I think it’s becoming clear.

… but I don’t know how to fund or make it sustainable.

I started an accidental community almost two years ago.

It all began with a post on LinkedIn about leaving a job without something to go to, and washing to carry on the conversation with the 20k people who had read my post. 18 months later, we have a community of over 800 people, across 15 timezones, and we are a support group for anyone who wants to work differently.

I often describe Leapers as 80% support group, 20% product business, but we don’t create products, and it’s not a business.

But rather, the insights I gather from the community, I try and prototype new ways of supporting individuals, or engage with organisations on how to support their indy talent.

So, as a result, in the last year and a half, I’ve created:

LittleWins — a tiny app for celebrating to small successes.

Welcome — a tool to onboard and support freelancers on site

Manual of Me — an online platform to help you communicate who you are and how you work, brilliant for ad-hoc teams.

I’ve concepted and pretotyped:

Grow — a personal development tool for Indy workers, to create a development plan, and access lower cost training.

Pool — a network of people you work with, based upon their passions and interests, not just capabilities and availability.

FridayFive — a simple way of sharing what you’re doing with others, to combat isolation and imposter syndrome

Huru — getting orgs to hack better ways of supporting their indy workers

And I’ve started building a model for how Indy workers can create their own psychological safety, and the role orgs need to play in this too, based upon research I have run across 500 freelancers.

Much of this work is rooted in what I started whilst at Carat, resigning our culture to put people and change at the heart, rather than in the corner. Much of that work centered around getting to understand what people wanted and needed, and building teams around people who wanted to do the work, rather than being asked to. It worked. We had 97% engagement in the programme, and it improved a number of important metrics internally. Plus where it was applied to clients, it created tangible improvements in quality of work, quality of ideas, and commercial value.

I am not an HR person.

I’m not an organisational designer, or organisational psychologist.

I’m a strategic hacker, that can look around corners and see problems or opportunities ahead, and wants to do something about it.

So, looking at the body of my work over the past five years or so, it seems to lay out something like:

• Strategic vision and articulation: where are headed, what we we doing, and why?
• Strategic pathways: how do we get there?
• Rapid Prototyping: build stuff which makes a difference, and accelerates us towards where we want to go
• Make it sustainable: helping everyone I’m working with to be able to do all the above without me. (I’m least interested in this bit, but it’s also the most important, so I spend most of my time on this).

The “Leapers” work follows that model too, as the way companies are building teams increasingly relies upon liquid talent, but they’re almost always badly designed, and not thinking about how to do the best work, but rather just find the best people, and that’s my aim, to do the best possible work, to do awesome stuff that I’m proud of, that has impact, but if the vision is missing and the team is broken, it’s not possible.

So I’m splitting my focus between supporting the individuals (that’s the Leapers community), and engaging with organisations (to support the Leapers community at large, not just it’s members).

My thinking is that if I can get paid to help organisations, that creates the space and sustainability to help individuals. Or even better, find a home, a company who also wants to do this as part of their model (an org design firm, an existing network using freelance, etc), and spend my time with them.

But I have no luck at making that bit happen.

At least I have a sense of what I want to do now.

Next I just have to find some businesses who see the value in doing that too.