 So welcome also from my side. Oh, yeah, it's not working yet, but I think now it's working, yeah. I guess you all can hear me in the back, right? See you in a minute. Okay, so my entry will introduce me really great and I wanna share one thing which is my background in agile or my main focus is on well, kind of what Mary was talking about today. So like agile in a large setting and also in a distributed setting. And I'm saying this not only maybe for advertising those two books I wrote, but also for motivating what's my interest in this topic about sociocracy because whenever you're applying agile in the large, you're also dealing with the organization and having an organization that allows agility is something completely different also in terms of what does it means scaling for the organization and not only scaling in terms of the project. So my interest turned into what helps hinders an agile organization. And with that on that focus are also my two newer books which is the retrospectives for organizational change and then the other one which I wrote together with Jenna Robman on cost of delay. If you are interested in those, I've got a few copies with me. Okay, as much for advertisement here. Starting with the context of my little agenda that I brought here and the context of sociocracy is maybe a really strange term and people often think, well, this is something to do with socialism. No, it doesn't have to do anything with that. It just means socios is the companion and critique, so this is Greek and I'm not really Greek at all time, is to govern. So what it ashen means is dynamic governance and we also heard at the opening speech the run from the government talking about holocracy and maybe one or the other had heard of that. So I don't wanna go into detail here. We can talk about this in the Q and A or maybe you're in the grade. The only thing that I wanna say here is that holocracy has sociocracy at its core. So if you know holocracy and some of the things I'm sharing here, some familiar, then you know why. Okay, so that's the one thing. The other thing is what do I observe when looking at actual at the organizational level? I see different kinds of struggles and they all have to do with self-organization. Self-organization just seems to be hard for a company to allow. And it's kind of okay for a team or a project, but enabling self-organization throughout the whole company just seems to be really hard. And some of the struggles that I'm seeing is one of them is getting the full buy-in for a decision. So it starts often that it seems that some of the decisions have magically appeared and you don't know really who has decided them on or maybe you were part of the discussion, but are surprised how the decision then turned out because you thought you talked about something completely different, but often you don't even know who has decided it and what's the rationale behind that and therefore there isn't the full buy-in from everyone, from the people there. So which also goes to the direction that often decisions are not transparent. I mean the decision making isn't transparent, which again doesn't help for a buyer. If you again know why things have been decided that way, then it's not helpful for me. And the last thing is that often a hierarchy, which is how a lot of organizations are structured, is preventing self-organization and with that it's also hindering agility. So these are the struggles I've observed and I believe sociocracy provides really a great means for addressing those struggles and that's why I believe it's a super match with the agile. Okay, decision making. So full buy-in, I said already, so that the problem is often, well a decision is made and then people are not really carrying it forward and they are overwhelmed with it and they are not supporting it. And this is one of the big problems because whenever a decision is made and there's not a full buy-in, then the decision will not be implemented. And now what can be done about this rather how are decisions made? So first of all, what I think is really important is to recognize that not every decision should be or is needed to be made in the same way. So different things that are at stake can be decided, are born in different ways and that can be acknowledged. Very often we have like one way of making a decision. I'm coming back to that just in a few seconds. The other thing is that some things are not ready for our decision, which is also a big problem. We all have heard, I guess, we all have heard from Lee. So deciding on the last responsible moment but this is not always happening in organizations. Often in a company people think like, oh we really have to decide on that but maybe we don't have the information ready yet or we don't have the right people here who can help making a good decision. So these are all things that make it hard. Now in terms of how to make a decision, but what kind of decision making strategies come to your mind? Voting, dot voting, dot voting is something that's very well known, we use it a lot for example in retrospectives and what it has underneath as a strategy is actually well, decision based on maturity or also sometimes labeled as democratic decisions. So the good thing about that is that all the voices get heard and it's kind of fast, at least if you make it like dot voting to people full there, that dot's there and that's full. The bad thing is that the minority votes are lost. Often completely lost. We just go with the majority and so we don't even listen to what minority has to say about that. Anything else, any other decision making strategy which is coming to your mind? Consensus, yeah, consensus is like we all agree to what we decide on, we are all in favor for that which is the thing that creates typically absolute full buy-in. However it takes often very long because till we all agree to something it takes a while so we make that decision in a way it's okay for all of us. Then maybe at the opposite end we have automatic decisions which are like one person saying okay we are going this way which is very fast and on the other hand which often creates that biggest struggle in terms of buy-in because it's only one person who has decided it that way and maybe I agree with that decision so I'm fine but maybe I don't and nobody ever listened to me which is frustrating then. So that's another way. Then maybe let's say one more which is magic or random so we can throw a dice. Well sometimes that's good enough, right? And the way in sociopathy how we are making decisions is based on consent which is another way of making a decision. It has nothing to do with, well nothing is maybe too strong but it doesn't have much to do with consensus because the question here is not do we all agree are we all in favor for that thing that we are deciding upon but we are asking if we believe, if we go this way, if our bigger goal is put at risk. So it's more a question about can we tolerate that decision and not so much can we favor? Are we in favor for that decision? Which is at least to me a completely different question and the really good thing about this it's making obvious what kind of decisions we are really making in everyday. So often we believe when we make a decision especially in a team of a crew we think we have to come up with the best decision. However, that's not possible. And actually we will never know only in hindsight if this was the best decision. We will never know in advance and therefore because we wanna make the best decision and we can't know in advance we keep discussing forever and ever. So what's really more appropriate is looking for a decision that's good enough for now and asking that question can we, is this in my range of tolerance and is that decision putting our joint goal at risk opens up completely different possibilities at least that's what I'm seeing when I'm applying it. So this is what a consent decision is about turning that question the other way around. The other thing with how it operates and I know I don't have a lot of time to speed up already the way it operates is if you are in a crew you are asking every single person and you are asking so you're going around and asking every single person do you object or actually the real question is do you have any paramount recent objection to that decision? And paramount and recent means I will say what my objection is so it's not only that I say well I don't like it, it's not a beto I have to provide a reason for it and paramount means the thing that I mentioned before is it putting our joint goal at risk so it's not so much about my preference well whatever I would love something else better it's that decision good enough for now can we get started with this so look more at it more like an experiment so is it ready to experiment with this and maybe one last thing about this no matter if you use consent decisions now maybe you heard more about this or if you use a different kind of decision what I find extremely helpful which I also learned from sociocracy is always put a time stamp on a decision so it doesn't hurt you much saying oh can we live with that decision maybe for the next three months and then we look back if it's helpful or not and put it at stake again this often also simplifies to not having a discussion about the best ever possible decision that we are making but just good enough for now I'll take a little bit more application of it maybe already in your mind ideas are spinning where you can use it well you can use it with your team even in a small setting like a retrospective but you can really apply it anywhere however from the sociocratic point of view what we say here is consent is governing decision making so you can also make a consent decision by saying we decide on that framework or in an orthopedic decision because we know you are the expert on that so we trust you you will check that out and then come up with a good decision because we trust you here so it's not that it means all decisions are made by consent but that we agree how we make a decision on a specific thing that's maybe also an important thing okay, votes and hierarchies uh, okay, I'll call it after a little bit of time ah, right, so votes and hierarchies another typical thing that I see is that often in organizations people are putting into positions and I often wonder how come that that person is now fulfilling that role I would have thought somebody else is way more capable for fulfilling that role and so this is another decision actually that has been made and it's also an transparent decision that's often made here and so I wanna offer another way of coming up with a decision regarding um, yeah, roles, functions and tasks and the example I wanna use is one which is a little bit adapted from one way where I did this actually which fits very nice here so it's um, it has been used for a conference as well now we are all at the conference so these conferences work in different ways one way is for example looking for people who are hosting the conference and the conference I'm talking about right now it's called the retrospective facilitators gathering it's a very, very small conference 20, 30 people only, so not as big as this one and the way it works is that we are looking every year for who will host it next year and the way this happened in the past was well, there was kind of a hidden cabal so four, five people talking to each other and saying, oh, we think like you will be good so we go to you and ask you oh, maybe it would be interesting hosting it next year and you probably feel very odd that you've got asked and said yes but nobody really knows how this is working and why have you been chosen so it's similar to what we see in organizations so as you see also in the actual work we do often repeat the same mistakes so um, this year at the retrospective gathering I offered that, so it's a pretty election and the way it works, we are, the people who are involved they all start writing up a proposal and the proposal is just like that so I, Yuta, so I say who am I, who should touch it here nominate whoever I'm nominating so, and it could be easy like that so a post-it note, so I nominate him and so we go around, everyone writes that down and then offers the proposal to the facilitator by the way, if the facilitator is also one of the persons who is involved then the facilitator will as well come up with the proposal okay, so we have a list of proposals so this is a small group here and we have different names here so this has been collected in writing and we've written it up on a picture and now the next thing is we go around in the, in the group, in the circle and ask everyone providing a rationale why did you suggest, well why did I suggest Tom and why did somebody else propose Ben and so on and so we provide a rationale why we think well that person is really capable for that task and one interesting thing that's happening here already is that everyone is very much engaged into that discussion and it's often also surprising for the people to hear how other people think they can handle a specific task so that's the interesting thing here okay, so we have been going around have heard all the rationales for that we still have that list of different names here so what we do now is going for another round and ask for a possible change so everyone who is involved, we ask again now that you have heard the rationale the people have given, do you still wanna propose the same person you had proposed before and maybe yes, or do you wanna change your mind because you've heard something else which is more convincing to you than what you have thought at first yourself so there's a change round and now we see here some people change their mind and some people stick with the same ideas and just whatever and then again, the same thing by this round asking do you change your mind we also ask and for what reason so we have as well the rationale so I think well that person is maybe really capable because of blah blah blah so now comes maybe the weird thing at least I thought it's a weird thing because well I've been to facilitator school and so on and you will realize probably why I think it's weird now the thing is the facilitator makes the step forward and makes a proposal makes a suggestion having heard all those different proposals but the rationales, I go forward and propose now I don't remember whom I'm proposing here so I propose Ella I think she would be the best candidate for posting that conference next year and the thing again is keeping in mind we are not looking for the best ever decision we are looking for somebody we feel is capable for doing that job and so this is the proposal and if I'm the facilitator I make that proposal and then we are going round again and this is now asking for the consent and we have been talking about this before so it's asking if somebody has a paramount recent objection against that and again the weird thing for me was like okay as a facilitator if I'm the one I should make that proposal I have heard that the facilitator is neutral yeah it's not interfering with what's going on here now here they're saying well the facilitator is more like a mediator listening to stuff and summarizing it up and then making that step forward in order also to move forward because we don't need to discuss things right or we really want to make progress and that's the point for it so making that proposal going round having a consent on this and now the one last thing I believe I'm missing here is which is also very interesting the person who is asked about his her consent is the one that has been proposed which might sound also a bit strange but we are going round and asking everyone if they consent to it or if they have common recent objection and then assuming you would be Ellen I would ask you as the last person going round and one of the reasons is that it's so convincing and confirming if you hear the consent from everyone else with beforehand and it's not really kind of pulling you over but it's also more like increasing the trust in yourself that you are the right person who can handle that and then what I have experienced is well at least kind of often that person is saying well but I'm not sure because I have blah blah blah and then so for example I don't have enough time because I have this and that on my desk I always, always experienced that then the whole crew is helping solving that issue for example maybe next step forward oh I can support you with this so maybe you can delegate this to me or something like that so everyone is so much into it because it's a transparent decision everyone knows the reasons behind that and the rationale and the last thing is I believe almost always we came up with a person for a function and task where that person later on told me in private oh well often not in private told later on I would have never volunteered for that and that's another thing which I find really powerful and I guess you all have experienced that too that often if you are looking for a person fulfilling a specific function and task then it's if you are asking for a volunteer you always get the names of the same people and also if you have like a small crew but people talk to each other and say well who could be qualified for that then again always the same people are coming up and coming to the mind and with this approach really completely different names come up at least that's my experience with that and that's why I find this very powerful as well now for so that's again that's a summary what we've done so the most important thing I forgot is how we start first we clarify what kind of function task we are looking for so we know what kind of capabilities and skills we are looking for then we have the proposal round and writing then we collect those proposals we have the rationale given we have a change round then we have a summary by the facilitator by making that proposal then a consent round and then we start a break we end up with that decision okay application for that actually again all kinds of so it's a good thing you could use throughout the whole company well maybe you cannot influence the whole company but you can influence some things for example you can influence who will be the representative in a community of practice that's a perfect thing of finding somebody you might not have on your list right away but it's really something that can be used for all kinds of functions and tasks but the thing like yeah representatives for something I think for that it's very powerful and that's something where you can start also on the team level so I'm hoping that this is then something that people will recognize and will copy at other places in the organization and oh right I have brought a quote or copy from the scrum guide and I guess all of you most of you know the scrum guide describing what scrum is about and how it should be and there are these three responsibilities amongst a lot of other things that we expect the scrum master will do now the problem that I'm seeing is well I've never seen a scrum master who was able to do that or was unable to do that and the reason is I believe because the scrum master is never embedded in the company structure and therefore the scrum master doesn't have the power to for example plan the implementation of scrum in the organization or helping the stakeholders understand and really act on it so everything that has to do with the company with the organization is just tough for scrum master because the scrum master is part of the team but not embedded in the organizational structure so this is my motivation why I want to offer the last bit of sociocracy and well now looking at hierarchies what we see in hierarchies is well a typical thing it's kind of a top-down structure now we have only three levels but there can be many more as you all know and well the problem with this especially if you compare it with Agile well maybe I'll do one more round if you think about what's at the core of Agile we have there this typical cycle what plan do inspect a depth and then plan again which is we do something and we want to learn from it and put that learning back into our plan right so in summary what's at the core of Agile I believe is feedback so whatever we do we try to acquire some feedback and want to learn from that feedback and we do this in many ways it is like with the iteration or sprint cycle it's with the retrospectives it's with continuous delivery it's with the test so everything is around we want to get the feedback in order to get better now if you look at the hierarchy there's just no feedback nowhere, anywhere so it's just linear and only in one dimension and that's I believe the biggest problem why it often feels that the company is not supporting Agile and it's more like a lift service and not a full service and that's by self-organization often only can happen on a very well let's say maybe Prince Island but not really throughout the company okay so what we need is what's called double linking and that's another thing that sociopathy is offering so the idea is that you don't only have the hierarchy top down but you also have, if you will, a hierarchy bottom up and maybe one other thing, how to automate that we often talk about managers who are in a sandwich position and the sandwich comes from that they are responsible for ensuring the implementation of, for example, a decision that has been made up at the hierarchy and is implemented below and their teams they're responsible for but we also expect that those managers are also kind of representatives or spokesperson or whatever of their teams and providing the information that's happening at the bottom up to the top now the problem is that both are typically not possible and that's why managers often decide one way or the other and if they, well, if they decide, like, the top down then it's more a command and control and if they are more designing for the bottom up, but this is also something that I see a lot then what you see at the team level that the manager is often overruled a typical thing that I see with product owners, if they are not fully empowered then make their decisions on priorities that everyone wants in a while somebody else, maybe it's the boss, maybe it's somebody for product management it's whoever is coming and saying, oh no, this is not what we meant and screwing up everything again and coming up with different priorities just one example, but we see this also in different occasions but I see enough people nodding that it seems that you all have seen that unfortunately I would have laughed and would say, no, no, no okay, so separating these two things out, that there is one person who is responsible for the bottom from top down decisions and information flow and there's another person who is responsible for the bottom up just loosens that hopefully and also comes to, well, better information and better decisions so the way it's working in a sociocratic manner, so first of all you have your hierarchy which is I think a really good thing because you can't stop where you are and it's not that I'm necessarily all in favor for hierarchies but most of the companies I'm working with, like, I don't know, the big insurance companies or Siemens or auto manufacturers they just have hierarchies and now me and Utah are going there saying, oh, well, hierarchies are really bad you should give up on hierarchies I don't see this happening in the next 20 years or maybe not even in the next 50 years and so this is what I think is helpful with that so you can start with what's there and it's easier to implement that and then you have on every level at this sociocratic election coming up with somebody who would be a representative of that level at the next hierarchy level so it would be here the, what do I have here, the reddish guy has been elected as being a representative of this team and therefore that person will be part of all decisions on the next hierarchy level and then again that group of people is electing for a person who will be representing that group one hierarchy app and also this, at least from where I'm working it's not so easy to say, like, okay, now we do this across so Siemens or HSBC or wherever but you can start somewhere and the start somewhere could mean, for example, the boss or the blue guy here is saying, oh, well, we are talking about this and that in our next meeting and can maybe, can you please come along because we need your wisdom here because that's the topic you know most about that and then you can make that as a leverage and say, like, oh, maybe we should tap that all the time somebody from the team because somebody from the team always can make a better point of what's going on here and this way it's much easier to implement that and so maybe you will be able to implement this only on this level but not on the next but you can start and that's at least what I really like about social policy it's something that allows me to start somewhere application and I think I said this already well application one of the things was I motivated it with this one with the scrum masters expect that we expect scrum master really implementing actual in the organization so one possibility is having this scrum master being the double link to the next level in the hierarchy therefore being embedded in the organization and I could imagine that this is really a good way of doing it however this also means to me something else which is the scrum master maybe would be a good idea if that person is elected and not appointed which I see typically that the scrum master is appointed but if we feel like this is the person who is responsible that well first of all we are represented but also that actually is understood at the next level we really want to be sure we have the right person here and we all agree on that five percent and electing that person so that might be a difference to how it's done right now and how you come up with this scrum master right now so that would be one thing another thing as well what we have often is already the top down link which is the often the product owner well in some cases I've also seen it's the scrum master which I think is not a really good idea because then that person cannot be really a spokesperson of the team because it's more spokesperson of the hierarchy of that and so that's why typically it would be product owner the link top down scrum master okay and I have been speaking I'm so good that we will have time for questions that's great so the lessons learned so the setting on consent really creates a full buy-in and you can trust me on that when I've experienced that it really makes a huge huge difference and again if you don't want to apply all of that just consider using it at times and consider not asking for do you really like that but more like is it good enough for now can we make the next step with that and putting a time stamp on a decision which I think these are really important things then maybe you want to think about sociocratic elections well maybe when you heard about it you thought oh this sounds like it takes a while actually it doesn't take so long it's kind of a quick way of coming up with with people to function their tasks and you have to buy in from everyone then the double linking is the way to really enable an organization to allow self-organization to many organizations allow enable a company to allow self-organization and you can start at just one level just at the team level and maybe one way up so that's the the really good thing you can start wherever you are and make the next step and that's a really important code because we often think it's people who are not who don't have the skills the capabilities for self-organization but it's actually the structure that haters it so if you work on the structure and the structure is like the hierarchy but also the decision-making thing with that you really can implement self-organization yeah right that's of course important so that's a really great book on sociocracy sociocracy it's really difficult work and the two main links where you find more information about that you're taking the picture and I have thank you for cutting and made all the illustrations and I believe we have exactly five minutes for questions so thank you um actually I get well the double linking will all to the top I haven't seen them not in the in the huge companies I'm working in but I've seen it like to the next level and then my hope is like with the actual where I see people are copying it from software to marketing to other departments that this was correct so that's the one one end so the other end so the the bigger difficulty I see is actually with that they don't really want to try it because of the term like social it's kind of with extreme programming which was too extreme for a lot of people just the name of it some have heard and read about holocracy and not only positive states proceed yeah it's really hard so the decision-making principle with consent I don't experience that adds a really hard thing to implement not at all and that's also something you can start everywhere or anywhere and that's what I do so often I don't even talk about that I just we are in a meeting some maybe I'm studying somebody else on somebody else's toes but I see we are in a meeting and we have that discussion it goes on and on and on and I say oh wait a minute I want to suggest now listen to that and then I just ask the question asking well sometimes I turn it around I do think this is safe enough to try good enough for now and go around this way and it's not even and that might be not fair not really explaining what we are doing here that we are deciding on consent here and then there's nowadays everyone's in a while there's a person like oh is this a consent decision yeah and this is so helpful so I don't see this is a big problem and I see also people like copying that and seeing like oh I've seen you two doing that that's great harder especially if you work in a multicultural I just realized do you understand the question in the back so the question was if I experience it to be harder implementing the side by concept in a multicultural environment and actually I don't but what I find hard or maybe you could also say it's a smell if the joint goal isn't clear and it could happen that you try to come up with the decision on consent and you cannot get consent because it's actually not a team aiming for the same goal because if you have that question do you think that decision puts our joint goal at risk then you figure that people are really deviating and which is good to know because you will have all kinds of troubles because of that so it's also a like actually it's a travel detector so finding out the problems you are having so and yeah maybe it's more likely that we didn't clarify the goal up front in a multicultural environment or people have different things in their mind but I wouldn't say it's necessarily so it's really for me more the do we all know what is our joint goal that if we know that then it's really easy and can be implemented everywhere and on the other hand as I said already I'm happy to know if we are having different goals maybe one more what is the drawback of doing the social that's the draw I don't really see a drawback the the thing is and maybe it relates to your first question which comes now to my mind which is that especially for the double linking that the higher up you go in the hierarchy well probably it's everywhere that often managers feel like they get they lose their power which is actually not true at all it's really not true at all but that's maybe also because of that social part in the term of it but it's also like okay and then there is also a double link and what is that and I thought I'm the boss but now so that's that's I believe that the half part of it and maybe the drawback in that sense that people are then hesitant to to give it a try to really experiment with it as long as they're the same stuff but I keep taking questions yeah one last one okay so I'm really using bits and pieces since I learned about social secrecy everywhere and I sometimes I don't even really realize that and that's all that would be also my hope that I trigger something for you that you think oh maybe I try that and maybe you try chest in quotes in a retrospective because that's kind of the same environment but once you try then you figure out if you are in a different meeting or somewhere else and it becomes also a second nature of doing it and again I haven't I haven't seen it being implemented across all organizations I know that there are companies who have implemented that but I haven't been part of that so I can't really tell what kind of struggles they have been going through I don't know about like the real huge ones the huge companies and these are the companies I am in but what I again what I can do here what's easy there is to start somewhere and that's actually to me it's the same thing how I started actual in those environments it's starting somewhere and now if we look at especially in large organization there's hardly a large organization not claiming that they are doing actual and so why shouldn't it happen this way as well and maybe what I could also imagine that people will not really talk about sociocracy which is unfair to the people who have invented it but that they are more talking about an actual organization because I really believe that those therapies providing answers to questions that actual doesn't have those answers but we see those problems so long answer to philosophical okay so all right thank you very much thank you very much