For the last two weeks I’ve been exploring the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy with my colleagues from Vancity. Our home base was Bologna, the region’s capital, which is the epicenter of the co-operative movement and in possession of Europe’s oldest university. Emilia-Romagna is also one of the wealthiest areas of Europe, especially when you consider how well they are closing the gap in terms of income inequality – thanks to a uniquely collaborative culture and the complementary presence of hundreds of co-operatives, Italians in this part of the world truly share the wealth. In addition to the formal study tour, I traveled around the middle of the country with many different colleagues and observed awesome craftspeople adding value on everything from industrial equipment to art and, obviously, food. Here are 10 ways to add value like Italians.

Re-blogging William Azaroff

My colleague, William, has been sharing lessons learned from our experience on his blog – check them out, too:

• Fake Co-ops!
• Final Reflections on Bologna – More Worker Co-ops

Unlock potential like Michelangelo

I visited Florence with a few colleagues and we toured the Museo Academia, which displays Michelangelo’s David. The thing about masterpieces is that they live up to the hype. This was absolutely our experience with the giant marble statue. Another thing that made the experience special was the knowledge and style of our tour guide, Francesca. According to Francesca, Michelangelo believed that art was contained inside the stone and that it was his job to surface what was already inside.

Add value for your friends, family and colleagues by listening, asking and coaching with the goal of helping them surface and share their unique gifts with the world.

Take food seriously

Italians are ritualistic about food. We all know this. Whether it was a lunch buffet offered by one of the co-operative partners we visited or the last meal I had in Rome, so much emphasis was put on the quality of what we ate and the experience we had with the food. In fact, our visit to Fico, the world’s biggest agri food park in the world put on display how much value Italians add to the world of food. In Italy eating dinner is an experience that enhances community wellbeing. Take time for your lunches, share meals with colleagues, and make it home for a slow and fully present family dinner.

Add value to your next meal by enhancing the quality of your food (this might require spending less on meat or simply having less food) and taking more time to prepare and consume the meal with friends and family.

Espresso >>> Giant coffee

One of my favourite things in life is tasting great coffee, especially sipping it from a giant mug. Italians don’t role this way. When they seek an afternoon coffee it’s in a café and it’s an espresso (if you ask for a cappuccino or latte you might hear, “what are you, a baby?” in response). This approach allows folks to get their shot of caffeine and anti-oxidants, engage in conversation with others at the bar, and dramatically reduces waste from coffee cups (we throw away over 1.6 billion paper coffee mugs per year in Canada).

Add value for your personal and community health by walking to a legit coffee shop and having an espresso in a tiny, reusable ceramic cup the next time that you crave coffee.

Re-imagine space

We Canadians aren’t great at effectively blending public and private spaces in service of community engagement. For example, one of our first meals as a team – there were almost 20 of us – saw us setup in an alley behind the restaurant next to several rows of tables sprinkled across sidewalks and under porticos. Our collective observation was “we could never do this in Vancouver because of the bylaws” – look, I don’t know what rules or understandings allow Italians to leverage public spaces in such ways, but fostering connections in public squares, parks and, in our case, alleyways certainly brings people into pretty much every corner of every community.

Add value by embracing the commons, an idea championed by Stefano, because it doesn’t make sense to divide the world into public and private – a lot of our space can serve myriad purposes when we engage in dialogue about how to use it.

Live life like Naveed, Dennis and Yvette

Okay, this idea has less to do with Italy and more to do with how a couple of my awesome colleagues experienced Italy. In different ways, Naveed and Yvette expressed their passion for living life to the fullest with morning runs, bold questions and adventurous travels. I was inspired by their efforts to enhance social cohesion in the group by including everyone on their journeys – Yvette welcomed all the women in our cohort to a pre-arranged trip to the coast and Naveed quickly instigated “walking group” when it became clear that many of us were afraid of running at 7am. Thanks to their powers of inclusion and joyfulness we were more connected with each other and certainly got more out of life because of what we shared.

Add value to your community of friends, family and co-workers by reinforcing with the group that we only have one life and that there are more inspiring ways to live it.

Find your style

Holy crap Italians are stylish people. From banker to baker to social co-operative general manager, everyone we met looked great. Especially in sunglasses! Look, I have little to add to what’s already been highlighted by Esquire.

Add value by seeking feedback about your style and then figure out how to express such a thing by what you wear and how you behave (no pressure … it probably only took the Italians 2,000 years to do it!).

Truly embrace competition

Stefano Zamagni, one of the leading academics of the co-operative movement, shared with our cohort the literal definition and etymology of “competition” – it means “running together”. We live in a world of zero sum games and races to the bottom because we have come to define competition as having winners and losers. The thing is that it’s possible to win together – you don’t have to lose for me to win.

Add value by collaborating with colleagues who you might not normally work with to raise everyone’s game to another level in service of your organization’s goal (not just yours or your team’s).

There is no free lunch

Reciprocity – like, real reciprocity – means that everyone puts skin in the game so that things get done. For example, one of the reasons that the Emilia-Romagna region is so fascinating is that the folks who are the soul of this community have a pretty good idea about what it means to solve problems fairly. Rich people probably have more capital to invest in solutions, so they should pay more. And this doesn’t mean poorer people pay nothing because “there is no free lunch” (a phrase stated by all of the professors who lectured our cohort) and everyone has something to contribute, such as labour or creativity.

Add value by being more open and direct at work about how much people are contributing to the organization’s purpose and then adjust how performance is measured accordingly.

Work like family

A defining characteristic of the worker co-operatives that we visited was that the member-owners operated a lot like a family. Feedback is generous and direct. Transparency reigns. Emotion fills the walls of offices and warehouses. This happens because most worker co-ops are small, sure. But most Canadian businesses are small, too. So I think that there’s something to be said about what it means to literally own your work as a member-owner of a co-operative, where you’ve invested not-so-subtle amounts of your own capital into the enterprise, which accelerates your connection to the work and the people who do it.

Add value to your workplace by being a loud, Italian family because doing so will probably get you closer to radical transparency than smiling and gossiping will.

Blend the past, present and future

Rome is one of the only cities in Europe that has housed and engaged citizens for thousands of years. Such a thing is seen and felt when you visit the city, which was my last stop in Italy. This is an incredible Italian advantage, to be able to weave the ancient into the present and also reflect on the past to inform the future by literally walking through the streets of your community.

Add value by understanding the land in your community, the indigenous people who never ceded it, and think about how we might blend the past with the present in service of our future here.