On Thursday we kicked the day off with training on the personal organization system “Getting Things Done”, or GTD.  This system was developed over many years by David Allen in his consulting and business coaching company. The system allowed business executives to be more productive, thereby getting more things done.  I read the book many years ago and have loosely used his system ever since.  It is legendary. Continue reading “Holacracy Training Report Day Four” →

In the morning we focused on tactical meetings. We broke into our company groups and then took turns facilitating a tactical meeting. The Holacracy tactical meetings are a suggested best practice, but they are structured to move quickly to knock out everyone’s agenda items and will be something we will be adopting because it dovetails nicely into the overall system.

In the afternoon we focused on governance again and broke into new groups that were given new scenarios to work through in a governance meeting. We each took turns handling objections and integrating feedback. Since we didn’t do any pretend work in our make-believe companies, it was pretty much a whole day of back to back meetings. So the day didn’t fly by as quickly as the first two. I still learned a lot and got to test out a bunch of different scenarios to better understand how everything works.

Chances are you’ve been in a meeting where someone “made a motion” or “seconded” that motion, “called a meeting to order”, etc. That language and how it’s used in a meeting is from Robert’s Rules of Order. I was first introduced to that way back in grade school while in 4H and in student council.  Chances are that’s where you first learned about it, too.

Holacracy has a certain format to its meetings that follows the same thinking as Robert’s Rules. There is a certain structure and some particular language that is used when you are in a meeting. So today we dove into how to facilitate a governance meeting. In the morning Brian introduced us to the concepts, then we broke into our groups and had a work session. But the real learning for the day came in the afternoon when we had a meeting for the entire afternoon. Continue reading “Holacracy Training Report Day Two” →

This week I’m attending the Holacracy “Practitioner Certification Training” conducted by HolacracyOne in San Francisco.  It is a four and a half day class.  Each day I will write up a bit about what we covered, so welcome to my first post!

This morning I sat at a table with 6 other people, and one of those happened to be Mark Ward from ArcherPoint, which is an IT consulting company with 100 employees. They are a recent ESOP (24%) and Holacracy adopter. They also recently did a book study of GGOB and are considering adopting that. Also at my table is Leona, who is from Beijing. She works for Baidu, which is a Chinese company with 50,000 employees. They are in the process of adopting Holacracy.

Soon after the meeting kicked-off we went around the room and everyone got to introduce themselves. It seemed like we might be the smallest company here. It is a very diverse and international group to all be gathered together in one room. Here’s a sampling of who’s here: Continue reading “Holacracy Training Report Day One” →