my year with brafe.space by Rolf

THE FOUNDATION

Nearly one year ago, on the 21st of March, we were sitting around a couch table in Brandenburg. In good old business manner, we had produced a lot of whiteboards plastered with hundreds of little post-it stickers. It was one of many approaches we used to give words and structure to a topic that seemed constantly sabotaged by our attempts to condense it into something both clear and meaningful.

My personal struggle with this something had started already a year before. My former trivago colleague Anna wanted to convince me not to waste the experience we had made with our approach to business and people and believed it was an episode of our lives that would be helpful, and even transformative, for others.

Meanwhile, I had just started with my personal transformation. Although being only a couple of months out of my job as CEO at trivago, and despite the way this company had defined my life for the last 15 years, the business world suddenly seemed so far away and I no longer wanted to be close to it.  It was a continuation of my modus operandi - doing something with my full heart, but also turning away quickly and not looking back. I had framed this as my way to live in the present, but there was undoubtedly something pathological in there as well. So I thought, why not approach this headfirst, documenting my experience and giving myself the chance to close this important chapter of my life properly.

Our first idea was to write a book. We started to find a structure for our experience and came up with the HEIDI principles, five cornerstones clarifying how our approach to leadership differed from what we called the old narrative, including Humbleness, Empowerment, Intrinsic motivation, Dynamic capabilities, and Identity. In the process, we gathered many old co-workers around us who shared our experiences and helped to find the right words for them.

Over the years, trivago had developed into quite a biotope for leadership. Our independence as a mostly self-financed company gave us the opportunity to try out a lot of alternatives for “how you do stuff”. Many things worked, a lot did not, but the quick trial and error was definitely the basis of our commercial success. Nevertheless, the last years as a NASDAQ listed company also taught me what can happen when the steady pressure of capital markets slowly creeps into an organizations’ guts.

We quickly understood that this experience was not uniquely our own. The more we researched and talked to other founders and entrepreneurs, the more often we heard a similar story.  The world simply got too complex to maneuver with tools developed in the industrial age. Those who had the chance to deviate from that toolset, giving their organizations the freedom to face complexity (instead of neglecting it), were contributing a vast share of their success to these cultures they had created. On the other hand, there were stories of organizations deprived of that freedom by the impact of capital and investors in an earlier or later stage of their development. The saddest stories were those of young entrepreneurs who started with a very holistic mindset, but who within a financing round or two, found themselves part of the hamster wheel, simplifying the world down to revenue and profit numbers and losing their ability to evolve.

The more we researched, the more clear it became that we needed more than a book. We were facing a major societal issue and something needed to be done about it. If we take away the freedom of entrepreneurs to evolve, they will also not evolve their organizations and the people within them. As a result, they will exclude a large part of the world and not only disconnect from it, but also impair their ability to impact it.

THE PEOPLE

We felt we needed more people actively contributing to this, and our post-it battle in Brandenburg was our first attempt to do so. Next to Anna and myself, Holger and Sven were sitting on the couch.

Holger, like me, was the founder and CEO of his company for many years. Unlike me, he also had a strong background in psychology. I met Holger several years before while we were presidents of an EO chapter, and since then he had ranked among the people who inspired me the most. He introduced me to the topic of adult development, which had a significant impact on me in my last years at trivago, and he was using his own company to experiment with new approaches to leadership. Sven was not only a very successful founder, but for the past years had also been a companion on my own inner journey. While in my organization I was often brave in giving freedom to people, I was definitely not strong enough in providing an environment to nurture their inner development - this was Sven’s domain. He understood very early that creating space requires complementary support for people to evolve. He not only created an amazing culture, but made it his quest to send everybody around him on a quest of their very own.

Of course we had spoken a couple of times individually before meeting that weekend, but it was the first time for us to come together in that round. Our question was: are trust-based organizations and empowerment, accompanied by inner work, the key to creating sustainable and impactful enterprises in a world of exponentially growing complexity? and if so, how can it be key to creating a more sustainable and impactful ecosystem? If the amount of post-its is an indicator of progress, we had already come up with a lot of answers. Still, we felt something was not right. Who were we, a pretty homogenous group of former and current business guys and girls, to be able to find an answer to how to lead in a world of complexity? Although it had already been hard to find a common denominator between us, we knew we needed a more diverse group as to not replicate our own view of the world and to come up with better solutions.

I had in mind one person who had impressed me massively on a long walk a couple of weeks before. Joana was introduced to me when I asked a pretty wise person for the wisest person he knows, so although I might have been a bit biased at the start, my walk with her felt like some of the most inspiring hours spend in quite a while. Joana was not only successful with her non-profit business, but also created a reference authoring her book about inner work. What impressed me most was rather how easy it was to relate to her as she openly shared with me the struggles of her own inner journey.  I knew that if we wanted to do something meaningful, Joana needed to be on board.

At the same time, I started discussions with Wilfried, one of the most successful entrepreneurs that I know while also being the least pretentious about it. It was just so much fun to exchange stories on ways the old narrative of leadership constantly fails to create true value and how one company after the other gets destroyed by managers who overestimate their own competencies and underestimate diversity. Yes, he was also a business guy, but he was so refreshingly different and full of love, we all wanted to work with him.

Then, to be honest, I did not expect Waldemar to be interested in joining us. Waldemar had expropriated himself to make his organization a purpose company and had been always very clear in our discussions that the only way to improve things would be a revolution. When I told him about our idea, he was constantly throwing curve balls and tearing it apart. Still, after at least 10 rounds through Volkspark Friedrichshain somehow hooked, also improving the idea in several important aspects.

One important contribution was that, obviously, we were still far too homogenous and needed to integrate more diversity to make a real change. So he entertained the idea of organizing an event, inviting a larger group, and introducing them to the idea. This, we thought, would be a good indicator of if we could really create something together and would show us how well we can work as a group. Being obvious that we needed more support, Ally came on board and started to work full-time on the idea together with Anna.

For more than a year, I had been taking walking meetings with many people and developed a sense for who might be interesting to bring in. Of course, my extended network was heavily biased towards profit entrepreneurs and as a group, we agreed we would want to extend the concept of an entrepreneur far beyond that. We did not want to exclude creators just for the fact that they were not paid for their contributions. Joana and Waldemar in particular brought in super interesting people from the non-profit and activist scene, and through several iterations, we decided on 50 people we wanted to invite for our first brafe.space experiment in September.

THE KICK-OFF

Here you can read Ally’s blog article about what happened at our brafe.space event in a way I find quite beautiful. For me personally, it was not only an emotional highlight of the year, it was also quite revealing. We had been convinced that to make people aware of the importance of saving space to evolve, they needed to experience it themselves. At the same time, we thought it would be very unlikely that something important would happen in 48 hours.  I think we were all surprised that it did. The way many of us made our life “work” involved excluding large parts of the world and disconnecting from ourselves and others. This approach helped us deal with challenges superficially and find seemingly easy solutions. Opening the drawers again and reintegrating those parts is painful, but it also evolves our ability to hold a larger complexity. At the event, we saw a glance of how this might look in practice.

When organizing the event we hoped to convince 10 people to join us. We wanted to take the experience of this one-time event, integrate it into our daily lives, and grow together as a larger group . For this, we created the idea of our brafe.space circles in which we wanted to meet once a month for several hours to explore our inner journeys together. After introducing the concept, 49 of our participants at the event wanted to take part in the full program!

Now, since the beginning of the year, and after a couple of preparation workshops, we are meeting once a month in six brafe.circles to explore one another and the process. My very own personal experience so far is that the depth of conversation is unparalleled and although the “what” is not ultimately defined, everybody can feel that this is something worth holding the tension of not knowing.

THE SIGNIFICANCE

If you would have asked me sitting on the couch in Brandenburg a year ago, I would probably have expected a more tangible outcome by now. I would have seen more checkboxes ticked and processes in place; thankfully, this person learned a lot in the last year, including that something truly meaningful needs to grow out of a diverse but still connected foundation.

Going forward, the identity we are building for brafe.space and how we use this to co-create will make all the difference. Still, we need to navigate the balance between manifestation and integration carefully: condensing too quickly will keep us locked within pre-created patterns and not fully use the power of multiperspectivity, but staying too blurry and vague will impact our identity as a group and will make it harder to attract and lose the right people.

After opening brafe.space for so many new people we feel that it's now the right time to start creating together and to open spaces (safe and brave) for entrepreneurs to evolve themselves, their organizations, and the people within them.

brafe.space is an operating system, not an application. We want to open spaces, not fill them. We do not want to “solve” this or that issue following this or that ideology.

We are fascinated by the idea of how an impactful ecosystem could be based on trust and values rather than rules and control, or how connecting with ourselves, others and the world might bring forth truly holistic and sustainable thinking with radically new ways to create value. We see value in a broader and broader evolving sense, including over time more complexity rather than reducing everything to a seemingly common denominator. Lastly, we are convinced that this can have a very far-reaching impact. Maybe not today and not tomorrow, but fundamental and sustainable evolutions need time and we believe brafe.space can be a facilitator of that evolution. We do not know where this journey will lead us, and still, it's vital to start waking.

Author: Rolf Schrömgens

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