101. Holacracy and Getting Things Done – An Interview With Brian Robertson

Transcript

Automatically transcribed and lightly edited. Timestamps omitted for readability.

Morten: Hi, and welcome to another episode of the Getting Things Done podcast from Vital Learning. I am Morten Røvik, and I'm here as always with my good friend and colleague Lars Rothschild Henriksen. Prævit, Lars. Prævit, Morten.

Lars: Good to see you as always, and it's always good to be with our listeners and viewers out there. We always start off with our quick reminder of the purpose of this podcast, which is to help you learn GTD or become even better GTDers. So we hope that today's episode also supports you in that. If you are new to GTD, we always recommend you go back and listen to the audio versions of episodes 1 through 6 to get an introduction to the basics of GTD. Today's episode number is number 101 of the podcast, and today's episode is a very special interview episode.

Morten: It is. You have been interviewing Brian Robertson from Holacracy. And I am really looking forward to listening to that. Anything to add before we roll the tape?

Lars: No, it's, you know, it's something that I've really been looking forward to talking to Brian. He has a lot to say. He has some very interesting perspective and I think a lot of value for GCDeers out there to learn more about Holacracy. So great that he was able to, to join us and looking forward to sharing this episode with everyone out there.

Morten: Yeah, me too. So let's roll.

C: And now our special guest.

Lars: I am here with Brian Robertson, who is the creator of Holacracy and author of the very good book called Holacracy: The New Management System for a Rapidly Changing World. He's also the founder of Holacracy One and Glassfrog. Ryan, welcome to the podcast.

C: Thank you for having me, Lars.

Lars: So, our paths actually almost crossed a few months ago. I think we were in Amsterdam, Morten and I and the other franchisees for a franchise meeting there in early September. And I think you were in Amsterdam around that time as well.

C: Yeah, I was.

Lars: Yeah, exactly, exactly. I thought I saw that. So hopefully if our paths cross again sometime in the future, we'll have a chance to meet in in person. So, for our time together today, as I gathered all of my questions for you in preparing for this podcast, I know that there seemed to be sort of 3 different categories of questions. One being about Holacracy, obviously, in general, and make sure that everyone understands what it is. And I had some questions of my own as well. And I was curious to hear your take on. So, we'll go through those. Second is the GTD angle to Holacracy. So, how do they intersect? How do you use GTD GTD, etc. And also, if, you know, there perhaps were some specific tips for GTDs out there to try, perhaps we'll touch on those as well. And of course, as those of you who have been listening for a long time to the podcast know, that we always do a quick check-in on the GTD practice of the person being interviewed as well. So perhaps some tips there as well. Does that sound okay, Brian?

C: That sounds great.

Lars: Fantastic. Then let's dive straight in. So, but Just briefly before we dive into Holacracy, I gave the very short introduction of you. So, in your own words, could you perhaps share with the listeners a bit about who you are and what you do?

C: Yeah, totally. So, Brian, that much you know. I pioneered a framework called Holacracy, which I love talking to GTDers about it because I can explain it in a way that is just pretty accurate, but difficult to explain to people that don't have a good GTD practice. And actually, I'm going to quote David Allen on this, who was on the board of our company, Holacracy One, for many years. I had his friend. He said, "It basically is what GTD is for an individual, Holacracy is for a team or an organization." It's taking some of the same kind of principles, mindset, focus, the way of relating to attention and to what's got our attention, and then having pathways to deal with that in a way that is natural, that is requisite, that is going to get it off of your mind and drive meaningful change when that change is the most important thing to do and shows up in your world again and all that. So that's one way of thinking about it. You can also think about it as a framework for distributing power or decentralizing power in a company that doesn't use a management hierarchy to do that. Right? So it's another way of breaking down work and clarifying who's doing what, who's making which decisions, within what limits, within what boundaries, what expectations do we have of each other, and more importantly, a way for changing all that. It's a framework for evolving the expectation and rule structure of a team or a whole company. Because many of the— I mean, what do you do when, you know, you've got a great GDD practice and you're sensing stuff, you've noticed things that have your attention, and some of them you can do yourself quite easily,. But some of them mean you need to expect something differently from somebody else in your team, right? Now you're kind of beyond the limits of where GTD directly can, can influence, although you can certainly organize your own world that way. But if anyone has worked in a team full of people with poor GTD practices, you know how frustrating it can be. Alacrity kind of builds on top of the individual GTD practices and gives you a team layer for changing anything on the team. So that you can go from something grabbing your attention to evolution in the way you.

Lars: Work. Very cool. Yeah. And I can imagine a lot of GTDers out there nodding their heads right now as we, as you, as you, as you describe that. I'm sure that'll be familiar to a lot of people out there. So, if we dive a bit more into Holacracy and the details of it, when you're asked to give an overview of the key points from Holacracy to someone not familiar with it, How do you describe it?

C: Yeah, it's an interesting challenge. It's so different from the way we're used to running a company. You know, it's sometimes easier to describe it by pointing out the misconceptions and clarifying it's not that. So, one misconception is that it doesn't use a hierarchy of managers. It doesn't use a command hierarchy of managers, which is what we're used to in most companies. And when I say that, people often imagine I'm saying there's no structure. And so to clarify the first misconception, there's more structure, not less, in a company running with Holacracy. We just get to the structure differently and the structure is much more clear. So one of the— I mean, so Holacracy grew out of my own GTD practice many, many years ago. And I learned through GTD the difficulty and value of clarity, of getting clear, what do I really mean by this? Or whatever it is that's on my mind? What do I really want to do with it? What's my real commitment here? And, you know, make the distinctions from there. Is this a project? Is this an action? What actually does done look like if it's a project? All that. And there's a structure to work into roles on any team. And it's doing this, by the way, in every team. So every team has a process of breaking down the work that we need for the purpose of the team. To execute on that purpose, we need a bunch of roles, and each of those roles is going to have a purpose. It's going to have some expectations or accountabilities, we call them, on it. It might have some authorities, some decision rights, or some things it controls, right? And then there might be some policies at the team that kind of constrain and limit people. So there's these different distinctions kind of in the way GTD has project and action, right? And other things as well, area of focus or whatever. There's a set of distinctions in Holacracy that form a language, if you will, a pattern language, much like GTD forms becomes a pattern language for how to organize your world, your life, anything you're committed to changing. Holacracy gives you a pattern language for describing how your organization functions. Right? So, and that language is actually quite a bit clearer, more clear than what we're used to in most companies where things are quite fuzzy often. The way things work around here on most teams is not well documented. In fact, if anything, if you go, I mean, when was the last time you ran and checked a job description, right? Fallacy. They're fiction. They don't mean anything. It's like most people's task lists, for that matter, right? They're not good DDD practitioners. Their task list is probably largely a fiction that helps them feel better. And Holacracy comes in and says, okay, well, let's like really describe what it is we're committed to doing and who's going to expect what from whom and what are the decision authorities on the team and where are their limits. When do you need to go to a meeting and when don't you? And that's another one of the misconceptions. When people hear no managers, they often assume decisions must be made by groups or some kind of consensus process. And that is not at all the case. Holacracy uses more autocratic decision-making than a management hierarchy, but it's a decentralized autocratic decision-making. What we do is clarify who makes which decisions within what limits, right? Based on a role-based structure. And so, you know, You might fill a lot of roles. You might fill roles on different teams. I have roles in one of my companies in 5 different teams and maybe a dozen roles or something like that at this point. And I know in each of those roles what decisions I can make, what authorities I have, what others are going to count on me for, and what they can task me to do. And I know I get to lead those roles. I'm effectively the CEO of my roles, just like everyone else. Right? So it gives you clear authority. So you don't need to use a lot of meeting time, a lot of buy-in building and all that. And most importantly, there's a way to change all that, right? Because that clarity is only as good as, you know, your ability to keep it alive and current. It's like, imagine trying to do GTD without a weekly review, right? Or for that matter, without ever changing anything in your system. It's just not gonna work. And that's what most companies do with their structure, right? They have no equivalent to a weekly review. They have nothing to clean up. They have nothing to keep it real and alive and current. And Holacracy introduces a process for that. We call it a governance process that allows you to keep the organization, the team, the roles up to date, allows people to process tensions, as we call it, or what's got your attention, as David says, and to take that and process it into meaningful change. To say, well, we need a new role or a new expectation on someone or a new limit on someone or whatever else it is we need. We have a way of morphing, changing, evolving that structure based on what's grabbing our attention and in the way of us doing our work. That's the high level. A lot more to all that, but I'll stop there.

Lars: No, that's great. And it's, you know, it really was such an interesting read and walking through how you then describe the different roles, the circles, the different processes that you just touched on now. I also had a quick look at the company structure that you share on Glassfrog. Very fascinating to see and quite helpful in getting a better understanding on how all those things might look. There was, as I was talking about this, we had scheduled this interview now for a while, and I spoke to one of our co-hosts, one of my colleagues from Estonia, Paul Vohur. He said, you know, I mentioned I was going to talk to you. And he said, well, I said to him, do you have any questions for Brian? And he said, I'll do you one better. And it turns out that he had actually spoken to you in a podcast in Estonia, I think around 2 years ago or something. So I listened through that episode, and I'll be sure to link to it in the show notes as well for those who want to learn more also about Holacracy from a leadership perspective. One of the quotes that really stood out to me was that, you know, you talked about culture eats strategy for breakfast. And then you added that structure eats culture for dinner, I think, if I wrote that down correctly. Can you perhaps elaborate a bit on that?

C: Yeah, totally. So, the first part of that is a famous Peter Drucker quote, all right, modern management theorist. And I have just a huge amount of respect for our kind of leading edge of management theory and management hierarchy is, as much as I sometimes in the press get accused of being somehow anti-management, that's missing the point. I'd say management is so good and so important to do that centralizing it on a team and just one person is just a substantial risk, especially as the pace of change around us grows. And there's just a need for more people to do the work of management. So holacracy in some ways is management without managers.. And the way it does that is by having a structure and a framework around that that makes it easy to change things. So Peter Drucker's famous quote, "Culture eats strategy for breakfast." That's— I love what it's pointing to. It's saying, look, you know, the business world gets a lot of attention and focus on strategy. But especially in the era he wrote that, culture was kind of a newer thing on the scene. Today, it's much more prevalent. People, leaders know. Lots of businesses the importance of culture. It's much more mainstream, but it wasn't when he wrote that quote. And his point was, you can have the best strategy in the world, and if your culture sucks, you're going to sabotage that strategy. It's not going to work. Culture is more important. And the opposite is true too. Your strategy can be lackluster, and if you have an incredible organizational culture, they're much more likely to adapt and learn and change the strategy and figure out how to better serve customers and get work done. And I totally agree. This is a really, really powerful quote. And my addition is, yes, and structure eats culture for dinner. Because what's even more fundamental, right, where Drucker was pointing to how culture is kind of lower level, it's underlying, it's the foundation on which all of the specific tasks and execution and strategy kind of ride on top of this underlying layer of culture. And yet what underlies culture is the power structure of a company, right? Where if you imagine, just to use a societal metaphor, if we lived in an era with a local feudal lord that has unlimited power and rights over us peasants and can just kind of come and do anything they want anytime, just about, that really changes the culture that's even possible, right? It's really difficult. Have certain cultures in that structure. And you might try, but the power structure, the fundamental power dynamics are going to underpin that culture and sabotage if they're not suited to the purpose. So I think in that way, power structure is more fundamental. And I've seen this. I've seen cultures emerge in companies running with holacracy that are simply not possible. Right? For example, I sometimes ask— one of my passions is I want more for just fundamental love, acceptance in the workplace, if you will. I don't mean just the romantic love. I mean just people showing up with open hearts and loving energy. And why can't that be our ground to relate? And so I sometimes ask in some of my talks, how many of you have somebody in your workplace who you're not related to or in a relationship with who you regularly tell them you love them? And not in a romantic context, but just because you just so deeply love and appreciate that human. Why don't we have more of that? There's something about the structure, the power structure underlying our organizations today makes that incredibly difficult. It makes it actually quite useful to kind of hold back parts of yourself to play a certain political game. The structure almost requires it if you want to be productive beyond a point. But you change that power structure. You have a power structure where suddenly there's not this parent-child, boss-subordinate relationship, but a relationship of adults taking full responsibility for their work and able to in a power structure where all of us get to be adults together instead of parent-child dynamics. And that unlocks things. It unlocks things in the culture. It allows us to relate differently, to bring our full self into the workplace. It allows us to see each other's gifts and talents and have personal relationships. I remember back in my management hierarchy days as a CEO, I read a study back then that was looking at loneliness in companies. And it didn't matter what industry, what type of company, the one position that rated by far the loneliest was the CEO position, which sure fit my expectation or my experience. I mean, and of course, right? And it's so ironic. Everybody wanted time with me. Everybody wanted to go to dinner with me or whatever. I mean, there was no lack of people that wanted to spend time with me, but it wasn't a totally genuine, vulnerable, authentic, real human connection because they were playing a game. You know, there was a power differential in the room in a major way that affected their lives and their careers. And so they played a certain game. The structure incentivized a certain game. And then I had to play a certain game too in that. It's so lonely. And now, I don't feel like that at all. Now, I have a bunch of business partners. It doesn't feel the same. It feels completely different. We all get to be adults together. We all own our part. We all lean on each other. And we all use the same process to change each other's roles or to add expectations on each other. It doesn't matter whether somebody's the newest hire or the founder. They're using the same fundamental power structure and system for evolving who makes which decisions and who does what. And it's decentralized. That enables a new kind of culture. It enables a culture where we get to be more human together, where we don't need to play the games. We can be more authentic. So hence, structure eats culture.

Lars: For dinner. No, and it's very interesting. And we know, as you read through the book and pick up from other sources, the dynamic nature of it and how it changes over time. I thought that was very fascinating. One thing that struck me as I was reading through the book is how do you really stay on top of that? Because I really I think I understand the approach, but I can also imagine that with such a dynamic organization and things will change and you'll need someone from different circles for different inputs, whatever it might be. How do you stay on top of that with those very dynamic changes over time?

C: Well, how do you stay on top of your own personal trusted system, right? I mean, think of all the changes you're facing every day. You've got requests coming at you. New projects or actions to take on. You've got priorities changing around you. You've got surprises and new inputs from customers or your world around you. How on earth does anyone stay on top of a GTD practice? That's what I hear often from people who don't do GTD regularly. It's too much. It's too burdensome. It's too much work, right? Whatever. And yet, you know, I imagine this is pretty common among us experienced GTD practitioners. For me, the question is almost the opposite. How does anyone not do this to stay on top of stuff? Who on earth do you even pretend to stay on top of your work without having this kind of disciplined practice, right? It makes it easier, not harder. The challenge is the adoption. It's the learning curve, right? It's— and that's, I think, what people are pointing to. It can— when people are new to GTD, it can feel overwhelming. It's totally different from the way they've organized their lives, or largely different anyway. And there's a whole practice to it. It's like learning a musical instrument. Or a sport, right? You can't just read David's book. I love David's book, but that's not enough. You don't become a master GTD practitioner by reading his book, right? You got to get your hands on it. You got to practice it. You got to do it. You got to live it. You know, maybe go to a training or workshop, get some hands-on practice there with an expert. The same is true with Holacracy. It's the adoption that's the challenge. Once you're in it, it just stays on top of things. I mean, for you, in a way, it's— the practice is all about staying on top of things. It's all about noticing what's got your attention.. And if it's something you can organize yourself in your own GTD system, great. Take that path. And if it's something that touches the team dynamic, the expectations of each other, the power structure, the authorities, the controls, the policies, any of that stuff, process, that you can feed into the Holacracy process and you do, and it naturally stays on top of things. And the other thing I'll say is part of the way it does that is by being incredibly efficient. The meetings are incredibly efficient when you do a meeting. There's a meeting structure to Holacracy, two different meeting structures. And we've actually had some measurement done and this has been studied. So Harvard Business School studied a couple of organizations doing Holacracy and had some great learnings and metrics from that. And we've had other organizations do their own surveys and studying. And one of them that was studied did a— they looked at the average number of meeting minutes. So minutes of meeting time that it takes to get clear on an action or decision from someone else when you need one. And they measured it before Holacracy and 6 months after practicing Holacracy. And again, it has a new meeting structure it adds to make this easier, along with the power structure. And what they found was an over 90% reduction in the number of meeting minutes required to get a clear action or clear decision from someone else when you needed one, which means they can do 10 times the volume of work in the same amount of time. Or 1/10 the meeting time and get the same amount done. Right? And that's not that dissimilar from what I find when— with GTD practice. I cannot imagine holding as much as I hold right now, carrying as much, getting as much done as I get done right now without GTD. It's— I mean, if there's any one thing I will credit most of my professional capacity to, it's really good GTD practice. So, it's very similar. It's bringing in the right processes and kind of orientation to work to allow.

Lars: Things to happen fast when they need to. All right. One thing I also noted in the book was that you mentioned that holacracy requires a certain company size, I think, and perhaps it didn't seem to be the case that projects were in scope. But I can also think back to my previous career as an IT consultant and the project teams were so large that they were really the size of a small company. How big or small does a company How big do they have to be.

C: To benefit from holacracy? Really, only 3. I mean, there are plenty of 3-person companies out there doing holacracy, and it's great for them. And I've had 3-person companies that I've been involved in myself doing holacracy, and it's great. I would never do it any other way at this point. And I've seen companies try it at 2, but it feels a little silly. It's just something about 2 people, as long as you have a good relationship, you can you can probably bypass it and do just as well as long as you've got another teammate you're used to working with.

Lars: Yeah. No, that makes sense. And that was also sort of my understanding when I went through the book and the best practices and the way to organize. And it just seemed to be a good fit even for small companies. So glad I clarified that for myself, at least. So if we switch angles.

C: Sorry, go ahead. Sorry. Yeah, I was saying, or to your point, for project teams, I've seen it used in part of a company where they have one, you know, team or department or division or whatever it is using Holacracy, even when the company around them doesn't. There's some challenges with that, but it definitely does work if you navigate the challenges well. The adoption is the hard part, but yeah, it also works at.

Lars: That level too. Very cool. So if we switch the angle towards the Holacracy from a GTD perspective. First off, I was curious, I know you refer to GTD a number of times in the book. So, I guess you came to GTD before Holacracy, or how did that happen?

C: Yeah, I sure did. In fact, David Allen wrote the foreword to my book as well, which I was so grateful for. It's partly in that Holacracy grew out of GTD as one of the main influences on it, right? It was me— sorry, it came about by me running a company and just asking, "There's got to be a better way to do this. What is it?" So, I turned— I ran a software company at the time. I was an avid GTD practitioner, and I turned my company into a laboratory, and I experimented. And specifically, what I noticed was I loved my GTD practice. It was, you.

Lars: Know.

C: Life-Saving, sanity-saving anyway. But then there were things that went beyond its scope. And that's when it felt like the cleanliness of it, the clarity of it, the focus, the— I mean, when I'm in my own little GTD bubble, it just feels so solid. And then when I'd work at a team level, I was hungry for the same level of clarity, the same level of clear pathways and clear order and organization and discipline and all that. And so I went out and tried everything I could think of and tried all different methods that were already out there. I pioneered some of my own, more and more started pioneering my own over years. And many years later, Holacracy kind of emerged from that. So the fundamental, you know, I guess, ground in which it grew was a ground of GTD practice in not just myself, but every major, every key person in our company. Was an avid GTDer. And then we were trying to figure out how to scale some of these ideas and concepts to a team and organizational level. I mean, there were some other influences as well. So it wasn't just GTD, but that was probably one of the most significant out there.

Lars: And I think it's, you know, it's interesting to hear. And I think it's safe to assume that, you know, the listeners out there will be mostly GTDers. So you've already kind of touched on this, I think, a couple of times now, but Are there perhaps any specific pain points that GTDers have which Holacracy addresses? You already mentioned the ineffective meetings. That's something I'm personally very sensitive to. And I think the Holacracy best practices have helped my meetings.

C: What would you highlight for GTDers out there? Yeah, the role structure for one. And one of the nice things about the latest version of Holacracy as opposed to earlier versions, earlier versions were hard hard to incrementally adopt or to adopt pieces of. The system was kind of all woven together in a way that just made it difficult to break down. But the latest version, we version control it, the latest version of Holacracy and its rules are kind of broken down into a series of different modules that are independently adoptable. And that gives you an incremental path. So you can kind of start where you are, add one piece, get used to that, add another piece. It makes the adoption much easier. Easier. And one of the most common things I see out there, and I think it's especially appealing to GTD practitioners, is just bringing in the clarity of the role structure of Holacracy. Even if you don't do any of the better meeting practices or the group governance practice where you can evolve that structure, even if you're still relying on managers to, you know, be a stopgap and make command decisions and evolve the structure, that's fine. As a next step, you're still doing a lot better when you have a clear role structure. And I think GTD practitioners more than most understand the benefits of clarity and how easy it is for something around human nature to try to dodge clarity. And I see this in teams all the time where it's just not clear. And titles do not clear this up. Titles do not tell you who's actually making which decisions, who's doing what. You really need a more defined structure to clarify, right?

Lars: Who owns what?

C: So even just bringing in Holacracy's role structure, I think, is often really appealing to GTDers.

Lars: Yeah, no, absolutely. And I'm so happy to hear that you can sort of, you know, pick off different parts of the methodology or approach and then implement that, because that's part of what I wanted to go through next. At least when I reflected on my GTD practice and having read through the book, there were at least 3 different places where I thought, you know, perhaps knowledge of GTD would give people a different starting point, perhaps, in meetings, in purpose, and in areas of focus. Those were sort of the 3 things that I sort of highlighted, at least for myself. And perhaps to start off with the latter, for those listeners who already, you know, have areas of focus of their own, can this be sort of a helpful starting point for how to organize your Holacracy organization? Does that— how does that work help? I imagine it would be helpful when.

C: Defining Circles that exist in the company. Yeah, that's really where it picks up on, really. So you can think of a role as just an area of focus with a lot more detail and with interconnections to the other team roles. The challenge with GTD without some structure around it is it's great for clarifying your own stuff. I use standard GTD areas of focus in my personal life to organize my own non-work world. But when I'm in a team working with others, I need more clarity than just the area of focus as a bucket. I need to know more. I need to know what can others task me to do, right? What are the expectations on me? I need to know what authority I have. I need to know when I can make a decision without going and talking to somebody else. It's one of the interesting things I find often when teams try to get more agile, which is another huge part of Holacracy and one of the huge influences in it was the agile software movement. When teams try to get more agile, the instinct is often remove anything that could be bureaucratic and in the way, structure of any sort, remove policies, limits. And to some extent, when they're the wrong ones, that's really useful. But you need to know the boundaries or you don't know your freedom. And this is the paradox and irony. If you don't clarify the controls, what you can't do without going to a meeting or talking to someone else or checking with another role or whatever, if you don't know what you can't do, then you don't know what you can do without talking to anyone.. You don't know what's yours to lead if you don't know what's yours to not lead or what constraints you need to operate under. So there's a focus in Holacracy at that area of focus level or role level on clarifying all of that, clarifying what expectations can people reasonably task for you and what's outside of that scope. So you can say, no, that's not really my role. We need to figure out a different approach. And authorities, what are the boundaries of your authority so that you know what your authority really is? If you don't know the boundaries, you don't know your freedom. So all of that, it's just so much more nuanced and rich. It's not a— I wouldn't say it's not throwing out GTD's area of focus. It's just expanding on it in a major way with a lot.

Lars: More clarity and detail. Yeah, no, and I can perhaps recognize that in, you know, hiring my wife last year in the company. Starting to work with the different areas of focus and distributing them and trying to align with, you know, different expectations and ownership of different, you know, business processes areas. I can recognize some of those discussions and how to really go into detail on who does what and who owns what. That certainly resonates with me. The second one was, for me, was purpose. So seasoned GTDers, they'll have their horizons of focus, have perhaps a fairly clear picture of the purpose. And I know from Holacracy that you also work a lot with purpose even on the circle level, which I find very inspiring to direct teams and also hopefully to inspire people even more and perhaps lead to higher employee engagement. I noticed that you've mentioned before. Can you perhaps speak a bit more about that? And will GCDRs perhaps have an advantage.

C: As they already have some thought about their purposes? Oh, yeah, absolutely. So, this is another major component of Holacracy is just how it organizes everything around a purpose. And the challenge with purpose, when you get even a really good purpose for the overall company, it's really hard to break that down. It's really, really difficult in a company setting where there's lots of different people. It's hard to relate to it if you don't break it down, but it's hard to break down. There's no, again, language for that or structure for that. But Holacracy gives you that. There's a purpose for the whole company. Every circle or team has a purpose that's a breakdown of that, a piece of that. But it doesn't stop there. Every role has a purpose, right? So, every role you fill has a piece of that broader purpose. So, there's a kind of direct connection line from the role you fill to the purpose of the team you're in, to the purpose of the broader team around that, to the purpose ultimately of of the whole company. And I find that so helpful. It invites people to be creative, to go beyond their assigned, you know, tasks or the things they need to do just to keep the lights on and things running and invites them to be creative. How do we better achieve this purpose? Right? So, and again, just having the standard framework for how do you break it down and what's the language of it and all that is so helpful in making sure it happens. People tend to do things when there's a good framework for doing them. And it's hard to do things without that. I think we leave a lot of managers— I feel bad for a lot of managers. Management's hard work, really, really hard work. And we don't, in most companies, have many tools or frameworks to support them in that work, right? Like a good manager doesn't micromanage. They create clarity. Part of the clarity they need to create is what's the purpose here? And what are the authorities you have? And what are the limits? A good manager creates clarity and gets out of the way. And attends to what falls through the cracks and doesn't, you know, have clarity yet. But it's hard to do that. It's really hard work. And when you get somebody who's really good at it, they get promoted and replaced by somebody who's not as good at it because there's not enough to go around. It's really hard. So I think some of what holacracy does is just give a framework that says, here's a set of tools, here's a process, managers. Now you can kind of go through this instead of just resorting to micromanagement because you don't know what else to do. Now, here's a framework to use. And by the way, everyone else is invited to participate and use that framework as well, not just you, the manager. So in a lot of ways, another misconception is Holacracy is trying to strip away power from managers, and that's missing it. It's not. It's trying to raise the power of everyone else in the system. It's trying to give everybody the tools and process that allows them to do some of the work of management, including the former manager. It's not in any way about trying to remove or limit their power to do do useful things. It is limiting their power to jump in and micromanage in a way that's actually destructive. That is limited. So, it's limiting the bad habits, but not the good ones. It's giving them a framework to do it.

Lars: And that includes breaking down purpose. Yeah. And I imagine it must be really, like I said, inspiring to have that kind of clarity on a team level and also to, yeah, to organize the circle around a common purpose. The third one that that really inspired me following reading the book was the tactical meeting structure. This is something that we're now using for some of our internal meetings, and it really has put a new perspective, I think, on my agenda list and how we approach it here. Perhaps you could, you know, give us a taste of that a bit more. You know, how would you structure these meetings, the metrics, the process on how to use them? Because I think that would be a be a really good takeaway for the.

C: Listeners from this podcast. Totally. Yeah, it's a really cool process. I love it too. There's many differences from the way we're normally used to meeting. One of them is, so there is a kind of a framework of an agenda. But the actual specific things we're going to discuss is an agenda built on the fly in the meeting. So the broader framework has steps for like, let's surface data. We have a step to share checklists if there's any checklists on the team that we need to quickly review or any metrics. There's a space for project updates. So this is in kind of the preamble, we call it, to the meeting. We start the meeting. There's a little check-in round. We do a little, little, just kind of get present round and then checklist, metrics, project updates. And then we build an agenda and we build the agenda on the fly based on what's got your attention or in Holacracy language, what are the tensions in the room? And I don't mean tension in a negative way. It could be an exciting opportunity. It's just a sense of tension, of stretching between where we are and where you sense we could be and wanting to bridge that gap. And that's Holacracy's definition of tension. It maps perfectly to what David says is just notice what's got your attention, right? And a piece of stuff in David's language, right? Stuff comes in, it's got your attention. Great. So we build the agenda in a tactical full of tensions. In most meetings, when there's an agenda item, one, it's often built in advance, which incentivizes people to put things on the agenda to make themselves look good, because they think this is what they should put on the agenda. It also encourages people to put things on the agenda and then spend time talking to them that are not the ones that they're actually feeling tension about, that has grabbed their attention, that something is needed on. It's almost like doing it automatically by default or something I see happen. So we stopped that. No, I mean, you can keep your own list of agenda items, which is a good GDD practice in advance. But when we get into the meeting, it's after we go through the preamble right then and there, what are you feeling tension about that you want some of your team's time to work on? And then when we get into the agenda item, the typical approach in most meetings is it's a topic and anyone who has tension about that topic is invited to bring it and we discuss and we try to build some buy-in or something like that. And what we often end up with is a Colosseum battle for the collective attention of the group. As everybody piles on trying to get their, you know, pet project or their thing, like getting some attention when they need it. The Holacracy tactical meeting shifts that by saying, look, when it's your agenda item, the goal is not to discuss the topic you've brought up at all. The goal is to help you get what you need to solve your tension. And no one else, doesn't matter if anyone else has tension about that topic, we're going to actually, there's a facilitator to this process, is going to stop them from hijacking your agenda item and instead invite them to add their own, which is simply about taking turns. And you'd be shocked how hard that is to learn for a lot of adults. If you've ever taught your kids to take turns with a toy, it's not any easier in a business setting with adults. But we take turns. Each agenda item is one tension. And if it's your agenda item, it's yours. So we start that agenda item by just giving you the floor and saying, what do you need? And everyone else gets into a mindset of, I'm not trying to solve any of my tension here. I'm going to wait, park it, add my own agenda item if I need to. I'm here to serve and to respond to your requests. So you then have space to make requests. And then we have different ways of processing the requests depending on what kind it is. So instead of trying to get consensus, We try to get clear what role owns whatever decision or whatever it is you need. And then let's task that role with maybe an action or a project, or maybe you just want some information from them or whatever it is you need from them.

Lars: Let's get clear.

C: So what do you need? And then who do you need it from? But who in terms of the roles? And we end up— the outputs of that meeting are actions, projects, and sometimes we realize there's something in the system that needs to change. The authority or the expectations, the policies or process. And we kick that to the governance process that I mentioned before. So it's a really different way of meeting and it's super fast and disciplined, right? It's your agenda item. What do you need? The average in mature teams is often just a few minutes per agenda item. Some of them might take quite a bit longer. Some of them are even faster, but it's so focused because we're not trying to solve everything for everybody during one agenda item. It's just your floor. And we are done with that agenda item as soon as you say, I got what I need. And it doesn't matter if somebody else is mid-sentence. You got what you need, check, we're done. They can add their own agenda item if they want to say something more because that's no longer about you. That's about them and their desire to speak or be heard, which is fine. They just have to wait their turn and have their agenda item. And there is such a focus, a laser focus and a discipline with that. And there are many other differences as well, but I hope that gives at.

Lars: Least a taste or a highlight. Yeah, no, absolutely. And then, yeah, I hope people will try it and, you know, learn more about it because it's such an interesting process. Just for the, you know, limited, let's say, testing that we've done, you know, just the simple check-ins on shared projects, we're establishing the metrics now that we want to follow up on in different meetings. We have our agenda lists already that comes with the GTD practice, but adding those different layers and ways of approaching the meeting just for a simple 2-person meeting can actually be, at least it was very helpful for us to implement. Lastly, I wanted to switch to your own personal GTD practice. You've already mentioned it a bit, but I'm just curious to hear about your own practice.

C: How would you describe it? Yeah, I've been doing it so long. I almost, it's just so, it's like breathing. I don't even think about it. It is. Somebody asked, "How's this breathing thing going? What does that work like?" I don't know. I just do it. That's kind of what GTD is now for me. It's been, oh God, over 20 years. And yeah, I love it. For me, I sometimes get asked, "What's your spiritual practice?" And people are often expecting some kind of meditation practice or something like that. ?" And my answer is, well, one, life is my spiritual practice. It's integrated into everything I do. But if I have to pick a single practice that's a discrete practice, it's GTD. GTD is my spiritual practice because it's how I relate to my attention in every moment all the time. I notice the subtlest thing that pops into my mind that doesn't seem to have somewhere to go or that some part of me doesn't want to let go of. And I have just fine-tuned my system to sense that, to realize, Wait, there's something here. And it instantly goes into an inbox. And then from there, the whole GTD thing. And every day it's just, it's how I live. I use OmniFocus on Mac. I actually switched to the Mac specifically to get OmniFocus because I was tired of my Windows GTD tools. This is many, many, many years ago now, but I still use OmniFocus. I know there's lots of other tools out there now. There wasn't when I first started on this path, but I love Omni. Yeah, and I've got, you see little evidence of it.

Lars: Everywhere. I know my inboxes, I know all that stuff. Yeah, no, that was actually my last question about what are you using for a list manager, reference system, support material, capture tools, automations, or anything you would highlight or any really cool tricks.

C: That you may have added. Recently? You know, I love OmniFocus's Siri integration to my iPhone, right? Like, I can, I can just say— I'm not gonna— well, I'll do it and then I'll ask later, why is this in my inbox? Hey Siri, remind me to whatever. And that goes right into my Omni inbox, right? So I'm using that all the time and talking to Siri all the time. My friends even will joke, we'll be right in the middle of some, like, deep interpersonal space Or, I'll be sitting in on a lot of psychedelics. I do a lot of work with psychedelics as well and invest in that space. And, I'll be literally in a full-on trip or on ayahuasca and I'll be talking to Siri to have it remind me of something because something popped into my.

Lars: Head. And, I love.

C: It. I wouldn't have it any other way. It works so well. That's my main inbox. I have others too. Even filing. I love I use almost entirely electronic filing. I have one, basically one file drawer for my entire life. And even that is because I've been too lazy to go scan it all and all that. But yeah, I.

Lars: File everything just electronically. And yeah. Very cool. All right. Well, this has been so much fun. I really think it's been a really valuable episode for our listeners out there. For those who are curious to learn more about Holacracy and perhaps investigate how they could implement Holacracy or parts of Holacracy in their own organizations, where would be the best place for them to.

C: Start? Is that holacracy.org? Yes, it is. And I should mention people misspell it all the time. So, if you're listening and you're trying to find our website, notice the spelling is not what you might think. It's holacracy.org. People often put two Os in it. It doesn't have.

Lars: Two Os, only one O. H-o-l-a-c-r-a-c-y.org. Perfect. And I'll be sure to link to that in the show notes as well. I have so many more places that we could dive into, but I think we, we, we covered everything for today's purposes. Thank you so much for your time.

C: Brian. Really appreciate it. Lars, thanks for having me. It's been a.

Morten: Pleasure and a joy. Thank you. That was a really good interview. I thoroughly enjoyed it. And it's some thought-provoking thoughts around how you can structure the company, basically, or an organization. I don't know if you wanted to point out some things that that stood out for.

Lars: You? Well, just, you know, I just love listening to the way Brian describes the setup and the different approaches and what in his mind works and doesn't work in current organizations. It's really interesting to hear. And I really hope that people will try out some of the things that we spoke about. Like I said in the interview, some of the things that really spoke to me was this tactical meeting structure, for example. And I think combining that with your agenda list and improving meeting quality and efficiency, I think there's definitely, for example, something to pick up from Holacracy for GTDers out there. So if you try some of this out, as always, let us know.

Morten: Podcast@Weissellearning.Dk. We'd love to hear how this hopefully has helped.

C: You.

Morten: Indeed. I smell that our status meetings are going to change. Perhaps they will.

Lars: Maybe. Good.

Morten: Good. Well, it was a good interview and I hope, as Lars, that you enjoyed.

Lars: It. And Lars, will you take us out? Happy to. And to start us off with the process, I'll share that we actually have now the GTD Summer Camp Summer Camp 2024 dates in place. It has been scheduled June 15th to 16th will be the dates for the 2024 Summer Camp. It'll be in Denmark once again. If you want to learn more, head on over to gcdsummercamp.com. That's where you can read a bit more about it, as much as we know at this point. Um, key takeaways here is that we'll have a bit more time from last year, and also the tagline for The 2024 edition will be getting things done together. So that will be the overarching theme of the summer camp. So really looking forward to that. gcdsummercamp.com to learn more and sign up if it fits your.

Morten: Calendar. So we hope to see you there. Yeah, indeed. Then it is, I'm sorry, I have to interrupt you there and say that it is a really good, you know, I'm, this will be the fourth year we are doing this, I think. And I, looking back on the, the very start until last year, this is getting better every year. And if you're considering going, don't consider, just come, just decide to come. It's well worth it. And we enjoy hanging out with all of you and, and to help you to get, become even better.

Lars: GTDers. So, okay, Lars, yeah, back to you. Will be a lot of fun. It will be. And then the usual wrap-up, which is to remind you to head on over to vitallearning.eu to have a look around, learn more about the offerings that we have—Getting Things Done, Crucial Conversations, etc.—have a look at all of that, the different offerings there, virtual, in-person, across the different countries in the Nordics+ region. So be sure to have a look around there as well. If you're outside the Nordics, cruciallearning.com is the place to go to find your local.

Morten: Partner. Indeed. And as always, people, stay safe and stay.

Lars: Productive.

C: Bye-bye. Bye.