Camplight Scales Team Decision Making with Loomio
We are big believers in self-management and the flat organisation.
Marin Petrov is a seasoned systems architect and a passionate steward of teams. We catch up with him late into his evening and he is gracious enough to share with us a bit about the culture of Camplight and how he brought Loomio into the organization post-Covid.
Camplight is a dynamic software development and consulting firm based in Europe. In the early 2020s it faced a challenge many successful organizations encounter: How do we make good decisions as the team expands? With 20–40 team members and a commitment to autonomy and flat organizational principles, they needed a tool that could support their collaborative approach.
The first time I’d heard of Loomio was after it was first born, just after Occupy Wall Street. I was getting involved in the world of co-ops and self-management and this tool made a big impression on me at the time. I immediately felt ‘ooh, like-minded people’.
Marin joined Camplight in 2022, having already implemented Loomio in other organizations to great effect. His comfort with the tool allowed him to imagine it in other contexts and types of organizations. “Here, I saw the need for a tool to support team decision making, which at that point was slow and ad hoc. I proposed Loomio and now we’ve been using it for 3 years.”
From Consensus to Consent
At the heart of Loomio's power is its ability to give each voice equal weight and make the process transparent. Rather than decisions being dictated from the top down, Camplight's team members are empowered to actively participate, share their perspectives, and build alignment and consent.
At times, flat organizations can hobble themselves by trying to achieve consensus on each decision. Adopting a consent-based process can be quite a departure from the typical arrangement where a group seeks consensus – full agreement with the entire group. With a consent-based approach, groups can move forward as long as there are no significant objections. Team members do not waste time debating or trying to persuade other members to minimize their objections. Consent is reached when no one is aware of a risk that the team can't afford to take. This levels the playing field, allowing the collective intelligence of the group to shine.
The transparency Loomio provides is also crucial. By documenting the decision-making process, the team can trace the evolution of an idea, understand the reasoning behind choices, and see how everyone contributed. This builds trust and accountability, ensuring no one feels left out of the loop, no matter which part of the project timeline they entered on. Loomio is one of the keys to holding Camplight's harmonious workflow together. “The tool doesn't just facilitate decisions”, Marin explains, “it invites transformation of how the team collaborates as a whole.”
The Gift of Good Enough
Crucially, Loomio encourages an iterative, adaptive approach to decision making. Instead of striving for perfection, the Camplight team focuses on reaching the practical state of "good enough." Good enough is a solution that can be applied immediately and refined over time. Good enough means we can take the risk to move forward together. The permission to aim for good enough reduces paralysis, allowing the group to be nimble and responsive to changing needs.
Loomio encourages the Camplight team to cultivate their soft skills and collaborative muscles. By regularly practicing decision making together, the team is continuously strengthening their ability to work in harmony. What may have felt daunting at first has become rhythmic and natural – a fluid, improvisational dance of shared leadership.
Loomio is a tool that can catalyze cultural transformation. Empowered by the tool, Camplight evolved how they made decisions. The new process allowed the team to be more agile, innovative, and true to their value of self-management.
More Q&A with Marin
How does your team use Loomio on the daily?
It is mainly used for consent-based decision making. But we also use it for our salary process, for aligning on strategy, financial vision, etc. “Loomio is super useful for both operational and strategic purposes º it helps teams to co-create strategies that can be executed quickly.”
How does Loomio fit into your current workflow at the org level? Most of our ideas are actually born in Trello – we avoid Slack and prefer a lot of asynchronous communication. We use the Slack integration to notify team members about new threads in Loomio. The new template feature in the tool has also really helped us. We create and tweak templates of our own, for example, our self-set salary process is custom and quite specific, so we created a template from scratch.
What advice would you give other teams looking to implement Loomio?
There’s a lot of growth that happens when you commit as a group and hold a process around decision making. After some discomfort, people will inevitably learn to let go of anxiety about mistakes and become more comfortable moving forward together. But it takes practice to build collaborative muscle, relationships, trust – the bedrocks of social capital. “We grow up together as a team.”
How do you know it’s working?
“This tool empowers people.” Recently, I tried to bring Loomio into a traditional, hierarchical organisation. I ran a workshop on team decision making and the members were surprised at the idea they had any autonomy at all. “Are we allowed to do that?!” While the employees waited for permission, the leaders waited and wondered “Why aren’t they taking initiative?” I invite all teams into a mindset shift toward self-responsibility that doesn't require you to be in a flat org or a startup.
Anything else to add?
“We [Camplight] needed to add clarity and transparency to the decision-making process. Now that we have implemented Loomio, we can see and trust that the decision the team made is the best we could have done at the time.”
