Community-Powered Transformation: An Emerging Paradigm

Welcome to the Atelier Insights Podcast series. Atelier is a strategic design and innovation consultancy based on Istanbul, Dubai and Amsterdam, with an extensive network of creative professionals across the globe. Through our community-powered approach, we help organisations tackle complex challenges to create lasting impact. In this series, we are inviting you to witness and gain insights from real-life projects and challenges. We'll be sharing how leading organisations, practitioners and thinkers design solutions for society. Each episode will be hosting individuals from various fields, so you can expect to listen to cases on urban design, corporate innovation, sustainability, creative communities and so on, through the lens of experts who work on these domains every day. Hope you enjoy the conversation and don't hesitate to contact us if you have any recommendations for experts we can host. Hey everyone and welcome to episode three of the Atelier Insights Podcast. My name is Leigh Ann Satter, I'm the Director of Community and Communications at Atelier and I'm really excited to be hosting today's episode. We have two very special guests who are today, Angin, Ayaz and Aslem Tuscan. Angin is the co-founder and co- CEO of Atelier, a design and innovation consultancy specialised in community-powered transformation. Angin is also a transdisciplinary designer and strategist with the background and architecture systems thinking and interaction design. Angin, thank you for taking the time to be here today. Hi Ling, great to be here. Also with us today is the wonderful Aslem, Aslem Tuscan is the founder of NCIO of the Resilient Consultancy Serving Founders and their teams like Atelier with the confidence to build powerful brands that drive growth. She's also a transformational coach, a brand innovation and future strategist and a speaker. Aslem, it's great to be in conversation with you again after having worked together quite extensively last year. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you. Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. In today's episode, we're going to deep dive into a word that has become pretty overused in today's world. I think we can all agree. That word is community. Even though the word has become really bussy and trendy and we're seeing it everywhere from nerdy single homes to coffee shops to music festivals and sometimes if you look at everybody and their mom is building community nowadays. Today's conversation will hopefully examine a different kind of unique intersection that the three of us, Angin, Aslem and myself, has spent quite a lot of time thinking and talking about. That's really where the space, where community systems and practices and impactful resilient businesses overlap. We're going to explore this intersection and hopefully have a great conversation today. In today's episode, we hope to hear from Angin about how Atelier was born out of a community itself and how that ethos has shaped its offering and its journey so far. With Aslem, we'll explore what future trends she's observing when it comes to collectivism and coalition in business. Finally, we'll deep dive into what community-powered transformation even is and how integrating a community approach across different parts of an organization might help leaders of today get unstuck. We'll probably go off on a bunch of tangents as we normally do but hopefully those tangents will be interesting. So, yeah, let's get into it. So, Angin, I'd like to start with you and I'd also like to start from the very beginning. Yuko founded Atelier in 2013 and Atelier was really founded on this principle of community at the core and so maybe we can hear, we can start by hearing why you felt such a pull towards building this impact driven community in Turkey at the time back in 2013 and how that journey has led to where Atelier is today. Thank you, Lin. It's been 11 years now and while so much has changed about Atelier, the good news, the fortunate thing is that I feel like what we initially declared as the core tenets, the core foundational values have remained the same and there were actually three of them that me and my other co-founder Karam outlined pretty early on in the journey where we said we really do want to cultivate and network a community in Istanbul which is where we were from but we had spent at that point about ten years abroad in our own respective professional journeys and we felt at the same time that there were incredibly talented, motivated, curious, collaborative folks that we had met here in there in Istanbul in the landscape back then but we felt like there was some maybe there was a gap in the system that could bring these amazing impact driven creatives, practitioners, business leaders together. The values we anchored on were one around creative, the power of creativity, the power of creative leadership. We felt that that was a very compelling pull for those that believed in the power of analytical thinking but felt that that's not necessarily going to solve the most intractable problems of today on its own, that creativity is a must. The second one was the power of collaboration, that collaboration needs to really index on diversity across disciplines, across mindsets, across organizations, so how organizations and how do individuals transcend their own boundary to build something in that new liminal space. The third one was on the power of long term thinking, especially being originally from a place like Turkey and Middle East which is in constant flux, constant uncertainty. They're not necessarily easy to keep your eyes on the horizon to say that whatever you're building, whatever you're designing, developing has to serve not in the quarterly or annual cycle but in the five, ten year, twenty year cycles. Then we were fortunate enough to encounter a beautiful group of twenty, twenty five founding members that we then grew to about 150 over time, acknowledging the natural limits with dumbbells number and being really focused in the quality of interactions and the quality of engagement and not necessarily scaled the community in a traditional sense of the world but we felt we could always scale the impact and the best way we have found to scale the impact was through a model of consultancy. We realized that a lot of large organizations be it in private or public sector, you know, and the leaders at the helm, they might be stuck and they might be stuck from the lens of how do I develop and to end experiences, how do I connect the world of desire ability to the world of viability, how do I shape new environments that transform organizations, cultures, how do I launch products that really touch a broad mass of people in a meaningful way. So over the years between 2014 to 19, I would say, we've cultivated a pretty unique community of practitioners and a consulting practice out of this stumble and that was definitely a beautiful chapter but we also realized that the next step for us was to take this model and see whether it would also appropriate itself in new contexts. Joining QCollective in 2019 was a marker moment after which we took this, let's say, blended community and consultancy model to the Middle East through a hub in Dubai where actually, Ling, you've been in the journey since day one together we have cultivated, I would say, another beautiful garden of amazing creatives, impacture and practitioners out of Dubai across Middle East and now we're in the third chapter of exploring in the European territory through an Amsterdam hub where that can take us. The story is less about I think what we have done but honestly more of what has stayed the same and I'm glad to say that in whichever context and territory we showed up in these values on creativity, collaboration and long-term thinking had been genuinely the factors that brought the right people in the community and with them we kind of keep evolving the model and it's just exciting to see where it might evolve to. Thanks, Engin. You know, even though I've probably heard this story a thousand times, I probably told this story a thousand times in my own way but every time I hear it, it really does inspire this thinking about how can just coming together with the right group of people really affect the trajectory of what you're trying to do and 11 years ago I'm sure you couldn't have imagined the journey that it was going to take. Not at all. Every day has surprises in fact or get the ears. I witnessed many of them and actually Oslem has witnessed many of them as well. I do want to pause here and kind of acknowledge the current moment that we're in so you know we're 11 years later into this story and you know many years into the story of humanity and community as a whole and you might say that the world is in a bit of a crisis moment that might be an understatement actually depending on where you're coming from and what you're how you see the world. But really when we look around us, I'm personally feeling like the existential risks that I've read about and heard about and listened to on probably other podcasts like AI and climate and even nuclear war are becoming more real than ever. I didn't think that I would be experiencing this much change. I'm sure others feel similarly. We're watching wars unfold in real time on our screens. Loneliness stats are on the rise. We're feeling like everything is being questioned around us from how cities run, how work gets done, how businesses are led. And I don't mean to take us on this negative turn here. But I do feel that it's important to look at the world around us and acknowledge that the inspiring and aspirational vision that you may have had in with building Atoy is really unraveling itself around us in this uncertainty about how organizations and leaders like ourselves are going to make it through the speed of change that we're seeing. And so as long as I want to ask you as a future foresight leader, your work centers largely around helping businesses and leaders ready themselves for this inevitably uncertain future. And you've helped us in our work together last year through helping us with our brand work through really revisiting what we stand for as an organization. So I want to ask you what are you seeing are the most pressing shifts we should be designing for? And maybe even what do you think organizations need to completely let go of not just what they should hone as what do they let go of? Yeah, that's the big question isn't it? And it's a question I think every leader around the world is currently wrestling with and making choices around. And if I was to summarise it, I would say that the number one shift that we're seeing is that competition as you know was the previous paradigm is just simply not going to be part of the zeitgeist of our age going forward. And we are all as leaders being called in to a much higher place of being able to truly embrace what it means to be collaborative, how we get to embrace the equity and equality, true diversity inclusion, because we're seeing that the AI strategies aren't simply, you know, they're not really putting into place the change as fast enough that we need to see. And there's a lot of talk around this and what we're beginning to see is the evidence and the research to prove how creating diverse cultures actually lend strategies, lend businesses to really achieve the results at a much faster rate. So the exponential growth that a diverse culture can achieve is far greater than one that isn't. And the reason for that is really quite straightforward because the current state and organisations are failing on two main levels, they're not able to bring those diverse trustful collaborative teams together and they're not integrating the teams together with the systems and platforms in order to drive the efficiency and multiply the impact fast enough. So it's a really difficult time for organisations to try and find answers to these questions. And the conversation's been hard up until now, but I feel like the wall is beginning to to wear down and leaders are beginning to, you know, be able to present evidence to be able to accelerate the decisions they need to make in their positions towards this shift and this change. So there we're seeing this far accelerated pace towards collaborative way of working and organisations are being more co-itserative in the way they get there and they understand that there is consensus needed across departments and teams. And the reason for that is because these problems that you just identified are so seismic, they're so grand and complex and hairy that there's absolutely no way that we as individuals in our positions and with their individual teams can find the solutions. We've got to collaborate. Yeah, exactly. So the integration of the divisions, the breaking down of isolated siloed teams is so important to be able to get that impact in place where, you know, you've got actually a team of coalition leaders who have, you know, moved away from a more old fashioned, parodimical nature of leadership, where there's a pyramid to one that is very collaborative and distributed in its nature. And I think that's the big shift we're going to see. And as a result of all of these global drivers, you know, as a foresight analyst, essentially what we're doing is we're anticipating the future. You know, it's not like a crystal wall that we're predicting the future. We're seeing the patterns happen today. You know, I think it was William Gibson who said the future is here. It's just not even a distributed yet. So we can see the shifts in today as well. And it's showing us that there is a mass organisation happening across society because people's values are changing in light of all these huge global events and global drivers, which are universal now, which are global, which means that we do care, you know, even though the world makes us think that we don't care, we do care what's happening in countries, thousands, and thousands of miles away. And we're so we are being united through this deeper sense of empathy and responsibility and we want to do something. And as individuals, we're beginning to come together ourselves in communities and we're shunning individualism in favour of these alliances so that we can actually start to take control of the change that we need to create. And so we are coming together to rebuild what our claps and systems and we're taking absolutely no, you know, time. We're not wasting time to form these unions and alliances. And so yeah, I would say that we're going to see organisations have to take a far greater sense of responsibility to be part of the systemic change so that they as organisations can come in as trusted institutions working together with government for all the changes that we need to see to be able to start to address some of these problems. Yeah, I totally agree. And as you're speaking, I'm thinking about there's also a sense of urgency that we have to do this together, but we also have to do this fast. And that's something that I'm grappling with, you know, this idea that we're running out of time. We need to all get together right now and figure out what to do. So it's also great sometimes to hear that some things that feel intuitive like working together, you know, that sounds a little fluffy, but that there's actual, you know, science and statistics behind it that show that, you know, this is the way forward and this is where the future is headed. And that's something that we've been really passionate about and interested in and speaking about regularly, auditorium and beyond. Yeah, I love. Sorry, I was going to say it's been so inspiring to see the passion and the care within the organisation ask these big fundamental questions, which, you know, leaders get to learn from. Right, difficult questions to answer. I love this idea that you said about the coalitionary leaders, what a beautiful term. And it really links to this shift that actually I've observed you and can kind of lead the way for through this idea of shifting from community as part of our story, you know, community is something that we just are part of our DNA and part of our ethos and our brand to hold on. This is something that we can offer to the world that everybody else might need and benefit from. So I'm curious, I'm going to hear from you, how do you see community cutting through and actually resolving some of these separations and big complex wicked problems that we're seeing in the work that you're doing and that we're doing together every day? Yeah, that story of separation is probably as holders humanity and the natural paradox of how do I exist as an individual as a unique being with all the beautiful attributes and how do I feel part of the bigger we the whole? It's not inherent. So do I do that? That doesn't exist. So starting there, then maybe it's better to look at the environment within which you can have both. Our thesis is that environment isn't necessarily the scale of a nation, the scale of a massive religious story, although the fractals of that story have also created communities in the past, the church group, or you know, all the other religions have leaned on hyper local versions of communities where people felt united where people felt part of something bigger. They also incidentally feel it, you know, even in all these places like military people who fight to get or also feel like I'm serving towards a goal and in that one it might seem even noble at times or at least that's the story people maybe telling themselves. Now it's interesting that it's only maybe a maximum 100 year old narrative that we're telling ourselves that we exist as independent individual beings that can operate out in the world, succeed on our own, fail on our own. That's a recent myth and it's the very masculine myth as well, but we believe that is also tapering off now. It's not holding, it's leaking from a, from how people perceive themselves and from a practical place then, you know, can an organization of a 10,000 people be a community? We believe no, that's a tough one. Can it have micro communities? Yes, what is the scale of the micro community? Well, we have found through science and through our own practice that you can really weave trust amongst five people than maybe to 15 people and if we have good the level of diversity in that 15 people that can touch the next 50 and through another fractal, maybe you then are managing 150 group where people know of one another, people care of one another, there's a reciprocal relationship, there's a sense of belonging, there's trust, there's a unique sense of individual identity, but still being part of something. And incidentally, any organization actually craves that, any organization craves that people feel a sense of belonging, feel a feeling engaged and feel empowered and feel activated. Now, what's interesting is that a lot of current business paradigms, somehow indexed on it, we believe not necessarily from the most effective lens when it's like, well, what is this department doing? What is this function doing? What is this venture doing? But ultimately, it kind of misses the negative space, which is the relationships between people. It kind of takes status secondary, but in any community building act, you realize that's the main actor, the space between people. How do you manage those relationships? How do you weave trust in an accelerated way? How do you name the challenges in an early collaboration and tackle them head on? Because ultimately, if you figure out how the relationality works in the smallest terms, which we have seen over and over again in the communities, we have a build of for ourselves and for the clients we work with. It all comes back to this beautiful combination of, have we gotten the basic mechanics right in the smallest units of relationships? And have we also outlined the most clear aspirational purpose, direction, set of experiences, business models around it? When they coexist, then we have found the takes. And the beautiful part about the community that fixes that you feel it, you enter its space and you're like, wow, there's a vibe. You just get it. When you enter it, a company and you move into that innovation while nine out of 10 days, it has to be dormant. When it is buzzing, it actually elevates us to a different place because ultimately, it serves that part of, yes, I exist and I'm valued. And yes, I'm serving for the greater whole. And that's just basically from a feelings standpoint, as soon as you strike that chord, the rest comes easily. Yeah, and I would just add to that, isn't that when human imagination is really, you know, able to be fostered, nurtured and flourished and with that comes creativity. So if you don't feel that level of trust and reciprocity and belonging, then you don't have the confidence to be authentic, to speak up, to share ideas because you're scared that an idea hasn't been validated. Or failed gracefully. Yeah, yeah. And we know, I mean, I was at Steve Bartlett's talk last week. And he was talking about the number one reason why organizations that are growing fail is because they get to a place of complacency, they plateau and they stop taking risks. So now he's incentivizing his team to take risks and that is a measured KPI. And so without what you've just described, it's very difficult to be able to create that kind of culture and manage it. Yeah. One thing that we've been trying to do together is figuring out how do we code to find some of these learnings, right? Like, okay, well, there's this intuitive sense of what community is, what it feels like when you walk into that innovation hub, or when you walk into a co-working space or into an organization and you really can sense that this is a functioning creative, imaginative group of people doing things together. I am curious in that realm of community and business, which are two words that I think in a lot of conversations I have, you know, I'm like, yeah, community is good for business and people just look at me like, what are you talking about? You know, communities, the Lala, Lala land of coming together. But as we're describing it today, we've been trying to codify this idea of how do we take these really essential learnings and turn them into something that is easy to digest and easy to replicate in other organizations. And we're trying to, you know, build this movement, let's call it, of community-powered or community-powered transformation. And so I want to get into that a little bit and understand, you know, how do you define what the power of transforming through community is? What does that look like? And how can leaders kind of learn from that and engage in that kind of process? Sure. So we actually see it as four foundational steps when we look at any organization. And those steps are usually you start with mapping, you know, you need to know where the actors are, where the stakeholders are and cast a wide net where some of these actors might be sitting in your organization, IE or employees, they might be sitting in the periphery or outside your organization. The more you look at it as one single system, the more interesting it becomes because most organizations of the future, as long as there's a four-site term for it, are going to become more poorest, more membrane-like, more fluid. We're just betting on that future. As soon as you map, then it's necessary to curate for the diversity of skills, mindsets, but overlap in values. And then in that curation also try to diagnose with the people that are already in that system, that are intrinsically motivated, that are curious, that are collaborative. See what is the unifying purpose? What is the shared story that we want to be part of? And it's very rare that you actually pre-meditate that purpose and then try to find the people for it. It's more common that in any organization there is the two and five or ten percent of that organization depends on the size of the org, where you are already defining these change makers, these ambassadors, these champions, whatever you want to call it. So all you're doing in this effort is tapping into that latent potential energy and by inviting these people in, which might be through different vessels, you might say, we are building a new innovation lab. We are doing a new learning cohort on a certain subject, or we are really looking at the portion of the business and we want to rewrite the lives. There needs to be a newness in the narrative somehow that denotes the people together. And then you start looking at what makes them tick, what are the incentive models, what makes them engage, and all of a sudden if you have engaged a small group, but the right group, you might be observing this groundswell attraction of, oh my god, there's momentum in the system, something is really moving forward and that is almost self-propergating and attracting others. So we always think in terms of where is the pool in any organization, never to push. Push is actually not that easy. And it goes back to that masculine. Exactly. Exactly. What is the magnetic thing that's already in the constellation? And all of a sudden you might be finding yourself in this final step where you're like, oh my god, I may have done a learning cohort of 100 people over a year with different chapters and maybe some of them have become the trainers. We have seen that in the past. 500 are interested and maybe from that 500, 200 are so activated that they kind of want to shift their role in the organization to go after it. And as soon as you witness that, then you have to design for the next larger scale. But you have to actually, we have found stay patient, stay, appreciate the flatness of the exponential curve in the beginning, appreciate that it takes time to build this potential. And we have seen that, yeah, that transformation basically means a structural change, right? It's used liberally as much liberally as community is, but we believe that it's tapping into the power of the most intrinsically motivated folks in an organization is probably the best way to give it a go. And then not do a lot of premeditated acts, but kind of watch their emergence unfold and respond accordingly. This is a, this is what I do starting with a few people who are already activated or already passionate as a reminder of assignments. And I always just start with why, but there was this article written, I think, by Michelle Bachman, that was actually start with who? And that, I think, is a principle that inspires the work and the community systems that we build, where it's really about understanding who to bring together first and then figure out the purpose behind it. I do want to talk a little bit more about these evidence that you've started to allude to Engin and Oslem what you're seeing as well. I think one of the hardest things about this whole community power transformation idea in my experience at least is actually showing how it works, you know, measuring the impact of it. What are the metrics that you can say, look, this is working. And we know we have this hunch that it's working, we have some evidence of it, but that often becomes the difficult thing that magic moment that you just referenced, Engin, that is so hard to pinpoint and it just is this intangible benefit of having these kinds of relational approaches. But we are seeing more and more real life examples around us that tell us that, okay, yeah, this is working. So I'd love to hear from both of you. What are some of those examples? Like what are you seeing out in the world that indicates that really this is the direction that we need to be going in? Yeah, I mean, I'm literally witnessing it today, very fresh off the press. I want to love the founding advisory members of Female Founders Rise, which is the community of the female founders. We have come together as the sort of inception team and it's led by Emmy Faust, who that's at Ybrouillian, to help women understand how they get to come together, learn skills and grow in order to address the issue around the lack of funding for female founders businesses. And we're not alone in the space of 12 months. We've come to a membership base of 5,000. And what's allowing that community to come to life is exactly what Engin just explained. And because it's not held or run by an organisation, we get to set the rules, set the beliefs. We are in absolute reciprocity. We have shared values that we harness every day and how we show up. And there is just this incredible sense of belonging and it's just true relationships in practice. And it's not just us. We're seeing everybody in the female founding community as female founders coming together in different communities to say, what can we do? How can we address this incredible, you know, unethical situation where we're only getting to, you got more chance to get funding as an Afro Caribbean female founder. Sorry, you've got more chance to win a lottery than you have getting funding. So there's a real problem there. And instead of us sort of creating this echo chamber where we're just talking about the problem, we're coming together. And the groundswell that all of these different little communities are creating is an ecosystem of communities. And then those communities are collaborating with communities to then say, how can we bring long term systemic change and policy change? And yesterday we've just heard that we, there is going to be an invest her initiative that's now started as being founded by, well, so it's come a number of founders. But Debbie Roscoe who's the former founder of Allbright now, she's doing many, many other things. She's co-chairing this. And the vision will be to make UK the best place in the world to be a female founder. And that has, you know, that's come from the communities creating grassroots pressure up towards policy change. So yeah, ripple effect, ripple effect story. Yeah, exactly. And hopefully we'll see a boost to engine investment and access to finance for women and boost in micro funding. But you know, what I'm seeing in the female community is a true sense of, yeah, that kind of move away from competition. It's like, how can we support each other? How can we collaborate? How can we use what I've learned in 10 years to help you make progress in six months? You know, it's that kind of knowledge, knowledge exchange with so much transparency that's going to, I think, change things for us quite quickly. So yeah, it builds optimism and it helps you stay even truer to your set of shared values. And I think those values when they are intrinsically there within an organization and they're authentically there, you've got those spearheading, you know, talented individuals in the organization that champions those values, supporting senior leadership who's usually wrestling with a billion things, particularly around transformational change. They're dealing with their own transformation in how they get to lead. Okay, there are teams all around the world right now at C suite level who are trying to figure out how to restructure systems, operations, models to be able to bring collaborative cultures into place. So they absolutely fundamentally need those rising stars within organizations to support them, almost like their antennas into culture to accelerate the change they need to make as an organization in order to survive. Because we know that 40% of CEOs don't feel like they're going to be around the next 10 years. And they literally don't think that their businesses are going to exist. Yeah, it is. And so the action they need to take has to be very fast. And I think it was Ursula Van Leyen, president of European Commission who recently said the cost of the transition will be big, but the cost of non-action will be much bigger. And so community, you know, is a big, big objective that I think every organization needs to really understand and strategize around in terms of what it means for their organization. Otherwise, yeah, they're going to be left on the sideline. Thank you. Aslam. Ingen, I'd love to hear from you. What are you seeing out in the world in terms of the impact that this community approach can have? So the way we are thinking about embedding the mindset or community, our approach, community, our transformation is that it shall not be yet another department. That's the first thing. Just like sustainability is important. Let's build the CSO role. Innovation is important. Let's build the CIO role. Well, we're not arguing that community or platform or network in different organizations. They might be used interchangeably, even if it's not exactly the same. That shall not be another CSO role. What we see as an opportunity instead is that the act of cultivating a community actually serves businesses in four very clear directions. One is the story of the brand. The brands that talk about themselves cannot access their audiences anymore. The brand that represents a powerful purpose, a powerful story, a movement, they have something new to say. How do they do it? They build a community around this powerful idea and naturally they have these ambassadors that all of us have been advocates for this idea and indirectly for the brand. So we called it more of a powered by ex-type of model rather than the brand doing its own advertising. That's a community story. Let's say that a brand actually goes and does that. As soon as you have that group of people that are basically feeling a different sense of closeness proximity to the organization, why not tap into that community as your open innovation pipeline to ask what else they might want to see in the product or in the services they receive? How they can be further incentivized to spread the word. So all of a sudden you might even jump in into the business development and marketing territory even in a different way. But even if you don't, the community you have fostered from a brand can contribute innovation or vice versa. The community you have built around the innovation hub, why not have them actually think about what is the next brand move that you can do? Those are the two very obvious axes. Another axis is the one on sustainability impact ESG. A lot of companies are searching for stories that may not be necessarily always in their core. What is the foundation that I donate? What is the cause I support? And sometimes it might be in very tactical ways that the leadership feels close personally to a certain cause they're supporting. And that's beautiful. But we feel there's a much bigger opportunity or how the organization cultivates a community of practitioners around. And that group is actually creating a catalytic impact from a social lens. Let's say that a brand wants to build a set of circular neighborhood hubs. You know, maybe they don't want to do something on circulate, but really they want to imagine how immigrant communities need to be engaged in the discourse of circularity a bit more. I find it quite ironic that the social and the environmental discourse have its own set of believers, but rarely they convert. Let's say your organization were to take that up as soon as you have that group. Maybe you might be actually all of us are looking at your talent strategy from a different lens because you're not doing the AI for the tokenist lens, but you're actually thinking, well, who of these people might be actually my future recruits? That's so that they enrich my company. They bring a different perspective or who of the people in my company that I don't want to lose, but they kind of feel a bit disillusioned, a bit kind of loss, a bit in the moment of why. Maybe they reengaged them in part of being part of this program, 10, 20 percent fractional road, but it becomes a retention tool because they have all of a sudden found a new meaning. So you can see how this components of innovation, brand, impact, and talents are actually oriented over. Now what's not realistic, we acknowledge is that you might have four of these CXOs or VPs get along with each other perfectly so that they all of a sudden co-create a shared community at once. What we find is more realistic is that maybe you work with the communications department, but you make sure that the community you have cultivated for them is also serving the brand and you build an alliance between the CVHR officer and the communications office. That has been for instance the case. Without creating more silos, yeah. Exactly. So this basically becomes this connective tissue, this rhizomatic new entity that doesn't have a seat. Really, it's more powerful because it doesn't have a seat. That's the way experience we've had with building an image, which was Turkey's first social impact in innovation platform partners with UNDP, partners with Stanford Social Innovation Review. We built it for one of the large entities in Turkey. It started more from a communications lens. How can we actually elevate the perception of our brand, all of a sudden it contributed massively to their HR story and talent story of attracting use, like no other in very specific outcomes and business metrics, retaining some of their top people as they started leading this platform. Seven, eight years in, it's living on its own, it's profitable, it's getting very minor support from the founding entity, Zorlu. But Zorlu is recouping that benefits every single day from the position of having co-founded a platform that transcended the boundaries of the organization. Another example is working with a foundation in Turkey, education reform initiative, where the first act we have done was to unite six other NGOs in Turkey together, which was the first time in history, because we know that six entities have come together in service of building a new educational platform. What we did was to index again on the strong ties, not the weak ties, but the strong ties of 50 teachers that we curated across many different backgrounds worked with that for a year, a year and a half, cultivated the right level of culture, interaction, strategy, core team that was also picked partially from that teacher group. Now it's at 40,000, six years in, it's growing exponentially because the DNA has been calibrated in a very specific way. Now, in the world of NGOs, the impact is the big story, obviously, it's maybe a bit less of the brand, but from an impact standpoint, it is a very powerful, decentralized entity that is informing various educational initiatives across the country, and now partnering internationally as well. I'll give one last example. So we have also worked in a new innovation district in Abu Dhabi called Meeza, which is actually just becoming life as we speak, three, four years into what, when we initially got engaged. It's also fascinating because at the urban level, you don't have a single partner, you don't have a single client, it's a much more complex of a territory, but it is also now becoming a touch, a cornerstone of the narrative in Abu Dhabi, of how creativity, innovation, design, impact, and coalesce to transform a neighborhood. So independent of whether the community is serving around the particular challenge of an organization, serving the cause of an NGO or serving the mission of the city, we have found over and over again the mechanics of it, underlying mechanics have actually been the same, which actually gives us a bit of confidence that, okay, this can really be a way of thinking, a way of acting, a way of showing up that can be multiplied. You know, as I'm listening to you, Angin, I understand, right, because we're working together on this and it's just so amazing when I sort of hear you play it back and what incredible results you've got for the work you do as an organization, but I can't help but have the client how on my head and think, what would they be thinking as they listen to you? And so if I was like, I'm a senior leader in organization, I could be listening to what you say and think, well, you know, we've got things in place that are allowed for cross-disciplinary collaboration. We have work streams in place, driving cross-departmental work. We have our values as an organization, therefore everybody is sharing them and motivated to a certain degree through employee engagement tools and strategies and campaigns. We have communities that we collaborate with on the outside. We have partners. So we're kind of doing this. They could be thinking. So how is this different to what you have seen organizations currently deploying in this space? Yeah, that's a beautiful question. And the answer is obviously not evenly distributed. We have found that you do need this still because this is so much of a systems challenge that you do need a bit of understanding and mapping the system and being humble with it and then trying to find what is the really tailor-made solution. I wish it was of one size for all. But what is for sure is that organizations shift their parts based on attention. Whatever leaders attempt to is the one that attracts energy and then it gets resolved or it's shifted. All we're claiming here is that, yes, you might be actually doing that initiative in innovation and you might be doing this other initiative in Bredan. You might even be working on that employee value proposition. But maybe, maybe it is just creating the shared narrative, the shared conversational space within which that can unfold. And that space usually tends to be a bit of building trust and further team relationships off-site doing very intentional, collaborative work so that people actually are witnessing all these components and we like to follow the portfolio approach and then you're like, oh, in your portfolio, you already are doing five or six things. Are you really maximizing their potential? Let's look at that. And is there a gap, maybe in the second or third horizon, in what you need to do or the story of it that you need to tell better to the right audience? Sometimes it's for action and in other times it is, oh my god, like I was just with a business leader, one of the largest banks here in Netherlands and in the innovation side. And he was saying, well, actually, after this working session, now I realize we have to do very few new things. But we have to completely reframe how we talk about it. And maybe that's the unlock, you know? In fact, we'd rather intervene in a system where we try to do less with more. Yes, so I might take out with my client hat on is I'm going to curb wastage, wastage of costs of investments, of energy. I'm going to remove friction in the process of implementing my business goals and objectives and strategies. And essentially, I'm going to accelerate my opportunity to impact and drive purpose-lit profit. Sorry, I always think from my side. I can't help myself. This was a beautiful idea. It was great. The red thread. Yeah. I think we are coming close to time. So I do want to ask one more question to you both. We've talked a lot about why, you know, leaders need to start thinking about this. We've talked a lot about some of the examples we're seeing out in the world that show evidence that building, thriving communities, fostering relationships actually create this impact, this lasting impact and build resilient organizations. My question to you is what would you say to impact leaders who are ready to go through this type of transformation? My favorite quote lately has been very, very simple kind of summary of what community means to me, which is people need people. It's that simple. You need people to do anything. So I'm curious what skills and mindsets you think leaders need to have to build these types of businesses. As long as you can go first. Yeah. I mean, I think business leaders do have to embrace new mindsets and new tools and their relationship with not just their teams, but themselves. I think we're being called into a new heightened sense of self awareness as to what potentially could my contribution as a leader be to the problem itself and go on that journey, understand yourself, understand how you show up with people, under show up with your teams and truly nurture an environment where people can be authentic. I'm currently doing a report on the future of imposter syndrome within creative industries and we've spoken to 70 of the world's leading C-suite leaders across these industries and their teams and I can't stress the importance of having the ability to allow for people to show up themselves. It's such a simple thing but it's so undervalued and it's just not prioritized enough and I think what I noticed and I can absolutely wholeheartedly say because I've experienced it is that working with you and your team and your organization I could just see how everybody could show up in any way which they wanted every day and that just allows for a whole new level of collaboration, understanding empathy, compassion. So this idea of like I'm going to just smooth fast break things, I'm going to do things better, faster for high productivity is the masculine or paradigm like you were saying, in earlier. It'll broke everything so yeah you know and so to move towards this new regenerative future is absolutely undeniable and what we mean by that is essentially one that improves rather than simply sustains and it creates a bigger ecosystem in which it operates and so we as leaders have to take responsibility of looking at how we reverse the economic environmental social decline that we're seeing as we build our products and places and services so that we can almost essentially come together and feel the gap that the market forces have actually left us and actually to a certain degree what capitalism has kind of left us with and so we are at that point where we've got to be thriving as organizations to enable real you know people planet and profit sustainability as just strategies to take impact and that thriving can only happen through people it can only happen through our ability to think the unthinkable imagine the unimaginable come together as humanity in our resilience because that's when we can really start to see things thrive and make change happen. Could you agree more? I would just invite leaders to think like a gardener any metaphor that we keep borrowing from the world or landscape artistic that's also a beautiful field although a bit more hands off in the gardener also actually you know the bitter of skin in the game being with it but the metaphor is we keep going back to Inatelier and also in our recent venture Neol which is now taking its own course of building another community of amazing practitioners the principles of gardening really work you don't get produce over from an apple tree in the first one or two years for the third year maybe you might have enough for the family for the fifth year you're in abundance you don't know even give it to that's regeneration that's not sustainability that's literally life giving or in the garden you want to have enough diversity of species so that there's some symbiotic relationship in between similar to how in the core community or in your organization the diversity is just a foundational element to be ready for external forces and adapt to it so it's inherent in the way you set it up you also have to sometimes let things be wild or let things just rest sometimes we think by keeping by keeping all night you know a tragic way to kill your plants is by overwatering them the question is yeah I'm so bad I talked about the same so I like the worst person was terrible but the point is where are we overwatering in our organization is also a good way to think because some communities need the breathing space need the time some people need also just a bit of buffer and space to really feel like the story is thinking in and they're feeling part of it it's confusing then I also agree when we have these massive emergencies around us to say well okay let's just slow down and it will be fine but really in this case having gone faster is has not been much of a just going faster in the wrong direction what's the point we have written a year ago this article on utterly as a decelerator which really confused our investors by then now I'm starting to encounter these articles we need to get down it's still there and now I'm seeing this pattern of like you know all these other actors also talking about okay where do we slow down because good strategy we need reflection needs a good cause needs them small moment of expansiveness through which a lot of priorities reach and then you have to go really fast we do not in this nostalgic cute zone of okay let's just all you know be nice to one another and like feel small groups no we mean a serious scalable impact where you just need to know when to slow down and when to speed up and that's the act that there's no simple answer but that's what I would say is a gardener always knows knows that intuitively yeah and I just love that analogy I just to chime in here because it reminds me of the serenity that a garden can give you once you start to see the fruits of your labor you know grow and I think that's a beautiful note to actually start to wrap up on because it's really that moment of stillness that I guess you're asking clients and leaders to come into and at the moment they're too I feel that they're just loving this idea of causing a storm and a teacup but how about just causing with a cup of tea and being still and reflecting and not adding to that act and not adding to the chaos and it's yeah it's the time where we are being asked really to come up with real novel thinking through the power of our collective intelligence and I think then it's going to be a new era where we can really come forward in our true agency and put our best step forward as humanity hopefully beautifully said aslam I couldn't agree more and mix you want to have a cup of tea with both of you but we're on this zoom call so up with a kettle on honestly thank you both that's always a pleasure to be in conversation with you and I really enjoyed listening to your insights and I hope that others will also enjoy this conversation and with that we will wrap thank you very much thank you thank you thank you thank you so much for having me it's been such a pleasure [BLANK_AUDIO]