How do we operate and make decisions at brafe.space ?
In this blog post, I (Joana Breidenbach) reflect on some key aspects of leadership and collaboration at brafe.space from my personal perspective. On the one hand, this post serves as a basis for discussion for us in the management group, our board, and on the other hand, it is aimed at our community in order to make our organisational model, our principles and internal "research topics" transparent.
Let me start with the composition of the board itself:
Criteria for composition: competences, capacities and different perspectives
At the beginning of the initiative that was to become brafe.space, it consisted of five people in spring 2021: Rolf, Anna, Holger, Wilfried and Sven-Oliver. This group had come together to form a project called Leadership Sprouts. Realising that they were too homogeneous, they looked for more people to join them. They invited Waldemar Zeiler and me, Joana, to another meeting in June 2021. It was in this circle of seven people that brafe.space came into being. Shortly afterwards, Ally also started working at brafe.space.
In a further step, Joana brought Bettina on board. Waldemar left for capacity reasons. After the first brafeCamp in September 21, Raul became part of the board group, but also left in summer 2022 for capacity reasons. Lisa and Corinna joined in spring 2022, partly because we found their perspectives on the topics of diversity, discrimination and privilege important.
Today, in December 2023, we are a board with 8 members: Anna, Bettina, Corinna, Holger, Joana, Lisa, Rolf and Wilfried. Plus Ally, who is not part of the board herself, but sets the agenda for the meetings, moderates them and also enriches their content.
Permanent employment, voluntary work and financial compensation
Ally and Anna are employed full-time by brafe.space. Two other board members receive an expense allowance for their commitment, while the others work on a voluntary basis. The decision to support two members financially was made after it became clear that we would only find people who could afford to work unpaid due to their economic status. If we also wanted more diverse voices to be represented on the board in the medium term, we would have to provide financial compensation. The money for this comes from the general brafe.space budget, which is provided by a growing number of brafern (we will write another post about our financial and business model).
We develop directional impulses, key decisions on the composition of the community, formats, principles and attitudes through dialogue in the Board (whereby Ally is involved, even if she is not a formal Board member). The entire operational background noise lies with Anna and Ally. There are many areas in which Anna and Ally set impulses and make decisions completely independently according to the delegation principle. As a member of the Board, I trust that they will seek support or sparring from different members of the Board in the areas where they need it.
Over the last few months, we have succeeded in transferring more and more individual topics and tasks to the community. For example, in the working groups on co-create finance, the organisation of the annual brafeCamp or the brafeLabs.
We also bring in external service providers from time to time. For example, the mandatory Core Competency Workshops were originally developed as part of the betterplace lab (led by Bettina) and are still offered today in cooperation with the betterplace lab. We also purchase the Critical Whiteness Workshop from an external trainer. The facilitators of the brafeCamp are also externally commissioned trainers from our network.
Time commitment
Since the start of brafe.space, the board group has met online for an hour every week. In addition, there are a number of bi-lateral meetings within the group on a weekly basis, especially between the two full-time employees and the other board members. The Board also meets once a quarter for two days to hold larger strategic discussions and carry out its own cultural work. The Board also met for four days in the south of France in 2022 and for a three-day retreat with a Zen teacher in Brandenburg in 2023. We are involved in day-to-day operations to very different degrees. Rolf spends most of his time with brafe.space. On average, I devote one to two days a week to our tasks throughout the year.
Cultural work on the board
The governance of brafe.space consists not only of structural and organisational work, but also explicitly includes the individual development of each person and the development of an independent brafe.space culture. Our starting point is that we want to explore and experience a number of the enormous socio-political challenges in society (and the world) as a whole, first in our own (board) circle, before we can develop intentions, formats and principles for the entire brafe.space group. We assume that we do not have ready-made answers to many of the big questions, such as social inequality, fragmentation and division, but must develop them co-creatively.
In line with our motto "include more", we also try to include different perspectives on life on the Board. To do this, each of us must contribute with our whole person, our knowledge, our experiences, emotions and spiritual sensitivity.
This approach is iterative: we start with a question and gather the experiences of the group to date. We discuss, argue and argue, we listen, reflect and digest. This is a co-creative process in the sense that we try not to "impose" our individual, preconceived opinions and positions, but to introduce them into an open dialogue whose outcome is unpredictable and which ideally realises the greatest joint potential of our respective perspectives. This is a continuous learning process and we sometimes succeed more, sometimes less well. For me personally, for example, it is always a challenge to hold back my own enthusiasm and conviction for individual topics at times in order to give others more space.
Each board member brings different perspectives and experiences and influences certain areas of brafe.space more than others. In my perception, for example, Lisa brings her personal vulnerability and explorations in various groups. Corinna expands this spectrum through her experience as a social entrepreneur and close contact person for many of our participants who have experienced structural discrimination. Holger's authority is combined with his seriousness and expertise in vertical development. Ally contributes her poetic expertise alongside her overall operational vision. Bettina is my polar star in terms of inner alignment, methodology and group processes. Wilfried's independent view of entrepreneurship and the development dynamics within brafe.space are an important point of orientation and reality check for our work.
The voices of Rolf and Anna, who provided the founding impetus, are associated with a natural authority in my perception. Anna's perspective is also particularly important due to her close communication with many different brains and the overall view resulting from her work. Rolf also provided the initial funding for brafe.space (currently he "only" covers around 25% of the costs). I would also describe my influence as relatively large. This results from a mixture of my contribution to the basic DNA of brafe.space, certain (I hope, anyway, perceived) competences and time commitment, but certainly also from my personality, which tends to take up space.
So there are people on the board who currently have a little more influence on the overall design of brafe.space than others who contribute more to selected aspects of the emerging community. This results from a mix of competences, the history of development and the time and financial resources contributed. I believe that at most times this mix is seen by everyone as fairly coherent and effective. At the same time, there are of course occasional tensions among us that are not always clearly expressed, as well as unconscious stains that influence the group process. For example, we sometimes tend to conduct certain discussions very cautiously, probably in the fear that more direct feedback could lead to strong insecurities on the part of individuals. These unspoken differences or unconscious tensions stand in the way of an even more open feedback culture. One of the tasks we have set ourselves for the cultural work of the coming months is to make the implicit hierarchies and patterns more discussable and to refine our perception of subtle, unconscious dynamics.
Decisions
While many strategic directional decisions are made in the Board, it is mostly up to Anna and Ally to implement them at the operational level. They therefore make a lot of their own decisions.
There is no rigid hierarchy on the Board. The form of cooperation and leadership that best describes us is a competency-based, fluid hierarchy. In this form of leadership, there are certain people in the group who take the lead for individual projects and topics in order to develop proposals and then discuss them with the group or, if necessary, make decisions independently or in consultation with a sparring partner. We endeavour to give people who have particular expertise in an area as much creative freedom as possible.
In the group, Rolf, Holger and Wilfried, for example, have particular room for manoeuvre with regard to the financing and investment issues that arise in brafe.space thanks to their business experience and expertise. Bettina and Joana are largely responsible for the inner work track and Anna, Ally, Lisa and Corinna are the main contacts for all questions relating to the emerging community. However, there are many overlaps, interrelationships and cross-cutting issues between these elements - funding, inner development and community - to which all board members contribute. For example, we scrutinise funding issues from the perspective of our Inner Work approach and the community discrimination and power perspective, as well as looking at interfaces and contradictions between community issues and Inner Work.
In competency-based hierarchies, there are of course always arguments about competencies. What competences are actually required and what is a competence? Who determines the maturity level of a competence? In order to clarify these issues, we endeavour to communicate honestly and transparently, including regular feedback, 1:1 clarification meetings, etc. We are aware that we also want to learn and continuously refine forms of communication that are able to take criticism and relate to others.
In addition to the external competences relevant here, such as cognitive knowledge or project management, a number of internal competences are important for our work. These include::
Adequate self-contact. We don't just want to see the world mentally, we also want to include our feelings. However, without collapsing into feelings, but also reflecting on our own character and individual psychological dynamics.
A clear view of relationship dynamics. How do we shape relationship spaces? Where do we encounter projections? How can we remain empathetic and multi-perspective, even if the other perspective stresses us out?
A sufficiently good sense of "the big picture". How do we navigate complexity? How can we keep a larger group on the inner screen? What about our process awareness? Do we know when we need external, structural answers to challenges and when we need information from an inner perspective or inner growth?
Specific examples of competence-based decisions
Here are a few examples of our decision-making process that can be used to illustrate our approach more clearly.
Thematic development of the brafe.camp 2023:
The general theme of the 2023 camp was developed in the Board group, based on the first two successful meetings in 2021 and 2022. Bettina, to whom we on the Board attribute the highest level of expertise in the area of inner work and group facilitation, was given the task of further developing the theme in sparring with Anna and Joana. Her concept was then discussed with the entire Board and further enriched through discussion. Bettina then carried out the detailed planning together with the three designated facilitators. This was in turn agreed with Joana and Anna, as representatives of the board. Within this process, everyone had the opportunity to contribute ideas without inflating the process itself.
As the Board knew that the success of the camp would also depend largely on how well coordinated and coherent we were as a group, we met for three days in Brandenburg in the summer of 2022 with a wisdom teacher who combines Zen and integral work. During this retreat, we deepened our trust in each other and refined our approach to effectiveness, including by identifying important qualities such as "lightheartedness".
Conflict over the 2023/24 circle constellation:
In autumn 2023, we were faced with a dilemma. The participants in my (Joana) Circle had become very close over the course of the year and in the summer of 2023 there was a unanimous desire to continue the Circle after the brafeCamp in September. At the same time, we on the Board implicitly assumed that all Circles would be reorganised in January 2024. This led to various discussions about whether one or more circles could stay together for two years. We mainly held these discussions in the circle between Rolf, Anna and myself. I was involved because it was my circle that had triggered the conflict. Rolf took part because he had many years of group experience at EO and was very much in favour of the Circle format, and Anna represented the larger brafe.space community. The three of us exchanged good reasons both in favour of maintaining the Circle and against it. I myself had a strong preference for keeping the Circle for another year, even if all the other Circles would be reshuffled. So what tipped the scales in favour of the decision to disband all the Circles, including mine? I could hear various rumours in the background, including the assumption that it was Rolf who, as the main financier of brafe.space, had the final say in fundamental decisions. In reality, however, it was Anna's perspective that was decisive. As she was in contact with most of the people within brafe.space and knew the motivation, mood and needs of the various groups best, her voice carried the most weight. And Anna told us that the most important thing for the community as a whole at the moment is that as many people as possible have a positive Circle experience. It would help if the participants of particularly committed Circles could act as champions for the Circle work as a whole. In this case, the decision was based on Anna's expertise in having a particularly good feel for the interests and needs of the community.
We could add examples of this kind from a wide variety of areas.
I think it is important to emphasise that these kinds of competence-based decisions are not tied to fixed roles in areas where decision-making power has not been delegated to someone beforehand. Instead, they arise in dialogue between those involved. At the beginning of our conversation about the Circle constellation, it wasn't clear that Anna's view would be decisive. The fact that her expertise was central here only emerged during the discussion. The decision emerged once the various perspectives and arguments were on the table.
Principles for the individual tracks
Over the last few years and months, we on the board have developed a series of principles that inform the structures and processes as well as the cultural work within brafe.space. At this point, I would just like to mention a few key points, as we have either already written longer texts on this or will do so in the coming weeks and months.
Inner Work - Consisting of:
Core Competency Workshops, formative for Circles, brafe.camp and general communication and culture within brafe.space
Wisdom Retreats
Here we are guided by some key principles and intentions:Include more
Being with what is, exploring and recognising the present and the current state
1st person perspective
Relationship skills and multi-perspectivity
Conscious handling of power dynamics
Expanding the ability to feel instead of just thinking better (but that's good too!)
For more detail check out my blog post here.
We have many unanswered questions in this area, including:
How do we design Inner Work processes in a way that does justice to the diversity of our community?
What balance do we maintain between what connects us as people/our commonalities and a deepened awareness of the differences and social dynamics between us?
How do we use Inner Work to change the status quo of inequality and power dynamics without trying to impose a particular direction of development on our participants?
How do we create spaces in which the most diverse development opportunities can take place?
Financing - Consisting of:
Open working group Co-Create Finance rethinking how the flow of capital can support the evolvement of entrepreneurs and their organizations
the brafe.funding platform facilitating fundings amongst the community supported by standardized founder friendly contracts
Financing of brafe.space itself, developing a sustainable independent business model
Scholarship program, from 2025 enabling pot
Our central principles and intentions that I have just listed also apply in this area.
In this area, the following are among the unanswered questions that we are constantly (or not yet sufficiently) wrestling with:
How can we inspire more people to participate in for-profit and non-profit ventures as funders?
What do different groups of participants need in order to participate in this track in a meaningful way?
How can we make the funding process as lean and effective as possible?
How do we deal with the fact that founders want to use our network for their fundraising, but only some companies in the network are likely to find funders? What additional added value, other than fundings, are we offering these entrepreneurs?
How can we create a safe, relatable space to have "difficult" conversations about money and investments?
How can we create positive momentum in the existing funding landscape outside of brafe.space?
What could discrimination-conscious financial instruments look like?
How can we make scholarships available to as many people as possible who are dependent on them?
Community - Consisting of:
monthly brafeTuesday
annual BrafeCamp
Scholarships, from 2025 on Enabling Pot
Many informal, self-organised activities, but also brafeLabs
The principles that are relevant for the community are the same as those listed above.
Open questions here include:
How do we reach the various participant groups in brafeSpace so that we can expand what has so far been a relatively small circle of very committed and enthusiastic people?
On the one hand, how can we deal sensitively and consciously with power differences, fragmentation dynamics, shaming or injuries without overloading the space and becoming dogmatic and instructive at the same time?
How can we prevent people with experiences of discrimination from being repeatedly exposed to violations and (mis)using them to support mainstream society in its learning processes around topics such as privilege and intersectionality?
How can we work out the benefits of brafeSpace for the founders who do not receive funding within the network?
