How I Use Holacracy to Get Benefits of GTD® in a Team

In 2016, I found myself managing three organizations: my family real estate business, a fledgling school, and a startup.

Around that time, I also became a dad.

I woke up every day pulled in different directions, not knowing where to focus. I couldn’t sustain working this way, but at the same time, I loved my work and didn’t want to give any of it up.

Getting Things Done® (GTD) was still working wonders for me individually. It gave me a way to experience stress-free productivity, and I was achieving Mind Like Water. But I wasn’t getting the same experience when working on common goals with my team. I would find myself:

• Chasing them with my Waiting-For list, asking for updates
• Getting bogged down with small details that were not worth my time
• Involved with too many painfully long meetings

I began to search for ways to give my team more autonomy, but in a way that would protect the purpose of the organization. It’s around that time I came across Holacracy. I was particularly excited to try it out because I learned that David Allen, founder of GTD, was practicing it in his own organization.

This is what David says in the foreword of the book “Holacracy: The New Management System for a Rapidly Changing World”:

“When I heard Brian speak about changing a fundamental operating system to achieve the organizational equivalent of “Mind Like Water” (a metaphor I use for an individual clarified state, achieved with GTD), I knew this was a frontier worth exploring. Once you have tasted the increased clarity generated by the meeting and communication formats, it’s hard to dismiss the system.”

I began exploring Holacracy, and adopted it to a various extent in all three of my organizations. It gave me a way to extend the practice & benefits of GTD across my organization. I now have:

• Real-time clarity on who’s accountable for what, which avoids confusion
• A more autonomous team that takes ownership of their individual projects
• A common place to track projects, so everyone knows their status
• Effective meeting practices that help to quickly raise issues and find pathways to address them

In this post, I’m going to share with you how you can use Holacracy practice and its supporting software, GlassFrog, to achieve Mind Like Water for your organization.

What is Holacracy?

By now you might be wondering, “What the heck is Holacracy?”

In a nutshell, Holacracy is a set of rules for evolving the structure of your organization. Just like a game has rules for how to play, Holacracy gives you rules for how to structure your organization.

Note that these rules don’t tell you how to “run” your organization. It doesn’t tell you how to do things like hiring, firing, compensation, etc. They are rules for clarifying the work of the organization, along with meeting practices to create alignment.

GlassFrog is software designed to support your Holacracy practice. In this post, I’m going to show you how I use it to:

• Clarify the structure of my organization
• Record metrics, checklists & projects
• Run Tactical Meetings

So let’s explore how you can extend the practice of GTD across your team.

1. Start with the Team’s Purpose

Do you remember this model from the GTD Methodology? It’s called the Horizons of Focus:

By clarifying your commitments across each of these Horizons, you are better able to use your intuition to prioritize your work. Just like an individual has a purpose, so does a team. A team is defined as a group of people coming to work together for a common purpose.

Imagine a team without a purpose. What’s the point of working together? Without a shared purpose, is there even a need for the team to exist?

So: what is your team’s purpose? And is it clear to everyone on the team what that purpose is?

Once your team’s purpose is clarified, it becomes the guiding force that will help you make decisions, prioritize what is important, and increase your chances of reaching your goals. You can break down the purpose into a 5-year vision, and 2- to 3-year goals.

At Calm Achiever, we do clarify our team’s purpose; however, we hold 5-year plans and 2- to 3- year goals lightly. Given how fast the world is changing, these long-term goals tend to naturally reveal themselves once we focus on the short-term commitments — which are all guided by the organization’s purpose.

2. Empower Your Team Through Transparency in Accountabilities

In GTD, “Areas of Focus” are where you clarify your ongoing commitments. These could be around health, finances, relationships. Or, they could refer to the duties you perform as part of your job.

But here’s the problem: does anyone actually refer to their job description after they’re hired?

Hardly.

People don’t refer to their job descriptions because they don’t reflect reality. As the work shifts and adjusts to meet the organization’s evolving needs, job descriptions remain the same. And when it’s unclear what work everyone is actually doing, there is confusion about who should handle what.

In Calm Achiever, instead of using job descriptions, we break down the work into smaller roles that people fill.

Each role has a clear purpose and accountabilities. People with the right talent and interests fill relevant roles. One person can fill multiple roles.

Here’s an example of a role I fill:

Notice how the work of my role “Bonus Architect” is broken down into its:

• Purpose: The reason the role exists
• Domain: The assets the role has exclusive control over
• Accountabilities: Ongoing activities the role is expected to perform

Currently, I fill these roles in Calm Achiever:

These roles are not static; they evolve over time. There’s a process to add, remove, and modify accountabilities of these roles as things change. Unlike job descriptions that are often outdated and irrelevant to day-to-day work, in Holacracy, people fill multiple roles with clear and regularly updated accountabilities. Everyone knows what they can expect from each role.

Here are some key differences between positions in a management hierarchy and in a role-based structure:

In a Management Hierarchy:

• Positions are static and change only when there’s a re-org
• Positions are fused with the individual filling it
• Position descriptions are often not transparent to all members of the organization.

In a Role-based Structure:

• Roles are dynamic and easier to change.
• Roles allow easier movement between them.
• Roles create transparency for who’s accountable for what.

I’ve found that a role-based structure is much easier to update and clarify who’s accountable for what work, at any point in time.

3. Create Alignment with an Effective Meeting Structure

Here are some common challenges I hear from GTD practitioners working in teams:

• My Waiting-For list is growing so long. I end up spending too much time following up with people to get updates. It’s like I’ve become their secretary.
• I don’t have clarity on who’s working on what project.
• During meetings, I don’t see people capturing their actions and projects. I don’t have confidence they’ll get the work done.

I can totally relate to this. And I see why it happens. While Projects and Next Actions are owned by individuals, when working in teams, they often involve other people.

I use the Holacracy Tactical Meeting process to get alignment on Projects & Next Actions.

Wait… what… meetings? Oh no… not another meeting! Aren’t meetings a waste of time? Trust me, I get it. Before I implemented Holacracy in my organization, I used to hate meetings.

Here’s what would frustrate me:

• I’d find people raising issues, and expecting the boss to solve their problems (while they’re more than capable of solving it themselves).
• Meetings drag on with the extroverts talking most of the time, endlessly discussing issues.
• When someone would raise an issue, other people would jump in to hijack the conversation to solve their own issues.
• There would be little space for the quiet introverts to share their insights.
• At the end of the meeting, it wouldn’t be clear who has taken what action.

However, the Holacracy Tactical Meeting process has been structured exactly to avoid all of these problems. Here’s what makes it work. In every meeting there are two key roles:

• A Facilitator who facilitates the meeting, keeps time, and holds space to process one agenda item at a time.
• A Secretary who schedules the meeting, and captures any actions and projects that emerge from an agenda item.

This helps to keep the meeting:

• Action-oriented with concrete outputs.
• Able to give every team member the opportunity to get what they need.
• Moving at a fast pace, with agendas built on the fly.

Let me show you how it works. The meeting is in 2 parts.

Part 1 — The Preamble

The steps of the preamble are:

• Check-in
• Checklist Review
• Metrics Review
• Project Review

There’s no discussion at this stage, just a review of key information relevant to the team. This surfaces useful information for team members, and can trigger agenda items to discuss.

Part 2 — Building the Agenda and Processing Each Agenda Item

This part starts by building an agenda of issues to process. This is not so different from doing a GTD mindsweep.

Unlike typical meetings where people look to the boss to solve their problems, in Holacracy’s Tactical Meetings, the Facilitator holds space for team members to solve their own problems. For each agenda item, the Facilitator starts by asking the agenda-item-owner, “What do you need?”, and may present 4 options to choose from.

Agenda-item owners can:

• Request a Next Action or Project from a role
• Ask for information from the team
• Share information with the team
• Request to set an ongoing expectation (like adding a new accountability)

Here’s the thing: any request that you can think of can fall under one of these four categories.

There’s a parallel to GTD here. In GTD anything you capture can be clarified into one of six buckets:

• If actionable: Do it, Delegate it, or Defer it.
• If not actionable: Trash, Incubate, or Reference

Similarly, in Holacracy Tactical Meetings, every agenda item can be processed using one of the four options above. Knowing this upfront encourages team members to add their items to the agenda and clear their minds of their concerns.

We use GlassFrog during Tactical Meetings to review key numbers and capture Next Actions and Projects. At the end of the meeting, the outputs are emailed to all team members.

Here’s what the email looks like:

We schedule these meetings every two weeks and usually take 45 to 60 minutes. We get transparency on metrics and status updates on projects. Everyone gets a chance to process their issues. By the end, we have clear actionable outputs assigned to relevant roles.

---

Experience a Simulation of an Organization Practicing Holacracy

It’s one thing to read about Holacracy, and another thing to experience it.

If you’d like to see how you can get the benefits of GTD across your team, I invite you to join a live workshop where you’ll get hands-on experience on what it’s like running an organization using Holacracy.

What will you experience?

• How to structure your team into roles to create clarity and enable autonomy
• Lightning-quick, action-focused Tactical Meetings
• Steps you can take to implement Holacracy in your organization

---

Originally published at https://www.calmachiever.com on February 6, 2021.