Dark Matter Labs: rethinking organizing #BeyondTheRules – with Indy Johar and Annette Dhami

Podcast Notes

Dark Matter is a multidisciplinary design team developing new working methods for system change. Today we’re joined by Indy Johar and Annette Dhami to discuss their mission of discovering, designing, and developing the institutional ‘dark matter’ that supports a more democratic, distributed, and sustainable future.

Indy Johar is a founding Director of 00 and Dark Matter Labs. An architect by training, Indy is a Senior Innovation Associate with the Young Foundation and a visiting Professor at the University of Sheffield. He co-founded Impact Hub Birmingham and Open Systems Lab, and was a member of the RSA’s Inclusive Growth Commission. He is a thought leader in system change, the future of urban infrastructure finance, outcome-based investment, and the future of governance.

Annette Dhami spent over a decade building, operating and driving mission-led (and often place-based) organisations and networks, including Impact Hubs (Brixton and Islington) and the Plymouth Social Enterprise Network, exploring how we organise, finance, use buildings, build networks and create economies for shared benefit. Annette joined Dark Matter Labs in 2020 to focus more deeply on how we organise and operate (in theory and creating this in practice) for transition. She holds the organising and operational work of the international Dark Matter Labs ecosystem (read more about that here), and explores these organising questions more deeply in the multi-partner #BeyondtheRules project.

Key highlights of the conversation

We discussed:

• Dark Matter Labs’ ambitions for creating a real learning organization.
• Governing by building learning capacity inside organizations.
• The theory of “genius”: make people accountable through care and learning.
• The ability to work diagonally across local and global dimensions.
• Creating markets and new theories of value.
• The tension and spectrum between “patronizing” governance and fostering autonomous (almost autocratic) entrepreneurialism.
• Making space for care and innovation at every point in the system.

Find out more about the show and the research at Boundaryless at https://boundaryless.io/resources/podcast/

Thanks for the ad-hoc music to Liosound / Walter Mobilio. Find his portfolio here: https://boundaryless.io/podcast-music

Recorded on 26 October 2021.

🌐 Boundaryless Conversations Podcast is about exploring the future of organizing at scale by leveraging on technology, network effects, and shaping narratives. We explore how platforms can help us play with a world in turmoil, change, and transformation: a world that is at the same time more interconnected and interdependent than ever but also more conflictual and rivalrous.