Context

At Kwanda, we’re able to move fast and produce outsized and high-quality results with a small team because of our commitment to effectiveness and thoughtfulness in both our communications and our tangible work outputs.

As organisations grow, they often slow down, and the quality of their work suffers. To prevent this, we prioritise deep work and scalable, asynchronous communication.

This is especially important for us as a remote-first team with members across different time zones.

Thoughtfulness

At Kwanda, we do more than provide funding to change-makers. We also help shape perceptions of the African diaspora, and those living on the continent. Serving these communities requires a high level of thoughtfulness and care in our decision-making. This thoughtfulness should flow through to all levels of decision-making, both external and internal. We use writing as a tool to clarify and disseminate our thinking and find it to be a great force for thoughtfulness in decision-making.

Writing

Writing is core to our working culture, which values thoughtfulness and scaleable communication. Strategic thinking should be shared in thoughtfully written memos, and most information should be disseminated asynchronously, resulting in a low-meeting / low-sync culture. Here’s why:

  1. Valuing time: Most meetings require coordination of schedules, dial-ins, and audio/video fiddling. There is often a loose agenda and only a few key moments where information is transformed, or a decision is made. All the time those meetings take, multiplied by all attendees, adds up quickly.
  2. Deep work, focus, and flow: It is important to find flow in work to produce a quality product. When maker schedules are interrupted, the velocity of our collective output slows down.
  3. Deep thinking: By leaning on memos instead of meetings, we distil our thoughts to better understand and share context, the challenges at hand, and the various ways we can solve them.
  4. Written words live on: Meetings are ephemeral. You “had to be there,” and the written minutes are usually not as good. Through clear documentation, we create a written record that can be referenced by anyone, at any time — even months or years later.

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