No easy thing to define, but something we have battled and debated over for some time. After running an initial fact-finding workshop between ourselves in Finsbury Park (beer and sun included), we got in Pete and Lasy from Conscious Business People to run a workshop and help us get to the bottom of it.
What did we come up with?
“Creating digital tools people need to make a difference, while daring to work unconventionally”
Although not utterly perfect – it never will be, it hits the vital bits of what we’d already identified and everyone agreed with it (Phew!). It has focussed our minds on what is important to our business. It isn’t about making a lot of money, but doing things that we can be proud of, that do good for the world and give us satisfaction beyond the bottom line.
Working in a way that isn’t like other agencies is also core to our values and IS part of our purpose. We exist because the founders were unsatisfied with the way other more conventional places of work were structured; we have chosen to use sociocracy to make decisions, we are all business owners and we do more than just our day jobs (in fact, none of us have defined job descriptions to highlight the flexibility with which we work). Being brave enough to approach things in different ways, change the way we work if we don’t feel it is the best and take risks allows us to try and get better rather than making do with the status quo.
There is a tension evident in the statement – we want to produce quality products that do something good, but doing so in an unconventional way may jeopardise our ability to do this. We need to explore this further and test our assumptions around what this means at relevant decision points. What clients should we work with? how do we talk to them about how we work? How do we give them confidence we are choosing to work unconventionally in the right ways, and not just doing it for the sake of it?
We have so far to go, but this has moved us forward and given us something tangible to work from and test our assumptions around the business decisions we make.
What do you think?