Ruben Timmerman

I'm leaving Google: it's easier and harder than I thought

Fri, 03 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

This is a first dispatch from the other side, and it’s still a bit scary! I’ve been using Google Workspace with my own domain for 10+ years. It works so seamlessly that you stop questioning whether you actually want Google holding your email, your calendar, your photos, and your passwords. I think about EU digital sovereignty at work (and at work) every day. And yet there was my entire private life, sitting in Trump land.

So I moved. Or rather: I started moving. And I want to write about it honestly, including the parts that are harder than the enthusiast blogs let on.

What I moved so far

Email and calendar are live on Proton. 121,000 emails imported. DNS flipped. ruben.org now routes to Swiss servers. That part is done and it feels good.

Passwords moved from 1Password to Proton Pass, just to cut quite some costs even though I love 1Password (but it’s bloated and expensive now). Most things came over fine. Passkeys didn’t: that’s an industry-wide limitation, not a Proton bug, but you’ll need to re-enroll them manually per site.

Drive and Photos are downloaded from Google but not yet uploaded to Proton. Why? Because 1.8 TB of your life takes up more local storage than you have lying around. That problem is queued, since AI is causing world wide memory shortages so I didn’t want to buy a 2TB SSD drive for €500 yet…

The cold shower

Keyboard shortcuts are a genuine regression. Gmail’s [ key (archive this email, show me the next one) is so deep in my muscle memory I didn’t realise how much I used it until it was gone. Proton doesn’t have it. One of their most upvoted feature requests, for years.

Calendar is the most social problem in the migration. The tech took an hour with Proton’s really nice Easy Switch tool. But shared calendars were tied to my Google account identity. My girlfriend, daughter and I use our calendar constantly and those hundred-odd shared events? They need to be re-invited. One by one. That’s on the humans, not the software 😬

There’s no magic sync button. Google Drive to Proton Drive means: Google Takeout export, unzip, re-upload. For 1.8 TB, that’s a weekend project. Except I ran out of local storage halfway through. Proton doesn’t offer a cloud-to-cloud migration path. Neither does Google of course, because why would they?

The web app is slower than Gmail. There’s a reason power users end up running Apple Mail via Proton’s Bridge app which handles the encryption. The browser experience is clean but not fast. I tried Airmail too, but apart from the annoying 3 day demo - automatically pay for a year trick, it didn’t feel nicer than Apple Mail…

The encouragement

Proton’s design is genuinely good. Cleaner than Google’s in places I didn’t expect. Onboarding was frictionless. The apps feel considered, not bolted together.

Watching “encrypting and backing up your photos” feels different from watching Google Photos quietly inhale your memories. I didn’t think the psychological dimension would matter as much as it does. It does.

Proton’s business model is the real thing. Their controlling shareholder is a non-profit Swiss foundation legally obligated to defend their privacy mission forever. No VC investors. No advertising model. You literally can’t invest in them — by design. Google’s product is you. Proton’s product is privacy. That distinction is structurally enforced, not just a marketing claim.

And the fact that I’m doing this at all with a custom domain, on my own terms, able to point my email anywhere I want is only possible because I own ruben.org. If you take nothing else from this: get your own domain. €10/year. It’s the cheapest form of digital independence available. Do it before you need it.

What’s next

Drive and Photos uploads once I sort the storage problem. Evaluating whether Moral Fabric (my ops company for nonprofits) should become a Proton or Mosa Cloud reseller. And a proper guide once the migration is complete, for anyone who wants to follow.

For now: the cold shower is real. So is the reason to keep going! 🇺🇸 🍊 🇪🇺

The Trusting People Paradox of self-management

Mon, 16 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT

A: people can’t be trusted, they always selfishly look out for themselves.
B: people can be trusted, we’re wired to altruistically help each other out.

What camp are you in?

In the business world we see this divide as well. Employees need constant carrots and sticks to deliver their best work. Or employees will fully benefit the business once you as a founder or manager get out of the way.

Systems of self-management like Sociocracy and Holacracy have grown in popularity in the past decades. This shows that the balance has shifted from factory or even slavery based approaches, to ways or organisation that thrive on autonomy.

These self-management operating systems are built around trusting people. Allowing people to make decisions on budgets, priorities, strategy, and even refuse or take on projects and roles as they see fit. However, self-organisation or self-management does not mean simply throwing out all management. If done properly, it means replacing management with principles, processes and systems that help people manage their own work.

Can we be in both camps?

Maybe you recognise the paradox creeping up on me in the past 15 years:

I ran my company Springest on Holacracy because I don’t trust people.
Why? We’re only a slightly more evolved version of our primate predecessors. Because of this, our Thinking, Fast And Slow brains make us act based on fear. We’re proven bad decision makers, Predictably Irrational at best.

And managers are people too. Good managers can add a lot of value, but they are scarce. And if a good manager has a bad manager above them, you’re still screwed. On top of that, even the good managers have bad days, weeks, months or years. Or they burn out…

I also ran my company on Holacracy because I trust people.
We are wildly creative creatures. We have a lot of energy. We can convince other people of things. We can come up with solutions algorithms still can’t. We inspire other people like no robot does.

These are precious qualities, but if you manage us badly, you’ll kill all of that. If you run us like a machine, we’ll be replaceable by artificial intelligence. But give us more freedom, and we’ll be happier and even more productive than your average bot. Heck, we’ll even figure out which parts of our work actually should be automated!

A paradox of trusting people and dictatorship

This leads us to the Trusting People Paradox: we can be trusted without managers, but can not be trusted without a solid management system around us. To illustrate this, people sometimes asked me if I just replaced my dictatorial founder habits with a rigid system of rules. All so I could keep controlling my employees and the company.

And you know what? Maybe it’s true… except for my dictatorial habits of course! I indeed believe people can’t be trusted in some respects, while they should be fully trusted in others. On top of that, I think that figuring out which elements belong in which category, is the key and art of running an organisation.

This is true on the organisational level, but also at the person, role, and even project level. Skills like empathy and abstraction are sometimes mutually exclusive. One might be important for one role and less for another. Compare a customer service rep with an IT systems architect. The same goes for different types of projects ranging from repetitive to requiring a lot of research.

Designing a system around people

So how can we use the good parts of humans, while diminishing the impact of our built-in weaknesses? Why might self-management be the missing piece of the puzzle here? Because a strict system of rules provides safety.

Safety to be creative, to make mistakes, to test ideas, to evolve based on reality. If you let people manage themselves, there has to be a very clear structure. Their creative energy has to be aligned towards a common goal, because the manager who would otherwise do this, is absent. She’s replaced with a system where purpose flows hierarchically. From the company’s mission to its periodical goals, through teams in projects, to people actually doing tasks feeling they contribute in a meaningful way.

Intelligent design like a God, or use evolution?

The key in designing your organisational operating system is to not design it at all. After all, you are terrible at predicting the future. It’s better to let your system evolve based on what reality throws at it.

But reality tends to change, both within your growing organisation and in markets, technology and society. This friction with reality is called tension in Holacracy-speak. A tension is a specific example of something that needs improvement. The governance process has evolved as an open-source system to help you adjust your system through those tensions every day. Whatever your organisational system of choice, you need to allow for constant evolution without depending on managers to wait for information to reach them.

Maybe we’ve ended up with another paradox here. You need to intelligently design a system that allows for evolving itself. So that those humans can focus on doing what they do best. I guess that’s the art of self-management. Zooming out, that’s exactly what our genes have done for us as a species. As the late Tony Hsieh said: we need to build companies more like societies so that they don’t go extinct. Let’s not do it the other way around. What evolutionary experiment can you start at your company today?

Startup therapy: fix a blow to your momentum by using tension as fuel

Tue, 08 Nov 2022 00:00:00 GMT

One of our Friday Town Hall Meetings, where we discuss anything anyone wants. And where we fixed our momentum.

As a startup founder, you’ve either been there or will soon: a slump in your growth. It can triggered by growing too fast, a key team member leaving, a sudden market change, or losing a big customer. In any case, you need to face reality and get back on track.

After leaving Springest, I’m now investing in and coaching other startups. One of them is going through a rough patch, so I thought I should recount how we dealt with such a time a few years ago. Here we go…

Our CTO left the company to work on his own startup. He was my main confidant, and had lead the effort to rebuild our entire architecture. At that time we were a team of 25 people, working on Springest for 7 years. Our goal was to become the world’s biggest marketplace for professional learning and the leading SaaS platform for organisations to empower their employees’ learning.

The person leaving us was a huge blow. In hindsight, it also wasn’t that big of a surprise. He seemed to slowly lose motivation and we had talked about that a few times. We agreed to take some time to figure out how to fill the gaps he would leave. This part turned out to be fairly easy because of the quality of people we already had, and the clarity in roles that Holacracy brought. But I also asked him to be very critical in his last months, to share any and all doubts he had with the team. We could only learn from that, right?

🤕 Well, he did, and it hurt…

Confrontational therapy: put it out there

Every week, Tinypulse sends out a question to everyone in our team. One recurring question is “How happy are you”. We share the answers with everyone without any curation, so everybody could read how our soon to be ex-Springeteer felt:

We haven’t disrupted our industry, we’re focussing on the wrong things, we’re lucky no other startups did what we should’ve done yet, and we’re on a slowly sinking ship. My work-happiness is at an all time low: 4/10.

Some people asked me about it in private via Slack, they felt it was too harsh. I felt a bit betrayed too, but was confident our colleagues would be able to make up their own judgment based on reality. So I immediately put the “sinking ship” on our Friday Town Hall Meeting agenda to have a discussion about it, making sure everybody noticed the comments. I also posted a public note on Tinypulse to make sure everybody knew he’s already quit, to give it some context.

Group therapy: let it all out

So, in the town hall meeting with the comments on screen, I asked him to explain his remarks in more detail. That brought some nuance and context. Then we asked everyone for their reactions. In hindsight I would’ve liked to use Holacracy’s reaction model where everybody gets some safe space to react without any discussion, but we did this “popcorn-style”.

Some people expressed sympathy. Especially the newer people who felt that our purpose feels a bit less shiny after you’re working on it on a daily basis. Definitely a wake up call for others: if they felt like this, were we betraying our mission? Or was this merely the messiness of reality?

Intervention: look on the bright side

Being data driven and ambitious, we naturally point to things we think should be better. But it takes more effort to celebrate successes and notice the things we did change.

We have introduced many new things to our “old school” professional learning sector. Even though you and me are already used to all kinds of online tools and of course e-learning, about 85% of professional education in Europe still happens in classrooms, and it’s offered by for-profits ranging from big corporates with tv-campaigns to freelance coaches & trainers. We’ve pushed this sector to act more transparently towards consumers, for example by forcing complete clarity on pricing. Our performance based business model has given us stable profitability even though everyone thought it couldn’t work in this sector.

I mostly let others do the talking here, but also felt it was needed for me to jump in and point to these successes. Just like the bigger bets we’re making currently that we believe in and show signs of validation. I tried not to sound too zealous, but rather just mention facts from different parts of our business. People tended to forget that many things were very different before we came onto the scene.

Luckily I didn’t have to do this part on my own: other people gave examples where the assertions were just plain wrong. Since we’re profitable, growing and have enough money in the bank, we’re surely not a sinking ship. We concluded that, at worst, we might be on a slippery slope. Good to get that out of the way. And we had our “investor KPI sheet” with our most important numbers on the screen to focus on data, not opinions.

The professional learning sector is extremely fragmented and therefore hard to change. The startup graveyard is full of learning startups and even the most well-funded over-hyped startups in Silicon Valley have had only moderate success in disrupting it. Look at Knewton’s recent changes or Udemy’s rounds of financing: both received $100M+ in funding, are awesome examples for anyone in EdTech but are no AirBnb or Uber (yet).

This is not a matter of us being lucky nobody beat us yet: we have had quite some success already because we did a better job. And the fact that many “old” ways of learning still exist doesn’t mean we haven’t also disrupted many things. The fact that BMW is still selling cars doesn’t mean that Tesla hasn’t disrupted their industry either. It has forced them to change, and so have we.

Take the matter into your own hands: let everyone come up with solutions

Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. So we were definitely not going to let this chance slip by to improve ourselves. Many people came up with things we should do that we weren’t doing. In every case, these were things we wanted to do for a long time, but we chose to focus on other things that seemed to have more short term leverage.

We realised we should listen to our end users even more, to find ways we can actually help people figure out what to learn. We also noticed we often focus on growing short term numbers over playing our real end-game. We are so good at growth hacking we do a bit too much of it, maybe slowing down our longer term growth by postponing our more audacious projects.

All this discussion upped our sense of urgency. This fuels momentum: the most important concept for every startup. So how do we leverage that, coming from this seemingly negative side note in our recent history?

Take action: put your OKRs where your mouth is

After this town hall I heard people say “whoa… this was one of the more intense meetings we had in a long time”. And it was, everybody was really involved. As always I was happy we recorded the entire thing to share with anyone not present or not hired yet.

I tried to make sure we ended on a positive note, to capture the momentum, by pointing at our current Q3 OKRs and how today’s discussions can feed our Q4 OKRs. We’ll focus even more on playing our end game, on doing what we believe in by addressing the hard to change things in our industry. I hinted towards some concrete examples of this and tried to connect that to what we’re already doing.

In case you care about learning (boy, we certainly do! ;)), it means we have focussed a lot on the “transaction” part of learning: how people find, request information, choose, book / buy and evaluate learning products. This is needed to be able to change the “data” part of our purpose: broaden the types of learning products so that it becomes more habitual and intrinsically driven. This follows from our mantra that Supply follows Demand and not the other way around.

So, it all comes down to this 1 step plan…

I just really liked the happy rocket guy, representing momentum. Image by James Yu.

At the start of this phase, I felt my urge for transparency and hunger for criticism finally bit me in the ass. But I actually just needed the energy from the team to realise what we should do: use it to our advantage. We regained momentum. We later looked back and realised that stories of startups only in hindsight look like clear successes of disruption. In reality, it’s a lot of hard work and there’s lots of dips along the way.

When it gets hard, just remember to turn the tension into fuel…

No more Policies, Processes and Rules in self-management with Holacracy?

Tue, 28 Nov 2017 00:00:00 GMT

When your colleagues all self-manage, who makes sure everybody adheres to certain rules? Is there some magic that does not require optimal processes to be written down? Are policies an archaic instrument not needed in self-management heaven?

Nope. Probably even the contrary: our self-managed organisation is arguably more documented, more structured and more explicit than your average corporate in a heavily regulated industry.

If it’s not written down, it doesn’t exist.

One of the base rules at Springest is that we write things down, almost always in Asana with some exceptions at circle level (eg. developers make comments on code in Github because that suits the work better). If we talk about some work that has to be done, the conversation will end with “I’ll make a task for you in Asana”.

Work itself is explicit in roles and the consitution

One of the main and first benefits of Holacracy is that there is a rule book, the constitution, that everybody adheres to. Why? Because the formal and legal power holder (me, in this case, as founder and majority shareholder) has signed a contract that it is so.

Our publicly available governance records, exported from Asana and visible at http://roles.springest.com.

Of course, in Holacracy, there is a process for keeping track of what can be expected of whom. The governance process defines circles and roles, consisting of a purpose, accountabilities, and optionally domains and policies.

But if something is expected, it doesn’t mean that it will happen. That depends on how the role holder chooses priorities. There is always more to be done than can get done. But if work is done, sometimes you want to make sure it’s done in a certain way…

An explicit role with expectations for each employee

The Springeteer role in Asana, where our governance records are stored.

At Springest, this starts with your Springeteer role. It lives in our Alignment circle, our renamed “General Company Circle”, and everyone working at Springest holds it as non-core circle member. You are not allowed to drop it because it’s in your employment agreement. As you can see in our governance records (it synchronises with Asana every hour), it contains links to other policies and rules that are updated by other specific roles and communicated via Sputr or Asana.

Policies for circles and roles

Part of the governance record of our Alignment circle, including some policies.

In Holacracy there is a construct called Policy to basically limit access to certain things (a Domain, or something the circle by definition has authority over) unless you respect the policy. We tend not to use them too much, because they’re harder to parse than accountabilities, which are more direct.

However, we do have some policies on our Alignment circle that govern how we work together. We sometimes doubt whether to make a certain rule into an accountability of the Springeteer role which we added only a year ago, after running on Holacracy for 4 years already. Or, to add the rule as a policy. We instinctively choose accountabilities for something you actively do and that can be expected (which policies are not for), and policies for the way that you do it.

Rules of Engagement

A problem often encountered is that roles are filled by multiple people. As a platform focussed on helping people learn, we employ about 15 people that hold the role “Learning Advisor” (and often a few others as well). We want those people to work according to a certain process, to ensure quality and consistency for our customers. This is hard to express in accountabilities, might be hard to enforce and and sometimes seems to contradict with self-management.

Part of our Rules of Engagement for how we treat our customers.

To solve the tension of ensuring adherence to a process, we have evolved the construction where:

Role 1 is accountable for creating and updating certain “Rules of Engagement” (link points to our General Communication Rules)
Role 2 is accountable for adhering to those roles, with a link to the rules in the accountability.
In some cases, Role 1 lives in the super circle of Role 2.

Part of our Rules of Engagement for the many communication tools we use

This creates transparency around those rules and often reasons for them, without falling back to old-school management where a Lead Link might naturally set those rules.

ISO certification

To top it off, we recently received our ISO 27001 certification. For a relatively small company, this might sound daunting. However, we found it was quite easy to pass the audit. We already have all of these constructs for documenting and guarding processes in place and it was simply a matter of adding all the demands from the ISO 27001 certification in our governance records.

We protect the ISO certification with a domain on the governance records itself that prohibits its change, unless the Security Officer role agrees. We thereby comply with one of its most important demands: that certain people (in our case, roles) can limit change that might impact security.

The ISO auditor, and earlier the consultant who helped us navigate the ISO process, literally said they were really impressed with the level of explicitness in our organisation. On any of their questions we were able to answer “oh, sure, you can find that there, and a link to it goes here, and then that role is defined there”, etc.

So, what’s the fun of all this?

To conclude… yeah it does sound pretty regulated huh?! Consider this:

It makes me as founder very relaxed about things like security, quality, durability of my business etc, knowing that we have this covered. I can focus on our purpose.
All changes to these regulations are incremental and iterative (except when they’re protected by a domain :)), because of Holacracy’s evolutional governance process. It’s not daunting at all!
Everybody can influence many of those rules. Again, unless protected, but then it’s still clear how to change them if needed. This makes it so much more motivating and not frustrating for people in the organisation to follow the rules, and not abuse them in case they don’t fit with reality.

I’m curious to hear your feedback. Remember, our organisation is also just a perpetual work in progress. We also don’t strive for perfection, we merely solve tensions as we go, when they limit us to reach our potential.

Springest communication Rules of Engagement in Holacracy

Tue, 28 Nov 2017 00:00:00 GMT

This is a copy of our internal Rules of Engagement, updated when our Communication Clarity role updates them internally in our helpdesk system. You can read more about communication, rules, policies and processes in this article.

PS: as a customer, partner, employee, parent, husband, friend, pet or child of a Springeteer, you can not derive rights from these rules ;)

— Updated: 9 April 2019

The rules of the tools

Sputr: Scan (and read what’s interesting ;)) all posts (not replies per se), within 2 business days.
Asana: Read and respond to all inbox items, within 2 business days.
Slack: Respond to direct messages and mentions of your (user)name within a few hours, @here / @channel you should also read in your role’s channels.
Don’t ask someone if you can ask them a question and don’t spend extra lines saying “Hello” (goes for Asana too): just say it, preferably in 1 go, not in several messages! And say what you link to, not just <link> “what do you think?”.This way, somebody can actually act right away instead of waiting for your actual need.
It’s not needed to follow all Slack channels, especially not the team-specific ones, and only use the #general channel if you’re sure it interests everyone (and use #random for fun stuff). Only use @here or @channel when it’s really needed that everyone sees your post.
E-mail: Never e-mail another Springeteer, unless you’re communicating with the outside world.
Respond to mail within 2 business days. Preferably, respond within 2 hours with an estimate of when you can actually process the mail, so the customer feels heard quickly.
Gmail 🔗: never use your Springest (or other) Gmail to e-mail with the outside world. Only use tools that have shared mailboxes, like Help Scout (for almost everything), Recruitee (for recruitment), Pipelinedeals (via Gmail but always Bcc)
Real life 🔗: Respond to face to face (or phone) requests immediately, but be modest in using them and ask via Slack first if person can be interrupted, especially if (s)he) wears headphones or seems focussed. Try not to talk from a distance: walk to the person and stand or sit at their desk to have your conversation.
Real life foreigners 🇳🇱 🇫🇷 🇩🇪 🇬🇧: if a person not speaking your native language is within hearing distance and the talk might interest them, switch to English.
Slack or Asana?🔗
If you are in hurry (quicker than 2 days) or you just need a clarification: Slack. If it’s not urgent or big, make an Asana, but if it’s urgent and big > Asana so it’s more structured and easier to find back for others.
If a customer is waiting, Asana is too slow, as every response can take 2 days (ping pong).
🔗For next actions: always prefer Asana and if you are in a hurry, copy paste the URL it to Slack incl. a few words of what you need so someone knows before they click.
Read these articles on how to formulate tasks so the reader spends less time figuring it out, and you get your needs filled faster: 7 Ways to Write Better Action Items, How to write the perfect task to move work forward. A few Springest-specific pointers:
Always include all info needed to understand the task, in the task. I.e. don’t just paste a link elsewhere. It’s easier for you to copy paste the relevant part cuz you’re already there.
If you refer to a customer email, don’t link to the email because not everyone will have access to it. Rather, paste the relevant context in the task as text or screenshot (and block personal data as always)
Make it immediately actionable, don’t just assign an idea or a few words and don’t reassign something back to someone without changing the task name to something proper.
🔗Paper trail: when you complete a task or say something like “I’ve made this into a project / task”, always leave a “paper trail” of what you did and where to find it with a direct link. Otherwise people have to search extra, or make assumptions about what happened, which decreases clarity and gives room for mistakes.
Also, don’t use repeating tasks, but rather keep it in one task and move the due date when it’s done.
Appreciating = Communicating. Let people know you have read their Sputr-posts by liking it or commenting to it, same for :heart: in Asana and reactions in Slack :)
Remote working: be prepared to be a bit more responsive to requests on Slack, because people can’t reach you in real life. And keep your phone close :)

But but it’s too much!!! Nah… We can always revisit these rules, and should discuss these things in our FTHM. It’s essential to keep your communication channels clean so we can depend on each other. It’s not acceptable to say “if I don’t respond you should just ask me on another channel”, because that creates the expectation that we could just drop our inbox and wait for something to catch fire before we respond.

Clarity in communication🔗

Clarity is the most valuable thing in communication, because it saves time directly, as well as indirectly by making better decisions. Your 10 extra seconds for creating clarity saves 10 seconds * X persons * X interactions needed to clarif, so yes it is worth the extra effort. Some rules of thumb that can help you increase clarity:

When you’re asking / initiating / talking:

Ask one question at a time: if you add related stuff, you increase the chance that people only respond to part of your request.
Ask a specific person: if you don’t know who to address, then that should be your one and only question. If you ask a channel, you will receive multiple
Ask in private: if you know the person, don’t ask a channel / group, to decrease the chance of someone hijacking the conversation or creating unclarity by adding heir own tensions or opinions.
When unclear, increase the bandwidth: the more asynchronous your communication is (think e-mail vs. chat) and the less senses are involved (think text vs speech vs seeing each other), the lower the “bandwidth”. When you you want to increase clarity, you often need more bandwidth to increase the chance of understanding each other. Eg. if you’re unclear about a task in Asana, ask clarification on Slack or face to face, then add it back in Asana.

When you’re responding / listening / receiving:

Don’t answer if you don’t care from a role you have. If you want to process your tension / idea / improvement anyway, give it to the role / person who does care because they’re accountable for it and they can better gather all input and combine it.
Don’t answer if you’re not sure: it will only increase other’s unclarity if you do. If there are no answers, make clear that you just have a hunch and try to help by pointing to another role who might know.
Answer privately: even if asked in a channel, and especially when you’re not sure, answer privately so that you don’t confuse others who want to respond.
Give one answer at a time: or if you need more answers, separate them clearly by stating to which question you’re answering.

Communication with the outside world

Be sure to also check out our Communication tone of voice and style guide.

We want to be fast for great customer happiness. Because of our different target groups, we have support requests coming in from many sides (mediapartners, providers, users, suppliers, Go clients) and very often they mix, because it’s our role to connect those groups… So, to make sure we still delight them with our snappy and friendly response, some pointers:

Our first response: should be within 2 working hours.
Our resolution time: within 24 working hours. This is very hard if an external party is involved, but in those cases you can call Pending resolved too: as soon as the request has been processed and sent to an external party, and the support requester has been notified within 24 hours, we’re cool/.
You touch it, you own it🔗: if you are working in a mailbox and are not accountable for solving the user’s problem, you are responsible for making sure someone else takes care of first response within 2 hours. So you’ll probably have to ask someone in Slack or face to face, to take on the ticket. If not, you dropped the ball and that is very risky (since nobody seems to be at fault, but the customer is being screwed).
You touch it, you create clarity and stay accountable: often, you need more time to resolve an issue, or you’re waiting for someone else to fix it. You should tell the user when you expect a solution (by which day) and then get back to the user on that day. If it’s not fixed then, you apologize and you give a new estimate, if possible with an explanation why your first estimate was off.
You move it, you (un)assign it: if you have to move the ticket to another mailbox, or if you have to make a new ticket cuz it’s an incoming call or chat, you make sure you unassign yourself from it and either assign someone you pinged, or unassign so it’s visible in Unassigned in the other mailbox. Also make sure the ticket is Active when you assign it to someone else or move it to anther mailbox.
You touch it, you don’t disappoint the user: if you suspect we cannot achieve 1. and / or 2., you have to tell the user that a delay is to be expected. In case the person who is accountable isn’t there, can’t fix it soon, or of course in case an external party is involved in which case 2. is happening still.

And, depending on your roles there might be other Rules of Engagement applicable:

So are we not human anymore?

We are still be human, and if you’re really busy (behind on communication) for a few days, just share that with whoever depends on you so they know. It’s perfectly acceptable to respond to an incoming task or question with “No time for this in the coming days, let me know if there’s tension with that!”.

Also: if you’re really busy I think you can still scan your inbox at the beginning of your day for 10 minutes to make sure there’s no 5 second answers you can give to help your colleague progress her task. You can just skip the rest and mark the as upcoming actions, this is basic GTD: separating processing from doing. And just ask one of our David Allen roles if you need a helping hand with GTD :)

With all our communication channels exploding, and more tools replacing even more tools, I thought it might be good to share what we expect of everyone, communication-tool-wise :)

Cultural observations on self-management and Holacracy in China

Wed, 08 Nov 2017 00:00:00 GMT

I had no expectations coming to Shanghai to speak on Holacracy, at The First China Organizational Evolution Forum. I was maybe too busy with day to day business, considering my trip something exotic that I just had to experience. Talking to a few dozen Chinese people, I realise I was right, and wrong. Right, because I was open to be surprised and had no judgment. Wrong, because the cliche is true: China is now moving so fast that you should pay close attention.

Important disclaimer: I spoke to maybe 50 people, who represented many diverse companies. From Alibaba-big (60.000 employees) to startups of a few hundred people that its founder would call small. People interested in these topics are no doubt the forerunners, and I will just generalise them and say “they, the Chinese” because I care for the potential and not the correctness :)

They’re ready to be vulnerable

I heard some founders of “small” Chinese tech-companies talk very openly about discovering their personal weaknesses. Small company means 250 or 800 employees here, by the way. I felt extra humble, with 50 Springest colleagues running Holacracy in the past 5+ years.

In a panel on personal leadership as “ex-CEO’s” these founders shared their fears of not able to inspire their employees to take initiative. And the risk they run if they don’t trust their employees to make decisions. At the same time acknowledging their tendency to command their troops*, because we have businesses to run and goals to achieve.

Over lunch I talked to one founder extensively through 2 Chinese — English interpreting colleagues, about his trouble to motivate employees in a non-extrinsic way, about his doubts about Lead Links “demanding” overwork from their circle members, etc. I was really impressed with his openness and willingness to let his ego not get in the way.

They’re moving (too) fast

On every slide from every speaker where there was a model with “rules” to follow, half of the crowd got out their phones to make a picture. Likely to WeChat it back to their colleagues to start learning from those principles right away. As if one slide can hold the solution, simply to be implemented to quickly beat the competition. I often felt that they are so eager to quickly adopt, that they do it before really understanding. I’m not even sure this is a problem though: they might just get enough of the methods to combine their execution power with a bit more efficiency so that they’ll get there sooner than those who patiently figure out all the nuances of self organising methodologies.

Let’s not forget we’re still at the beginning anyway. The current systems are not “done”, nor will they ever be. So understanding everything might be a paradox of self-management: to study it very thoroughly means falling in the same predict and control trap that we try so hard to avoid.

We’re different but also very similar

In more than a few discussions, we turned to human nature versus culture. Yes, culture can be in the way of adopting self organisation. The Netherlands is showing to be a more fertile ground for new Holacracy adoptions than even Germany and the United States. Yes, China is much more anchored to centralised management and very strong top down leadership.

But people are just as resourceful, can be just as driven by a purpose or a dream. Many employees are at least as disengaged as their Western counterparts. And like all evolved monkeys, we love to feel safe, be in a group and follow a strong leader. Their leaders recognise these human traits and want to address them to increase the potential of their organisation.

It will all converge

We all have to figure out how to organise ourselves in ways that make organisations last. Hopefully, that way will also be healthy for humans. The west can learn from China just as much as they can learn from us. In any case, our companies and cultures will converge naturally because the world is still getting smaller (or was it more flat?). So we will have to learn from each other and I’m very happy to have had the opportunity.

*Military style is mentioned often as the “old way”, top down. But the army is actually going in the direction of self-organisation, because especially on the battlefield there is no time to wait for decisions from above.

Measuring happiness as a KPI at a self-managing organisation

Thu, 26 Oct 2017 00:00:00 GMT

At my company Springest, happiness is not a goal in itself. Long term productivity is, and I believe one leads to the other. We do measure happiness on a monthly basis and people often want to know “does Holacracy, or self-management, make people happy?”. It’s quite hard to get statistically relevant (A/B tested) data on this, but with the data we have I would say: yes.

Above you see the monthly Happiness Trend as measured by Tinypulse. A few things are good to know:

Employee count fluctuated heavily, as we are a fast growing (and sometimes shrinking) startup. This also has a major influence on happiness, as you can see in these periods:

May — Oct 2014: funding and heavy hiring, from 15 to almost 30 people
Oct 2014 — July 2015: initial growth, success and enthusiasm. Expansion to multiple countries, ending in mixed success and letting go about 10 employees to downscale international operations (the dips)
Sep 2015 — Mar 2016: very successful period of revenue and profit growth with the smaller team, more focus on fewer projects, leading to ever increasing happiness.
Apr 2016 — Jun 2017: Steady hiring, lots of things happening, moving offices (dip in Mar 2017, chaotic period), opening Berlin office, share buyback and new investment round
August 2017: our workation (article in Dutch), one week of working together in sunny Spain…

Answers are 100% anonymous, and if there are more than 5 responses for a certain circle (team / department), we can drill down the report too.

70% of employees answer the question every month on average. 50% of them also leave a comment with their remark, and if someone leaves a grade lower than 7, I will ask them to get in touch with me to talk about it.

We outperform the tech industry by a full point on this happiness metric: 8,3 vs 7,3. Keep in mind, these are companies that measure happiness so it’s very likely the actual benchmark is a lot lower even (if you measure happiness, you likely care about it and try to improve it).

Quarterly Happiness Hour

Of course, being a company that runs on Holacracy, everything we do is explicit. So I don’t do this because I happen to be the founder of Springest, but I do it because I am accountable for it from my Happiness role:

The role description in Asana, where we process all our Holacracy Governance.

Even with 50+ employees, I consider this one of my most important duties. We don’t talk about roles, about performance or about the work itself, but merely about how happy and productive the person feels. This is the rough agenda for the talks, that I often do during a walk around our Amsterdam or Berlin centre offices :)

Quotes from the happiness survey

I bet you’d like to see a bit of the actual responses to the survey, since there is little use in just a number, a simple metric. It’s about getting the conversation started, so here is a sample of recent scores and answers to give you an idea:

Score: 9 - Product circle got bigger & stronger again
- We’re in full force for the new Q now, excited about that
- Great Springest-wide focus on LAs, and great upcoming product projects.
- Cool & chill new people keep on joining, and people who’ve been here less than 1 or 2 years keep on stepping up. Makes me have a lot of faith in maintaining or even ++’ing our culture and fun as Springest grows bigger.

I’m always very happy if people leave a comment when they’re not so happy, since then it can be addressed. Although we of course try to not let it come to this, since this should have been addressed (although maybe it already is, but the effects are just not there yet for this person):

Score: 6 The main part of my job doesn’t interest me anymore, in which I mean the tasks and theory I am executing. I am learning in my free time to go into other roles, but my current ones aren’t really fulfilling/satisfying me a lot anymore. The only thing that keeps me going is really nice colleagues, awesome office and the freedom.

And just a bunch of “what you like to read and makes you feel all fuzzy and warm but doesn’t immediately trigger action”:

From our last happiness survey, that got a lower survey response rate than normal (only 11 answers out of 34 ratings)

I hope this gives some insight into why happiness is important to us, how it’s not just a slogan on the wall, and how we try to go about it as data driven as we can. Let me know in the comments if you have questions or remarks to help us grow even further!

Using OKRs for Holacracy strategy and targets

Wed, 24 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Strategy is of course a keystone of management, so it’s also important in the organisational operating system Holacracy. Even more so, since teams and people manage themselves, you need very clear strategy to make sure you all go in the same direction. At Springest we adopted the OKR (Objectives and Key Results) method to help roles prioritize work. I’ll explain why and how in a short FAQ and will expand this article when questions come in.

I won’t explain what OKRs are. Christina Wodkte is the best source for that in both her book and blog.

Why we adopted OKRs after trying the “normal” Holacracy strategy

Strategy “may be” defined by the Lead Link, according to the Holacracy constitution.

How you define and communicate strategy is not clearly defined in the Holacracy constitution. The Lead Link is accountable for “Establishing priorities and Strategies for the Circle”, so while it’s optional from the constitution’s point of view, you may expect the Lead Link to do so.

The word strategy is mentioned only once in the entire constitution. Holacracy does have several other constructs that help people choose direction within their roles, such as metrics, accountabilities and especially purpose as defined in its governance process. Strategy is defined as:

…heuristics that guide the Circle’s Roles in self-identifying priorities…

The form that is used in many Holacracy running companies is:

Emphasize X over Y (where both should be something valuable fitting the purpose of the circle, to make it a real choice)

After using this syntax for 2 years, we learned about OKRs. They felt like a more data driven and concrete way to push ourselves to achieve our purpose. We decided to try it and have now been using OKRs for over 2 years. I will not explain OKRs in detail, but unless mentioned otherwise we follow their definition religiously.

FAQ about how we use OKRs:

We only use OKRs at circle level, not at personal or role level. Some people have defined role based OKRs but we’ve noticed that that comes very close to projects that should have clear outcomes that contribute to a circle-level OKR.
The Lead Link of the circle defines the OKRs (as he/she is accountable for defining relative priorities and strategy), often gathering input from circle members.
The Lead Link of our GCC (General Company Circle, which we call “Alignment”) sets the OKRs for the entire company, after which each circle’s Lead Link interprets that into OKRs for their circle.
We change OKRs at least every quarter, sometimes even for 1 or 2 months periods.
OKRs are graded between 0,0 and 1,0 every other week based on progress made towards the Key Result. This is done in a short discussion during the Metrics part of the Tactical meeting and documented by the Secretary. The Lead Link calls the final grade if needed.
OKRs are often Metrics we keep track of in our regular weekly and monthly metric review in the Tactical meetings. Sometimes they are split up in several more specific metrics. We review about 20 metrics in each circle, with many more being tracked by individual roles in deeper Google Sheets.
OKRs are not targets, they’re more like Big Hairy Audacious Goals, so we don’t couple things like compensation or even employee reviews to them. They are merely the starting point for discussion and to force ourselves to be very clear on where we’re going and what is most important NOW. Read more about common OKR pitfalls in this article.
OKRs of our Alignment circle (in effect the entire company) are graded in an all hands meeting to involve everyone and trigger discussions.
OKRs are added in Asana in the circle’s Tactical meeting overview, as well as an overview of all OKRs for findability and transparency.
To correctly ratify our use of OKRs, I as Lead Link have added a policy on GCC level that Lead Links should define strategy with using the OKR format.
There’s a role in our Smooth Operations circle called “OKR Master” that acts as OKR expert, spreading knowledge and giving feedback on badly formulated OKRs (I don’t hold that role by the way).
Key Results are not projects, but projects are often derived from them. If they do converge, you have probably made your project too much like a metric / measurable outcome instead of a project that will end successfully on completion regardless of a metric it influences.
If priorities change mid-OKR we change the OKRs or keep them on a bit longer. It’s not recommended to do this often but it has allowed us to dynamically steer while still having clarity on where we want to go.

Why you don’t understand Holacracy

Sat, 26 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

The headline about Holacracy at HBR.org.

Reading an outsider’s perspective, even from management authorities like Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini on Harvard Business Review, it dawned on me. You don’t understand Holacracy, and other organisational systems, because you fail to recognize them for what they are.

In comparing Holacracy to bureaucracy, it’s neglected that self-organization operating systems (let’s call them SooS, because there can never be enough acronyms!) such as Holacracy and the wealth of current management systems actually live at the same abstraction level. But they are often compared as if any one SooS should replace the many forms of bureaucracy that we have been growing, optimizing and changing over the past 150 or so years.

The reality is that we’re just at the beginning. The processing skills of people getting used to the technology that gives us extreme transparency, the shrinking of the world that makes people want to do other things, robots and software taking over jobs that used to require strict top-down process management, the fact that we’re quite wealthy, healthy and safe, the scandals and crises a fake sense of hierarchy-driven control has given us: they all indicate that now might be time for a change.

I often compare this to the invention of Linux, which was based on the Unix operating system. After its invention, many forms and styles of Linux-based operating systems were created, or forked as it’s called in open source lingo. The future will have to prove whether Holacracy is the Linux to the Unix of systems like Scrum, GTD and Sociocracy, or merely one of many “distributions” for self-organization like Red Hat was the most famous one for Linux. Maybe Holacracy turns out to be the Unix of self-organization. Or the Mac OSX that’s actually based on Unix and is universally loved inspite of it’s “ugly and un-usable” grandfather which was intended for mainframes and other non-personal computers.

Starting with Linus Thorvalds’ Linux, many “forks” of new distributions have been created. We are doing this for self-organization too in the next decades. Source: Kde-files.org

Hamel and Zanini write about experiments being the key to change the way we organize:

Now imagine a large organization running dozens of such experiments concurrently. Some hacks would fail, but the best of the rest would be replicated by units eager to reduce the costs of bureaucratic drag.

And this is exactly the point: you need a framework for running these experiments. A way of coming up with them, of making sure the organization still executes whatever it should, a way to measure progress and impact, and ways to document what works. Holacracy is such a system. So you can look at Zappos’ Holacracy and conclude it’s horrible and it won’t work for your organization (or theirs even) but that’s the same as looking at a Linux distribution made to run supercomputers and conclude “Linux can never be used for any form of personal computing”.

The SooS we have created at my company Springest, with Holacracy, has many other elements. Our culture, the way we hire, the other tools we bolted on there like OKRs, and of course the many software tools we use to Get Things Done. If you’d compare it to Zappos’ SooS I’m sure the most recognizable part are the way we run some of our meetings and maybe the way we document governance. But those are not very visible in day to day operations, if you compare them to the actual roles, projects, tasks, metrics and people that really make Springest what it is.

Of course all automakers told Ford that their system wouldn’t work. And of course, none of the workers that entered this new mass production hierarchy, were accustomed to it. I bet 30% of the workforce in those days could also not deal with it like it’s hard for people to get used to Holacracy or any other SooS.

The question is not if Holacracy is the solution, or the problem. The question is what we’ll create with it and its hopefully many forks, siblings and parents. Because we have enough data to show that the current systems of bureaucracy and hierarchy provide a fake sense of security and control, and make people unhappy and unproductive.

Medium drops Holacracy: how we dealt with their challenges at Springest in the past 3 years

Mon, 07 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Last week, Andy Doyle from Medium announced they won’t use Holacracy anymore to run their company. It’s great that such a visible company was so open about both adopting and dropping it. Andy cited 3 specific reasons for dropping it, I’d like to reflect on them based on my own experience with Holacracy at Springest in the past 3 years. A few caveats to start off with:

I haven’t talked with anyone at Medium about this (would love to!)
Medium has raised $82M so far from very high profile VCs, so they might be under different pressure than other companies to care about what (growth!) vs. how (consciousness!).
I don’t know how big their team is and how fast it’s growing, they merely mention “scaling” and their About pages don’t show. It doesn’t look like they’re with more than ~50 people though.
Holacracy’s system has evolved to make it easy to evolve, so “our Holacracy” will not resemble Medium’s. For example, OKRs are how we define strategy and we have a very explicit policy for how projects must be defined, beyond what Holacracy offers out of the box. We also added some specific accountabilities for Lead Links like doing and documenting one on ones with each circle member.
Compare this with different Linux distributions that might have a totally different focus.
It’s not about Holacracy, it’s about discovering better ways of running organisations. In that sense, I agree that you should move beyond it once you discover something better. We choose to do that with Holacracy as the underlying operating system, and I think we can keep using that for quite a while since it’s so easily adjustable.
Andy writes they’re going “beyond” Holacracy and I first included that in my title. But after rereading I went for calling it “dropping” anyway, see below why.

So, on with the three reasons mentioned:

1. Can’t synchronize efforts at scale

Our experience was that it was difficult to coordinate efforts at scale. […] for larger initiatives, which require coordination across functions, it can be time-consuming and divisive to gain alignment.

I recognize this, because sometimes it feels hard to do “cross circle” projects. Often we don’t point at our structure, or at Holacracy, for the problem. We look at how to improve communication, via strategy or metrics or clearer project outcomes or explicit accountabilities. Or, just by having an extra meeting to coordinate an effort. Nothing wrong with that!

Also, our Governance meetings happen weekly, allowing for even more iterations in our organisational structure. Whole circles are formed, deleted and recreated again in different ways within months.

We also adopted OKRs as the way we formulate strategy. We found most of how OKRs are usually done doesn’t conflict with Holacracy, although so far we mostly define them on circle and not role level.

Assumption: Medium never reached this level of Holacracy learning and consciousness (i.e. people being able to feel this tension and solve it within Holacracy) because of a higher hiring pace or lower learning investment.

2. It’s too hard to codify while growing fast

…every role requires a set of responsibilities. While this provides helpful transparency, it takes time and discussion. More importantly, we found that the act of codifying responsibilities in explicit detail hindered a proactive attitude and sense of communal ownership.

I also recognize this, especially when new people enter the company, or when big initiatives are run by people with less Holacracy experience. If change is not cheap (see above…), and if people are not comfortable with the mechanism of individual action and processing tensions based on reality, then indeed pro-activeness and ownership can suffer.

Adding new accountabilities or entire roles or circles based on a sense of ownership isn’t hard to do. “Discussing” this like Andy says, is not something you even do in Holacracy: its Governance process makes sure proposals are processed quickly if the Facilitator is good at her job. Also, it’s up to the proposer, the person who feels the reality based tension, to define how explicit a responsibility is defined. Often, they’re deliberately open for the role holder’s interpretation.

Assumption: Training / coaching / learning / onboarding might be the bottleneck for Medium. Also, hiring “bosses” like Andy writes, surely creates problems because they might be used to create ad-hoc jobs in a top down fashion, which indeed is faster than processing the tension by doing it and codifying it later*. But this comes at the price of implicit vagueness later, so scaling seems easier but you need more “managers” to keep everything in check.*

3. Recruiting is too hard because the media is too sensational!

Holacracy has become fraught with misconceptions that make it hard to separate the actual system from the imagined one. In recruiting, this became a problem — particularly among more experienced candidates, who worried that they were being hired as “bosses” in a boss-less company.

The other points feel very valid, but this one baffles me. Suddenly, they’re hiring “bosses” and they care about mainstream media?

In The Netherlands, 80% of the press we get is positive or at least inquisitive. Of course there are doubts and misconceptions, and they annoy us and sometimes put off potential hires. But we’re also winning awards and get many applications because of Holacracy. And we value those more than the few we lose: those people probably didn’t make up their own mind based on data, so they wouldn’t fit here anyway.

Assumption: I guess they couldn’t stand the heat anymore, so they got out of the kitchen :) Changes are always met with skepticism and self-management of course isn’t the end all of management, at least not within a few years.

This will take time, and the way Medium and its parent company Obvious were presented it seemed they were the ones ready to take the heat and the lead. Maybe they still are, but they just don’t want to deal with Holacracy as a term, which makes sense. I guess a lot of companies adopting something like Lean or Six Sigma or at some point claim their own flavor.

Bonus: We need bosses to scale

And we have bosses — people who have the experience of scaling companies, leading through hard challenges, and developing teams.

That sounds a bit like going back to the old days. I hoped Medium would remain self-managed, but this sounds like only certain people, with experience, can develop teams and be bosses.

In my perception, Lead Links still do about 20% of what old school bosses did. The other 80% is divided between the Rep Link, the system itself, and other role holders. Which can very well be people that used to be a boss, but now have explicit roles explaining their boss-like accountabilities. So yeah, you still need leaders in various ways, and you can call them bosses if you want. But if you’re hiring you better make sure those people understand they can’t just do what they’re used to.

Why the Holacracy meeting process makes you wonder how other companies don’t implode

Fri, 03 Jul 2015 00:00:00 GMT

The past months we have invited people from outside our company to join our Holacracy tactical and governance meetings. Those meetings are highly structured according to Holacracy’s process. That’s why they are a nice way to experience what it’s like to run your organisation with Holacracy. I’d like to share the experience with you through a video and quotes from some of the 50 people who were present as observer during one of the meetings.

Roughly, the meeting consists of reviewing a few dozen metrics and projects and processing any “tensions” (agenda items) that arise from that. Next actions are formulated and hardly any discussion is permitted next to that. Between 2012 to 2015, our weekly “management team” meeting time went from lasting 2 hours to only 45 minutes. We also grew that meeting from 3 to 7 people and our company doubled in size during that period so there’s a lot more to talk about…

The professional meeting consultants from Vergaderverkalking were so impressed by the speed and clarity (“We’ve seldom seen such an uber-effective meeting”) that they asked to record it.

Video of our tactical meeting

This is a 15 minute edit with explanations about the process, of our 45 minute tactical meeting. Feel free to ask clarifying questions here!

Feedback from observers at the meeting

After each meeting, I send the observers a feedback form to capture their thoughts in 3 questions. We hope to learn from this as well as make their experience more conscious :)

What did you think? What stood out? What was different?

great to feel the vibe of quick interaction between everybody, and to experience the fast meeting pace — Olivier Tardieu, eyeOpen.nl

Super honest and open. The process help, ‘allowed sentences’ and facilitator made sure it was still constructive. — Stefan Verkerk, WeTransfer

The ‘Springest vibe’ stood out, loved the atmosphere and interaction. There is a lot of focus and that was combined with fun. A totally different way of working than I am used to at the companies I’ve worked for! — Jorrit Zijdewind, Allego

The high energy and efficiency stood out. The “check in” and “check out” were different, they make you focus on here, now, your level of participation in and after this meeting. — Laura Kenter, Bloeisaam

Springest plays Holacracy at champions league level. It was very impressive to attend the meeting. High speed, transparant and happy faces! — Rene Hendriks, Aan Zee Retail

What’s your take away? Will you try it?

This is a confirmation that my passion for a new way of working (together) in companies, and the push I am trying to do at the company I work for in that direction is the right one.
I am all in ;-) Still some missionary work to be done and this takes time. For me, the traditional way of organizing a company and the work is a thing of the past.
— Jorrit Zijdewind, Allego

Definitely standing meetings & digital wrap up of actions taken/coming. Also the equality of every issue, the change-update (in stead of an endless story…) and agenda-making. — Laura Kenter, Bloeisaam

“Stuff we could immediately start using:
1. Circles in the organisation to make sure the right people are involved without any hierarchical suggestions.
2. Introduce a process role / some process vocabulary to help in our weekly all hands meeting”— Stefan Verkerk, WeTransfer

Any doubts? Things you didn’t like?

Not really, the only thing I am doubting is if this will also work in organizations with a lot of people not @ the office (sales/business development) on a day to day basis. Things like the stand up are a very effective way to touch base and sync with your colleagues, but how to do this in teams with a lot less stable day to day presence. — Jorrit Zijdewind, Allego

High energy is awesome, I wonder if there is enough balance when this energy is asked for during all working hours. — Laura Kenter, Bloeisaam

Maybe I am a creationist ;-), but changing scope of circles (something discussed when I was there) should not be taken too lightly in my view: the impact / noise of it seems substantial, in my old-school perspective ;-) — Stefan Verkerk, WeTransfer

No doubts at all. We are all in :-). — Rene Hendriks, Aan Zee Retail

Productive transparency with GTD, Holacracy and Asana: a guide through my setup

Mon, 13 Apr 2015 00:00:00 GMT

10 years ago, Getting Things Done (GTD) was a hype after David Allen released his book about his quest for a mind like water. I dove right in, together with other Dutch “lifehacking” enthousiasts and productivity nerds. It has very much influenced the way I work. The personal transparency and the constant drive for conscious decisions are things I always looked for when hiring people in my 20-person startup. One question kept nagging though: how can I grow beyond a two pizza team while staying productive and transparent, without management layers or meetings all the time?

The solution for us is a combination of GTD and Holacracy, with Asana as our task, project and role management tool. We started out with HolacracyOne’s own GlassFrog, as you always should when you learn Holacracy. We found it not sufficient to support our projects and GTD-driven task management, since it overlapped with Asana which we chose after testing it vs. Trello and Basecamp.

I hope to give you some insights in how we organise on a personal and team-level. Even if you don’t adhere to the GTD or Holacracy methods, I think the concepts and examples can still help you become more productive and relaxed while moving full speed ahead with your team. If you’re interested in the why and how of our Holacracy adoption, check out Why we’re adopting Holacracy and 8 challenges to overcome when adopting Holacracy.

I’ll roughly cover these concepts as I walk you through my / our setup:

Everybody uses the same system and rules, no exceptions.
Symbols and conventions for a common ground.
Projects, roles and areas are all tasks, linked together.
Run meetings with Asana as live guidance on screen.
Tools like Alfred, Gmail and Github integrate with Asana.

Yes, this is the only way to work

We used to say: “As long as you have some kind of task management system and are transparent about what you’re doing, you can choose your own tools to achieve your goals”. It was a matter of respect for individual levels of nerdiness and preference for things like paper, a CRM system, or a code repository.

We’ve let go of that and replaced it with “this is the best way to do it, and we’ll help you in your transition and learning”. This means everybody uses Asana for managing tasks, there are rules for how to administer stuff and we’ve come to say if it’s not in Asana, it doesn’t exist. We also have rules of engagement for response times in our other communication tools like Slack, Sputr and Real Life. I believe this is the only way to really maximize team output and as long as you’re open to try new things and invest enough in learning / coaching, this still treats individual differences with respect.

Basic GTD: Projects, Tasks and Contexts

Asana can be a bit overwhelming at first, so we use pair GTD reviews where more experienced GTD’ers do a weekly review with you to help adjust to this system. A few of us have a role called “David Allen” and others are “Holacracy Ninja” in our “Smooth Operations” circle that has the purpose:

Kaizen all the things to let happy productive Springeteers fully energize their roles

Here are the basic building blocks of how we adapt Asana to support GTD:

Context lists: Things like Waiting for and Someday / Maybe and contexts like @office or @phone are simply private projects so you can quickly add your own stuff to them without annoying others.

Asana doesn’t allow for private tags anymore, so you see private projects here. I didn’t “star” all contexts as I don’t need them often.

I’ve added the most important contexts to my sidebar and most of us use the Unicode character ∅ to indicate that these are GTD things. Most important context lists for me are meetings I have agenda items to bring to (“tensions” in Holacracy-speak), and my list of phone calls (“bellen” in Dutch).

Projects: per circle and my own

Asana’s support for projects has improved a lot, adding progress charts, project updates and even a dashboard. What still lacks is a way to group certain projects, for instance those of a circle. So you’ll need a small hack that we call the placeholder. It’s just a task with the same name as the project, and that task is added to another project that’s used as a circle’s project overview. Confused? Here’s what it looks like in my project:

The placeholder is in multiple circle’s Project lists, under a subheading with my name / roles there.

And here’s how that shows up in the Alignment (our General circle) project corkboard that we just call ✪ Alignment Projects:

This is where it all comes together… Enlarge

We’ve added ■■□□□ Unicode characters to our projects to give some idea of completeness. It always feels nice add to a ■, and often we ask the Secretary to update it while we’re in the Tactical doing our Holacracy Project updates.

Linking a Circle together with @

Asana has a great inline linking feature, just paste an Asana link or start typing @ to search for a Task or Project. As you can see in above screenshot in the top right, we use that to link a Circle’s Holacracy parts with each other. So a Circle’s Roles, Tactical meeting, Governance meeting, its Purpose, Accountabilities and Domains, and of course its Project overview are easily found.

You can create your own project overview by creating a saved search in Asana to look for tasks (remember, our project placeholders) under certain sub headings (you or your roles) in all your circles’ project overviews. You see this saved search in my favorites as “∅ _ Ruben’s Projects”.

Holacracy roles or GTD areas of focus

In our setup, roles that you hold in your circles are also just tasks. Those tasks are assigned to you, and you put them in Asana’s Later overview so they don’t bug your daily GTD’ing. A project also contains all the roles for a certain circle to have an overview of them. Just like with your projects, you can create a nice overview of your roles (or your GTD areas of focus) by using a saved Asana search.

This way you also have a history of the role, who energized it and how it changed in Holacracy’s governance process. You could also add your role to your projects to indicate from which role you’re doing that project, but we found that a bit too cumbersome. We do however give project updates in tactical meetings under subheadings per role to make this clear.

Tactical and Governance meetings

The secretary owns the screen in the meeting room, and has Asana open at either the tactical or governance “project”. Here’s what that looks like:

The tactical project divided in several sections as agreed in our Holacracy.

Agenda items usually show up on top of this overview. We triage them in the meeting so the tactical project looks clean again after the meeting. It’s awesome to have next actions directly in your personal GTD system after a meeting, with the right followers added for full transparency.

Tools and integrations (nerd alert!)

This is also great for tactical meetings where you don’t want to interrupt the meeting flow as a secretary!

New tasks land in my inbox mostly via Asana Quicktask, an Alfred workflow that allows me to enter a task by hitting ctrl-space so I don’t have to switch windows. You can change the target project or workspace for your created task too.

Email is often a source for new tasks but I want to keep my inbox to zero. So I use Gmail labels to automagically create an Asana task via Zapier. One for things that take more than 5 minutes to deal with, and another to add followup tasks 1 or 2 weeks from now when I send a mail.

I type l, as, [enter], Zapier makes a task linking back to the mail

Github commits are automagically linked to Asana, where all our development projects and issues are too of course. So when a developer commits code, everyone who’s following it gets notified of the commit and any mentions in it.

Feedback and improvements

To wrap up, I’d like to ask your feedback! We have regular visitors from other companies at our tactical meetings as well as people studying or teaching management or meeting practices. Some quotes from their check-out after the meeting:

…this meeting, project structure, task accountability and transparency is like a dot on the horizon for me when I teach students about management…

…I have rarely seen an über-effective meeting like this one at Springest…

…I’m flabbergasted at the speed and discipline of this meeting… and you still seem to think it’s fun..

If you’re in Amsterdam, consider yourself invited to a meeting too.

I hope this guide helps you improve your own GTD system or even move your organisation to Holacracy and Asana. I honestly don’t know how we would run our startup without it. I really welcome any feedback, questions or improvement suggestions you have. As the meeting facilitator says after every meeting: “time for check-out, please share your thoughts!**”

Why we’re adopting Holacracy as our organisational operating system at Springest

Tue, 23 Sep 2014 00:00:00 GMT

You might have heard of Holacracy (if not, check out About Holacracy on Medium), the “organisational operating system” that’s becoming more popular lately. Springest has formally adopted Holacracy, after a few months of experimenting on small scale with it, in January 2013. It’s quite a big switch from regular ol’ business, and it takes a lot of effort and learning. So why did we take the leap?

1. The promise of control without controlling

Working at a startup is challenging because things constantly spin out of control. Sometimes because things don’t work, but often because you’re growing fast and the people and structure can’t keep up with the changing environment. I was only half joking when I said “I want to be sitting on an island sipping a cocktail, without worrying if Springest is running well” when I was asked what my goal was for adopting Holacracy. As a startup founder you’re used to changing a lot, but also to doing a lot of things yourself. In my case that also means controlling a lot of things and “making sure” they’ll go as I want. I always had the ambition to learn letting go, but I also have the ambition to do the right things right. Holacracy’s big promise is that it enables people to have more authority, but without the organisation spinning into uncontrollable chaos.

The reward of learning together

I think personal and professional growth through learning are the second most important things in life, just after Health. Of course, Springest itself is all about learning. I really appreciate the fact that our employees are learning together and from each other, myself included. You really don’t just “implement” Holacracy, much in the same way it takes years to master a sport or GTD for that matter. Actually, it’s often said by experienced practitioners of all of these things, that learning all the rules and how to apply them is actually just the beginning. Mastering the game is something different from learning the rules, and learning the rules together can be very rewarding. We’ve had so many AHA moments together… And of course we also had our frustrating moments.

The ambition to create a better type of organisation

We get a lot of compliments and jealous comments about adopting Holacracy. I think they are justified and I’m proud of them. We really want to build a better organisation, not just for getting better results, but also for it’s own sake. I personally love tweaking and optimizing, that’s why we always worked with GTD and use over 100 different apps. We test and tweak a lot, sometimes maybe even too much. But I’m okay with that, we really want to build an organisation that is more efficient and self-governing than any other. Holacracy is not that organisation. Holacracy gives us the tools to try and evolve into that organisation.

The wish to be a more rewarding place to work at

I sometimes joke that we have Holacracy, a pingpong and foosball table, regular SpringFests, an amazing office, great organic lunches and a chef, and the best desks and chairs, just so we can pay lower salaries. We actually do pay less than most corporates, although we do tend to keep up with other startups ;) But we firmly believe that money is only a negative motivator: if you get too little, you will be unhappy. But if you get more than you need, you will not become proportionally happier. Of course there is a ton of scientific evidence on that, and I hope people really love working here. Holacracy is a way for us to try to give people more space for their own development and to actually use their full potential.

I hope this gives some insight into our motivation. Leave a comment or tweet any questions you have about our Holacracy implementation!

8 challenges to overcome when adopting Holacracy

Tue, 06 May 2014 00:00:00 GMT

A year and a half ago I first heard about Holacracy: “GTD for your organization”, or so I thought. We started adopting it at my company Springest, and have been learning the hard way ever since. Now that it’s becoming more popular, partly because of Zappos adopting it and the first books coming to market, I’d like to summarize some challenges we encountered. Actually, I thought Holacracy’s popularity would rise much faster. But it didn’t, and I think I know why…

(Spoiler: it can be great, it will be misunderstood and it is quite hard!).

I’ll mention a challenge and for each the approach we are taking to overcome it. We accept the fact that we’ll learn along the way and that trying out stuff and failing every now and then is the only way to go.

1. Holacracy doesn’t tell you how to run your organization

You might think that Holacracy tells you how to run your organization, but it doesn’t. Sorry for all those startup founders out there that hoped for a shortcut without reading a ton of management books… ;) Most of what’s in the constitution (which you formally sign as “power holder” when adopting it) is about how to decide how to run your organization. For instance, there are a lot of rules on how to run meetings. And there are rules on the basic principles people have to adhere to. But with those rules, you evolve your own structure. The challenge is that it often feels like you lack structure or certainty, in the same way you might not know who to play the ball to in a soccer match. You only know you have to stay within the lines and get the ball in the other side’s goal.

Our approach: embrace the uncertainty. Honestly, we just try our best to use the process to create clarity around all the things we’re doing or want to be doing. We have a seasoned Holacracy coach to help us with this, and often reiterate to everyone how it’s OK to feel a bit lost when you have a tension but don’t know the solution yet.

2. Holacracy tells you exactly how to run your organization

Then again… there are a lot of things you can’t do in Holacracy. Like telling people what to do, or “reorganize” a department at once, or even setting sales targets for next month. You can achieve the same goals with different tools, and you’ll have to learn which one to use at which time. And if you don’t know yet what is the best way to process your “tension”, you will feel frustration because you are probably very aware that the way you’ve learned to fix your problem is not allowed.

Our approach: learn the rules! This might seem obvious, but we definitely should’ve placed more emphasis on this. Not just for our lead links or facilitators, but for everyone. You have to understand the rules, or you can’t play the game. And the goal of the game is to speed up evolution so you can run the organization effectively.

3. If it looks like a manager, smells like a manager…

We found that old habits die hard, even with the best intentions. When adopting Holacracy, you naturally start out with the structure you have, and hopefully evolve from there. The problem with this is that for Holacracy to really work, you have a unlearn a lot of habits that are connected with the old way of doing things. Like managers telling people what to, and in micromanagement cases, how to do it. So if a Lead Link asks another role in their circle “could you take on this project?”, the person asked might feel this is an order. And of course this goes the other way round as well: if you feel really responsible for something you have to resist the temptation to take the lead by ordering people around.

Our approach: coach each other a lot. Especially for lead links, who might have been “managers” before Holacracy, this requires a lot of learning and peer-feedback. Maybe the biggest and hardest part of their job is to teach other circle members (as Holacracy calls your team mates) to not look up to them as the “boss”. We definitely haven’t solved this one, and actually writing this posts is one of my tries to address this issue (hi guys! ;)).

4. When the going gets tough, you have to suck it up

When the going gets tough, the tough get going, right? With Holacracy everyone energizes one or usually more roles, and is accountable within them for certain activities. Lead Links can set the current circle strategy (we do that with input and discussion from the rest of the circle) and can prioritize projects. But because of the distribution of authority, it can be hard to quickly change course or force everyone to work on the same thing. The trap is then to forgo the process and pressure people the old fashioned way, even though there might be ways to change course within the Holacracy rules.

Our approach: try out different methods for synchronizing efforts. Currently, we’re trying to make our strategies more concrete*, and also make it clear and accepted that Lead Links can change priorities of the circle, and thereby indirectly for other circle members’ projects. You don’t want to do this all the time, because people “in the trenches” tend to know best what’s important to fulfill their roles. On the other hand, we’ve learned that setting priorities also requires a lot of perspective and judgment about the leverage something has.*

5. You can’t out-evolve the grapevine

People might still gossip amongst each other in an old fashioned corporate politics way, and some of them might not understand, like, or trust Holacracy. One of the fundamental ideas of Holacracy is that it’s about roles, not people. So you can freely discuss the tensions you have with how a certain role performs, without directly criticizing a person. Easier said then done! People have to ignore their personal feelings in meetings, and instead focus on the tensions they have and try to solve them in the process.

Our approach: practice what you preach. Try to address people by stating your and their role (“I want to ask you in your role of X, to do this for me in my role as Y), and explaining the process for addressing other roles. For instance, it’s fine to address a role directly even though they’re not in your circle. And if someone tells you someone should be doing something, we try to remind them to check the accountabilities to see if they can actually have that expectation.

6. Learn the game by reading the rules, or by practicing (and losing!)

Holacracy in many ways is a serious game. It has a big book of rules (called the constitution) and at first it seems daunting to start learning them. We did a half day workshop with the entire team, and wrote some articles internally, but we chose to do most learning on the job. Our Holacracy coach facilitated a lot of meetings, and in them explained the process and rules. The problem with this is the same as with learning to play a game. There’s two types of people: the ones who read the rules first, and the ones who just start playing and don’t mind losing the first few times. And there’s also two types of players: the ones who can and can’t stand to lose. And if you don’t know the rules as well as someone else, it might feel like losing the game, and thereby the trust in the system.

Our approach: we should probably have placed more emphasis on learning the rules*, and we’re correcting that now by doing more training. 9 of our colleagues went to HolacracyOne’s Taster Workshop, and one of us took the* 5 day Practicioner Certification Training. We also created a role “Holacracy Ninja” in our “Smooth Operations” circle that has some Learning & Development accountabilities, to spread knowledge about Holacracy from within other circles and not just from the “old management’ or the founder or external coach.

7. Classical Creationism vs. Holacratic Evolution

You can describe Holacracy as an “evolutionary algorithm”. I agree with that, as it is supposed to have many random iterations, leading to constant improvement. But it’s also hard to stop yourself from “designing” instead of “evolving”, i.e. trying to come up with a big coherent system for organizing work. Yet, sometimes, you must do that to make progress faster. Especially when your organization isn’t well versed in Holacracy, which is always the case if you grow fast. The normal governance process will feel very slow and you might not have time for that.

Our approach: First, we remind ourselves to not be creationists. Of course, using that word already conjures how we think about it. However, we sometimes allow ourselves to dream up new structures so we can explore each other’s thoughts about it. We do try to focus on our tensions, so instead of talking only about the solution (“this team should work like this, with these people doing this and that”), we talk a lot about the tension (“what exactly isn’t going well and why?). This forces us to not overdesign and not fix things that aren’t broken.

8. Keeping the faith

Funny how I use the word faith, huh… Yes, Holacracy can feel like a religion, much like any other management or productivity philosophy. Especially when some people “see the light” and “get it” and some people are totally ignorant, right?!
Wrong. Adopting Holacracy requires a lot of trust from the current “power holder” in the system, and from his colleagues in him to have made the right decision in adopting it. It also requires trust in your colleagues to abide by the rules and help or even protect each other when someone isn’t sure about the right process. So you have to be sensitive about trust slipping away, and frustration taking hold of people and processes.

Our approach: we first said Holacracy was an experiment, and it was. However, when you’re further in the process it’s important to stress that the intention is to keep using it forever*. There’s no way of doing it half-assed. If you call it an experiment, make sure you set an end date and change the mindset after that. The extra training we did (after 1,5 years of working with Holacracy!) and speeding up our governance seem to be helping in gaining trust.*

I hope these challenges give you a feel for what it’s really like to run your organization on the Holacracy operating system. It’s been a very interesting journey for us, and we’ve definitely not finished yet! We intend to keep sharing our learnings, so if this article raises new questions for you, feel free to leave a comment here. I am happy to elaborate!

Holacracy community is on the rise, and we need it too!

Fri, 11 Apr 2014 00:00:00 GMT

The number of organizations showing interest in Holacracy is growing rapidly. Thanks to inspiring cases like the Holacracy implementation at Zappos in the US, more and more people all over the world get to know the method for organizing a company. Now that more entrepreneurs learn about Holacracy from a theoretical perspective, the need grows to learn about the practical application of it. Last month, this interest clearly emerged during the very first Holacracy Meetup in Amsterdam, organized at Springest, one of the first European companies that adopted the method.

The Meetup took place in the context of the Holacracy workshops and trainings that were held by HolacracyOne from March 21 until March 28 in Amsterdam. About 100 Holacracy enthusiasts and pioneers from the Netherlands and other European countries, like Austria and the Nordics, participated in the sessions. During the meetup attendees could meet and mingle and experience firsthand how the method really works on the inside.

The benefits of learning from companies that already work with Holacracy became evident. It was interesting to find which parts of the concept needed more explanation and clarification and to witness how valuable the exchange of knowledge and experiences amongst adopters was perceived.

Here are some of the thoughts and learnings that I would like to pinpoint:

Holacracy is a work in progress

The Holacracy movement has only just begun. And not only the pioneers are discovering more easy ways to practice the organizational method along the way. In Amsterdam, Brian Robertson talked about his discovery of the concept. He explained how all people working with it — including himself — are currently on a learning and development journey to reach to the most agile, efficient and effective way to organize their business. He stressed that Holacracy was not so much something he created, but more something he had discovered, being the most natural way to organize.

The referral to the book ‘What technology wants’ was made, with Holacracy being part of the evolutionary journey: it is such a natural way to organize, that it had to be discovered at some point in evolution. Just like the Internet, according to the writer Kevin Kelly. It serves people so well, it makes so much sense, that the discovery was inevitable. The method should not be envisioned as one person’s ideas projected on others, but as the most natural way to structure things. There was no creation, but a discovery to an exquisite way to organize and this discovery is an ongoing process.

During the meetup it emerged how valuable the exchange of ideas amongst the early adopters is. As founder of Springest I shared some of my experiences with the implementation of Holacracy. I explained which phases and stages we had been through thus far, where we are at now and where we expect to go with Holacracy. Our team members demonstrated to a group of interested meetup participants how we actually work with Holacracy. There were many attendees interested to hear about the practical side of the implementation from a company that practices Holacracy.

Building the structure together

We consider the process of learning together as an organization to be very powerful: you build the structure together. Learning is such a big part of the process, that exchanging knowledge and experiences with other companies too, seems the only logical way to go about it. Diederick Janse from Energized.org, the first coach to help companies work with Holacracy in The Netherlands, agreed with the idea that sharing learnings is very important at this stage. It is all about figuring out what the best ways are to ‘go at it’ in an organization. It is an experiment, in which we discover the best way to get things done.

All attending pioneers, expressed it would be great to organize more similar meetings. We are looking forward to welcome more adopters, supporters and explorers to the Holacracy Meetup Group and aim to organize new meetups shortly. We welcome all suggestions and ideas for future events — everywhere in the world — and obviously thank all participants for being there and making the first Amsterdam meetup such a great start!