The Point People convened for the first time in 2010 and incorporated as a nonprofit organisation in 2011. We began in part, as a response to the dominant narrative around entrepreneurship. There were so many programmes, accelerators and incubators geared towards social entrepreneurs but all of us had a sense there were other ways of adding  value to a system of change.

Each of the Point Peoples’ work was in some way about being plural, working with complexity and building value laterally rather than building one thing that can often be focussed on growth, in a linear, reductive ‘enterprise’ trajectory.  Global issues being so huge and complex, we saw a real need for a greater focus on cross-sector working - and that people who could traverse and translate across disciplines had a really important role to play.

Such people are skilled in pattern recognition, in sensemaking, in spotlighting, narrating, weaving and convening, and in connecting and coordinating. The Point People was born as a response to this.

Our initial group of 16 people had large networks in different sectors and had all developed a language and set of behaviours that embodied a transdisciplinary and generous approach.

As 16 people sat around a table we became a microcosm, a fractal, of the larger systems at play in the world around us and we believed that by sharing and learning and working together in a way that bridged across all of our different experiences - drawing on our collective intelligence - we could bring some value to trying to address these huge systemic issues.

The very first video we put on the website back in 2011 was this talk, and it still helps to make some sense of how we see our role in systemic change.