Holacracy by Brian J. Robertson

Author:Brian J. Robertson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781627794299
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

What’s Valid to Process?

To some extent, the “impersonal” quality of the Holacracy governance process arises from the types of tensions we’re addressing in governance in the first place, and why we’re addressing them. For a proposal to be valid to process in a governance meeting, the tension behind it must be somehow limiting one of the proposer’s roles, and the goal must be to remove that limit, for the sake of the role. A proposal may modify other roles, as long as the reason is to help one of the proposer’s roles—perhaps by making it easier to execute an accountability, or by harnessing an opportunity to better express the role’s purpose. To enforce this restriction, a proposal can be discarded by the facilitator if, while processing the proposal, the proposer cannot give a concrete example of how the proposal would have improved his or her ability to express the purpose or accountabilities of one of his or her roles, given an actual situation faced in the past or present. One small exception is that you can also propose something to help another role you don’t fill, as long as whoever actually fills that role has given you explicit advance permission to speak for it.

This rule will ultimately filter out two types of proposals that may seem desirable but that actually get in the way. The first are ungrounded or scattershot attempts to improve “everything,” often including things that aren’t the proposer’s charge to improve in the first place. This tendency of certain idea-rich, helpful folks often distracts from getting work done by tinkering with and overdesigning governance that experience hasn’t shown actually needs improvement yet. It’s also sure to annoy those who work in the co-opted roles if they don’t want the “help.”

The second group of proposals this rule protects from are those that attempt to serve the proposer personally, not a role he is stewarding for the organization. For example, proposals about improving vacation policies, compensation systems, or travel policies may fall within this category—unless the proposer fills a role whose purpose or accountability is actually limited by them. Although, as in any relationship, it’s important for us to figure out how to fulfill our personal needs, there are useful and appropriate boundaries here. If we want healthy relationships between the organization and its stewards, we don’t want role fillers to co-opt the organization’s space and internal processes just to meet their personal needs, any more than we want parents co-opting their children’s lives and internal processes just to meet their own personal needs. The job of a role filler in a Holacracy-powered organization is to help parent the organization, not the other way around—we are stewards or fiduciaries for our roles and for the organization itself, and that obliges us to find a more appropriate way to address our personal needs, not to violate the organization’s internal governance process with them. We might renegotiate an employment contract (or equivalent) with the relevant role to get certain agreements in

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