Category: About DFF

Two years into our journey with distributed leadership at Digital Freedom Fund, we’ve moved solidly from theory to lived practice. What began as a structural shift has evolved into something more fundamental: a complete transformation of almost all aspects of how we work together.

Things in the world haven’t gotten any easier since we began this journey. AI and surveillance technologies evolve faster than regulation as civic space shrinks. The communities we support face increasingly complex and urgent challenges, while funding remains unpredictable, shaped by shifting donor priorities, political pressures, and global crises.

In this context, organisations can become confined by structures designed for more stable times. When decision-making is overly centralised, or processes are too fixed, critical moments can be missed and have lasting consequences for the people and movements we are here to support.

We believe that distributed leadership has made us stronger and more responsive in these turbulent times. One example of this is the way structural feedback, reflection and iteration required to work in a decentralised model allows us to adapt in the face of ongoing change.

Working with distributed leadership depends on building structures for intentional, ongoing reflection. At DFF, the buddy system, which allows staff to check on each other’s well-being, combined with our monthly staff well-being survey, becomes an intentional space of reflection on how we can better support each other.

Bringing the whole team together for our monthly team feedback and model evaluation meetings and during our biannual team retreats allows us to surface challenges and collectively pinpoint the underlying causes. We are then able to respond and design solutions with care and urgency, rather than waiting until misalignment or crisis occurs.

One example of an issue we were able to quickly surface and respond to was recentralisation and workload imbalance. Over the past year, the team experienced prolonged absences and a total capacity reduction. Staff raised concerns in monthly and periodic evaluation meetings about the impact on other team members’ well-being.

As the situation persisted, the team agreed it was not temporary and that we needed to adapt. We reviewed roles across all circles and decided which were essential. We accepted that we do not have the capacity to do everything and deprioritise some work to take some of the burden off the team. Then the essential roles were redistributed throughout the team.

Distributed leadership is not simply “less hierarchy”, but a discipline that enables resilience. For us, distributed leadership is less about distributing authority and more about distributing awareness: of context, of each other, and of the systems we are part of. That awareness allows us to act with greater intention and responsiveness in an unpredictable world.

Especially in turbulent times, the ability to pause, reflect, and adjust collectively is essential. Only on that basis will we have the stability to strategise, inspire hope, and build the future.