Welcome to the world of Enspiral. We are an international collective of people pooling resources and ideas together to help build a better world. A social innovations incubator and resource for changemakers.

Creative Intelligence & Design Thinking to co-create a Better World

Human Centered Design Toolkit

How do we create a better future for our communities, our families, and ourselves? There has recently been much talk about co-creation, collaboration, innovation, and design thinking. In 2011, I set up Collaboration Cafe with a few fantastic friends to do a little more than just talk, but get actively involved in creating a blueprint for how we created a better world from the grassroots, up. We learnt a lot, and from time to time we will still run Collaboration Cafe, but at its core all it is, is a process. Sure, there’s some finesse around the edges that is brought by the team of … [Read more...]

The Hundred Year Company

feat_100yrcompany

I'm a bit of a business geek. Ever since I threw in my Engineering job to try my hand starting my own web design business in the sexy dot.com age, and later a string of startups in the dot.bust and 2.0 era, I think one of my favourite things to do is to sit back and listen to audiobooks and podcasts on the glorious stories behind successful ventures. One thing that's been bubbling in my mind this month is an interesting mystery in the world of business... No company has survived beyond 100 years.(Okay, I'll qualify this with the exception of a few banks and family owned … [Read more...]

Double Lives of Enspiralites

leading a double life

Some of us here at Enspiral have double lives.  Some people are working on startups, some people spend time volunteering, some just love to surf. Me? Well I also work with a national organisation which focuses on connecting people to their environment - mainly through volunteering. I love this other job, and it really complements my work on Bucky Box (helping to build tools for a better food system). At the end of last week, I found myself suddenly called on, in this other capacity, in much more urgency than normal. For those of you in New Zealand, you will undoubtedly be familiar … [Read more...]

In the pursuit of purpose

Sam working as a conservation team leader in NZ

A few weeks back I wrote a blog which was picked up by Nature Coast, about lifestyle working and it’s possibilities for something greater.  It posed the quandry “if we’ve got more flexibility & choice over our working lives, what’s our new found motivation directed toward?”. I have been exploring this with my own life for the last 4 years.  I sometimes call myself a ‘corporate refugee’, but really my time was only slight compared to many who’ve escaped the realm later in life. I left the UK with the assertion that I was ‘off to work on something which I … [Read more...]

New working paradigm = new possibilities

Paekakariki Beach

This is the extended post of a my guest article published in Nature Coast's newsletter in April. The term 'lifestyle working' has been bandied around a fair bit over the last few years, but has made fairly minimal impacts on the day-to-day environment in which we work, in general.  Sure, perhaps we're able to leave the office with an iPhone and connect with calls and emails on the move, allowing greater freedom, but generally we still go about business in a similar way. Having done a fair bit of personal research in this area, I'm now finding a radical shift in this model is … [Read more...]

Bettermeans rocks our world

I was lucky to stumble across Bettermeans a few months ago and it was like walking into what our dream company intranet would look like with a couple of years development. Very exciting for us, but I think this software will profoundly change the way people work together. Here are two things Bettermeans does really, really well - there are many other things but these are two stand outs. Democratic collaboration Building a large scale, flat, decentralized organisation focused on high performance is hard work (trust me!) and the big challenge is staying fast and efficient. The whole … [Read more...]

Balancing Life & Family – the results

In our original blog Balancing Life & Family, we spoke about how work-life balance may be maintained, or even shaped to your particular circumstances. We got some great feedback from our survey, and this is our chance to share it with you. Most of our respondents had young children, and felt their current employers had a fair bit of room for improvement, several had even gone freelance in response to business’ unreasonable demands on their lives. If they hadn’t already, most people said that they would like to work part-time with flexible hours (dependent on family … [Read more...]

Wikileaks and what it means to New Zealanders

Wikileaks is a new player in the apparently unstoppable trend for information to be free in the modern age.  Data is perfectly replicable, sharable, scalable, and virtually free to reproduce or distribute.  The scarce resource is no longer information, which flows like water.  The resource is our attention and focus.  The international hostility to Wikileaks deserves a closer examination. Wikileaks has published cables with additional information on the progress of the war and documentation on international player in geo-political hot spots.  They have produced evidence proving the … [Read more...]