We’re about month into implementing Holacracy here at Intrust IT, and today we had our first awkward governance meeting. The good news is we learned our lesson so it doesn’t happen again to us, and hopefully after reading this it won’t happen to you, either.  What made it awkward was halfway through processing our tension list, one of the tensions resulted in creating a new Operations Circle.  The creation of the circle wasn’t necessarily the awkward part, it was what happened right after that.

After the new circle agenda item was processed, all the remaining items on the agenda needed to be addressed in an Operations Circle meeting, not the General Company Circle meeting.  So, all the remaining agenda items were withdrawn and we closed the meeting with 40 minutes remaining in the hour we had set aside for the meeting.  What made it even more awkward was that we had 2 employees that were attending their first governance meeting, so they were a bit perplexed by what occurred.  We had to spend a few minutes explaining to them what had just happened and why this wasn’t a normal meeting.

Since everyone still had time available and there were still a bunch of tensions to process, we went into the newly create Operations Circle and started a brand-new meeting and proceeded to elect a secretary and process the tensions that everyone had originally brought to the meeting.

At the end of the day, we got everyone’s tensions addressed and learned that if one of the agenda items in a governance meeting will probably result in the creation of a new circle, it is best to make that the last item to process.