Social Entrepreneurs often start off with an idea of how to solve a fundamental human problem in a new way. In order to scale their work to make a bigger positive impact in the world, sooner or later they need to build an organization and make it profitable.

I joined encode.org in July 2016. Long before that I always felt attracted to working in a holacratic environment. Now there was this opportunity opening up to work with some of the pioneers of Holacracy and to work on taking the next step, currently captured in the encode.org purpose statement “Going Beyond Employment.

Ever since Eugen Herrigel’s popular book “Zen in the Art of Archery” the magic formula “Zen in the art of…” has entered the pantheon of ready-made, catchy titles. So here’s another one. The inspiration hit me when reading the book “The Science of Enlightenment” by contemporary American Zen Buddhist teacher and ‘dharma geek’, Shinzen Young. In this article I apply his pearls of wisdom to the organizational realm, to the practice of Holacracy, and the For-Purpose Enterprise — exploring commonalities between them.

Leading-edge models of self-organization like Holacracy distribute authority across the organization while aligning the work with an overarching purpose. This article explores commonly perceived blind spots and criticisms of Holacracy and how the practice can be complemented by upgrading the surrounding structures to become a For-Purpose Enterprise.

Encode.org was bootstrapped as an enterprise with its members as its investors. Instead of trying to predict the perfect equity split up front and fighting over the percentages of shares later, we decided to try the dynamic equity principles of “Slicing Pie” by Mike Moyer on ourselves and directly bake them into our legal agreements.