The Reinvention of the
Findhorn Foundation

At Hallowe’en in 1996, Judy McAllister, the Foundation Focaliser, shocked the community by announcing that a management consultancy process had shown her and her team that the Foundation was unmanageable, with no clear decision-making processes, vision, purpose or identity, no clear lines of accountability, or evaluation measurements. The whole management team courageously resigned, thus provoking a crisis and creating the conditions for change.

The trustees appointed an interim management group to make executive decisions, and a think tank, including Robin Alfred, a criminal justice social worker doing the Foundation Programme.

After much reflection, they proposed a new management structure with clear lines of accountability, plus a reinvention stream to bring coherence and direction to the Foundation. The trustees took a huge risk by appointing Robin as reinvention focaliser. He’d only been there eight months and people were asking: Who is Robin Alfred?

Robin spent the next three years working with an excellent team to focalise task forces looking at decision-making, values and ethics, staffing, pay and remuneration, and identity and structure.

They worked hard to repair the community’s wounded self-belief through numerous meetings with co-workers, areas, departments and individuals. Robin focalised a long series of listening exercises and community meetings, synthesising feedback and proposals as we went. He went to one meeting with a flip chart plan of the agenda. People laughed, explaining: We have to see what the group energy wants to do.

The team introduced supervision throughout the Foundation and developed departmental mission statements and clearer priorities. They wrote the first Equal Opportunities Statement, and became clearer about staff contracts, work expectations, holidays, sabbaticals and the implicit and explicit contracts between co-workers and the Foundation. They established a development fund to support new initiatives and gave impetus to setting up the College, and supported the new Spiritual and Personal Development area. Core Group disbanded and community-wide meditations were established. Optimistic expectation filled the air.

People’s ideas for the Foundation’s future were synthesised into five options and 98% of people chose Option D. This involved small management teams running departments as they saw fit, with their own budget, free to generate their own income. Today, departments are increasingly responsible for their own affairs; however, the need to coordinate and ensure fairness across the board has mitigated against a more radical interpretation of Option D. About this time, Alex Walker stepped out as Chair of Management. Everyone assumed that, as Deputy Chair, Robin would step in, but he didn’t want to. One day, when Robin was learning to focalise Experience Week, Eileen came and read from Waves of Spirit about how connecting to spirit is like plugging in a kettle: you need to switch it on before spirit can flow through you. As she spoke, energy rushed through his whole body and banner headlines appeared in front of his eyes: YOU HAVE TO DO THIS JOB AND YOU HAVE TO DO IT NOW BECAUSE EILEEN WILL SUPPORT YOU.

Eileen told Robin: “Your task now is to make God’s will your will, or it will never work.” Mari Hollander had also received guidance to chair management. Robin relished external-facing work: PR, fundraising, the UN, consulting. Mari loved internal stuff: KP, rotas and helping the departments work really well. In under an hour they drafted a shared job description, later unanimously approved by the coworkers, management and trustees. Robin has likened their time in the chair to a relay race. He held the chair for the first year, while Mari learned about the management process. They held it together for a year before Robin let go, and Mari held the chair for another five years, doing much to embed and embody the reinvention spirit of Option D.

Catharine Stott, based on an interview with Robin Alfred