Open Undercurrent
How self-organization helped a small consultancy grow revenue, profitability, and engagement – all at the same time.
Governance
How organizations make rules, allocate authority, and hold themselves accountable. Less corporate-board, more lived practice.
21 posts
Clarity Hurts
Watch out for approaches that prioritize clarity above all else. Clarity can make you a cog in a machine, it can stunt your personal growth, and can pressure organizations to stick to the status quo.
New Governance Models
I very much enjoyed this article from the FT. I am not the first person to worry about the joint-stock company. Adam Smith, founder of modern economics, argued: “Negligence and profusion . . . must always prevail, more or less, in the management of the affairs of such a company.” His concern is
Four Holacracy Misses
Four things to reconsider about Holacracy: confusing word choices, a legalistic constitution; heavy dogma; a closed-source codebase.
Four Holacracy Keepers
Four key things to keep from years practicing Holacracy: Rule of Law; Continuous Participatory Reorganization; Structured Decisions; Defined Output Formats.
Core Protocols
Most employees give themselves over to a set of rules that govern their day-to-day corporate existence. How good are those rules?
Objection Criteria & Strategy Reviews
Along with a few other folks in the UC “Management” crew, I spent Monday and Tuesday learning about Holacracy. It’s an interesting organizing idea that deserves a much longer set of posts, but the five-second version is that it’s a explicitly structured, distributed-authority, adaptive decision-making system that aims
Skunkworks
To spare you the extreme displeasure of going to the Lockheed Martin site to find the operating principles behind the O.G. Skunkworks, I’ve pasted them below. The bolding is mine. 1. The Skunk Works manager must be delegated practically complete control of his program in all aspects. He
Principles for Pattern Implementation
The following seven principles are from a book called A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander et al., and they describe the method by which builders should implement the “patterns” laid out in subsequent chapters of the book. The patterns used by the book are essentially design guidelines, and they range