Experiex Trips: Cooperative Leadership in a Social Enterprise

Introduction: Leadership And Business At Two Extremes

The most important lessons in leadership can’t be taught in a book. Real life is the best teacher. The only way to get a complete and deep understanding of a how to be a cooperative leader is in the try to be one. No one will tell you how to manage a group but the group itself. In each chapter of this book, different authors share their cases, so that you can have an approximation of what happened in certain specific circumstances. Hopefully you will get some tools, ideas, strategies and techniques for you as a future leader. But even understanding the best of this book, there is nothing like the experience that you will get dealing with real problems. The best you can do is to go out and experience your own leadership style.

In this chapter we will share with you the case of Experiex Trips, a small enterprise that encourages people to get out of their seats and start experiencing in their own skin conditions that are different to those that they are used to. This is so that they will return home with deep and transformative learnings that will lead their life decisions.

During the entire chapter, we will explore the history of Experiex Trips; its core values; its business model; the three pillars for its success, which are Cooperation, Experimental Education and Sustainability; but most importantly, the way Cooperative Leadership works in a Social Enterprise.

This chapter is divided in 6 sections. The first section will give you a brief history of how Experiex Trips was founded and its core values. Here we will examine the concept of Cooperative Leadership in contrast to Competitive Leadership. We will gain a basic understanding of the methodology needed to take a group from a competitive and individualistic perspective, to an inclusive, cooperative and community-based way of understanding our role in any group, company or enterprise.

The second section will discuss more fully Cooperation and why it is the roots of a Social Enterprise. We will learn what is a Social Enterprise, the conditions that any project has to have in order to be considered cooperative, and different perspectives on how to lead a Social Enterprise. We will notice that for some authors, the concept of Social Enterprise is so new that they find it difficult to clearly define the borders of this model, while for others, a Social Enterprise is an old model of organization, just with a new name. We will evaluate the differences between Social Enterprise, Non Profit Organization, and a Profitable Company with Social Responsibility.

During the third section, we will see how Cultural Differences are the Common Ground for Cooperation. In other words, how the global condition of our world nowadays opens millions of possibilities to learn, grow and build together with cooperative leadership within social enterprise. We will analyze the intricate relationship between Diversity and Cooperation.

The fourth section will talk about how Experiex Trips has used Storytelling to connect with people from different cultural backgrounds and from all over the world. By teaching Creative Writing Workshops to women and children in developing countries, it has achieved the goals of its Community Developing Programs.

In section five we will recognize that one of the biggest challenges for a Social Enterprise is its Millennial clients. From there, we will analyze how Millennial Culture can pose obstacles but also open opportunities for Cooperative Leadership. The culture of immediacy that Social Media has created, plus the narrow understanding of different cultures, and the voracious appetite for satisfaction, makes the commonly slow processes of Cooperative Leadership hard to implement, but at the same time it potentiates great transformation for participants, once they find its benefits.

The last section will open the doors to the future of Cooperative Leadership. Through building and keeping Long Term Relationships, the Social Sustainability of a project is guaranteed. Understanding that the participation of our Social Enterprise is not only temporal, but that its work creates a long term impact in communities, Experiex has developed the philosophy of Participation in Process that already exists within developing communities.