 Welcome to the self-governing teams through SOFA, Sociocracy for All, which will be delivered by Ahmad Avaz. He's based out of North Carolina. He's the business agility coach with Project Brilliant. He's currently engaged in agile transformation for healthcare IT. He's got into agile in 2008. Without any further delay, over to you, Ahmad Avaz. Thank you so much, Pankaj. So I am going to share my screen. Awesome. So today's topic is talking about self-governance for self-organizing teams. And we will probably go through, depending on how many people show up, we may do some more interactive exercises here. But just to add on to what Pankaj said, I'm also a Sociocracy for All facilitator, a practitioner, and on my way to becoming a trainer as well. And I am a working member of SOFA. I am part of the organization where I help with open source content circle. So there's multiple connection points. I'm available on the interwebs and happy to always chat up if this topic is of more interest for you. So with that, let's get into the topic. So why governance? Now, governance typically means how do you run the organization? How does funding happen? How do you make the whole organization a more futuristic organization? Especially in this topic of governance that we have, where people who are governing also have a voice in how they're governed. The world isn't rapidly changing. We have up to five different generations in the workforce. And COVID has permanently changed our landscape. And more and more people have different expectations whether we are in manufacturing, in medical devices, in software development. Everybody's touched by software. So we're essentially in an era where knowledge work was the term that we started with. But all these systems have been using governance models from many, many, many decades ago. What are the typical one? Like top-down hierarchy, boss decides. Or we all decide. Or in the family, mom decides. Or we vote, right? Majority vote wins. Then there'll be winners and losers. If you have simple majority, then other folks that who had less majority or minority will lose. But all these aspects are important to understand. Well, who decides? Who decides? Like how do decision-making happen? And do I even have a voice? The way society works in a democracy is not quite the way organizations or companies work. So it is important to see that how do we tie in this connection? Now, a lot of time people will say, well, we have this weird balance that we need to achieve. We need to get work done. We need to just get it done. Just work, work, work. We don't have time to do anything else. Or we can be connecting, thinking in a building empathy, listening. It's either or. So I find that this either or thinking is also not helpful. We have to find the right balance. And there is a possibility of increasing, increasing the balance towards a more humane, more connected organization. So if you are in an agile team, you're practicing Scrum, you're practicing XP, you're practicing Kanban, we still have a lot of opportunities that, hey, when decisions are being made, do we go back into the old patterns from 1980s, the management style of the old, versus that, you know, making sure that people feel included and we're still getting work done. However, isn't necessarily bad, but how we share power in a team, in an organization does matter. So we have to think about how are we governing each other? How are we governing our team? So in that, this is the most common model that you've probably seen many, many variations. The pyramid model, like, you know, the top makes the decisions and people on the bottom carry out those decisions, right? So whoever's on the top, they'll give the next order person, next line person, next line person, and decisions are being carried out. And this is a little bit of an outdated model. So in sociocracy, we say, well, we have to think about three things. We have to talk about how our organization can have an unceded flow of information. So we use the term circles, circles and we'll go a little bit more into it. Circles are containers of people who are getting work done. And there is decision-making happening, which is happening by consent, not consensus. There's a little bit of a nuance there and it's coming up to understand, well, what does that mean? Because a lot of time, you know, you talk to fruit, especially if some of you, you know, I don't know, let me ask this question. How many of you are software developers? Or put it in the chat, you know, what you do. So I can give you a better example. If you are a software developer, please write in chat that you are a software developer or share what your roles are. I'm curious to know. You're an agile coach, software engineer. Hi, Bart. So Bart's a friend of mine, all right. And I'm still waiting for maybe one or two responses as possible that you're probably distracted. So software is a good example, right? So let's go back to software. So a lot of times when I find, when I'm talking to software developers, they get really, really bound up in the type of frameworks. It's like, you know, the flavor of ice cream. And I like vanilla or this person likes chocolate and they get really hung up on, hey, vanilla for me all day long or chocolate for me all day long. And those type of things are called personal preferences. But if it's a really, really hot day, you won't care what the flavor is. You will have ice cream. So we want to make sure we move away from preferences and into area where you're tolerated or accepted for the benefit of the group. Whereas, where problems, what we want to do is remove any harm. If there's any harm that's there, we want to remove that. And so that's why consent is very important because the point is not to make sure that you get your chocolate and the other person doesn't like chocolate, doesn't get it, but is to make sure that when there are things, parameters around it that is agreeable for everybody and no harm is being done. And then the last point is to be continuously evolving. So you don't need to bring things wholesale. Like for example, I was leading a team of coaches in a financial technology space that had adopted Spotify model. And we were already bringing elements of sociocracy. It was not wholesale where the whole organization has adopted it, although if you're smaller, you'll find that there's less resistance and you can easily get to there. So it is effective, it's egalitarian. And the point is to always focus on, well, what is the aim and domain of this organization? So with that being said, maybe I'll go a little bit deeper in this. So the word sociocracy as opposed to democracy comes from those who work together or associate together, makes decisions together. And it's egalitarian, it means that people who are the subject of your decision are also holding voice in your decision making. And there are three key pillars and those three key pillars that we just showed that decision by content, a decision by consent, circle structure and continuous evolution if they exist, you're already on the way. So what's important in this, this may go a little bit more detailed for now and we can hold off on the academic part of it. But it's important to understand that, there is a type of organization called TEO. I don't know if anybody's familiar with it. If you are familiar with the word TEO, put yes in chat, otherwise I can give a quick description. So I'm looking at, can you give me a quick indication or give me a emoji thumbs up that you know TEO? When I say a TEO organization, do people understand what I'm saying? Just say yes in chat or give me a thumbs up if you already know, so we don't need to go in detail over that. So there's one person, Ojoao, so there's a couple of people that know TEO. So by practicing sociocracy, you're actually implementing TEO. So it's one of the most practical ways to move in that direction. And so, because there's a couple of people, I won't go into the total detail of Lalu's model and TEO and all that, but let's go back to sociocracy or where did it started, who uses it? It started in the Netherlands by this gentleman named Gerard Endenberg who had a company called Sociocratic Electric, something like Sociocratic Center. And they had all these implementations in the 80s and essentially the model got created then. So it's not a new model, it's been in service for a long while, but Gerard's work has gotten into other places. So this model is now in schools, in Netherlands and many other places. In India, there's a famous documentary, I invite you, encourage you to watch, it's called Children's Parliament that is implementing sociocracy with children. And it's fascinating stuff going on. It's a child led participatory structure with 10,000 neighborhood communities and 23 states. It is so exciting. I watched the documentary, but there's elements of sociocracy that are brought in. Now the question for our business side, for those of you who are agile coaches or software developers is, although we use the word Spotify model and there's a problem with using that term, it's not necessarily was ever considered Spotify model, but if you look in the origins of it, what Spotify did was take elements of sociocracy and start to create structures that are more metric style, more inclusive. And they talk a lot about time with alignment. So Spotify was an implementation of sociocracy. I mean, I invite you to go into the details how sociocracy connects with what Spotify did, not necessarily, I wouldn't go as far as calling it the Spotify model, but there were some experiments that started and they continue to evolve it. So what's happening in Spotify now is much different from what you might find in popular blogs. And this is the circle I support is if you go to sociocracy for all, sociocracy in free and open source projects. So I hold a working position in this circle as I'm practicing and learning more and more across sociocracy in real life by being part of the organization for a few years. So now I want to invite you, I'm gonna drop this link for you in chat and just to make a point on how things work. If you can kindly jump into this Google doc, my invitation to you is to jump in this folder. And actually, you know what? Let me do this and let me give you an example of how what I expect you to do is to color these dots by, if you're still seeing my screen, fill it by any color you want. And what we're doing is we're gonna write the word agile. Let's see if we can accomplish that goal without with minimum effort. I mean, if it's two or three of you can jump into the Google doc on slide 17. If you are in there, you can click on my icon or I can bring it to you. So you don't have to work, I write the word agile, but you can select a cell and clicked on the fill icon and select any color you want. We are going to use its pixels. Let's see how long it takes us to write the word agile. You know, if you've never done this before, essentially an A might and I can start off some part of it like so, for example, this is an A that I'm forming, but decide how you want to participate. If you make a mistake, you can change the colors. But let's see if we can work together. We'll need at least a couple of people to do this. So I see a couple of people, if you guys can also jump in. Normally if we have five or six people, this goes much faster. Colors don't matter, but you know, the word agile does matter. Is there anybody having difficulty getting the, so I see a couple, one, two and three people actually. Quite let's see how quickly we can get this done. And you do, you can unmute your mic and give me some feedback. We got a screenshot. Let's see, let's get the whole word done. It's interesting because I started off as an example, then we're just basically following the same color, which is okay. And I know we have a, about how many people do we have on the call? Looks like we have eight. Let's give it a couple more minutes. Let's finish this exercise. Interesting, we have a U pop up. So maybe we can change it to an E. And you can help each other. The point of this exercise is to collaborate. I love that. All right, so this is complete from my point of view. So now why did I do that? So the point here is that even with limited instructions, we are able to accomplish the goal. The goal was to write agile. And even though it may come up with different colors or shapes or exactly if only one person did, but how was this accomplished? It's pretty legible. Anybody who, for those who participated in excess, can you unmute yourself? How did it feel doing this with another person on the same slide who you've never met and talked to before? Possibly. Please unmute your mic and share with me how that experience was, if you can. I know there's a couple of people who are working on it. Usha here. Yeah, Usha. Am I on it? One thing I observed is what we could see what each of us was doing. So it was very visible and transparent. So that helped us self-adjust. Exactly. And that's a form of feedback. That's a form of feedback. If you're working in the open, that's an awesome form of feedback that we can adjust as well versus working separately and then worrying about integration. Thank you for sharing that, Usha. So good. What else? Anybody else? I know it's in the afternoon, right? For most of the folks over there. It is 5.19 a.m. where I am in North Carolina. So maybe I should also think about, but let's see, let's call on folks that were participating. Maybe you can write in chat. So, Surat, I know you've been interacting in chat. What are you participating in the exercise? What was your experience like? What was your observation? I didn't join the Google form or whatever link that you have given. I was just observing. All right, well, what did you observe? Yeah, the collaboration initially, I mean, probably the people didn't join. Everybody didn't join the board, but then slowly I think people were helping each other and could see that towards the end, we could complete it quickly. Absolutely. And by the way, normally this exercise, if you do such a short lettering, you'll find that the line of the E becomes a problem. But I was, so this was a more innovative solution and people are able to do that. And I'm always surprised if you allow people to communicate with each other, interact with each other. They come up with creative solutions and a lot of times we have to think a little bit more about the structure, how we are working together versus just the task at hand and getting done with it. Thank you for sharing. So we are gonna move on to the exercise. So now this is the idea I was explaining before, that we are trying to integrate objections. Like so, for example, if somebody had put in a completely different color or just erased everything we saw, somebody put in a screenshot there. So that would be an objection. Well, now I can't even see the canvas. So those are objections, that's harm from the work or the aim of what we're trying to accomplish. But a lot of times you have variability, somebody has selected pink color, somebody has selected a different letter size, a larger, shorter, it doesn't matter. As long as it's legible, it means that it is usable at least in an early stage before we go into refining, it's acceptable. So the idea here is we are constantly thinking about preference, which is where the realm of consensus a lot of times. And then the range of tolerance that this is maybe not my personal style, but hey, it's not bad. I can accept it. And that gives you more room to work with, whether you're in a natural working team, in a startup, in a larger organization, you wanna keep working with more, otherwise you're gonna lock in with very, very small parameters. So don't try to please people is the message here that we cannot match everybody's preference, but we can definitely bring in the range of tolerance. And any harm that is done, we want to remove that harm. If any of you have done sailing on a sailboat, you'll find that there's a term they use tacking. A sailboat does not go in a straight line. What happens, it works with the opposing winds and that tacking process works with those opposing winds to keep moving forward. And that's an excellent metaphor for applying sociocracy or any of these decision-making is that how do you work with objections to keep moving forward towards the aim? And we want to make sure that we are not in the business of convincing and saying, like, we are right. Or we want to say, well, what else is out there? And I could have said, hey, that letter E needs to be that cell size. Like, you know, it has to be the square. It cannot be a different element. But why? It's still legible, it's reasonable. And even though that's not the solution I would have, I may have preferred, but it does the same job in a way that it's actually exciting. So what we want to think about is this dark green circle is what your personal preference might be. And this light green circle is the area you would tolerate. And then the red part is that you would not. There is an actual harm. There's an objection that this is not going to work. So what we want to do is constantly through conversations, through meeting protocols, through sociocracy protocols, or any other ways. I mean, that's not the only way to do it. Move from objections to the area of consent. Now, this is good enough. We'll say, good enough for now, safe enough to try. Because anything beyond that, like trying to move over here, but everybody is like each other. Everybody is 100% agreed upon. That last 20% is not worth your time. So we want to keep things practical. As soon as you get into the space of consent, we'll say consent and let's move on. Because otherwise, this type of effort to get to this stage is not good for, is not, is not the amount of time and work that's needed and the result is not proportional. So consent gives you more to work with. Everybody has, if you were to like take a diagram, a vanish diagram here, you'll see that people have their preferences and you can see the overlap of their preferences. So each one of these, if you look at three individuals here, so this is one individual, second and third, they have an overlap of preferences. But with an overlap of tolerance, you have more to work with. And anything outside of this range will be things that you are not agreeing to. That's an objection. So with that, let's try an example out. So I would need a few volunteers and those will, so if I can get three volunteers, please raise your hand. I'm looking for three volunteers to do this exercise with me. Give me a thumbs up. Not I can also describe. If I can get three is probably not, it won't illustrate a point. Tom, did I see your hand raise? Well, video is ready. I really appreciate people on video because that way I can get another sense of feedback. So it looks like I'm not getting three volunteers at the moment and that could be because you'll be maybe multitasking or you may be busy or audio is too bad. That's okay. So I would have given, and we would have gone through rounds and I would have put myself in a round and we'd have gone around like one by one talking about what our reflections are and whether something is agreeable to us or not and then we would have gone to a concentra. So if our aim for today's session to the workshop is to understand the experience, understand experience, the basic principles of sociocracy and how might that work in our software development teams, our organizations, then I would have made a proposal. No cell phone use during this class except for emergencies or urgent calls. Then I would have gone. So for example, a few folks that have given me feedbacks if I would say, hey, let's go with Tom then Usha and then once Tom and Usha, well, what are your reactions to this proposal? So well, I don't like this proposal. I like this proposal because and then Usha then Sirath, so and then Sirath then me and then we'll go once we do that round, we hear all those objections and then we'll try to include those objections and we will make modifications to the proposals until we have integrated those objections and then we'll go and do a round of consent. All right, is this proposal good enough? Tom then Usha and Tom may say like, yes, agreeable. Usha may say yes, agreeable. And then Sirath may say, well, I still have objections. Then we can do another reflection. We wanna keep on going. It has to be some harm when an objection has to be real. Cannot be in the realm of perfect preference. And if we get consent from all of us, we agree and we move on. So it's really to illustrate what that steps look like and you can take this and implement it in any, I would say I've done this in agile teams. I've talked with in actually family gatherings as well. Here's the proposal, let's understand the proposal. People may have clarifying questions, their reactions, then we'll go do a round of explorations and then we'll consent to it, make those decisions and move on. So essentially that's one of the core pillars of sociocracy and in that it allows and includes voices and the benefit of going grounds and making sure that we are doing that circle or like, you know, that conversation is that you may have a question that somebody else already has asked by the time it comes to your turn, you've already got to hear that answer and then you may have a different question. So it's very, very efficient in that process. We talked about consent process. Now let's talk about circle structure. So, sociocracy really believes in decisions that are made in small groups. Small groups is important because if you're doing rounds with 40 people, that will take a very long time, one by one by one by one. So we create a smaller container of people that we call a circle and we build expertise and trust and create psychological safety. It's the somewhat similar to how Scramasa promotes seven to nine people so that, you know, we can limit the communication channels and make sure that we are working together closely. So this is an example of a circle of individuals who are working together towards an aim, whether that's an agile team, a governance board, leadership team, marketing, doesn't matter, they have a need to work together. And we know, you know, you guys are agilist that the pole point is both from individual tours teamwork. So say they have expertise, they have documentation and documentation is also core benefit that you get out of it. Like, you know, agenda making, documentation and so far has a ton of templates that you can use. I've used those templates to run my sprint planning sessions. I've used those templates to run my meetings and there's definitely elements and benefits in that. So the each circle needs to have an aim and domain, like area of responsibility, what can they do, what they can't do, right? And aim would be translated into purpose or charter, however you wanna call it, but they all need to have an aim and a domain of focus. So imagine we create a few circles. So this is one circle and they have their own expertise. They could be a circle. So if this is the intentional community, if that term's not familiar with you guys, say a community that has gardening, has electrical work, has construction, has infrastructure. So maybe this is the gardening group and then there's two other circle. So let's take an example of this group is a gardening circle and this is a fencing circle. So imagine that they are putting fences in that physical location and that creates shade on plants that need full sunlight. Now that's creates a problematic situation where, hey, why did you put these fences where they are? Because now you're impacting the plants, all the work that we've done for plants that need full sun. So obviously there is a missing communication link here. So what we do here is instead of creating silos, which is really how, even in agile transformations, we tend to create small teams, but then we forget the connecting layer. We forget the coordinating layer. So this is to first look at intentionally how do we make that connection? So if we had two representatives from each of these circles, let's call them a leader and a delegate, which is a selected position in that group. Then we form a new circle. So this gentleman and this young lady, they are part of this circle, but they're also part of this middle circle, the connecting layer. And then these two are part of this circle and these two are part of this circle. So when they have their own circle meetings and they turn around and join this circle, they can report out and they can share and tell, hey, we are putting new fences and this is the region. They can immediately say, well, hold on. Well, we have plants that require full sun and with your fence, they're good to have shade on it. How might we work together to make sure that you're not creating harm for our work? So because the opportunity exists. And by the way, if you go deeper into the idea of scrum of scrums or something like that, or if you're doing flight levels, it's the same idea. But what sociocracy or brings in is the idea of double linkage and that we have continuous flow of information throughout all these circles. And they meet and they make sure that those voices are brought up and how they work together. Each circle has their aim and domain. The circle in the middle, the general circle, their responsibility is making sure that we're connecting the child circles back to the main circle. And they have their responsibility to bring it back to say, well, here's what we heard. Here's new things that are coming up. So the general circle is a circle that has participants from all other circles. And we will create sometimes sub-circles like helping circles to solve a temporary problem or a long-standing problem. It really is more fluid than saying, hey, let's create a permanent team everywhere. But by having a mission circle, we can actually drive focus on policies, procedures, like funding, some people call it the governing board, but there is benefits in creating those circles. So now these guys are doing work, but they also have these linkages. So, and you can continue to evolve and this continues to grow. So within a circle, there are sociocracy calls out specific rules that have to be filled. So I already mentioned a leader. A leader of a circle has a responsibility and it's a selected position. So they all nominate, they all agree to objection, integrate objection and one person takes that role on. So the leader is the person who is responsible to run that circle, who has the mission in their mind, the aim in their mind. And that's not necessarily a person who holds authority because any one of them can be leaders and then the circle decides who should be the leader. But once they do it, they do have a responsibility. The delegate is a person who will work with this general circle to represent the voice and the double linkage is very important. We don't, so one of the things that missing and say scrum of scrums is we, sometimes those, especially feeling like a safe like environment or other places and S2 and S3, they delve into becoming a scrum master forum where only scrum masters attend, but none of the product owners do or none of the other people do. But by having that double linkage, A, you benefit from people can take on vacations. So we, I'm in the free and open source circle myself and we had a couple of times where the leader was who had to go on a call and the delegate was the only person available and other times the delegate had to go on a vacation but the leader was available. So we are always thinking about that there has to be a connectivity going up to the current circle. The other roles that is bureaucracy. 35 minutes more. Thank you, Pankaj. So the other roles are facilitator, similar to a scrum master, you can think of it and a secretary, a person who's taking notes. This secretary works with a facilitator to run the meeting and the facilitator works with the leader to make sure that anything we're hearing from the parent circle is also being brought in and brought in as our agenda items or our backlog to move forward. So similar sounding and very much, if you'd go deeper into it, there is a lot of correlation with how we set up agile teams. And this does not matter whether you're doing scrum, convo, none of that because it still applies to serves the need of, well, we have onboarded a new person, where do they even start? Where is the lightweight documentation? How do we keep it alive? And then the operational roles, for example, a web developer admin or just an example I gave of a community like gardening and fencing, those are operational roles and it's based on the type of work you do. So delegates are selected bottom up and confirmed, consented by the whole group and they're sent up and each group have those representatives going in. With that, this is the same picture, but with an illustration of why we do this. So this in the middle, I don't know if it's possible for you to see, we see if I can use a spotlight. So right here, if you see my red dot, this is the general circle. And then this is one, those circles like the gardening circle or the fencing circle. And the point of linkage here, because when you do a report out, that's the delegate. And when you're doing a report in from the parent circle, that's the leader. And you can always continue to morph and increase since you can have sub circles. But the point here, imagine all these people are standing in physical space and holding hands. So essentially it's like holding hands. This information is flowing bi-directionally and unseated, so unhindered. And that's the whole point, why we create structures like these so that we are not holding and blocking information where it's needed and when it's needed. Otherwise harm can be done. So with that, I will share this. I think that the slide deck will be shared with you guys, but essentially there's other models of governance that exist. You see if I can go back to that. So autocracy, democracy, no governance system, like no alignment, everybody running around everywhere. Whole group consensus is good, but when a whole group consensus takes a very long time and then finally sociocracy where circles and roles come in and it's one of the better ways. It's also not a silver bullet, but I've seen real benefit in improving the team dynamics by just applying the idea of rounds and the idea of consents. So a lot of eye charting because we're now going into, well, let's go into it. This is good. So how do you select a leader? How do you select a facilitator, right? Do you volunteer people, which is the way world has worked in the past? Well, the way sociocracy says and is so, this is where it becomes real, that you define the role and the length of that role. So say, hey, we are going to select a facilitator, but we want other people to take that opportunity. So we will hold that term for six months or three months. I mean, whatever rotation makes sense to you or a whole year. In some cases, these are longstanding position, but then gather the qualification. Well, what type of skills are we looking for as a team in that person? And then consent to the qualifications. Then we all sit down and write no down our nominations. We go through a nomination round. We go through a change round. We propose the candidate and we consent to who that is. With that, this is what a template we use. We'll say, for example, hey, facilitator. This person is a facilitator who's facilitating a small group meeting. Their term is just for today. Well, what type of skills do we need? And then people who are in the circle. So for example, if I were to say, like, you know, Usha, Sarath, Tom, Bart, they will put their name there. And then they'll all give an opportunity to nominate and we'll go in a round to look at the nomination. People may give a different person's name as a, hey, we really think Usha should be the facilitator or Sarath or Usha may say, well, Sarath may should be the nominee. So now we have some differences. Then we go, and why? And why should they be the nominee? And in that, we will ask questions. Okay, well, what was the reason? What's the reason for Usha's really, you know, she can really read a room. She can bring the feedback, bring the background information in the foreground. So all that. And this only gets to be revealed when you have gotten a chance to work together. So you don't really select it right away, but you can start. And if you say, well, I'm not quite sure, you can reduce the term so that we can experiment and as we get a chance to work more, then we find out, okay, over time, this is the direction we go. And then we go around, hey, do you have an objection to it, or would you tolerate it? And with that changed on, then we are able to come up with a second set. And finally, we do the consent round. So what that might look like, and I will share an example. I was gonna do this exercise, but since it may be difficult based on, this is the last call. So I will give an example of what that might look like. So in the first round, we go and go in a round and ask people, what are the skills needed for this person? Well, this person needs to hold space and the secretary is taking notes, they need to be themselves, good sense of humor, ability to multitask, be able to seek fairly. Whatever the group thinks, whatever the team thinks are the necessary skills for this person. And then those folks in the group, and you can add more roles if there's a larger circle, you can reduce roles if there's less. It really depends on what you guys are. But then you go in the rounds of, well, why do you think, so Tamsen would say Mary, well, why Mary? Well, because many hold all of these qualifications, really, really good at it. So then we go through nominations. Now, obviously most people said Mary and one person said Tamsen and Amir and we asked like, well, would you consent to Mary being a facilitator? Or is there a real objection there? And this is where the team comes on my ears. Yeah, I mean, I can see Mary can do it too, Tamsen can do it too. So I can change my position to the second round to Mary. But in some cases, they're gonna hold on. So we'll ask the last time, hey, is this a real objection or would you consent to it? And if they say, yeah, no, it's just a personal preference. I think Amir should be it and I shouldn't be the facilitator. But if I'm asked to do it, I will do it and you can totally nominate yourself. So with Mary saying Amir and everybody else is married, we had option of either Amir or Mary. And then we all go through consent round and if everybody consent to it and finally we make that selection. So just I'm gonna pause for now and see, because I've thrown a few things. We talked about rounds, we talked about consent and now we talked about circles, now more tactically speaking, the selection process. What questions might you have so far before we go to the next step? Put your question in chat. If something's puzzling you, if I used a term that was not very clear. Unmute yourself or write your question in chat. I do have chat window open. What questions might you have? Unmute yourself if you'd like to ask it live or if you wanna put it in chat. Thank you, Sirath. So sounds like I may be preaching to the faithful, like folks are already familiar with a lot of inclusive protocols. It's just another system and it's a very effective system. All right, so with that, since I don't see any questions coming up, I'm gonna go back to the slide deck. So who uses social advocacy? I probably don't need to give a lot of examples here but it's slowly, slowly it's going on to many circles. And by the way, so far itself uses social advocacy and I am part of the ecosystem's sub-circle. So I'm actually in the organizational chart too. So if you have interest in learning more about social advocacy and using their templates, some very bite-sized information, there's a lot of venues you can go to sociocracyforall.org slash training and you can find content that you can consume or join a public class. There's a lot of opportunities there. You can also join a sociocracy leadership training. I've been gone through an academy myself. So it was a year-long journey but it is very powerful to see how this can, other just understand the mental models, how do we practice and how do we get better at that? There are these three books, Many Voices, One Song, which is the Manual of Sociocracy, Who Decides, Who Decides? And then Sociocracy in School, similar to the Children's Parliament in India, which is also implementing that. So I will now leave it open to any other question. Actually, Pankaj, we seem to be closing earlier but how might we see if there's any questions people might have? Because I could, we could do, all right, there's some questions coming now. Aliyah is saying, can we use sociocracyforteam formation based on the nature of engagement? Tell me more. What do you mean by team formation? Could you unmute yourself? Aliyah, Aliyah, I'm missing your name, Dixit. Can you help me understand team formation? Do you mean like launching a brand new, standing up a brand new agile team? Is, was that your question? So if your question is about forming a team, I would say yes, there is ways you can improve depending on the level of organization, like who gets to decide what, who is part of a team. So when we are, when we have a leader who's newly formed, say, is a product owner or a team lead, typically they have already an idea of what the team's purpose might be. So that's a starting point and you can use elements of sociocracy to say, okay, well, what are the skills needed? What is that conversation? The way you will implement sociocracy, not in that particular setting as a wholesale but think about what are the skills needed and have that conversation as a team and invite feedback into what is your purpose? And the team liftoffs is a book that I think aligns very well with sociocracy and there's a lot of practical facilitation techniques in that book, if somebody can drop the link for team liftoffs by Diana Larson and you will find that they talk about purpose alignment and context. And when they're talking about purpose alignment and context, you can bring in elements of sociocracy and integrate those templates in that team launch process to make sure that when we are launching teams, people feel like they have a voice and they're working together to form it. So in that you could, but without knowing specifically what might be under team formation, I'm not sure how I could just, so I will need a little bit more information but what I would recommend is use things like team liftoffs and bring in elements of sociocracy. You will still have meetings, you still have workshops, you will still have to work through some of those differences and remove those objections, integrate those objections in a place where it's good enough for now. Thank you all, yeah. And, right. And yes, if I ramble on, you need to let me know that I may be going to maybe repeating myself at some point. Bart has a question, any tips on how to transition of traditional orgs to sociocracy? This is a very tough, tough question. The larger the organization, the more difficult it would be. I am consulting with a co-hosting community in Ecovillage and they have very little resistance moving into sociocracy, but they're also very small. They're growing very quickly, but they're small, the 40 people in total. But if you could talk with a larger organization, it's gonna be an uphill battle. But what I can do, and I was in an organization that had, you know, the particular group I was supporting, the 1800 associates, you can start to bringing elements of it in the teams that you influence or have a say in, but transitioning from a complete organization is probably going to be, you know, and Bart will probably familiar with the agile fluency. So that's the last zone, zone four, the one that we understand where we have a whole organization operating in synchronously. But if you're at a startup, I would say start from day one, but for traditional organizations, there's many, many steps to take. First with validated experiments within the organization why sociocracy is working. So having pilot and test groups within a few teams who are willing to make decision-making by consent and support that and evidence of that working, those are the things I would start with. Like, you know, where we have certain teams that could be further along and ready for it versus some support teams and other, say legal or marketing or compliance that may be harder. So where's the safe experiment and start there? But just like we say, not all of the, even agile fluency has four different zones, it doesn't mean that the fourth zone is the best zone for all of them, but sociocracy does belong in the fourth zone. So you may have one or two teams that are in that zone and start there. And when the organization starts to notice that, hey, look at how much value we got out of that, that's where there's energy to build upon and bring it to the rest of the organization. But the smaller the organization, the better. Right. Thank you, Bart. Any other questions? So with that, I will leave you, well, I will stay back for any more questions, but I think that was the content. We were planning to do a few breakouts, and that's where I said, well, can I get three or four volunteers? But I don't think that is as valuable for this group, but I do invite you to come in and learn more about sociocracy for all. And I can actually drop that link for you guys here in case it's not something that may be of interest for you to expand as an agile coach, like somebody says, well, how do we make an organization teal? Well, SOFA is one of those ways that you can actually make it teal. And it works, we have evidence, we have organizations that are now signing up and making this change, but it takes a while. It's not an easy solution, but it is a practical and purposeful solution. Thank you so much, Pankaj, for hosting me, and thank you everyone for listening attentively.