Tip: There is always more than one way to process a tension

When an organization changes from being more traditionally structured to self-organizing, it may be tricky to understand what a tension looks like and how you can process it. This article draws upon practical experience in a self-organizing model called Holacracy.

Before we move to the main topic, let’s see how one can discover a tension. Think about the past week. Try to assess if there were any moments when you needed someone’s opinion or approval. Were there times when you felt you were blocked and couldn’t move as fast as you ideally wished?

This is what we call a tension. You can also think about it as about a gap between the existing reality and the perceived one; sensing room for change that stands in line with the purpose of your surrounding. A tension in its nature is not something negative, it’s rather neutral and has one goal: to move things forward.

There are many ways to handle a tension in Holacracy. The only wrong way to process a tension is to not process it!

Now let’s see how you can process a tension within Holacracy.

Context 1: Josh is fairly new to the way Holacracy works. Among others, he fills a Content role where he aims to create valuable content for a broader community. He’d like to initiate a series of posts drawing upon useful practices in Holacracy. Some of the tips he has in mind may refer to basic practices, however, some of them may require a higher level of understanding and experience.

Tension sensed by Josh: “The posts I intend to publish may harm our purpose by providing inaccurate or misleading information because of my limited knowledge and experience. However, I’m sure that releasing this kind of content may bring a lot of value for our community and it is a right thing to do bearing in mind the purpose of my role”.

To solve his tension, Josh may:

– First, check the governance of his organization (the existing roles and accountabilities) to find out if there is a role that may help him. Josh may check it himself (the Holacracy-style governance structure offers transparency to everyone) or if, for whatever reason, he needs help with that, he can approach a Secretary of his circle (a circle is a group of roles filled by people and devoted to a particular purpose; one of the roles living in a circle is the Secretary role). The Secretary is the right role to address with this kind of question as one of the role’s accountabilities is to interpret the governance upon request.

– Josh may also directly approach peers that have the right expertise (for example, they may fill the role of Holacracy Coach) and ask them for help. If Josh’s request doesn’t fall under their explicit accountabilities, they may accept it as an individual action or reject it. However, in Holacracy, Josh does not have the right to expect action from a peer if the item they are requesting assistance with doesn’t fall under the explicit accountabilities of the peer’s role. In this case, any assistance would be at the role’s discretion.

– Josh may also bring the tension to a Tactical Meeting and simply let the process take care of it.

– If Josh knows that this will be a recurring requirement of his role, he may as well bring this tension to a Governance Meeting and ask for the creation of an explicit accountability. This way, a recurring action item that the Content role (filled by Josh) needs, may become an accountability of an existing role or may trigger the creation of a new role that would be held accountable for ‘proofreading and giving feedback on drafts upon request from Content’.

You may encounter situations when a tension refers to a ‘cross-circle’ issue. For instance, your role might be placed in a broader circle and a tension may refer to a domain held in a sub-circle by one of its roles, and vice versa. Let’s go over some tips for how you can approach this kind of situation.

Context 2: A tension is sensed by a role in a sub-circle and refers to a piece of work residing in a broader circle:

– If you are certain about which role holds the right accountability, you may go directly to the role holder and talk to that person about your tension.

– You may also go directly to the Rep Link of your sub-circle and ask to process your tension during a meeting of a broader circle (this solution comes in handy when your tension isn’t linked to a specific role or when you’re not sure about where responsibilities sit in a broader circle). The Rep Link, by rule, participates in a broader circle’s meeting and is accountable for seeking to understand any tensions identified by sub-circle members and removing constraints hindering the fulfilment of the sub-circle’s purpose.

– As with the first context, you may again bring your tension to a Tactical Meeting and let the process take care of it.

Context 3: If your role resides in a broader circle and your tension relates to a certain piece of work that lives in a sub-circle, then all of the above holds true with a small tweak. Instead of approaching the Rep Link, you should approach the Lead Link of the sub-circle. This Lead Link is responsible for welcoming tensions from the context of the broader circle (which you are a member of) to the sub-circle, and holds that sub-circle’s purpose and governance.

So to summarise, as you can see, there is no Right Way™ to address a tension. There are probably some that fit better than others under particular circumstances, but what’s certain is that the only bad solution in Holacracy is to keep a tension to yourself.

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More useful tips and cases to come. Stay tuned! In the meantime, visit our blog to find multiple personal stories capturing the changes caused by the introduction of Holacracy, and visit our website.

If you’d like to learn more about Holacracy, we recommend this article by Adam Pisoni.

We’re always happy to connect too! Just shoot an email to hello@energized.org or contact the author Gabriela Krupa at gabriela@energized.org.