This post is longer, as it covers an entire month. April was a very different month from March, like March was different from February. I didn’t write a single post on this blog and didn’t explore deeply any specific topic. I was, as planned, making myself invited to visits or conversations about organizations or initiatives around me.

My first impression was of added inefficiency: it was much more difficult to manage time and be efficient since I depended on others’ agendas and needed logistic time to get around. Anyway this was hugely compensated by what I learned and by the feeling of being out, exploring not a topic but the space, people and reality around me.

Seven Visits, Seven Realities

In just seven events I was able to contact so much diversity and richness. It was like opening doors to parallel worlds and, in each, finding enough to lose myself for months. The friends that welcomed me on these visits actually helped me understand the structure and logic of their worlds, not to get lost and to integrate each into my world, creating bridges and opening possibilities for future sharing.

I wrote a section below for each of the visits.

A Strong Civil Society Ecosystem

I was introduced to the story of the Degrowth movement in Portugal by visiting someone that I didn’t know before and who lives on my home street. I was curious for some years now about the Degrowth principles and early in this sabbatical I read James Hickel’s book “Less is More” (see my previous post on this book). The conversation was as much on Degrowth as on the way to collective joining efforts to share, influence and transform the world around us.

The Degrowth movement in Portugal is recent but involves already tens of persons organized into three regional groups. There is a Manifesto, an Internal Organization and a series of tools set in place for internal and external communication. The group includes some experts on the matter but many are new arrivals to the topic. The movement is admittedly managed by means of collective intelligence and decision and does not aim to create a legal entity.

On the Degrowth principles, it was challenging to hear about the specific proposals and actions for Degrowth in Portugal and to be exposed to different Degrowth definitions, in this case, centered around French authors like Latouche. Apart from subscribing to their newsletter, I plan on going to the local meetings and reading new books on the topic.

As I listen to the long personal path of my host, now in retirement, I also brought from this visit a sense of living in an ecosystem of self-managed civil initiatives. So many, so close to me and so intricated into a network as they connect to each other via ideas, shared members or shared spaces. I arrived with an idea of fragility: what can a few dozen people do, not even formally organized… and I left with an insight of confidence: I was looking at a specific beehive but there is an entire and diverse ecosystem of initiatives that, as a whole, can be super strong and resilient.

Check more info on the global movement here: degrowth.info and for the Portuguese group, check more info at decrescimento.pt and, in case you are curious, join the newsletters as I did.

Complexity Science Geeting Applied

I discovered recently that a friend of mine is doing a Ph.D. in Complex Systems with one of the top UK researchers on the topic. Besides being incredibly jealous and feeling somehow diminished for my little four-month sabbatical… I had to know more about it so I booked a lunch with him.

Complex Systems is one of the topics I must write one, or several, posts on. In a single sentence is the science that models how large groups of entities by means of interactions between them, emerge with behaviors that the single entity could not perform, or even understand. An example is an ant colony behaving in advanced and almost strategic intelligent ways even when the ants perform simple tasks and react to each other. Another example is the stock markets or economies where each individual is playing by his own, somewhat simple, rules and are linked via trading to each other but the system can experience unexpected crisis or growth. See more on Complex Systems in the video below.

My friend was deep into the technical challenges and possible outcomes of fully modeling the Portuguese Economy using a specific complex system technique. Because he accumulates the Ph.D. with a job in a national state agency he passed me his privileged view of how the current National Economy modeling is done without the Complex System approach, in a linear and deterministic way, and how his work could help improve it.

Apart from having an excuse to talk to someone I didn’t reach for long, the best part of the conversation was to hear firsthand that this better understanding of the complex system we live in is getting out of the textbooks and into research, real-world problem-solving and, hopefully, into state and government organizations.

Transforming Tasks and Materials into Value

I drove one hour to visit a warehouse near Lisbon where an old friend welcomed me to show what they do and the strategy behind the recent success.

I was in complete shock mode the moment I arrived. The company is a relevant one in the Portuguese market, part of a multi-national huge corporation but the warehouse and small team of technicians conveyed the feeling of being in a somewhat car workshop. I don’t say this is pejorative mode, quite the opposite. This around-ten-person team with hardware and logistics skills and a simple warehouse were able to support a lucrative and respected business.

The shock was also emotional since I was revisiting my past. Back in 2006, for six years, I was head of WS Energia which made a somewhat similar miracle of transforming steel and plastics parts into a product and a successful business.

The parallel was reinforced when my friend showed me the reason for their recent success: an organizational and management shift towards sharing more information with the team, towards having and using a lot of data to improve every detail of the processes and towards being ambitious and pushing that goal every day on yourself and on your team. He was actually the real-time proximity layer transforming a series of tasks and procedures made by a small team into value for the shareholders and the clients.

Five years ago, when my second child was born, I decided that I had done enough of what my friend was now excelling in and happily doing. Now, by visiting this reality and revisiting my past and my choice I was sure of one thing: the organizational role of transforming raw processes into value is very very tough but very very important.

The whole process remembered me of the management best seller books “The Goal” and “The Hard Thing About Hard Things”. If you are thinking of embracing, or just understanding, these kinds of jobs they are a must-read.

Consulting vs Building New Realities

I visited a friend that is now doing strategy consulting for a successful entrepreneur after other jobs in leading organizations. I was challenged by his path since I see myself possibly acting as a consultant in the future, as a way to share my technical and management experience and at the same time connect to different realities.

After an initial presentation of what we were both doing, I was suddenly stopped by him saying: you, a consultant? forget it, you are a builder. You will get tired of making suggestions others won’t follow. From all of April’s visits and conversations, this is the sentence that more often echoes in my mind. Am I missing my potential by thinking about how to help others? Should I embark again on a creation cycle, with all the promises but also the struggle that comes with it?

Another interesting topic of sharing was his experience in dealing with government and administrative organizations, and how my ideas on collective intelligence are maybe possible at the low-level processes of small teams in those organizations but very hard to instill in the high-level political decisions. Anyway we agreed to continue to keep, as a thought experiment, brainstorming on new kinds of collective intelligent political process.

State Organizations as Catalysts for Positive Change

During one of my other April visits, a friend told me: you must talk with this young guy who has a lot in common with your ideas. The result was another welcoming visit to another personal path and perspective. In this case how State, Government and Administrative organizations can be, contrary to the rigid notion we have of them, catalysts for change in society.

This person is working on a Goverment Agency to instill Collective Intelligent and Cross-Colaborations inside the otherwise bureaucratic governmental offices. He is also pursuing a possible integration in the biggest European project grant ever to explore pathways towards post-growth economics and at the same time thinking on local city councils, especially in remote regions could be agents for change in behaviors and best practices in local realities.

It was interesting to share the key importance of starting by adding notions, lexical, and definitions so that people could even have discussion on what change looks like. I was also very energized by both the ambition of tackling change in such difficult contexts and by the logic of connecting such different approaches in a single perspective.

I will follow with more interest now what these central organizations are doing, also internationally like OCDE and European Union, and add them to my mental map of complex systems and collective solutions!

Creating Rich Soil from Waste

By visiting a beautiful unknown backyard near my house, I learned, theory and practice, how composting transforms unprocessed food waste into rich soil full of nutrients. Looks like magic! In this case, everything is done in a private backyard, by someone who is an expert on. I learned that there are lots of people like him, to whom anyone can give their food waste if previously selected. Check this link for a map of delivery points anywhere in the world, maybe one near you: https://sharewaste.com/

In my case, the Lisbon municipality also has a network of community collectors. Check more here: https://lisboaacompostar.cm-lisboa.pt/.

I want to try to join this movement since in Portugal there is no food waste separation and anyway the processes mix a lot of nice things, like being local, decentralized, personal and organic.

What I assimilated, in this case, was the slowness of the composting processes which can take months, the degree of complexity to make it right with fewer odors, animal intrusions and the expertise of it all, like choosing the correct mix of food waste and plant material. It was a direct link to my agriculture side (not much active during the last few years) on being outside, solving each day some small problem, waiting for nature to do its work and in the end, feeling rewarded and awed by the magic and belonging to a self-balanced cycle.

Searching for Work-Family-Life Balance

One of my auto-invitations was to visit the workplace of a friend that works at a multinational corporation while being the only one based in Lisbon. He also has young kids and tries to live a healthy lifestyle, so I was curious to see how working in a co-work with several strangers worked for him and if this would be a choice for me. In case you are interested in finding co-work spaces near you, check this map for locations anywhere in the world https://www.coworker.com/

The visit ended up including sharing the challenges of parenting, how to commute by bicycle, how to integrate with remote work colleagues, and how to merge yourself with networks of people close by, that start to be strangers but then become friends. It all seemed like recipes to find the work-family-friends balance that works.

In my case, I was happy to know that there are relaxed and healthy environments to work outside my home office, but I confirmed I would not get out to transfer to another building, what my body needs is sun and be outside! Besides my work is mainly made of meetings where I sometimes do a key part of the talking and, said by others, in a rather strong voice… not ideal for an open-office co-work space.

On the other side, it was reassuring knowing how much others are investing, like me, to improve and test the work-family-friends balance.