Today we had our first Holacracy governance meeting.  Prior to this meeting I spent about three months introducing Holacracy to my company in different meetings and communications, so I was excited to see everything actually come to fruition.  Last week I even held a pre-meeting with the initial three people who would be in this meeting so that they knew what to expect.  In that meeting I asked them all to bring two or three tensions to the first governance meeting so we would have some things to talk about.  I also set them up with accounts in the Glassfrog website and showed them how they could input their tensions.

For the first meeting, I invited the three people in my company that head up Sales, Operations and Finance, respectively.  I contracted with an external facilitator to run these meetings for the first three months of our implementation.  With the facilitator and me, that brought the number of people in the meeting to five, which is a good number to get started with.  Because we already had a facilitator designated, the first item on the agenda was to elect a secretary.  Since I was the only trained person in the group I volunteered for the position, but we still went through the formal Holacracy election process so we could see how that works.  That was one thing that wasn’t taught in the class I attended, so it was good to see it in action.

Altogether we had twelve tensions to process, and we were able to get them all done in the two hours we allotted for the meeting.  That included quite a few “process time-outs” from all us newbies asking our facilitator questions.  We even had to use our handy desktop constitution once to clarify a rule.  Our facilitator Dave said it was the most productive first meeting he had seen, so we felt pretty good with that feedback.  As we left the room Chad remarked that it was “fun” meeting, and I told him I would be sure to include that in my blog post.