In this podcast recorded after the JAFAC 2018 conference Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke Miki Szikszai and Sandy Mamoli about Snapper’s adoption of holacracy.
Key Takeaways
- Clarity of purpose is key for an organisation looking to improve their ways of working
- The sign of a good coach is when they realise they need to step away so the client can stand on their own
- The most important skills are around collaboration, teamwork, innovation and empathy, not technologies and tools
- Holacracy is a system to create a self-organising organisation where decisions are made at the right level with a hierarchy of purpose rather than a hierarchy of people
- Holacracy amplifies the culture you already have – so get the culture right first
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Show Notes
- 00:45 Introductions – Sandy
- 01:18 Introductions – Miki
- 01:48 Looking for ways to maintain innovation as the company grows
- 02:12 The background to Snapper’s agile adoption
- 02:33 Building on an existing culture of collaboration
- 03:03 What needs to be in place for effective agile adoption – clarity of purpose
- 03:21 People who want to collaborate
- 03:38 Passionate about the industry they work in
- 04:05 Agile was about building on an existing good culture and finding ways to be more effective
- 04:45 Being consciously incompetent about ways of working and looking for guidance on getting better
- 05:18 Looking for a way to create a culture that sustains itself
- 06:24 Exploring some of the challenges and ways to expose and overcome them
- 06:54 Recognising that the executive team were unintentionally causing bottlenecks in communication flows
- 07:26 Transparency of information was the biggest hurdle to overcome
- 07:56 The sign of a good coach is when they realise they need to step away so the client can stand on their own
- 08:33 The existential crisis that prompted some discussions about growth and new ways of working
- 09:38 The initial approach to growing the team was a “unicorn hunt” – looking for skillsets that simply weren’t available
- 10:02 Identifying that the most important skills needed were collaboration, teamwork, innovation and empathy, not technologies
- 10:24 Recognising that tertiary education institutions in New Zealand are developing people with these skills through their group project work
- 10:42 Enumerating the skills these people brought to their work
- 11:05 The story of the first graduate group and how they delivered an initiative
- 11:35 Recognising that using this approach will require a different way of operating the company
- 11:43 Developing an operating system for the company which will allow it to remain innovative while growing
- 12:12 The willingness to experiment and try cutting edge ideas
- 13:16 Starting with reading the Holacracy Constitution and realising the potential in the approach
- 14:33 Deliberately taking an experimentation approach – not assuming that it will work, rather exploring if it can and being prepared to abandon or adapt
- 15:05 The first experiment was difficult and adopting it in a big-bang approach didn’t work well
- 15:33 Stepping back and adopting the ideas in a small group to start with
- 15:49 Describing the key elements of holacracy and the organisation drivers for it
- 16:54 Using holacracy to create an environment where teams feel empowered to be innovative and figure out the best ways of working for themselves
- 17:22 Holacracy is a system to create a self-organising organisation where decisions are made at the right level with a hierarchy of purpose rather than a hierarchy of people
- 18:04 The tedious but necessary activity of defining roles in great detail
- 18:29 The tedious effort of defining roles was necessary and very valuable
- 18:41 Some of the observations from the role definition activity
- 19:34 Identifying which roles are needed in a particular circle is an important and hard step
- 19:48 Learning from using the holacracy meetings and identifying that the purpose of the meetings is good, but the strict format was not a good fit for the company, so they changed the format while keeping the meeting intent
- 20:25 It wasn’t a straightforward journey, but it was a valuable journey for Snapper
- 21:28 Sticking with the principles rather than mindlessly following the rules results in very good outcomes for the organisation
- 21:45 One example of the changes that came about was the senior technical people became coaches for the more junior people, and the role change was organic and easy
- 23:01 Getting push-back from team members when expanding beyond the initial team
- 23:18 Some people chose not to go along with this way of working and left the organisation
- 23:36 The organisational practice of creating new circles
- 23:58 The story of disbanding a circle and allowing it to be reabsorbed into the organisation, allowing the org design to flex
- 24:48 People are able to organise and reorganise themselves based on what is needed at the time without needing any external permission
- 25:52 Circles are not islands and communication flows across and between circles smoothly
- 26:03 Describing the current structure of circles at Snapper and how they interact
- 26:48 Any person can raise and identify a “tension” – a gap between where you are and where you want to be
- 27:03 Each circle has roles which link to the other circles responsible for helping circles keep aligned
- 28:23 People can fill roles in multiple circles
- 28:54 Describing the importance of the hierarchy of purpose and how it keeps circles aligned
- 29:24 Holacracy has enabled the company to flex and adapt to change rapidly and dynamically
- 29:40 Describing how a specific experiment was addressed and the way collaboration was exhibited through it
- 31:33 There is still temptation to fall into the old ways of working they are conscious when it happens
- 32:03 There is criticism that holacracy doesn’t have a customer focus, however this is overcome by adding the right purpose to each circle
- 33:05 Advice for other organisations who may want to consider adopting holacracy
- 33:48 Identify if holacracy is the right tool for you, and focus on the principles rather than the mechanics when adopting it
- 34:15 Beware of holacracy as a way of entrenching silo behaviour – if the culture does not support collaboration then it can be used as a weapon
- 34:23 Holacracy amplifies the culture you already have
- 35:01 The language is important – new concepts need new words to help entrench them
- 36:05 Getting started is hard, but becoming proficient makes it quite easy and very effective
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