Ep. 359: GTD and Holocracy  🔗 **Source:** [Ep. 359: GTD and Holocracy](https://share.snipd.com/episode/04f2f01a-e453-4bfa-84cd-47495adc0d30) ## Highlights - **David Allen Adopted Holacracy Overnight** - John Forrester describes how David Allen adopted Holacracy in 2011 after hearing Brian Robertson speak and immediately implemented full immersion training. - They brought Holacracy One coaches into the office for week-long training and ongoing meeting facilitation to avoid early mistakes. Transcript: John Forrester We just ticked over to our 13th year of using Holacracy. Back in 2011, David adopted it for the company. And I'm going to pause here. There's a noise outside that's a bit out of my control. Will be over in another few seconds. There we go. So back in 2011, David Allen adopted Holacracy as his company's way of managing itself. And that was shortly after, at the end of 2010, I believe it was, he met Brian Robertson, one of the founders of Olocracy. David met Brian when they were both speaking at a Conscious Capitalism Conference, CCC. So David was scheduled to speak there, and so was this guy named Brian Robertson. David heard him speak and said to himself, that's the way to run my company. David had been searching for a better way than any traditional way of running the company and wanted to find something that didn't involve him being the boss, being the top of the hierarchy And managing the entire thing. So he heard Brian speaking about holacracy and said, that's it. That's the way to do it. Within a month or two after that, when he came back from that conference, he had talked to our team, at least those of us who were considered the leadership team of the company and said, I think this is the way to go. I'd like to try this out. And we dived in. We did not hold back one bit, dived in completely. We had Brian and Tom Thomason, and I think there were a couple of other people from Holacracy One who came to our office and did a week-long training with us, a full immersion in Holacracy. And from that point on, we were in it. ([Time 0:01:12](https://share.snipd.com/snip/38231817-0a92-4439-8cb3-22a8358beb14)) - **Holacracy Embeds GTD Workflows Into Governance** - Holacracy codifies GTD concepts like processing 'what has your attention' and tracking next actions and projects directly in the constitution. - The constitution assigns role leads responsibility to externalize tensions and maintain next-action and project lists for their roles. Transcript: John Forrester In the getting things done methodology, we have something very similar. We'd say that it's about engaging with what has your attention, A-T attention, rather than just your attention. The words are very similar there, and the effect is also very similar. It's getting stuff off your mind, externalized, so that you can process it appropriately. And this is clearly laid out here as a responsibility of the role leads in holacracy. So it's not theoretical, it's part of the constitution. Next we go on to next actions and projects. So in holacracy, these are part of what you're responsible for considering in how you enact your role and carry out its purpose. In getting things done, these are what we would call horizons of focus. Your next actions are at the ground level. David originally had these horizons in terms of feet, but changed that to be more international and called them ground level and then horizons one through five. At the ground level is your next actions. These are the things you're going to do concretely today, for example. So on your calendar today, very likely you had attending this event listed. So that's very much at your ground level for today. Other next actions you have, you most likely have some kind of a to-do list of other things you intend to get done later today. Good for you. Here they are in the Constitution. Next after that, we have projects in the GTD terminology that would be your level one. The list of outcomes you have that are going to take up to a year that have more than one action to complete them. That's our very specific definition of what a project is in getting things done. Mentioned as specific outcomes useful to work toward in the absence of competing priorities. We'll talk about priorities a bit more, but there you have it. Both in getting things done and in holacracy, there's this concept of having next actions and projects. So here we go. You're responsible ([Time 0:12:27](https://share.snipd.com/snip/d0dbb51b-fc9b-48a5-8c0d-5c28e75d8df7)) - **Capture Tensions Then Bring Them To Meetings** - Regularly capture tensions and convert them into items to bring to governance or tactical meetings so they’re not stuck in your head. - Use a mind sweep and update next-action and project lists so you can process tensions in the proper meeting pathway. Transcript: John Forrester And for any projects that maybe you've completed your next action on it and you're ready for something else, if you haven't already defined that next action to move the project forward, You'll do it during that review. Often that happens when you're in the middle of your busy week. You finish some next action, and it takes until the next weekly review for you to look back and go, okay, for that project, I need to define another next action. And let's see, it's also in the constitution here that you're tracking your projects for your role and tracking tensions you intend to resolve. The tracking your tensions is an ongoing activity. As you go through your day, it may occur to you that you have a tension about something in your organization. There's something there where you perceive, here we'll define tension, something you perceive that could be better than the way it is currently, and you'd like to do something about It. So as a role holder, you're keeping track of that tension that you intend to resolve in some way. You don't have to necessarily do anything about it or commit any of your time or resources yet, but you want to be able to get that tension off your mind, externalized and tracked, so that You can bring it to resolution in one of the pathways that's described in Holacracy. So in getting things done, you'd be doing a regular mind sweep, saying, what's on my mind? What has my attention? In other words, what do I have attention about? It's got my attention and getting it off your mind and tracked externally. So you're also responsible for reviewing and updating your lists of next actions and projects. And in holacracy terms, the tensions that you have captured are items that you would most likely be bringing to your next governance or tactical meeting. ([Time 0:15:38](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a0a26d2f-235d-4e22-9222-30dd0c8fed19)) - **Process Protects Organizations From Mistakes** - Strict adherence to Holacracy processes reduces risk and prevents big mistakes during organizational change. - Structures like the objection round act as safeguards that integrate concerns into proposals instead of bypassing process. Transcript: John Forrester One of the wonderful things I've found out through just stumbling into through holacracy for years and years has been, it's very safe. It prevents me from making serious mistakes if I simply stick to the structure. Early on in our adoption of it, we had people, I was one of them at times, who would be looking at what we were doing and saying, whoa, whoa, whoa, let's stop following the structure because We could make an enormous mistake here. However, the more we stuck to the structure, the more it prevented us from making mistakes. For example, there's the whole objection round to a proposal in governance. The objection round is, I'm going to call it an ironclad way of preventing you from making a mistake. It's wonderfully specific about how to bring up an objection and how to process the objection and integrate it into the proposal. So as much as we thought that we might be making mistakes early on, the more we followed the process, the more we were sure we were in safe territory. ([Time 0:18:25](https://share.snipd.com/snip/24e2fb55-91f9-42d6-bf59-7259cd32e95b)) - **Follow GTD Workflow Before Choosing Actions** - Use the GTD five-step workflow: capture, clarify, organize, review, then engage when choosing what to do. - When engaging, consider context, tools, people, and energy before prioritizing actions. Transcript: John Forrester I would say executing next actions translates directly to what we call the engage step in the GTD workflow model. So, again, I'm jumping back and forth here between what's, for those of you who are somewhat familiar and those of you who are brand new, but in the getting things done workflow model, There are five steps to your workflow. You're going to capture what has your attention. You're going to clarify whether it's actionable or not. Organize what's actionable into appropriate places where you can be reminded about what that is when it's time to take action. You're going to look back and review those lists regularly. And the fifth step is to engage. This is the doing of getting things done. This is where, all right, after I finish this holacracy presentation, what am I going to do with the rest of my day? I'm on Pacific time in the US, so I have quite a few hours left in my day after this. I have lots of choices about how to engage. Right away, what I'm going to do is switch over to my other lists, my calendar, a chronological list of things for me to do, or my next actions lists that give me a bunch of choices about What to do to engage in the rest of my day. ([Time 0:21:49](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ba233cd8-764a-42d7-bd18-be25b28addb0)) - **Delegate And Track What You’re Waiting For** - Delegate roles instead of hoarding work and track delegated items on a waiting-for list to avoid lost follow-ups. - Treat orders or external dependencies as delegated tasks and put them on your waiting-for list to spot failures quickly. Transcript: John Forrester A circle lead controls the circle's role assignments and may assign any role within the circle. So on this one, I would say what came to mind for me was the idea of delegation. If you want to do a bad job of being a circle lead, do everything yourself. Don't assign any roles, just own them all yourself. And especially if you have a larger circle that's covering a lot of work, there's a great way to create some tensions in your organization. Ideally, it would be at the very next tactical meeting that somebody would be coming up with something as a tension to say, John, what are you doing? Why haven't you assigned these roles? Or at a governance meeting, somebody would be coming up with governance that would force John to start assigning roles in a timely way. In our early days, we had, I remember about a year in, we had one circle that simply wasn't scheduling meetings. And there was grumbling within the circle members saying, we're not having meetings regularly enough to process our tensions. So they got a meeting scheduled and they came up with a policy about regularly scheduling meetings. They could then hold the circle's secretary to account saying, here's the policy. We'd like you to schedule meetings according to the schedule set forth in the policy. Solved the problem. They had meetings regularly. The secretary learned more about the secretary role and that took care of that. So controlling the roles assignments also to me speaks to what you might be thinking of as delegation. In the getting things done terminology, things that you delegate to someone else are items that you're going to be tracking on a special list called your waiting for list. So if you think of the concept of delegation as being fairly broad, it could be that you have somebody who reports to you in some way and you delegate a project or a next action to them. You're going to be tracking on your waiting for list. I've assigned this project to John on this date and I'm expecting to hear from him on this date. Could be as simple as that. ([Time 0:24:01](https://share.snipd.com/snip/91c72e14-1ecf-4e58-8af4-8eee422a486c)) - **Strategy Lets You Feel Good About Not Doing Things** - Strategy in Holacracy (and GTD) helps you feel good about what you are not doing by clarifying choices between equally valuable options. - Writing down all options and reviewing them lets you choose confidently knowing what's deferred. Transcript: John Forrester Defining priorities and strategies. Priorities. This is an ongoing part of the work and getting things done as much as it is in holacracy. You likely hold several roles. You likely have many choices at any moment about what you spend your time on. So you are going to need to be prioritizing as time goes on. It used to be, and some software still tries to do this, that actually I'll pause there. There's somebody in what's the chat say? Paul says, I'm tracking stuff that I'm waiting from John, his colleague Ana Maria, and even things I'm waiting for from David Allen. Excellent examples. And Paul or anyone, feel free to just speak up. If you think of something like that and want to say it and not wait for me to see the chat, go right ahead. So prioritizing happens in that engage step that I talked about a few minutes ago, where you're looking at your lists of things to do and saying, which one do I choose? You might think prioritizing is what you'll do first, but it actually comes a bit further down the line after you've looked at where am I? What tools do I have available? What people are available to me at this time? Let's see, right now it's David Allen is nine hours ahead of me. It's dinner time. I'm not going to consider that David Allen is a resource or a tool that I have available to me now. So it doesn't matter if the most important thing on my list, the most high priority thing on my list is to talk with David about a particular topic. He's simply not available unless I'm, like I could get on my phone here. I could get on my phone and send him a text or dial him and interrupt his dinner. Most likely, I don't have anything that's that important. So it doesn't matter that that's a priority. It's not something I can do right now. I'll look to something I can do now. So these are the things that show up before priority. But once you get to the point where you have looked at your list and you said, all right, I have all my tools available, all the people I need available, I have a good level of energy, I've Had my caffeine, I'm well rested, then you can prioritize among many choices. So think of priority as something that probably comes a bit later rather than as the first thing you consider. For strategies, one of the things that Holacracy used to do was have strategy meetings. I don't, those of you who are pros at this, jump in here and comment. I don't think that they define strategy and strategy meetings as explicitly something to hold on a regular basis anymore. It used to be something we would do about once a year was set the company strategy for the year. And one of the most useful things that Tom and Brian, I think, defined as a way to look at strategy is strategy is a short statement that helps you decide what to do between two things that Are both very high value. It's easy enough to decide between reading through spam and working on some presentation about the fate of the company that's due later today. There's no priority. There's no strategy there. You choose the one that's obviously more important. The trick is, how do you choose between two things that are very close, if not equal in value? Strategy helps do that. So it's about choosing one thing over another. And the way this relates to GTD is David Allen will often say, you can't feel good about what you're not doing unless you know what you're not doing. So having a strategy is especially useful if you also have a list of things that you could do. So that when you decide what you are going to do, you're also aware of all the things that you're not doing. Not that you have to have those in your head. Of course, you don't have them in your head. They're all written down. But your strategy choice is clearly made knowing what else you are not doing. And that's part of having all those lists is you know what you're not doing because it's captured, it's clarified, it's organized, and you've reviewed it recently enough in your getting Things done system. You've reviewed it recently enough that you know that when you choose to do one thing instead of another, that's a choice you can feel comfortable with. In the same way, the strategy of a circle helps the members feel good about what they're not doing. So the circle lead defining strategies helps the members of the circle carry out their roles with less stress. ([Time 0:27:37](https://share.snipd.com/snip/3f4fb5aa-067f-45eb-b3bd-3cf1312e879b))