Lumino is a young company, formed in 2020 when working from home became a reality by enforcement for a lot of people. The effect of this was to instil a sense of what is important.
If you've worked somewhere before, particularly if it was somewhere big, you probably didn't pay much attention to just how much intellectual infrastructure there was keeping the whole thing going. What you probably did notice was how hard it was to make anything change, even for the better. That's because invisible infrastructure and corporate dogma are closely related.
Conversely, young businesses tend to have far less infrastructure and are more open to people making positive changes. It is liberating in that people are welcome to take on improvements, with the trade-off being that it's often necessary to start completely from scratch, get messy and make small, incremental improvements.
Lumino is definitely more in the second group than the first, but, more than this, we're a company with a strong sense of social purpose. We've baked that positive social outcome into our mission.
Whereas most businesses measure success in money alone, Lumino is a company of its age: we measure success in terms of positive impact and, if we get that right, the money will come.
We're designing Lumino to be the kind of company we'd want to work for, based on our own good and bad experiences elsewhere. We started by drafting our Working principles that describe how we expect Lumino people to behave. We cast this widely: these expectations extend to people connected with Lumino at our partners, or those who are with us only for a limited time.
Lumino needs a really diverse skillset. But if we tried to get the diversity of skills needed to make it work onto just one payroll, it'd be a disaster. First, we don't need all the skills all the time. Second, some skills we need in great excess now but less so later, and vice versa. And thirdly we believe that talented people need good leadership from people competent in their specialism.
So instead of trying to assemble a monster we strongly value partnering with other specialist organisations. This means that people contributing to Lumino may not work for Lumino. But it works out healthier that way.
Born of remote-working and made up of a small team, we haven't fully worked out the social fabric of our work. We can't, for example, all go down the pub at 6pm. We're very open to improving this: not only suggestions but actually doing it.