closing round & open source governance

November 16, 2018

closing round & open source governance

Tuesday & Friday 15^th / 16^th of November 2018

Yesterday was the last day of a very inspiring coach training! Thanks to the whole team of holacracyOne and The Producers Loft for coaching and hosting us! And to all the other participants! Sharing experiences with people, following the same movement and spreading it all over the world (Canada, Brazil, Mexico, India, Indonesia, the Netherlands, Dubai, Sudan and one participant from the US) was so much valuable!

Another day full of practicing coaching, in different circumstances and with different methodologies, getting feedbacks immediately and reflecting conclusions.

And now? What are my conclusions?

Well, there are many! It will take me quite some time to order all my notes and thoughts to summarize in the right way.

But one important thing got much clearer for me. Thanks to distributed autocracy, organizations are more safely controlled. Further, everyone gets the same voice, gets space and everyone, not only managers, can use the same tools (in a sense of how to request an outcome for instance or propose a change in the organization, for instance an accountability)! As an effect - much more confidence for all people involved.

The openness of similar thinking people across companies and the willingness to share and exchange experiences, is comparable to an open source community (see “The Holacracy Community of Practice”), which develops software and shares it among their community, to improve it and on top of that develop it further. Imagine, you are developing and experimenting with a new process that for instance, defines a new approach how you handle compensation in your company. And you just share it with other companies. They might also share their experience, and reply to yours which helps you at the end, to improve and find a better approach. This is so much powerful! Re-Inventing your organization with holacracy, is not only about defining new team structures, it is a radical and disruptive mind-shift, which asks for new behavior and requests to change existing habits.

Now from a founder or chief executive officer’s point of view – what is the impact, when he or she decides to sign the holacracy constitution and pushes his or her authority into the organization?

It is totaly liberating – Sandra of our group mentioned! You can proceed much faster, Brian explained out of his experience! As a formal CEO he had this forward pulling sense, wanted to run! But on the other hand, he was also aware, that he also had to take care for his team, as a leader! Everything lies on you! Everybody is watching on you and is expecting everything from you. And in the same time, you just want to run forward, to invent and deliver fast!

And as soon as he decided to push his authority into the organization, he had much more support and suddenly was able to run faster! As a formal CEO, you can still define roles, which you energize, and which give confident about your business. Additionally, you decentralize autocracy. Define roles in a governance meeting, which every member of the circle can attend and set circle members on the roles. And they can create roles too!

The process will support you! Based on that, you request next actions, or outcomes to resolve your tensions. And people decide by themselves according to their accountability! They do not have to ask you for every single decision or even next step. As long as it is in their accountability, they decide according to their authority! Which pushes the whole company forward! Of course, as already mentioned, because of the disruption, this takes a lot of time first!

After a nice walk at the beach with huge waves this morning (the smoke from the fire near san Francisco was quite bad today), I am now in San Jose in a co-working space. Preparing for some customer workshops the next week. Tonight I will meet Gabriel, a very good friend I was working with in projects about 10 years ago. And then I will fly back tomorrow! Looking forward to get together with my family and to exchange back in the office how we will proceed with our own holacracy journey – and whatever happens.. I am very inspired to help people and organisations on their journey!