Organisation
As an ANBI foundation, Picaflores is not profit-oriented and is subject to strict rules to maintain this status. The directors in an ANBI foundation are unpaid. The website should give transparency about the finances and activities. When setting up the Picaflores.org organization, we looked closely at appealing examples of shared leadership in other organizations. An optimal organizational structure is dynamic in nature. In successive phases of growth and development it will be necessary to look carefully at what works and what does not work for the people who make the organization realize its goals. To this end, a broad and changing representation from the organization will be asked for advice. It will be common practice to experiment at the organizational level to investigate whether new ideas and concepts do or do not work.
The success of an organization or project depends to a large extent on the people involved and the drive and motivation they bring in. Picaflores.org is designed as a flat distributed organization that works according to a number of principles that fellow workers conform to and that are developed organically on the basis of what appears to work in the organization. These principles and best practices are maintained in the Picaflores concept manual.
The content of this guide is the reference for the activities of the people involved and other stakeholders who work for Picaflores.org. Future participants and partners are asked to commit to this concept. The successful organizational concept and participation model of SemCo (Brazilian entrepreneur and Harvard laureate Ricardo Semler) has been one of the sources of inspiration here. The Agile manifesto is also a source of inspiration for the way of working in the sense that the principles prevail over the underlying rules.
The board of Picaflores.org acts as guardian of the Picaflores concept and the values of the organization. External partners and parties thus experience consistent, ethically responsible business practices in line with these principles,
The board is supported by an advisory board from a number of ‘elders’ and people from the organization and underlying projects. The advisory board is partly fixed and partly dynamic in composition. The advisory board ensures that the board remains sharp, pure and on the right track and that room is given to improvement initiatives and experiments at organizational and other levels.
The hummingbird is the symbol for all activities of the foundation and on the one hand symbolizes the connection with, and inspiration from the higher goals (symbolic meaning for the Ashaninka people from the Amazon). On the other hand, the strength and meaning of the individual for the sustainability of this world. The latter is aptly shown in this short film by Prof. dr. Wangari Maathai, Nobel Peace Prize winner in 2004.
We use the following 6 organizational principles in the Picaflores.org organization:
- Values prevail over structure, processes and contracts.
- Open – Everything is transparent The fear of transparency comes from the fear of judgment and that translates directly in company politics, slow decision making and silo formation.
- Flow! Every idea is play-clay. Projects, proposals and ideas are meant to be malleable and thinking should not be rigid and immobile.
- Act! You already have permission. From control to confidence. By being clear about the goals to be achieved, in combination with a good learning & development structure, many checks in the way how professionals work superfluous.
- From complexity to simplicity. Many professionals tend to make things more complicated than necessary. By always | going back to the intention (‘What are we doing it for?) work processes can be made easier.
- From attending to contributions. By addressing the real talents of professionals, their work will not only be more enjoyable for them, but their contribution to the organization will also be bigger.