CASE STUDY 3: Opus Independents (Sheffield)

James Lock, a director at Opus, describes Many-to-Many as both a philosophy and a set of practical tools. The key realisation was that the kind of systems work Opus wanted to do wasn’t possible for a single organisation. They needed ways of working that enabled collaboration across boundaries.

For James, this isn’t about rejecting hierarchy for its own sake. It’s about creating governance and decision-making structures that suit complex, interconnected problems.

At Opus, this has meant paying attention to:

• How value is defined: for example, in the River Dôn project, exploring what it means to value nature and who holds responsibility for stewardship
• How governance works: experimenting with new civic infrastructure through the Sheffield City Goals project.
• How decisions are made: testing tools like Loomio and Notion to support consent-based decision-making.
• How trust is built: using relational practices like onboarding, role-setting, and collaborative risk analysis.
• How value is shared: developing cultures of asset and risk sharing, not just relying on individual champions.
• How learning happens: emphasising reflexivity, iteration, and cross-pollination.

Internally, Opus has shifted towards more distributed governance, embedding shared decision-making and accountability into everyday culture. Structures are deliberately light and flexible, balancing coherence with adaptability. As a worker-owned co-op, responsibility for governance is shared through member roles and working groups.

One example is the River Dôn Project, which brings together artists, scientists, and communities around bioregional governance and river restoration. Here, Opus chose not to formalise contracts too early. Instead, they let relationships lead, avoiding blockages that formal legal frameworks might have caused. As James put it:

“We decided not to formalise the contract – because it would have undermined the trust we had. The clarity came from the relationships.”

Opus has also fed their governance learning into national projects like the Unfurling Fund, which explores new ways of resourcing cultural and civic work.

Across these experiments, Opus emphasises the need for strong learning infrastructure – shared reflection, transparent documentation, and regular check-ins. They are building this through projects like the UBI Lab Network, and by reimagining the role of their media platforms Now Then and the Festival of Debate.

At first, Opus saw governance as a static backdrop – something to put in place and then leave alone. Over time, they’ve come to see it as a creative act, continually reshaped in relationship with others.

They also realised that Many-to-Many tools could both enable leadership and collaboration, and protect against harmful forces (like rivalry between organisations or perverse incentives). This has required new capabilities: emotional literacy, systems thinking, and the ability to hold uncertainty.

• Navigating when to stay informal vs. when to formalise, especially in formal environments.
• Balancing autonomy with accountability across distributed teams.
• Keeping documentation and learning live and relevant in real time.
• Working at ‘the speed of trust’ while also meeting funder or public deadlines.
• Translating across different languages, priorities, and problem sets to create shared understanding.

• Don’t rush to formalise: early contracts can undermine trust.
• Build learning infrastructure early: make time for reflection and course-correction.
• Design for affordances: create simple ways for people and organisations to connect.
• Stay rooted in place: national systems change is enriched by local grounding.
• Keep governance visible: name it, share it, and adapt it.

Opus continues to experiment at the intersection of culture, ecology, and democratic renewal. They’re part of a wider movement of place-based networks prototyping the governance systems needed for a regenerative, plural future.

For James, the challenge is not just technical but relational. Many-to-Many approaches, he says, offer a way to hold that complexity with care and intention.