Today, my business partner and former CEO, Sara Hicks, and myself, are thrilled to introduce our new venture: The Intentional Organization, a coaching practice and a forthcoming book.
What is The Intentional Organization?
The intentional organization is about building companies, teams, entire organisations based on three principles: inclusion, clarity, and learning. These have been the pillars of the business we’ve been building over the last decade. They’re the pillars of our coaching practice, where we work with leaders, founders, and executives to build organizations where great work flows from great people and great teams.
In practical terms, The Intentional Organization is about two things (for now!). First, it’s a book that we’ve been working on for the past year. It’s an accumulation of everything we’ve learned about building companies that put their people first while still building a sustainable and successful business. We spent years focusing building a good place to work. The book covers our learnings, our hardships, where we failed, and where we succeeded, and what we’ve learned from all these things. It’s a guide that anyone looking to build a company in an intentional way can turn to for advice, for ideas, to learn about our ways of doing and thinking about things. It’s the kind of book we wished we’d have as we founded and built our respective companies.
Second, The Intentional Organization is a coaching company (for now!). We’ve been working with clients from all types of businesses throughout the last couple of years to install and crystallise that practices that we’re covering in the book. This new company is where we’re offering our services to clients across the globe, helping them to grow as leaders and to build organisations based on the three principles of inclusion, clarity, and learning.
What’s our story?
Back in 2018, I was looking for a new role as a CTO. What I found was a role that went beyond a role and its set of responsibilities. I found a business partner with whom I wanted to keep working beyond whatever endeavour brought us together. What brought us together wasn’t just that we were each looking for a role to fill. We clicked on a level that stemmed from going through challenges and hardships in our past experiences. It was those experiences and the importance of relationships as something for work to flow from, rather than the other way around, that got us together.
Over many dinners together, coffees, long walks along the waterfront, over a good beverage while sitting somewhere to process the day, we found many more of the things we’re aligned on. We found things where we complement each other. We found vulnerability in each other, and in ourselves, that shone light on our struggles, past and present.
Even though we spend most of our time working together being nine timezones apart, we kept holding on to those things that brought us together and to those things we discovered along the way. We joked about the things we would do next, about stories that definitely needed to go into the book. Whatever the book really was. At the time, it was just an idea that our experiences needed to find its way into the public. Just like they’ve brought us together, we were also hoping that they could provide an example of what building a business is. It’s an ongoing struggle, a challenge, an opportunity to grow and learn, a chance to invite more people to the table.
Building a different kind of business is what brought us together. And it’s kept us going. We couldn’t think of a better next step than to quite literally write the next chapter in our relationship ourselves and share it in book form.
The process of writing this book has been a cathartic experience for both of us. It’s been an opportunity to put into writing how we’re thinking about things, a chance to process certain situations and what we’ve learned from them, and to formulate frameworks that have been in our heads but that have never fully been spelled out in a concise and reusable way before.
Writing and sharing what I’ve learned have always been a passion of mine. Working with folks one-on-one to help them overcome the crucibles and challenges that founders and executives are facing, that’s what I’ve been enjoying the most about my jobs as CEO, CTO, and now as a leadership coach. I’m thrilled that Sara and I are continuing our work together in this way.
While the book isn’t ready yet, we aim to publish it later this year. Please do head over to our new site to learn more about the book and about what we do. Go read Sara’s blog post as well where she shares her perspective on what brought us together and on what we’re doing next. Follow us on the Twitters (all three of us!) and sign up for updates. We’ll keep you posted on the book’s progress and on everything happening in between.