In project work, we often speak of “Roles”. But rarely it is made explicit, what it means exactly to take on a “Role”. What are the expectations one can have towards you? What expectations can you have towards others?

Holacracy is a framework for collaborative work. It provides explicit and clear rules for how to work together.

In Holacracy, taking on a role means taking the responsibility:

• to sense tensions for that role and process them.
  A tension is a gap between what is, and what could be better.
• to break down the role’s accountabilities into projects and next-actions, and to document these projects and next-actions.
  (The role’s accountabilities are decided on in a governance process. You can see examples of role descriptions on our company’s public governance records. (click any small circle.))
• to continuously decide which projects and actions to work on

(More detail in the Holacracy Constitution, Section 1: http://holacracy.org/constitution#art1)

Filling a role grants the authority to take any action to express the Role’s Purpose or Accountabilities, as long as it doesn’t impact the Domain of another Role without permission. (Constitution 1.4) (More on “Domains” at another time.)

Continue reading Energizing Project Roles (Holacracy Basics, Part 1) →