Ariadna Manent González

Original article published in catalan on 11/04/2022   Last weekend, I was reading an article written by Xavier Marcet titled "The Pride of Having Substitutes", which focuses on defining and promoting a certain style of leadership. Some of the reflections he shares include: "To lead is to serve and not to serve oneself," "If we play a leadership role, our responsibility is to create new leaders," and "What is not acceptable is people who climb up to gain power and then are unable to understand that people don't work for them, but rather, the higher you are, the more you work for others." "I also know proud entrepreneurs who misuse power for improper ambitions." This article, inspiring as always when you read an article by Xavier Marcet, coincided with the moment when I'm reading an interesting book by Julie Diamond called "Power. A User's Guide." I'm currently at a part where she explains that adopting a high ...

  Original article published in Catalan on 10/10/2022 This is the reflection I shared on October 3, 2022, during the inaugural presentation of the Week of Social and Solidarity Economy in Mataró. A reflection born from theoretical knowledge; from ideas, vision, and dreams; and from the experience of the organizational transformation process that we have been promoting and building at Fundació el Maresme for the past few years. Ideas, vision, and dreams about how Social and Solidarity Economy (SSE) organizations can contribute to building a fairer, less unequal world where people and their well-being are at the center of the economic model. The main idea of this reflection is that the way companies, organizations, and entities are organized is not neutral, and if they truly want to be active in social transformation, it must begin within the organizations themselves. Organizations should be the mirror what they aim to generate around them. Social and Solidarity Economy emerges...

 Original article published in Catalan on 09/20/2022 In various reflections, I have pointed out the idea that organizational and management models of third sector entities could be a lever for driving social transformations. But why? The reasons can be diverse, I  explained   some of them in my article " Third Sector: what if the lever lies in management an organizational models? " , but when I share this idea, I also draw on the fact that the way we relate to our environment influences the response we can provoke or receive from it. So, can we think of different forms of organization that facilitate and promote social intervention with a more community-oriented perspective? And if entities organized according to more communal, participatory, and democratic models became a reflection of the social intervention approach that the third sector and administration are advancing towards? In a very summarized and simplified way, when we talk about community-oriented social...

Original article published in Catalan on 08/12/2022   We find ourselves in a moment that third sector entities feel constrained by rigid regulations and bureaucracy that are not aligned with the social needs of the society, we live in. A moment with multiple factors of social exclusion, complex problems: dynamic and multifactorial issues... The need to seek different solutions, the need to innovate organizational models based on person-centered models, community models, inclusive models, transformative models... these are some of the challenges we have on the table. But why is it so difficult to carry out? Why is the effort to move forward so monumental, while the results we see are only small green shoots? Green shoots that entities protect so that they aren't destroyed by a gust of wind... green shoots that are repeatedly used as examples to show that change is possible. The pace of this transformation is slow, and there's concern about whether this rhythm will be suffici...

Original article, published in Catalan on 07/18/2022.   A few years ago, I was taught that in public policies, "what is not on the political agenda does not exist." However, I would complement this statement in the following way: "what is not on the political agenda and does not have an allocated budget does not exist." We can talk about the agenda in public policies, just as we can talk about strategy in organizations. The strategy in organizations is fueled by latent concerns that begin to emerge, signaling where we should focus our attention in the coming years. In my experience, when we start detecting these signals, they indicate the end of one stage to give way to a new, a different stage. Lately, one of these latent concerns that I perceive is the need to pay attention to the care of the employees. So, I've been thinking for days that it's increasingly necessary to discuss, debate, understand, and share what we mean by "care," specifically w...

Original article published in Catalan, on 07/03/2022   In the construction of participatory and democratic organizational models, we are based, among other aspects, on the empowerment of the working individuals and teams to generate this change in the management approach. We work towards decentralizing power and decision-making, so that those decisions that directly affect teams are made by them in a self-managed, participatory, democratic, and decentralized way. Seeking teams to evolve towards self-organization of work. We focus on building more participatory management models, also advancing towards a democratic organizational culture . What do we understand by organizational culture? Without attempting a textbook definition, we could define organizational culture as the set of values, attitudes, ways of doing things that permeate the people working in an organization, and thus the organization itself. Therefore, it is that intangible substrate that binds the working indivi...

Original article publised in Catalan on 06/19/22   "We do not live in homogeneous communities, nor should we aspire to emphatic units or absolute consensus. These are impossible things and even if only for that reason, situations that make no sense to wish for".   Daniel Innerarity affirmed this in his article on "The society of gaps" (La Vanguardia, 04/30/22). This reflection suggests me to think of organizations as communities: we cannot expect organizations to be calm systems where absolute consensuses are given. This idea, however, becomes a greater challenge in entities that focus on working with participatory and democratic organizational models: management models that are based on shared decision-making, distribution and democratization of power, self-management, and self-organization between other characteristics. In any organization, there are different points of view regarding how to do things, which are the best decisions to make, which are t...