 Okay, let's start. You are in the session exploring holocracies or secrecy and reinventing organizations in a Drupal agency. And before I start I would quickly want to know who you are. I mean you must be here for a reason. So are you like owner of an agency? Maybe raise your hands. Okay, somehow owner, some people working in an agency, most likely you are. All right, happy with your current organizational model. Raise your hands. Nice. Okay, all right, so let's start. I'm also an owner of a agency, Drupal agency, Netnode in Switzerland and a couple of years back I asked myself this question. How can we as individuals, I and everybody of us in our organizations, clients, we as an agency actually tackle 21st century challenges and foster universal thriving? So kind of finding the purpose. What should I do? What should we do as an organization? And I came up with a version like my inspired future is this. What if we have a sense of community, relationship and love when we go to work? What if we find inner peace between work, private life and everything in between or happy and have a strong sense of self efficacy? What if we actually apply regenerative practices in our daily lives, circular economy and actually you understand that there is an abundance in nature? What if we can go to work and express our full potential, our creativity? What if we know that high tech and low tech work hand in hand? So it's not always the latest and greatest and that open source is a good way to go. And what if we actually understand that we only live on one earth and that we actually have to develop an integral worldview? Well, this is just like words and maybe an inspired future. But I want to show you some patterns and new paradigms for maybe the future of work. So I'm gonna quickly explain what yesterday's world and today's world is and new paradigms, principles then about holocracies or secrecy as three. Also I want to show you how we transformed to a more distributed leadership company. And then I give you three tips on how you can start. Is that okay for you? Nice. Okay, I'm Lucas. I'm the founder of NetNow Digital Agency from Switzerland. I'm mostly geeking about digital strategy and web technology. And recently we founded a new project called Node Hive App, which is an eco-conscious headless CMS built on top of Drupal. While doing that I'm also a passionate gardener. So this was a good season. I don't know about yours, but the tomato exploded. I'm also a passionate composter. So this is one of my warm, worms in the warmery. And I'm also a cyclor. So let's go deeper with yesterday's world versus today's world. And I don't want to, you know, educate you on that, but it's more like built a ground for what I'm trying to express in this presentation. So what is the, what was the yesterday's world? Well, it was driven by oil. Oil has a very compressed energy and it helped us to grow our economies. So growth was after the world, after the world wars, the big thing. So actually our economy and also our population exploded. And if you compare to the decades before, it was a relative stability. The last, let's say, 60, 70 years. So we had stable jobs, stable income. Consumers started. Everybody wanted to have a car, a television, and everything else. And everything was driven by globalization. I mean, think about Coca-Cola everywhere in the world. And the paradigm was maybe competition. So it was like we either beat them or they beat us. So better beat them first. The management approach was profit-driven and hierarchies were set in place or are set in place to actually handle this massive growth. It was mostly command and conquer, planning and processes. So you actually set up a long-term project plan and then you rigorously followed it, commanded it, and controlled it. And everything happened in, you know, you could say, discreteness or you could also say it was just intransparent. I mean, I'm from Switzerland and I'm sure you heard the stories about the Swiss banks, for example. I mean, this is a bit over-exaggerated, but you get the point. Today's world, also known as the VUCA world or Barney world. I won't go deeper into that. You can look that up on Wikipedia. It's obviously driven by digital transformation. So everything digital transforms markets. It maybe replaces markets. The explosion of generative AI will maybe replace many of us or we maybe adapt first. There is also today increased complexity, so we are interdependent more and more, globalization. There's lots of information shifting around. It's not only increased complexity, but also increased pace. So everything is going faster and that has a big, big impact on individual lives, whether it's personal or whatever, family systems, villages, cities, and societal changes at all. And that gives pressure towards all the systems. So they have to be more adaptable, more agile, and even for us as Drupal Agency, for example, or whatever organization, yeah, we have to find an answer to that, right? Also in today's world there is a big value shift. I mean, think about boomers versus generation set. They have definitely a different approach to life. And there is climate change, ecosystem breakdown, loss of biodiversity. We'll see how that impacts us, even in Europe. And there are all these new fancy tools, AI, IoT, robotics that it certainly will change our daily lives. So this is today's world. Do you agree? Is that today's world? You experienced this? Okay, a lot of nothing. So my question is actually, this is the management approach of yesterday and maybe for a lot of company, even today. And the question is, is that still viable for today's and tomorrow's world? And my personal answer is not, but I ask you, is your organization ready for tomorrow? So this presentation is about new paradigms for the future of work. And I will explain the concepts and the foundations of it, how, yeah, how we can tackle that. And actually, we don't have to look too far. As developers or whatever agencies, we know HL methods, Scrum, Kanban, maybe you heard of getting things done, maybe use it, design thinking, OKRs. I mean, there are many of these labels and these ideas and systems. And I'm certainly you practiced them in some form. And I'm less a fan of whatever specific system, but more of the question, what are the foundations of that? And I will go deeper with that now. And I want to quote this book, Reinventing Organization by Frederick Lalu. And I'm not sure who knows this book. Maybe raise your hands. A couple of it. That's nice. And I mean, the story of Frederick Lalu is very interesting. He was a consultant, I guess, in one of the big consulting organizations. And then he went on a journey to, yeah, travel around the world and went to organizations who had somehow a different approach to management. And he came up with this book and documented it. And one of the key results is he came up with this model of these circles. And I will explain it very quickly. So you see five circles. It's the red, orange, yellow, orange, green and teal circle. And each of these circle has specific criteria. And it's not that this is like black or white or correct or wrong. It's a model. It's an abstraction of reality, you could say. And it's a map for me. It's like a map for myself and for my organization. And to discuss about it. And I want to explain each of these circles rather quickly. Let's start with red. So red is the impulsive circle. And in the impulsive circle, the management approach is you do what I say or I kill you. You know, there is one big boss. An example is the mafia or the street gang. Think about that. There is a yellow circle. Yellow circle, you can call it a traditional approach. A management approach is we do it very structured and very bureaucratic. Think about, let's say, the military or traditional churches, governance, university schools. And the goal was with this iteration in the organizational structure was to introduce replicable processes and a stable organization chart. Next circle is the orange circle or also called the achievement circle. And the management approach is we innovate, we compete, we win and we make a lot of money. Work hard, play hard. Right? Examples, think about multinational corporations, universities, startups who want to gain the whole market in the world. And this was driven by thinking about innovation. Innovation is a good thing. So we can grow its accountability. If we can get, we have to go there and you get promotion when we get to this goal. And that's actually the very positive thing about the orange circle. It's the concept of meritocracy. Basically, it was the first time in history where people who were not born into a certain status had the ability to go up the ladder. I mean, think about maybe a child of a farmer from the lands becoming the CEO of a multinational company. This was not possible before, right? Or not possible based on these principles. That's the orange circle. Then there is the green circle also called the pluralist approach. Management approaches. We are a family. We are all equal people, planet profit. Think about nonprofits, NGOs, software companies. And aspects of it is empowerment. It's value-driven culture. And it's also stakeholder value. Not only shareholder value, but also stakeholder value. I think lots of people working with open source or maybe even through Paul Dayover, tending to be in this green circle. I certainly are with netnotes. But Lalu found an additional circle. It was actually interesting that there is something new evolving, or it exists already, and he called it teal approach, integral worldview. And the management approach is we are a self-managed, holistic and adaptive organization. We dance with the system. What does that mean? Think about the company like Patagonia. I think it was this year. They released that all the profits they make, they give to nature. So basically they have a big fund and they invest the money into projects, saving whatever they want to save. There are many other organizations. I cannot go into too much detail. It's very interesting. So this teal organization have a new approach to how they organize. One is self-management, wholeness, and evolution of purpose. I will go into deeper into that in the following slides. So I said it's like a model. And my question to you is, where would you place your organization there? Are you orange? Maybe even yellowish or already teal? It's interesting discussion. So what are these typical characteristics of green and teal organizations? What can we learn from these organizations? And how do they actually work? It tends to be that they are organized not in hierarchies but in circles. So this is an illustration from a holocracy standpoint. So you have circles. A circle has clear boundaries. A circle has a purpose. And within a circle you have roles. And new circles can evolve. They can be destroyed. New roles can evolve. They can be destroyed. Stuff can merge. So it's like a more organic approach. So it's not a static, hierarchical power structure. Dynamic roles is another characteristic. What does it mean? A dynamic role is basically something that you can name. Let's say the holocratic approach is you give it a name, a role has a purpose, and the role has a set of accountabilities. It could be a marketing role. And purpose is obviously do marketing and bring our services products to the market. Accountabilities you can list them. But now instead of keep them static, there is a process in place to make this, change this role on the fly. Basically all the time. Actually then when there is a tension and the tension leads to a change in accountabilities. So there is a way and understanding that roles are not fixed, but they are actually fluid and can change whenever they need to. There's also a prototyping mindset. So instead of command and control in more traditional organizations, it's more like a sense and response approach. And this is actually saying from so secrecy, they say it's good enough for now and safe enough to try. So why wait until the boss decides and give a go? We actually consent on something and they say it's good enough now and safe enough to try it. So let's do it. Very important for green and teal organizations. Concept decision making. This is a little bit tricky. Who is aware of consent decision making actually? And who has experience with it? You do it in your company? Okay. I quickly explain it. So actually the idea is no one objects. So it's not that you have to say to something, to say yes to something, but you actually have to say I'm okay with that or I do not object. I make an example. So let's think about this three person. The first person wants to go and eat pizza. The second one wants to have spaghetti. And the third one wants to have vegan food. Oh, so okay, how do we agree on that? How do we decide on that? If we go with the cons, the consense mode and I quickly consense, consensus mode, we are actually here. So we try to find a shared preference. So we have to discuss and negotiate all the time until everybody agrees on. Right. In consent mode, you actually say to what proposal do you object or not object? So it's actually the bigger one. So it's actually shared range of tolerance. So let's say this lady suggests, oh, let's go to pizzeria. Do you object? And then nobody says, oh, actually I'm fine because the vegan guys as well sure they have vegan food and the pizza guy is anyway happy. And the ladies as a pretty sure that they also serve pasta. So they can go on. So they don't have to agree on and decide that and find consensus. Very powerful concept. Try it out in your daily routine when you have to make decisions. Very, very powerful. Another concept characteristic of this organization is, I mean, this is not revolutionary. I mean, the goal is really to go step by step, start with small changes, make an evolution over time. So prefer evolution over revolution. Another characteristic that these organizations have, and this is also a finding of of Lalu. These organizations have a clear rulebook, an explicit explicit rulebook. What does it mean? An example is if your organization runs on holocracy, they have to agree on this holocracy constitution. So it's actually a book like a constitution. Yeah, I think it's five or six chapters. And you have to basically sign it and say, Hey, now we run under the holocracy constitution. And all the rules are there. How you run operational meetings, how you run governance meetings, you can read it up and it's clear how your organization should be work. Why is that good? I mean, you say, Well, I don't want to follow whatever Bible somebody wrote. The thing is, you don't have to go with holocracy constitution. But the goal here is to have a rulebook, which is explicit to bring up transparency, and also which basically leads them into making building trust, because you know how decisions are done, how things actually work. So it's very explicit and very clear and also very powerful. And it can be very simple, right? It's not like a book that should be like 200 pages, maybe just one page, how decisions get done. So that was more or less the base concepts of paradigms of new way of working. And now I want to make it a bit more concrete, because you don't have to reinvent the wheel yourself. You can actually adopt one of the systems of secrecy or the sociocratic circle method, holocracy or S3, which are the most known systems. And it's actually quite hard to explain them in a 45 minute session, because each one deserves, I don't know, half a day workshop to get an understanding of it. But I try to give you some insights how they are different, how they are different and how they are structured. But they have a lot of things in common. So what are the overarching goals of holocracy, S3, and sociocracy? As I said before, transparency is very important. And especially transparency, who owns the control? Who controls the power within an organization? So that should be very explicit. And also how you can change the control of power. Then also equality in decision making. So everybody's voice is important. It's not the founder's voice or the one with the most experience. It's everybody's voice, very important point. It's also a sense of personal and shared responsibility. So you are accountable if you own a role, but you do it for the purpose of the circle. And I also mentioned that it's all about dynamic and adaptable roles. So it's basically becoming a dynamic and adaptable organization if you adopt one of these models. So holocracy, sociocracy, 3.0, sociocracy. Holocracy was invented around, I think 2010, maybe a bit earlier. And the holocratic constitution I mentioned before describes the concept of circles, roles, accountabilities, tensions, tactical and governance meetings. That's actually all you have to know to run on holocracy. A typical structure is circle structure is the one below. Sociocracy 3.0 is a little bit more complex. It's actually a collection of 75 patterns. So one pattern, for example, is how you run on circles or tensions. But they also have seven overarching principles and five concepts. So it's a little bit abstract. That's why there are several ways how you can structure yourself. So it's not just one version, but you can actually pick your own. You can even think it as a Drupal site. So install Drupal core, and then you can install the web form module and whatever module you like. And then you have your own custom solution. Sociocracy is a little bit more simpler. So there's four core principles, circle, circles, linking or the double linking, concession, consent decision making, and how you give feedback. And in general, you can say holocracy is very, very structured with this constitution. And a lot of IT companies adopt holocracy because it's for, let's say, developers. It's very easy to understand. Because it's more or less like code. The constitution, by the way, is on GitHub. So you can make merge requests or pull requests for the next version of the holocratic constitution if you want to. And Sociocracy is maybe more for social organizations. I know lots of organizations in Switzerland who adopt that, let's say, in elderly care organizations, even schools. And the one between Sociocracy is for the ones who need a custom solution or want a custom solution. And by the way, this is just guidelines. I mean, you can do whatever crassly you want to do. For example, we started with holocracy and now we call it node crassly because of node, node crassly. And we have our own flavor of it. And we are happy with that. So it's not that you follow whatever Bible you want to follow, right? So our journey at Netnode, by the way, this is the current structure we have. These are the circles we have at Netnode. Actually, in 2017, I heard about the book Reinventing Orization, the one I was mentioning before. And then it was the first time I learned about this distributed authority, you know, this concept of holocracy, etc. I found it resonated very much with me. And we started to experiment with the consent method. And it took a while, actually, until we really adopted holocracy. And this is actually the photo in a retreat we did. And we had an internal workshop and we adopted holocracy. And personally, myself, I did two workshops about holocracy and I learned it and also became a holocracy coach. And from the very beginning, we started to use a tool, the screenshot I just before, so I just show before with the circles is holo spirit. It's one of many tools to document your evolution on how you go with how your organization develops. And we use holo spirit for that. Since then, we made many, many iterations. So actually, these are screenshots. We make them every quarter. And we created new circles. We thought we found out this is wrong. We started new team circles, we split them, we merged them. So we found a model to vary dynamically, and also vary transparently to the whole team to be adaptable. And everybody was always informed what's going on in the organization, even if you were not part of a specific team. But we also learned that holocracy is not the full solution. So holocracy only gives you one piece. So it's really operational how you do meetings, how you structure your governance meetings, how you change roles and stuff. But we found there was something lacking. It was about how we come together as humans. And then we started to introduce what we call a culture book until today. And the culture book is a collection of basically slides now. And we also built a website which is fully public. You can look it up. So we describe what is our mindset? What are our tools? And what are our practices in our daily life? And we, I mean, we use them all the time. So if somebody joins the company, it's the first place we go and say, hey, look, we use nocracy. This is the structure. This is how we work. And it's very easy to explain what our culture is. And it's very close to daily life. So it's not some document written. And then we use it for the next three years. It's really, we update that on time, all the time. That was very important to us by adopting holocracy and then also evolving some other deliverable, the culture book, which we can evaluate on. So what's next? Basically, we want to cultivate the net-node forest. So what does it mean? We want to grow as an organization. We want to grow within the teams, grow as individuals and find flow everywhere. And what I think is important and it's nothing new, we have to work on soft skills. So it comes very obvious. So if you run on that and then you cannot give feedback or proper feedback and also get proper feedback and react open, it doesn't work, right? And so we are planning to do a nonviolent communication workshop, for example. One thing that also holds us and probably me as the founder of the company back, I also have old habits still somewhere in my head and they pop up from time to time and I have to really unlearn them. And in the end, what's interesting when you run on these concepts, it comes down to how do you grow as an individual or everybody within the organization. So it's a lot of inner work and it's interesting also to see the growth of people who are within the organization in the last years. So how could you start? I mean, the books are out there. I think it's interesting that when you do an MBA today, you hardly learn these new concepts, but you can read reinventing organizations, holocracy book, sociocracy book, it's out there. It's something we should have in the curriculum in the schools. Then also one very easy thing to start is take this circles, this map and discuss it in the team. Where are you? Where are you when in what situation and what is the dynamics within the organization? And a third one, which is also a good way to start, it's called the OS converse. So instead of saying, oh, tomorrow I learned about holocracy, I want to do that. And so we adopt holocracy and then we run on that. I wouldn't recommend that. I would recommend to start slow and this nine fields are different topics you can start and have a conversation around it. For example, the one of the top right information and communication. Well, you can discuss how is actually information flowing from whom to whom and why it's like that and can I give a feedback if so, how, etc., etc., right? So who is who actually owns the power of information, information sharing, or what are the meetings, why do we do the meetings the way we do, how they are coordinated? And then you can maybe go deeper and say what is the policy or the governance of our company? So how do we do decisions? Is it always the boss or project manager or whoever has a strong power in the company? Or can we do that differently? So you see the concept, so it's really growing into this and then at one point you say well, okay we have now an understanding or common understanding how this can develop in the future then maybe you adopt some system. Yeah, that's it for the moment. So I come back to my calling question in the beginning. How can we facilitate you and me and us, facilitate individuals and organizations to tackle 21st century challenges and foster universal thriving? For me the answer is it's definitely not the left thing. For me it's the organic, ever-evolving world and with that said I have to bring that slide up, join the contribution opportunities the whole week and please feel also the sessions are we directly in the mobile app and that's it for my presentation. Maybe you have some questions now. I will repeat the question, go ahead. So the question is how do you find an agreement on the next steps in adopting that stuff and there are strong objections towards that. Is that correct? Absolutely. So in holocracy there is actually the concept of proving the objection if it's actually a valid objection and there are four questions and one question is actually do you object based on an assumption that something could happen in the future so theoretically see a fear but it's not proven by evidence then the object objection is invalid. So it's very strong. You actually say hey why do you do that? You're feared now but I'm not feared I want to do that. So what's your problem? Obviously you could say hey we tried this in the in the past and we tried this and we tried this and we lost money it was you know the whole of the company left so okay your option is probably right. So you can test that and also objections are actually very valid because a very valuable because an objection is always a source for improvement. So in every objection there is some sense of truth and you have to find the truth. I'm sure if a person objects you have to find out it's just objection because you're lazy or you don't want to you don't you don't like change but there is something inside it and you have to find it out. Actually the facilitator the facilitator's job in a meeting is to find the reason for that objection and then if you found it and if it's a valid objection you try to integrate it and one solution and we do that all the time is how can we make the project smaller so it's good enough for now and safe enough to try so you don't have to change everything right now so you can do it slowly and then learn on the way. Other questions so there are many feedback options and it's one of on the culture book it's many we describe it as feedback and how we do that and one important thing is obviously we do retrospectives very easy then we do one-on-ones that's very very important so basically a safe space for two people to come together and discuss certain situations and maybe also address what happened in that situation okay you can do that and let's go forward and let's try next time. Yeah so the question is who runs the one-on-ones and sounds like attention so I immediately react in a holocratic way so it sounds like a tension so yeah it's a question but let's say in our organization it's like a tension so who why why why is this person responsible to do one-on-ones well you discuss it and you say well maybe this person is for a long period in the company he knows a lot of it and maybe he has the natural accountability to do that right so it's like a and yeah I mean the thing is there is there should be a role for that one-on-one and then there is a process to build that role and people can object and like it or don't like it so I don't know if that answers your question it's very interesting what you say it's very interesting what you say because for me it's it's so obvious and for you it's not and I explain my my thought process so you are actually looking for a plan to solve an issue that might come up in the future so you have an existing structure and you don't know how you do it and you want to have a system in place that can work the next 12 months somehow like that and I would say well let's just start you have people managers they are the one-on-one people and then it's set and then you can say in two weeks somebody comes up and say I have a tension with that you know how a people manager knows what we do in a project so he cannot really coach me for example or the project project manager comes so it's an evolutionary process it's not something you design it's small step it's iterative you start with small changes and start to adopt it so the best way is actually define a role and then start and see what happens so my experience is since we made this transition it's much easier to find people because I think people are looking for this purpose-driven organizations and also where they can have an impact also on the structure of the organization that's one part and then on the other part you're right so there is a skills that should be there that it actually works but the thing is you don't have to know it how it works you have to be open enough and you just yeah you want you should want to learn it once you join for example netnode or such a company and actually we have also processes it was many tensions about that how do you learn all the holocracy practices okay so we have the holocracy role and you can always go there and ask questions we have the one-on-one so it's like a thing we learn how to do that over time onboarding for example yeah yeah and also onboarding not only onboarding on how you how the development infrastructure works but also how we do decisions and how everything works how we work how our culture is basically any other questions go ahead yeah so the question is does it work for bigger organizations and does it work for teams single teams in bigger organizations right and I don't know I run a small Drupal agency we are only 12 and I'm not consulting about that but I was at the conference in earlier this year and rushed the pharma company they adopted holocracy with a department or group of 1500 people it's like I don't know how many teams they are they have like a fleet of consultants and they try to shift towards that so I don't know if that worked out or they are now adopting it I don't know are you from rush no you're not from us yeah I mean rush is like 70,000 and it's like the Switzerland branch they they adopted and what I can say I I have the tendency but this is my personal view I think it should be very top-down if the leadership team is not into that and sees it as you know we do new work now and we are fancy then it doesn't work out that's my personal opinion but any other questions it's very interesting actually yeah yeah so the question is does it work out financially for us that's that's and the other one how we do it if it doesn't work well something like that I mean personally I have to say we as Netnode are as the most resilient than ever we were before in the history of the company what I'm saying is everybody can now see risks issue and bring that up so we are really agile and also you know we really sense and not only you know the founder or the owner of the company but everybody's actually sensing and bringing up tensions so I'm very confident that we are much stronger than we when we go with this then without so what happens if let's say business is not going well I mean you have its dynamic roles you can also go back to a more reddish way of organization and that's maybe not even bad during crisis it totally makes sense you have a leader that says we do that as a next step and if we as an organization adapt to that say okay now it's not going well okay we need somebody that exactly says what's the next step and we do that naturally why not doing that but this is not the default assumption I think that's also the very important thing you have a question okay so I just want to tell one story or one one image you can think of and it's actually by the by the founder or the inventor of holocracy Brian Robertson and he says running an organization on a traditional power hierarchy is like you sit in a car and the handbrake is already in place and you try to push on the on the on the gas pedal you know coming forward because there's all these rules and stuff in place and you know you're gonna come forward we have to finish okay let me finish that one but running on holocracy is actually you you go full throttle you can go go go and then at one point you see oh there is a you know there is something coming up an obstacle as I should we break should we break no we don't we don't and then you don't meet you don't hit it you go next so that was cool you're really fast you're developing innovating and then maybe something happens you know and okay maybe this was too fast so then you start to hit the break and not from the beginning so that's the concept of it yeah I hope I could inspire you and we have to close and I'm here also if there are questions thank you very much