The teaser workshop was mainly a little bit of sales and background info for the whole system with a valuable extra. And this was the role playing game of a tactical and a governance meeting. The first was working in the organisation (by crating and finishing next action and projects) the second was working on the organisation (by creating roles, accountabilities, policies). Both gave valuable insights.
The beautiful part was when people with manipulative and defensice communication patterns couldn’t process their issues, tensions just after the hard work of transforming it to straight proactive suggestions. This needs personal work and a straight look in the mirror.
What left me confused is the fact that I saw Holacracy One an an entity focusing on the method of holacracy as a more important thing than the people who are the would-be applyers. Their mission is “exquisite organisation” wich does not contain any verb, any direction out from the method. For me mission is always something about contribution not just the description of the the core of existence. This was a kind of barrier between me and Holacracy One that afternoon.
Anyway, its promising, so we need to make a proof of concept.
Hi Greg, thanks for your posts on Holacracy, it's great to hear about others' experience. I work with HolacracyOne — and just wanted to clarify one thing about the purpose.
VálaszTörlésAlthough HolacracyOne's governance records are public on GlassFrog ( https://glassfrog.holacracy.org/organizations/5 ), and therefore anyone can see the purpose of the company as defined on there, for most companies this is not the case. The purpose has a specific definition in Holacracy (" the deepest creative potential the Organization is best-suited to sustainably express in the world"), and it is not meant as a tag line or a communication to the external world — what matters is that it makes sense internally.
The reason why it has no verb is that it's phrased here as an ongoing outcome, just like you could have a purpose on a Customer Service role phrased as "customers delighted with our services around our products" — it's the ongoing goal that the role is pursuing, knowing of course that it will never technically "get there", but it's aspiring to it. I personally find that it's a powerful way of stating a purpose, but nothing in Holacracy prevents from phrasing it differently. A lot of companies do use verbs in their company's purpose :)
Thx Olivier, your explanation clarifyes this for me.
VálaszTörlésThe origin of my tension comes from a different story. I experience a huge gap between the thinking of different nationalities. The hungarian language (my native language) expresses less activity in its sentence structure. Also its "active" word set is narrower. My favourite example for fellow hungarians is that we have only one word to translate these four synonims: goal, aim, objective, target. There are even more facts on tenses, modes that could be cited here. Therefore when I work in hungarian I need to "activate" the mission sentence or phrase by adding verbs. I assume there are other languages as well that may benefit from this practice.
I would like to add that by getting to know your clarifying question I have a deeper understandig about your choice for the purpose.