Launching the organization

Arbolife was founded by Morli and Marc Mathys because they wanted to take a road to better care about themselves and the planet. They experienced the difficulty of finding the right information, the proper contacts, be informed about ongoing events. So, they decided to launch a website where people in the French speaking part of Switzerland could easily join and find information. As they write “We’re contributing to evolve the world by showcasing and making it easy to access good finds for a balanced life and the environment.”

At first the organization was a small but energetic team of 4 people. They were happy to discuss,
imagine, project and create in a fully participatory way… So it progressed without a real
structure but when the team grew bigger, the need for a governance structure appeared
clearly.

https://res.cloudinary.com/arbolife/image/upload/q_auto,c_scale,w_600/v1514717968/website/about-us/team/ArboLife-team-neuchatel-spring-2017.jpg

Transitioning to Agile Structures

The co-founder, Marc, comes from a corporate background. When he founded Arbolife with his wife Moli, he had a strong need to do things differently. According to Marc, the development of the team was done iteratively in an agile way, particularly during the first year: new needs promoted the introduction of new tools and ways to work together. These are typical things which were introduced during this evolution:

  • Decision by consent
  • Role of the time keeper
  • Role of the facilitator
  • Role of the secretary
  • Operational roles organized in circles
  • Link via 2nd link (bottom up construction)

Here is how Arbolife currently describes their current decision making framework

As we were developing ArboLife, our integral vision of functioning naturally led us towards sociocracy, a participative model with no hierarchy, where everyone can be equally involved in the project. Similar to holacracy, sociocracy is a dynamic governance model that is emerging as an alternative to classic hierarchical organizational models.

Fundamentally, the project is organized in autonomous and connected circles, there are no hierarchical links between people, and all decisions are taken unanimously within each circle.

In order to facilitate action and reduce time spent in meetings, each circle can make decisions autonomously and propose its decisions to other circles.

ArboLife
C:\Users\man1ni\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\INetCache\Content.Word\Organisation Arbolife.png
Arbolife organizational structure

“If we want to produce results different from those produced by the system
we know, we have to start by functioning differently inside the project.”

Marc Mathys

Future decision-making goals

There are many wishes for Arbolife’s future development. These include:

  • Make the circles fully autonomous and add the first link
  • Develop  new activities
  • Simplify the onboarding
  • Grow within the whole country (German and Italian speaking part).

Read the full case study to learn more about Arbolife’s transition and use of sociocracy.

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