← Getting Things Done
Getting Things Done
Ep. 302: Individual and Organizational Productivity
00:28:25
Back in 2015, David Allen and Brian Robertson had a . In this new talk, they catch up about the current state of the intersection between individual and organizational productivity. You'll hear some interesting similarities between the two...
Loading summary
Transcript27 lines
- [00:10]
A
So, David, welcome. I wanted to have a chat with you about organizational GTD or what does it mean? What does it look like when we start trying to talk about even what does GTD look like when we go beyond an individual practice into an organizational practice and then bring in from that some of my work with Holacracy, which I think is certainly a piece of that puzzle and, and connects in all sorts of interesting ways to gtd. So I wanted to explore those connections with you and invite those listening to this to listen in to us, riff on GTD at the organizational level and how Holacracy relates. Does that sound good?
- [00:43]
B
Wow. Well, Brian, your methodology and the one I sort of recognize, sort of a match made in heaven, but recognized in hell, it was like, wow, what a complex world that's easy to screw up, how your head thinks in clear space. And then especially as you start to engage with other people, what happens? So maybe a little bit of a backstory and history for people listening to this who may not know all of that. And this will be boring because you've heard this a thousand times when Brian and I have hooked up together and chatted. But I was running my own company, trying to figure out how to get my company to run itself because I was not the best player for the play. Wound up on stage at a conscious capitalism conference 2010 in California, was followed closely by a guy named Brian Robertson who talked about a self organizing organizational model that he had come up with. And I'm going, that's exactly what I was looking for. And then Brian comes off stage, meets me. Turns out he's a fanboy for me. And he said, yeah, this is all sort of came out of your history with sort of figuring out how do you create clear space individually and then how do you sort of take that organizationally? And just for my own company, I decided to hop in. And it took a few months to kind of get comfortable with taking that kind of risk and jumping off the end of that kind of pier, but we did. And so we hired Brian and his associates to come in and change our organizational structure to a holocratic structure. And I said, I gotta prove this wrong as fast as I can, because if it's right, I did not want to wait one day, one hour, one second to start to implement this. And so let me prove it wrong as fast as I can so I can dismiss it. Turns out that I'm at, you know, seven years, eight years later, I'm still trying to find something to prove it wrong. Haven't quite done that yet. And you know, have hopped in, as, you know, Brian, so hopped in pretty much full bore. I think I was one of the first organizations that said, let's do the full game because I own the company. And so it was one of those I had to commit to say, let me be purpose driven, not David Allen driven in terms of the work that we were doing, which is a kind of a core element of, you know, the sort of holocratic process about how do you sort of work an operating system for an organization or an enterprise to really make it work and make it self organizing? I think you have to have that kind of reference point. So I think I was a perfect victim for Brian, for you, for you to begin with. That said, I was ready to fold my company if I couldn't make it self organizing and so was willing to hop in and invest both my own sort of personal, emotional, financial commitment to the work that we were doing and that I was willing to throw it into this model and see if I could make it work. But you had already, by that time, made this thing. You had so perfected this in terms of the rigor of the model. It's like, wow, that's wicked. Way cool. So that's my story. Let me hit the tennis ball back to you, Brian, and give your version of that three minute prologue, our intersection.
- [03:50]
A
Yeah, well, I remember that conference very well where we met. So turning the clock back a little before that for me. I read your book, I think very shortly after it came out, and it was the answer to all of the questions I had about how to be productive. And then a bunch I didn't even know to ask yet. So I kind of dove in and just made that like a really focused practice for me and just kept iterating and improving over years. So I had developed my own GTD practice, and it was a lifesaver and probably the most developmentally active and rich practice I'd gotten into. It's. I jokingly say, when people ask me, what's your spiritual practice? I said, gtd, you know, it's pretty deep practice for me. So in that context, I'm running a company at the time. This is the company where Holacracy was initially kind of experimentally pioneered. And I kept running into this question of, well, okay, if I have my GDD practice down really well and my colleagues have their GDD practices down really well, how can we still have an organizational mess? Because it seems to not directly translate that if everyone in the company is doing TDD really well, that you have all of the clear space organizationally that you want and you have the responsive agile adaptive system at the organizational level that each of us do individually. So I started really inquiring into that question and then experimenting with what more team level system structures, processes, rules of the game can we put in place that would allow us to get that clear, aligned space at the organization level? With the same kind of principles that I learned from gtd. And over the initial years of experimenting, we had come up with what is now an earlier version of Holacracy, but still something I was pretty excited about. So when I went to that conference and saw you were going to be talking, then I'm all nervous. I think this is somehow starting to answer the question of what are these principles like applied to the organizational level. But for all I knew you were going to just laugh me off stage when I got a chance to talk to you about it. That was one of my big inquiries is what do you think? Do you see the connections that I see between what I'm doing here and what you pioneered with gtd? And turns out the answer that was, yeah, there actually are not only all the connections I saw, but you started pointing out more that were somehow in the method that I hadn't even consciously realized yet.
- [06:07]
B
Let me stop you there, Brian, because as you're talking about this, something I hadn't actually seen before about this, which was if truly everybody did GTD personally, you wouldn't need Holacracy, actually it would be a holocratic process because people would go, wait a minute, I've got my attention on something. Well, what do I need to do to get this off my mind? I need to figure out, well, what's the action step I need to take and what's the outcome I'm committed to achieve about this? And they essentially would have created a holocratic process, which is actually what you did. So you actually took this and said, okay, with a GTD practice, personally, I'm going to arrange it so that the organization, I guess the big change was what if you have an organization where people are not necessarily that conscious of the full GTD methodology, How do you build that into an organizational protocol so that that becomes the essence of the operating system?
- [07:04]
A
Yeah, and I think that has another benefit even for companies where you do have good GDD practice, which is the organizational processes can either make that higher friction or lower friction. Right. Like when I get to clarity that the outcome I need is to request an outcome from you. Right. Like I need you to do something to get to my outcome. The organizational space can make that request easier or harder to ask, right? Or when I discover, really, I need a new area of focus for you, an area of responsibility, a higher horizon thing to solve my issue and what's got my att. I need you to be paying attention to something new on an ongoing basis. I need you to have kind of a new area of responsibility. The organizational structures around us today, even when everyone has good GTD practice, make that just a little harder. You know, you can ask somebody, can you add this, then, you know, get their buy in for it? But that's not a low friction fast request in most companies. So I had kind of a dual question, which is for the vast majority of companies out there don't have masterful GDD practitioners and all of their people. So how can we have the organizational framework hold the space for that, even if the individuals aren't perfect, but then to the extent that they are really good, how can we just make it easier for them to do it together when they actually need it?
- [08:19]
B
Yeah, no kidding. And let me be self effacing here. I recognized the methodology 35 years ago, the beginnings of it, pulled it all together, ran a company, hired people who got it. We were and still are to some degree, sort of the go to place for the GTD intellectual property, sort of best practice for in terms of coaching and training. And yet when we ran across you guys and what you'd done organizationally, we went even as good as every one of us was individually in the GTD practices, there were things that the legacy organizational structure that we were in, as hip as we thought we were, still did not support. The kind of clarity, the kind of freedom, the kind of frictionless space that you just alluded to in terms of how do you now start to recognize where there's tensions that have to do with interactions? And we've said this in many ways, but I can be clear, you can be clear. But when we get together and try to do something together, we've just now expanded exponentially the potential for confusion, lack of clarity, friction, et cetera. So what you and your folks have done and developed was such an elegant model about how do you take it to that next level of game where people intersect and interact with each other in a way that creates organizational mind like water. What's got the team's attention? What has the company's attention? You know, I mean, those are, I've always asked those questions because the model for just individual GTD Practice, which is, you know, capture, clarify, organize, reflect and engage. That basically applies to any kind of an enterprise as well. But you have to have a format actually ask that question. And nobody had ever come up with that except you guys did it.
- [10:03]
A
Which is the basics of what I got from gtd. Initially it gave me a language, right? Like this language of action versus project and the different definition of each and a language of context and all of these little language. It is like learning a language. There's new distinctions that help you then structure and organize your consciousness, your thought into ways that are more actionable. And I think what Holacracy did was give now a language at the organizational level, there's a language of roles and a language accountabilities and a language of governance and how you change those things when you have dependencies. And I have an example story to make that more concrete that I think is a really interesting. One of my favorite stories. Holocracy is this role based system where we each have multiple roles we fill. And I fill one role called spokesperson, which is out there giving talks at conferences and things like that. And I work with a colleague in another role, one of maybe a dozen roles that she fills called casting agent. And our casting agent role books me, our spokesperson for talks. And this is a great example of an intersection, right? Our roles work together a lot. But one day, many years ago, the person who filled our casting agent role was feeling some tension as we say something had got her attention. She was feeling frustrated because she kept going out and pitching me for talks at conferences, negotiating with them. She'd spent a lot of time and energy with a conference organizer. And at the end of the process she presented to me and I'd say, no, I'm not going right, it's the wrong market or the audience isn't big enough or whatever. And you know, she felt really disempowered and like she's wasting. There's a lot of waste in that. She's spending all this time and I shoot it down at the end of her process. So that had her attention and she needed something from me. It wasn't just an outcome, although it was that too. What she needed is to be able to expect something from me. She wanted to be able to expect. She realized as she thought through this, she wanted to expect that I would document for her my criteria for what speaking engagements I'll accept. Because if she could count on me for documenting that criteria and updating it as it changes over time, then she could use that. And she could assess the speaking engagements herself before spending all that time and energy at the beginning of her process. Right. So I think it's interesting in most organizations, even if you get to that clarity, you then have a lot of meetings and socializing and it's kind of hard to enact that change. In our case, she went to one of the processes Holacracy adds to make that kind of thing easy. It's a governance process. She goes into the governance process. There's a structured decision making process in that, as you know. And it took her about two minutes to go from making a proposal to add an expectation on my spokesperson role to having a new expectation added. And then she could turn to me and say, so could you work towards an outcome of getting an initial document for me? And by the way, can you give me a projection? When do you think you're going to have that done for me? And it took two minutes to get to that point where that expectation was clear and she could ask me that. And the thing I find most interesting about this story is she was our newest hire right out of college and I'm the founder of the company. In what companies do you know where the newest hire right out of college in two minutes can add an expectation on the founder and then turn to him and say, so when do you think you're going to have that done for me by. Which is kind of cool. And. And that's there because that's what I mean by low friction. What Holacracy is doing is adding these pathways. So when she realizes that there is no action or project solely she can take on in her role without a dependency with mine. To solve her tension, then she needs something from mine. And here's a pathway to make that easy to make it about the roles, not the people. And independent of the statuses and all that, she can just quickly, easily add a new area of focus for me and then request an outcome for me in a way that makes that pretty frictionless and fast. And then it gives us a language for holding that and documenting it.
- [13:36]
B
It's a fabulous story really because it embodies essentially the core element of the changing the operating system. Because when you think of, okay, that versus everything else and the legacy organizational stuff, what do you have? You have hierarchy, you have people's perception of themselves in terms of their roles and their power and their integration. And it's all about sort of the people to people to personality to what I think are my commitments. And my basically comes down to polit politics, you know, and so when you suddenly burst the bubble of politics, then, then, then you move to reality. Wait a minute, what are we trying to do? And what's the best way to get from here to there? And doesn't matter who brings it up or who says it or where it comes from. And for people to then commit to that kind of operating system and that kind of prioritization, it's, you know, cognitively it's like, oh sure, yeah, right. But to build a system where you have people who are committed to, to those behaviors and those, that thought process, that's a. Yeah, that's, that's paradigm shifting. I mean, truly paradigm shifting. And interesting. Now Brian, as you know, self organizing organizations has now come to the. At least in the business world, I don't know that it's reached high level, whatever. But you know, initially when you started this, we ran across each other and started this. This was like we were, you know, the people crying in the wilderness. Yep.
- [15:02]
A
Very lonely. Yeah.
- [15:05]
B
And now it's not a matter of whether, it's a matter of when and how that you do this and so forth. So very elegant in terms of all those aspects of it. And I keep uncovering and unpeeling, you know, another level of what this is about.
- [15:18]
A
Yeah, there's something that I think connects really interestingly between this whole self management, self organizing thing. You'll read about Holacracy and it's a system where there's no managers. And that's the focus. But it's really. I never set out to build a system which removes managers that kind of, we backed into that just by creating so much clarity that the manager function just got distributed into other better ways.
- [15:42]
B
Well said, well said. I haven't heard it quite that way, but elegant. Yeah, I'm going to steal that one.
- [15:47]
A
Yeah. Well, I mean, it goes back to before my Holacracy days, in my CEO days doing GTD practice. I realized when I had somebody that worked for me that was a really good GTD practitioner, I needed to do less as a manager. Right. Like they have their acting gear, they have their stuff managed. There's just less they need to lean on me and less I need to micromanage them to get good results. Things just flow better. And if you take that to its logical conclusion, it's kind of what we found with Holacracy. As you have this team level system now to get clarity across team members, you've got built in better GTD practice. It still takes effort. It doesn't remove that. But as People get better and better at GTD individually. And then the team level processes support this kind of clarifying and getting that team level clear. There's just less and less and less that needs to fall to managers to clarify it. I look at managers as the crutch. When you don't have clarity, at least you can look to a manager and they can decide when it's not clear who should decide or what process we should use. Right. They can kind of step in and catch the stuff. And when you have a really good process for that, there's just not stuff you need to catch quite the same way. You don't need to fall back on. A boss can just tell everyone what to do. When you know what you can expect from each other, you know the outcomes they're working towards, and you have a way to change that in a kind of a team focused way.
- [17:05]
B
Yeah. And so in a way at least validating for me that truly, if people really, really got GTD organizationally, they would have created a holocratic structure. Essentially. That's what it is. And what Holacracy did was it said, look, here's that GTD process and how do we make that more accessible, more structural, more explicit for people who are not ready to hop into black belt GTD thinking and behavior, if you will. At the same time, it still brought a whole new level of awareness of what gets in the way of interactive productivity. And I think that was such a big key, because interactive productivity requires some fundamentally different kinds of models and behaviors than just a simple GTD practice does. If you followed the simple GTD practices to their end result, yes, you could probably get to it. That's what you did. Okay, how do we make sure that that gets clear? And so you build an operational structure to do that. I don't want to get too far afield. You know, there's a wide range of audience probably listening to this podcast, so maybe we should bring it back to. Okay, so the basic GTD idea is that whatever you have attention on, get it out of your head, your head's a crappy office, get it out sooner than later. Decide exactly what that stuff means to you. Is it actionable? Yes or no? If so, you know, what's the next action? And do you have any project that's further than one action that you need to keep track of about all of this? I mean, that fundamental thinking process for an individual is key, as you know, can be transformational just for a person to sort of build that in personally and organizationally, you've taken that to a whole different level. At the same time, the necessity for people to be able to still do the GTD model still is necessary for successful Holocratic implementation.
- [19:08]
A
Yeah, totally. And it's almost like one of the things I noticed as I was in my early journey towards Holacracy and doing GTD was all those same distinctions that I have in my own GTD practice. Like, is this something that I have a concrete next action to take? Is it an outcome I want to achieve a project? Is it a new maybe area of responsibility? I need the area of focus for me, I need to look at regularly. All those same questions have this kind of a correlate for sometimes I need one of those from someone else, right? Sometimes to get something off of my head, I need somebody else to take on an action. Right. But sometimes it's not really an action I want to work, I want them to work towards an outcome. And sometimes it's not that it's a new area of focus I want for them. And in fact they're related, right. If I'm going to request they work towards an outcome, it really should be within one of their areas of focus or why am I asking it from them? I realized these interrelated ways, we needed a way to clarify that at the team level. And I needed to be able to trace up that chain to be able to know, is this an appropriate outcome to request, project to request from them, does it fit within their areas of responsibility or not? And if it doesn't, maybe I think it should, right? And I want to change their areas of responsibility. And all of these same individual concepts I might want to change and clarify with someone else. And when I'm changing it myself, it's very easy. I can just choose my areas of responsibility. I mean, within a company, sure, I have my, you know, whatever I was hired for, I have to align with, but I have a lot of freedom to kind of interpret that. And then if I need to clarify or change one, I can go to my boss and find out, I guess. But what about when I want to change somebody else's? And that's where like you can do that in a typical company today, it's just high friction. It's not easy when you talk to somebody about it. It's really hard to have that conversation without it sounding like you're telling them they're irresponsible. It's hard to go and say, you know, I think you need to add something to your areas of responsibility here. You can do It. It's just not easy. And, you know, and if they don't completely agree with you, then it can just get stuck in conversation. Or you go to a meeting and it drags down the whole meeting, and we don't have an easy process for that. And easy language. And I think that's really what Holacracy tries to add. Yeah.
- [21:17]
B
Dan, do you or Lexi take out the garbage?
- [21:19]
A
Yeah, exactly.
- [21:21]
B
I mean, come on. When you get down to it. Excuse me, I may have a tension call. How come Kathryn keeps asking me I should do this? And we haven't yet had a conversation about, wait a minute. Is this your role? Is this my role? How do we manage this role? So even though I may want to be clear, what gets in the way of my clarity oftentimes is that I don't have in my relationship and in quotation agreement, commitment with other people I'm engaged with. If that's not clear, you're never going to get clear. You're never going to get your head clear until you have some model or some conversation or some lexicon as Holacracy has developed to say, Gavin, your role or mine?
- [22:00]
C
Who takes out the garbage when?
- [22:02]
B
And do you care? Or do we just play this by ear and then deal with that? Any. All that is fine as long as we have that conversation that becomes conscious.
- [22:12]
A
Yeah. And I think one of the things Holacracy adds that really helps with that is by separating the questions. This is something I've always appreciated. GTD helps me do, too. It's separate the questions, like, is there an outcome I want to achieve here versus what's my next action? Holacracy invites us to separate. First, what needs attention? You know, what is the role from who's going to fill it? So we can have a conversation not about, is it my wife or I that takes out the garbage? It's rather, what roles do we need, you know, or in a company, forget about who's filling them for the moment. We'll come back to that question. But for now, what do we need to attend to? What are the roles involved? And then separately, okay, who's the best fit for these different roles? And when do we change roles and trade them and build lots of different roles? So by separating those questions, it makes each of them easier to ask and answer in the same way that separating what's the outcome from what's the next action gets you more clarity and makes it easier to kind of take that thing in your head and get it off your mind. Right. The Whole process gets easier when you make that distinction. So Holacracy similar. It's not just who is going to do what, it's what roles and then separately who's going to fill those roles. So there's a whole language and framework for getting clear on all those roles.
- [23:20]
B
It's so fascinating to me. Actually, two nights ago I stepped into an Introduction to Holacracy session here in Amsterdam and a bunch of folks were there and some already implemented this and you know, I made the sort of radical statement that said, look, if you really want Holacracy to work, you've got to have GTD practices. Whoever's listening to this, in case we're reaching any of the audience out there that are potentially Holacracy interested and not that GTD aware yet to be aware that the individuals involved still need to have these kind of behaviors built in to say, okay, I've just been given something I need to do. And then there has to be a trust that the individuals, once they've been tasked to do something out of any of the wonderfully rigorous processes and meeting formats that holacracies come up with, they actually do that. If you don't, then you start creating miscellaneous tensions that shouldn't be there that then have to be brought to an overly structured format that's not necessary. So this is just for those who have ears to hear that might be interested in this at this point. Then the more you trust individuals to be able to self manage, then you can start to really graduate holocratic process inside an organization and move you way up the food chain.
- [24:32]
A
Yeah, I totally agree. I've seen a number of cases now where holacracy is adopted in a team or an organization that doesn't have really good that's probably generous GDD practices yet. And it's not that you can't start Holacracy in that mode. It's just you better really get focused really fast on helping people with their individual practices. And I think holacracy kind of forces that need it, highlights the need, it shines a light on it, but you still have to attend to it. And if you don't, then you're kind of building on a really shaky foundation. It's this team practice is built on a foundation of people who can notice something's on their mind and clarify it and do what does it mean to me? You can't do that across a whole company or organization. If you can't start by just doing that as an individual practice. When something Grabs your attention. So, yeah, I can't stress enough. Good GBD practice is so important, a good Holacracy practice.
- [25:20]
B
It's built on Delightful conversation, Brian, and lovely. Hopefully we can see you again soon.
- [25:26]
A
Awesome. Thanks, David. Thanks so much. Have a great day.
- [25:28]
B
Thanks to everybody. Yeah, bye.
- [25:40]
C
I'd like to give a short message to those of you who've been participating and playing with GTA GTD Connect for a while and sort of remind you that all of us with this GTD methodology and this set of practices go through cycles. You know, I still go through cycles myself initially. There's kind of the inspiration and there's a lot of material to ingest and to get familiar with. And so people oftentimes, when they first come onto Connect, are just potentially overwhelmed by how much information there is. In a way, it's just a huge library where we've been able to archive so much different information from so many different perspectives and people and points of view and so understood that it's like walking into a library, oh, gee, where do I start? So that's oftentimes the initial phase of this and many people, after a year or two, you know, probably get on some level or some plateau where they go, well, I kind of got it now. I've got my system set up and everything's fine and I'm fine tuning. And you may find yourself at that point also finding yourself saying, gee, I'm now becoming a resource of this methodology for people around me, you know, people asking me for assistance and helping this. And we've seen in the forums a number of people now sharing ideas about how to get your teams more involved or families more involved with this information. So some of that information is in there as well. But I think you'll find yourself going through cycles of this and you may find that much like if you've ever read a software manual. I remember when I read, when I learned Microsoft Word to begin with, for instance, I read the manual, wow, this is really cool. And I started to use the tool and didn't need the manual anymore. As a matter of fact, a good example of that right here, the manual for this camera that's taking this picture right now. Initially I read this, got it all set up. That's really cool. And that's really fine. And so pretty much everything was onto cruise control. I didn't need to go back to my library to make this really work. Then of course, as I started to get more sophisticated in terms of the stuff I wanted to do, got more inspired about some things I saw other people are doing. I go, how do I do that? Went back to the manual. I went, oh, God, I didn't realize I could do that. I didn't realize I could do that. And I remember at least two or three iterations of going back to Microsoft Word back in the days when there actually was a manual for that, as opposed to just all online and realizing, oh, my God, I didn't realize that, oh, I could do that now. I could do that now. And I think that's what you might find with Connect, too, is that it's a gold mine of stuff. Well, many people have read getting things done more than three or four times, and every time they read it, they get something new out of it. So I think you may find Connect the same way and probably even easier because, hey, it doesn't take much to just click on, surf around, see what might be new or what might be of interest to you, and pay attention. There's more than meets the eye in there.