Tag Archives: process

What is Productivity?

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Do you have your own definitions for concepts or do you use whatever is in the dictionary?

I love having my own definitions. Depending on how you define something, you experience life differently.

Take success for example. What is success? There are infinite ways to define it. Examples are “earning a lot of money”, “having a lot of fun” or “being healthy”. Can you see how choosing one of these definitions over the other would shape the choices you make for yourself?

So it is for productivity.

Since one of the things I do is help people become more productive, I have been asking myself how to define this concept.

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Why personal productivity matters in Holacracy

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Imagine that you are the owner and CEO of a company and you are considering to use Holacracy as an operating system. That basically means, you give up the power to tell your employees what they should be doing and how they should be doing it. However much you may be excited about moving to such a self-organising structure, deep down you also feel fearful (or maybe not so deep down!):

What if my employees take different actions and directions than I would like them to take? What if they forget things? How can I make sure they’ll be taking the right decisions?

Trust and transparency

It takes a certain amount of basic trust in your employees, and people in general, to decide to use Holacracy. Besides that, it actually provides the proper framework for former decision-makers to be able to relax about controlling the work that needs to be done in the company.

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5 Steps to Building an Organisation

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What are the essential steps to seting up and maintaining coherent, purposeful collaborative work? How do you build an organisation?

Giving a talk to participants of Berlin’s Climate-KIC accelerator program last week helped me clarify my thinking on this. I will attempt to sketch out a systematic way to to get from “a bunch of people wanting to do things together” to a working and evolving organisation. There are many ways to do this – this is one, that, in our experience, has often worked well. It is informed by the work we did with Nenásilná komunikace group and our practise of Holacracy.

This will most likely be incomplete or unclear in places – please do leave questions and comments below so that it can improve!

1) Clarify Purpose

Goal: Arrive at a shared expression of purpose.

Method: Story Circle Conversation with Convergence.

'The Circle Way' Book Cover

Get all founders together and host a circle conversation on purpose.

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