By Loomio co-founder Richard D. Bartlett
Today I drew 6 circular diagrams to convey just about everything I’ve learned about forming a truly collaborative group.
I was discussing the challenges of working inclusively with Katrina Donaghy from openCoLab in Australia, a new group of 16 people with an ambition to work in a decentralised, collaborative way.
- Concentric rings
- Magical spaces
- Peer-to-peer accountability
- Rhythm you can rely on
- A place to make decisions
- Community is defined by its boundaries
If you don't want to organise with a hierarchy, but you don't want to be a formless blob either, then I can highly recommend the concentric rings model.
We use this pattern at Enspiral: the people in the outer ring are Contributors, and the people in the center are Members.
We share as much as possible with Contributors; we only use the Members-only space by exception.
One way to think about the difference: a contributor is somebody trusted by one member; a member is somebody trusted by all the members.
There's a low barrier to entering the first ring, and a higher barrier for the second. This means we can be open to new people, while accounting for the extra commitment and context held by long-standing members.
The rights and responsibilities of each circle are explicit, and there's a clear pathway to move from the edge to the center.
If you're forming a new organisation, community, or network, there will invariably be some people who are highly committed, and some who are n. The concentric rings model accommodates this difference with grace.
Collaboration is confrontational.
It requires you to confront yourself. Some people need to learn how to take up less space in a group. Others need to learn how to take up more. Either way, this is deep therapy.
The most effective method I've seen for doing this therapy is by sitting in circles.
Every six months, we go away for a weekend retreat together, which combines work with relaxation, ritual with fun, and freedom with form.
At a retreat the circle can become magical, challenging, nurturing, healing, bonding.
Retreats are a luxury though, we can't be in those circles all the time. We create miniature magical circles in the office with little every day practices, like asking everyone, how are you feeling today? and genuinely listening to the answer.
When you're building a decentralised organisation, all the cool technology, all your Slacks and Trellos and s and blockchains and Githubs, they all help, but there is no replacement for the face-to-face work of learning how to care for each other.
I've written more about presence and ritual in this previous article: A Caring Organisation: feelings, magic, and gendered work.
If you're going to ditch the hierarchy, you need to install a bunch of alternative structures in its place.
If you just remove the hierarchy without providing an alternative, you'll wind up ruled by the tyranny of structurelessness.
Stewarding is one of those structures. It's a peer-to-peer support system that distributes the work of caring throughout the group. My steward is someone I can have difficult conversations with, and someone who I can trust to reach out to me when I'm at my lowest.
If you're looking for an example of how this works in practice, here's the stewarding circle we use at Enspiral:
Innovation is inherently destabilising. Everyone wants agility, but it's easy for the thrill of change to tip over into the anxiety of disorientation.
If everything is changing all the time, you waste a lot of energy continuously getting reoriented. But if you don't change enough, you'll soon become irrelevant as the environment shifts around you.
It's good to keep modifying your course as new information comes to light, but it's bad to ditch a project before it's had a chance to be successful. So how do you strike the balance?
At , we rely on rhythm to help us change fast enough but no faster:
- every 12 months we agree a high level annual plan;
- every 6 months we go away on retreat, to keep deepening our relationships, and to keep falling in love with the mission;
- every 3 months we set 3-4 measurable objectives to orient all our work to;
- every 2 weeks we stop and reflect so we can make micro-adjustments to our plans;
- every day we hear from everyone: what did you do yesterday? what are you doing today? how are you feeling?
These dependable rhythms reduce anxiety and increase agility. People know where to bring their suggestions: if it is a minor tweak, we'll talk about it tomorrow morning. If it is a significant strategic shift, we'll talk about it at the next quarterly planning day.
I've written more about this in a previous article: Bootstrapping a Bossless Organisation in 3 Easy Steps ;-).
At , we organise by consent: we have rejected force as an organising tool.
That means our principles and policies are co-designed with the people that are affected by them.
Here's a real-life example:
At one of our retreats, someone raised the idea that we should have a conflict resolution policy. We discussed the idea with the whole team and got a shared sense that it was important, and that it would take a bit of work. A small working group formed to facilitate the policy development process.
The working group went away and did some research, to develop a first draft of the policy. They used to share the draft with the whole team and check that people had read it and shared any concerns.
The working group developed a second draft in response to the first round of input.
That green circle is a pie chart showing full agreement. 👍
Using means everyone can have their input into the policy without spending any time in a meeting: they can engage as their time and interest allows.
We have a full record of the deliberation that lead up to the decision, so the organisational memory is preserved. We can easily remember our reasoning if we want to review the policy in future.
If you want to learn more about how we use at , check out this awesome short talk from my cofounder Alanna.
When I was part of the Occupy movement, I learned a really hard lesson: there is no such thing as a totally inclusive space, as some people's behaviour will always exclude others.
As inclusion was one of top values, it was really hard for us to design a good system for excluding problematic behaviour. It feels like we've done a much better job of solving this challenge at Enspiral and .
All of the 5 previous circles build up to this last one:
- Concentric rings — the Members commit to maintaining the values and culture. If one of the Members is concerned about the culture, they will raise a discussion with the other Members.
- Magical spaces — our culture is developed, refined, and shared at retreats.
- Peer-to-peer accountability — we use stewarding to create space for hard conversations.
- Rhythm — we Members self-assess our own commitment every 6 months. It can be a heavy load at times!
- Decisions — we co-design our policies, so everyone has agreed what kind of behaviour is appropriate.
A couple times we've had to ask someone to leave Enspiral, and this stack of 6 circles has proved resilient. If someone makes a discriminatory remark, for instance, we can point them to the diversity agreement and invite them to change their behaviour or find a new community to work with.
While hard boundaries are very important to have when you need them, most of the time we actually just put work into defining the expectations and responsibilities at the different levels, and people self-select the circle they belong in (including none sometimes).
We have a structure, but it's a structure that we've all actively consented to.
He’s @richdecibels on Twitter. If you want to chat about this stuff, drop him a line. 🐢
If you're in Europe, check out this series of workshops being hosted by my Enspiral colleagues through September and October.