Notes from the Practice Lab

What I Mean by Enterprise as a Practice

I keep returning to one distinction in conversations with founders and funders alike: an enterprise is not a plan you execute once. It is a practice you keep doing, and keep getting better at.

Most business plans are written as if the hard part is the writing: get the model right, get the numbers right, and the rest follows. In our experience across enterprises of very different sizes and sectors, the model is rarely where things fail. What fails is the assumption that a plan, once approved, runs itself.

An enterprise that is treated as a practice behaves differently. Pricing gets revisited when the market shifts, not once a year in a strategy retreat. A hiring decision gets tested against the actual work before it is written into an org chart. The people running it expect to be wrong sometimes, and have built the habit of noticing quickly rather than defending the plan.

Practice compounds, plans expire

A plan is a snapshot of what you believed on the day you wrote it. A practice is a discipline that keeps producing new, truer snapshots as conditions change. That is the whole advantage: it does not go stale the moment the world moves, because moving with the world is what it is built to do.

This is also why we resist handing enterprises a finished strategy and walking away. A strategy delivered fully formed teaches an organisation to wait for the next one. A practice built alongside them teaches an organisation to make its own next move, and its next, and its next.

That is what I mean by enterprise as a practice: not a document to file, but a muscle an organisation keeps using. Our job is to help build that muscle, and then to get out of the way.

Why Creative Spaces Matter

Creating the Conditions for People to Flourish

When we talk about infrastructure, we usually think about roads, electricity, water, broadband or public transport. Rarely do we think about the places where people meet, create, imagine and build relationships. When I paused long enough to hear myself think, I have become convinced that these places are also a form of infrastructure. They create the conditions in which people, ideas and communities can flourish.

The places where I feel most alive are serene ones: greenery, art, the sound of wind chimes, somewhere I can hear myself. There are one or two cafés I loved in Kampala, both since closed. Walking in felt like coming home: the staff knew me, had watched my children grow, and always asked after the girls. So, a few years ago, I wasn’t trying to build a café, or an event venue, or a co-working space. I was trying to build that feeling, a place beyond the coffee and the tea, where I would want to spend my own time, and where others could find themselves and see one another. Good coffee. Books. Art. Thoughtful design. Natural light. A place where conversations were not rushed. A place where work, creativity and community could exist comfortably alongside one another. When I first started, even the name confused people. They would come in and ask, “What is a space?” The people advising me, on the marketing, on the model, pressed the same question. Are you a café? A boutique? What is the core of your business? I kept saying: it is a space. And I could hear how complicated that sounded.

As KaraSpace slowly took shape, I realised I was indeed creating more than a beautiful environment. I was creating the conditions in which people lingered, meaningful conversations and connection happened. Strangers became collaborators. People left feeling a little more inspired than when they arrived. We have provided a safe space for children to play and make friends, curated art-based team building events for groups, hosted reflection meetings for leaders of organisations, provided room for wellness groups to convene and converse, and space for artists to commune, connect and support each other.

None of this fits neatly into a business plan. You can plan for the number of coffees and teas; you cannot plan for the moment someone feels at home. In a creative business, what you are really offering is not the coffee or the cake, it is a feeling. How do you put that in a plan? How do you measure an experience? When people come to host something with us, one of the first things I ask is: what is your vision for this, and what feeling do you want people to leave with? We then curate the space around their answer.

These moments never appeared in the business plan. But I have come to think they are not a departure from it, they are the point of it. They are the real measures of success, the ones that will never fit inside a number. This has changed the way I think about creative spaces. I now see them as part of the invisible infrastructure that supports creativity, enterprise and community.

When we talk about supporting entrepreneurs, we often think about finance, training or technology. Those things matter. But so do places where people can think, experiment, meet collaborators, recover from difficult weeks, test ideas and feel that they belong.

Creative spaces provide something that is much harder to quantify. They create possibility.

People still ask the question from those early days: is it a café, a co-working space, an events venue, a boutique or a guest house? The honest answer is that it is all of those things.

The café makes conversations possible. The gardens invite reflection. The co-working space supports focused work. The guest house welcomes people into the community. The boutique celebrates African creativity and craftsmanship. Our weekend make and create sessions, painting, making beads, making cards, with more to come, remind us that making something with our hands can also be a way of making connections with one another.

Each part serves a different purpose. Together, they create an ecosystem.

There is a word I keep returning to: alakara. In Ateso and the Karamojong languages of north-eastern Uganda, it means happiness, “I am glad”, and it is the word people use to give thanks and to wish one another well. It is the spirit I hoped Kara Space might hold.

Because community does not happen by accident. It is cultivated. It grows through repeated acts of welcome. Through thoughtful design. Through consistency. Through care. Through creating places where people feel comfortable enough to bring more of themselves into the room.

The right conditions are partly physical: an uncluttered room, good light, something beautiful to rest your eyes on. But they are just as much about how it feels to be there: that you are seen, that the service is warm and responsive. We are far from perfect. But we care, and we work to take the friction out of the day, so that your energy can go where it matters, into creating, into the conversation, into the people around you.

That is why this essay sits alongside In Her Element and Enterprise as Practice. The first asks what happens within people as they move into a new phase of life. The second asks what work teaches us when we approach it as a practice. This essay asks a different question. What kinds of places help that growth become possible?

I don’t think there is one answer. Every community will create its own spaces. Every place will have its own character.

But I have become convinced that creative infrastructure matters. This matters even more, in a world this loud. With so much going on, technology pulling at our attention, we need places we can simply go to be: to convene, to commune, to think and connect, and, in the quiet, to be surprised by an idea we did not arrive with.

That, in the end, is why creative spaces matter, because they hold open the conditions in which people, enterprises and communities can flourish.

Ashanut