At this point we are almost two months into our rollout of Holacracy across our entire organization.  About 75% of our employees have at least one role assigned to them and are attending at least one circle meeting.  There are a few employees, me included, that are in multiple circles and therefore have many meetings to attend.  Currently I’m in three circles, so I have six hours of meetings scheduled per week.  That’s a tactical meeting and a governance meeting for each circle.

I’ve had the “too many meetings” discussion with a few people, but the interesting thing is that so far the sentiment has been that they don’t mind the meetings because they see so much being accomplished that they want to continue at the current pace.  In other words, we could have governance meetings less frequently, but everyone I’ve spoken to sees the value in getting our governance built out and they don’t want to delay it any more than we must.  It’s kind of like the first time I worked out.  My muscles hurt the next day, but it’s a good hurt and I actually wanted to go back and do it some more because that’s a sign that it’s working and I’ll see results soon.

Just to be fair, my six hours of meetings aren’t new meetings.  I’ve been able to eliminate a couple existing meetings and transition them into the tactical Holacracy meetings.  I think my meeting fatigue peaked for a couple of weeks when I still had my legacy meetings and began the new Holacracy meetings and was figuring out which meetings could be discontinued and how.

Of course, just because I have six hours on my schedule doesn’t mean I have six full hours of meetings.  Today we had a tactical and a governance meeting scheduled back to back for a two-hour time block.  We knocked out both meetings in under an hour because we are getting so efficient at the process.  Since we are getting that circle’s governance pretty firmed up and the number of tensions to process has decreased I think in another week we are going to change the cadence of that circle’s governance meeting to every two weeks.