Michael Honey — A personal politics of betterness
This essay was presented as a part of my work in the Design Leadership unit in the Master of Design Futures program at RMIT University.
What if I told you that there exists a successful business that treats its people well, has offices in two major cities, and has three-day weekends every week?
That this business operates on an ethical model that’s about doing good work that’s good for the people who work there and good for clients and the world?
That everything is framed in terms of being sustainable?
That this business carries no debt?
Here in the third episode of my series of interviews with people working at the intersection of design, leadership, and organisational culture, I speak with Michael Honey, the founder of Canberra- and Melbourne-based design and development studio, Icelab.
Over recent years, Icelab has attracted attention more widely for its innovative approach to working hours, the way it expresses its culture to clients and the technology community, and the collaborative and consensus-driven way it gives decision-making power to its people.
Over the course of our conversation, Michael and I touch on matters of politics, organisational economics, finding a version of capitalism that’s tightly compatible with a highly progressive worldview, and how to make decisions about leadership and culture that result in a sustainable business that is quite different to most.
I’ve known Michael for many years, and he’s been consistent about his vision the whole way along this journey. Reflecting on our conversation, the themes that are beginning to emerge seem to be consistent to this point:
- creating an intentional culture — in Icelab’s case focussed on a balanced life, sustainable work for the people at the company and for clients — is long tail work; you can’t do this quickly and you need to be consistent
- building the kind of company that Icelab is (and some others like Basecamp, Buffer, and here at acidlabs that express similar worldviews) requires a take on business and capitalism that isn’t shared by everyone, and that some would consider foolish; I disagree, and strongly believe that this pragmatic take on business where you need to be profitable, but other things have a powerful place in your perspective align strongly with the model expressed in umair haque’s books The New Capitalist Manifesto and Betterness
I’m beginning to suspect (actually, more feel like I’m having confirmed) that the nexus of design(fulness), leadership, and organisational culture that I wanted to explore in doing this series requires a fairly progressive take on the world, and that organisations that stick to a more traditional form of capitalism, and approach their people as a extractable resource, perhaps cannot work in this way.
We’re only three conversations in, so there’s a way to go, and some personal biases to test before I can be definitive.
