BetterMeans introduction

better means offers decision-making project management and governance tools that make it possible for people to work together in a new way openly efficiently and democratically I think we can all agree we're currently facing some enormous social environmental and economic challenges but while many of us are working to tackle these challenges headon progress is often slow and ineffective the problem is that we haven't changed how we work in hundreds of years every company or team with people has an agreement to help them operate rules about who makes decisions how information is shared and the way work is assigned yet with all of our technical advances we're still using the same organizational agreements we used since before the widespread use of electricity at the core of this agreement is a command and control structure and it looks something like this decisions are made up here and are executed down there and that's a problem because all the insights creativity and good ideas of the folks down here are wasted and the people up here end up being bottlenecks overwhelmed isolated and burned out a lot of us who work in this way feel that something is off something needs to change but we don't have a viable alternative to solve today's problems we need a new agreement of how to work together a new organizational structure and this is where better means comes in we've invented a new way of working together and we created the tools to support it here's how it works the first thing that's different about organization ation running on better means is the team structure there's no command and control no job titles no fixed roles and responsibilities everyone involved at the heart of this open Enterprise is an equal member work is divided into Project work streams and members can move freely between one or several workstreams choosing what they want to work on nobody's told what to do each project workstream on better means has a dashboard and this is where anyone can add new ideas for a work item new ideas are then discussed and voted on and once an idea gets enough agreement it becomes an open work item and members get to prioritize it ideas that have been collectively prioritized by the team can be started by any member and once items are completed the team votes on accepting or rejecting them voting's optional so decisions are made quickly by the people who want to be involved the activity stream keeps the work transparent and helps members stay on top of the work they're involved in if the organization chooses to it can make its work Streams Public and that means that if someone's interested in contributing to one of those Public Work streams that person can start by joining the conversation adding ideas or voting on existing work items however because these contributors are not yet members their votes are non-binding and that means they signal to the members what the larger Community thinks but they don't directly change the workflow if the members of an Enterprise choose to they can nominate a contributor for membership and vote them in organizations running on better means also have the option to use our Pure compensation system in this system system members and contributors are fairly compensated for the contributions and here's how that works first the cost of each work item is individually estimated by the team before it started as several work items are completed and accepted they're all rolled up into a retrospective each member then gets the chance to rate their percentage of contribution to the work as well as other people's contributions once all the ratings have come in each member receives the normalized average of other people's assessments of them and over time people can see the bias with which they tend to rate themselves and others and start to correct for it better means also include standard collaboration tools like wikis discussion boards and document storage overall the better means approach is a new way to tackle the complex problems we face today problems that can't be solved using the same way of thinking that created them we need new organizations that allow everyone's voice to be heard new efficient ways of making decisions smart teams that can move quickly systems that scale and most of all we need a work environment that's fair and driven not just by profit but by principles and these inspiration based work principles that better means uses are the same methods that allow unfunded volunteer run open- Source developers to successfully compete with massive commercial Enterprises better means Builds on these same principles giving social entrepreneurs the tools to build better organizations that make our world more environmentally sustainable socially just and spiritually fulfilling so start working today on better means and make your impact