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Foreign. Hi everyone. Welcome to our discussion of Holacracy and GTD and the intersections between those two. My name is John Forrester and this will be very informal and I invite your participation. Anything you'd like to say out loud in the chat, that kind of thing. I welcome your participation here. I'm interested in learning what I can from you as well as sharing my experience with both GTD and Holacracy. Quick bit of background on me. I've been around getting things done. Gtd David Allen's methodology for productivity for as long as it's been around. And I've worked with David at the company now for quite a few years. And then about, let's see, we just ticked over, since this is early 2024, we just ticked over to our 13th year of using Holacracy back in 2011, David adopted it for the company and going to pause here, there's a noise outside that's a bit out of my control. It will be over in another few seconds. There we go. So back in 2011, David Allen adopted Holocracy 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 Holocracy. 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, our team, at least the, 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, we were in it. We started creating our structure and creating roles. We immediately dived into scheduling governance and tactical meetings. One of the great assistances in all of this was that we knew that we would not be successful at all, or at least succeed as well, if we did not have good coaching. So we engaged the Holacracy one folks to coach us as we went along. In our beginning our we had Brian or Tom or one of the other people at holocracy1 sitting in on all of our meetings. At first they facilitated, then they handed over facilitation to those of us who were learning it. And it was kind of like they were our training wheels on the bicycle to make sure we didn't fall over or steer the company off a cliff. And I can say after all these years, we never steered the company off a cliff. In fact, over the course of those 13 years that we've been running on Holacracy, we have transformed the company several times. I entirely credit our use of Holacracy with navigating those changes in a graceful way and getting through that relatively easily. If you look at other companies who might have gone through similar transformations, they didn't always come out as well. But we have not only continued but have flourished as a result of using holacracy to run the company. So that's our Holacracy story. And today I'm just interested in talking about the ways that holacracracy intersects with the Getting things Done methodology. And I have a couple of ideas for that. First I would like to give a quick overview. A couple of items that are will help you understand GTD if you don't already have some familiarity with that. So this is a good time for me to pause and ask in the chat or out loud, whatever you prefer. Who on here would you call yourself brand new to Holacracy, somewhat experienced or very experienced using Holacracy? So this is specifically about Holacracy. Where are you with your journey experience understanding there? New, familiar, old pro. I'm glad to see that. I'm glad to see that Yoad is very experienced and got familiar somewhat fairly. Two years practice. Good for you. Good for you. Paul in Estonia is very knowledgeable. I I can say that's true for sure. Five years running. Good for you, Christophe. Familiar but not pro at all. That's the way to keep learning. I am always learning something new about it. Okay, great. Thank you for all that. Next up, same question, but about getting things done. GTD Are you brand new to it or you have heard of it or you're more experienced? Maybe you've started implementing it somehow? And how you organize yourself. Okay, Carla, welcome to you and brand new. Good, good. See who else? Paul. Since Paul is a certified trainer and coach in gtd, I'm going to just go out on a limb here and say he's fairly experienced. You just kind of. I made a clever remark and you just totally destroyed it because he tried to be clever and I said, I have some experience. Oh, we should have rehearsed that. I'm so sorry. No worries. Yes. So Paul is in Estonia and he's a certified coach and trainer. So when he says he's got some experience, he's understating it. Mauricio, Familiar with GTD and experienced with Holacracy. Okay, pretty experienced. Again, always learning. Pretty familiar. Good, good, good. I'm firmly of the opinion that if you are always learning, it doesn't matter how experienced you are, you, you're in a good place if you're looking at it. It's always learning. So thank you. A very brief introduction for those of you who are just brand new to getting things done. Getting things done is a way of having a clearer mind so you can appropriately engage with what has your attention. Pretty simple. The book, the original book was called the Art of Stress Free Productivity as its subtitle. I won't say that you will not have any stress ever again, but we can reduce your stress just simply by getting things off your mind. And the whole idea behind this is that your mind is for having ideas, not holding them. Or to put it a little more directly, David Allen would say that your mind is a crappy office. So if, if you would like to upgrade your office space, one of the best things you can do is to get stuff off your mind, get it externalized and objectified and just that will upgrade your mental office space. So getting things done has some very specific ways of helping you do that. And as it turns out, many of those ways are parallel to and often directly in the wording reflected in Holacracy, specifically in the Holocracy Constitution. So what I'd like to do there is show you a copy of the Constitution that I wrote some notes on and just discuss a few of those points. And as I said, anytime in here where you have a question, a comment, want to share your experience about something, please feel free. Honestly, I'm. I'm way more interested in engaging with all of you in some aspect here rather than just talking. Here we go. And here and find my. Share my screen here and you'll see my. Worked up copy of the Constitution. Share screen. So can you give me a wave if you can see this? Good. Got a thumbs up. Thank you. Thank you. So please don't bother reading this. I think one of the worst things you can do is a live presentation is throw a whole bunch of text on the screen and then ask your readers to read it. So honestly, I should have just blanked out everything except the parts I've highlighted here. So this is the Constitution. And this is. We'll spend a few minutes here looking at the ways that specifically has the getting things done methodology codified into the Constitution. This is the latest version, as far As I know, 5.0. Anyone who knows of a. An upgrade to that, a newer version, even if it's a point upgrade, like after the five, let me know. I'm interested in that. This is the version that our company is currently running on. So we start with the beginning. At the beginning. Responsibilities of role leads processing, tensions in the getting things done methodology. We have something very similar. We'd say that it's about engaging with what has your attention att tension 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, it's not theoretical, it's. 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. 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 change 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. And in the constitution that's 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 for defining your next action for each of your roles projects. So in getting things done once a week or as often as you feel you need to, sometimes it's a little more often, sometimes less often, you'll be regularly reviewing your next actions and projects. 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, 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. So in. In in gtd, we would say that the pro. The tracking your tensions is an ongoing activity. As you go through your day, it may occur to you that you have attention 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. Now, the structure of the meetings is beautifully designed so that if you bring Attention to a governance meeting and it turns out to not be resolvable through governance. The meeting can bring that to light and you can bring it to a tactical and vice versa. 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, it prevents me from making serious mistakes if I simply stick to the structure. Early on in our adoption of it, we had, 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, 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. And honestly, we never got close to driving the company bus off of a cliff. We, we weren't even. I don't even see the cliff ahead. So it was very safe. Same with gtd. As David Allen often says, it's not like running with scissors. You're not going to hurt yourself doing any aspect of gtd, just the process of sitting down with a digital tool or a pen and paper and writing some things down that are on your mind that will help. That's not all there is to it. But that can help. Just that alone, to relieve stress, that's not going to cause any harm. You're not having to commit to doing any of that. You don't have to show what you've written down to anyone else. But just simply doing that can be a great stress reliever. Similarly, in Holacracy, if all you do is just think about your various roles and let your mind come up with, what would I like that? How do I think that that might be better? Is there something where I could do this role better, or is there something I need from someone else to be able to fulfill this role better? Just writing those things down, even if you never even brought them to a meeting, that's going to relieve some stress. If you take it further and bring those to a meeting and process those tensions through the sausage grinder, I think Brian and Tom used to call it in early years the sausage grinder of the Holocracy process. Wonderful things can happen. So see Executing Next actions here. 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. And for those of you who are in Europe or other parts of the world, this may be the last thing you really need to pay attention to today and could be after this, it's time for dinner or cup of tea while you read or watch TV or something like that. And you may not really have to think too much about how to engage with the rest of your day. So good for you. You put in a good day tomorrow, you'll have to choose what to engage with again. That's this considering the next actions you could take for your roles part. All right, let's move on here. I'm going to trust that you're going to holler out if you have comments or questions at any time. A circle lead controls the circle's role assignments and may 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 attention 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, 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 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, 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. Delegation could also be if you broaden your, your understanding of that a bit, it could be an order you've placed online. You're waiting for something to show up. You've ordered one of the wonderful books about Holacracy and you're waiting for it to be delivered. That's a terrific thing to track on your waiting for list because you've delegated that to the company you ordered it from. You might think, I don't need to track that. The first time that you don't receive that order and you're looking back a month later and going, wait a minute, wasn't I supposed to get a book from so and so? The first time something doesn't show up that you've been waiting for, you'll realize how useful the waiting for list is. So here we go. Defining priorities and strategies. Priorities. This is an ongoing part of the work in getting things done as much as it is in Holacracy you, 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 Anna 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, 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, 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, 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, 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 something to hold explicitly, something to hold on a regular basis anymore. 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, that Tom and Brian, I think, defined as a way to look at strategy is strategy is a state, 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. 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 they're not doing because it's, 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. They don't need to be stressing about what they're not doing because it's been defined in the strategy that it's okay to work on this instead of that. Well, thank you all. I will, I will conclude the meeting here. Thank you all. Great to see you. And I have my next actions to follow up on here. Bye. Thank you. Thank you, John. Bye. Bye. All right, John, thank you. Sa.