The last step is the decay/death of the company and potentially of the entire RCO. We’ve proposed a mechanism for decomposing the company and redistributing the resources (financial and otherwise) back to the (eco-)system. Allowing for new expressions of the company’s purpose take form, more suited to the context/society as it looks like then.

Summation

The RCO is a toolbox not a solution per-see. It is a different way of thinking and organising companies as living systems. It invites conscious design also in the way we structure and grow companies. The structure is currently being adapted, implemented and will be tested in a number of companies in northern Europe. This is a high level intro to the main components of the RCO. If you’re curious for more, listen to the whole webinar (below), visit rco.life or connect.

This webinar was hosted by innrwrks