What’s the festival for?

All over the globe at this time there are initiatives to rethink the way we organise business and society. There are movements to encourage employee ownership, networks promoting more soulful, conscious or purposeful businesses, fans of cooperatives and activists advocating non-hierarchical structures. There are open source communities, networks promoting systems thinking in organisation, a society of organisational learning and plenty of groups looking at self-management. There are models galore – the viable systems model, adhocracy, holocracy, Holacracy, sociocracy and Agile.

It seems to us that these groups share a common bond – a belief that human beings could contribute more fully to a healthy society on a healthy planet if we can develop better ways of organising. Most traditional models of organising assume that people can be divided up into the rulers and the ruled. They assume that people are fundamentally unreliable and idle and need to be motivated. They assume that people are motivated primarily by money.

This new emerging and disparate movement of people shares a higher conception of humanity, as capable of great things – of unconditional love, of peace, of sacrifice, of compassion for all life. We have a dream that these groups could work together.

But how do you get that to happen?  How do you organise these almost intentionally un-organised people?  Maybe you need a neutral space, “owned” by no one, where each person can feel comfortable in themselves and are not required to give anything up in order to enter the space. The Festival of Human Organising is intended to be one of those spaces.  Come and play!