The Journey of learning why your organisation exists – example semdi solutions, formerly evecoo

When in August 2011 I started to do “my own thing” there were a lot of things which interested me and ideas I wanted to try: Events, Marketing, Websites, non profit, policy making, etc. – But one thing I wanted to be sure of; I always should be the director of what I am doing. I wanted to set my own values.

When you are 28 and you are founding an organisation you do usually not know yet, what exactly you want and where the path of life would guide you.

Also if you are starting your organisation without an investment, you are going for solutions, you can accomplish very fast, very quickly with the least amount of challenges – you are going for the low-hanging fruit and every request somehow is a chance. You are offering solutions on things you know, but you are not really passionate about.

Of course when we started evecoo with nearly no investment at all, we went this way. We were doing ok, but we were not fully passionate about what we were doing.

Found our own passion

In 2015 our first fully paid coachings started we understood what we were really passionate about it. Why did we know it? Because, the more we were working with people, the more we liked what we did and the more we wanted to master the art of coachings. We started to read more. We did not do it because we needed the money, but we felt autonomous in it and we felt a purpose. And we wanted to learn every day.

This learning every day is what we would like to follow for the rest of our journey. Therefore we decided to rebrand our company:

evecoo will be called from now on semdi solutions

semdi is created from the Latin expression “semper disce”, which means “always learning”. This is not only what we want to achieve, but it is our mission as our own organisation – that we want and should continuously learn in our lives. It should be also a symbol, that a continuously improving organisation is one, which learns constantly what happened in their past, in their surroundings and right now in their organisation. Learning is the stimulus, we need to plant into organisations, who want to change the world.

According to Google Translate “semdi” is also an Icelandic word meaning “to compose”. And the same way a composer directs an orchestra, we would like to compose and help an organisation to build empowered, self-organised and constant learning teams. We want to compose organisations with our tools and lead teams with our experience.

Solutions are desired final resolutions of undesired situations

Finally we chose the word solutions as it has a positive connotation. Solutions are around for having solved challenges or problems. Solutions are desired final resolutions of undesired situations. Our tools are solutions, which have fixed the issues and problems of organisations.

Our logo should exactly resemble this solutions –  A “s”, which is leading to a desired state with all the challenges, turns and pivots on the way. And a swoosh below the S symbolising the left part of an open book – the part we have read already and from what we have learned already.

For an increasing team and network over the next 1-2 years, we already established our set of core values, which we believe and which we try lead by examples with. Not only our team will be evaluated on how they live by these values. We expect them to evaluate leadership as well. Do we adhere to these values and if not, what are the actions what we are taking?

What to believe in – our values

But it is our goal to learn constantly, so we will evaluate those values regularly in all day meetings. What do the values mean to our team and are their values, which they would add or remove. Our core values for now:

• Grow everyday; settle only for excellence.
• Focus on working smarter, not harder.
• Trust your team, share your story.
• Embrace positivity and establish solutions.
• Collaborate constantly towards results.

“Create an organisation that matters” – we are trying to do it ourselves first for our own organisation. Building in what we believe in and trusting the tools, which help us to achieve that what we want our client’s organisation to be: A continuous flow of trying to be better. Constant learning from our past, our present and our surroundings.