Practices for effective meetings, proposal forming and decusion making

Presenters Frederik Vannieuwenhuyse, Siemen Bastiaens

context

• 5 Agile teams
• Needed more interaction between the 5 different teams

Need: Chapters, CoP

We had the visit of the guy behind: Sociocracy 3.0

Sociocracy

Collection of practical guide influenced of lean/agile…

Driver concept

What is your source of motivation?

Tensions: what are the frictions that prevent you from reaching your goal

Ex: Setting up jenkins instead is a pain in the a.. we need a fast way to set them up.

next step: let’s approach it in an iterative step by step way Is it good enough for now and safe enought to try

Decision making

• Majority
• Consensus

In sociocracy we want to have consent. = Proceed if we have no reason to not to proceed.

Do you have any objections? Then let’s go. Otherwise: Share the objection, treat it as a gift and use it as an opportunity to improve.

In sociocracy concern does not stop the way to change

objection: concern:

Way of voting

At the same time everyone gives a thumb up or down

Ex: Objections: it must not be in the cloud

Solution: remote the in the cloud concept and vote again

Proposal forming

Structured approach:

1. Consent to drive
2. List questions
3. Consider the questions in a round table format
4. Gather info about questions
5. Time boxed creative session to spread ideas
6. Define tuners: Who would like or should be tuning this proposal
7. Tunner will design the proposal (in small group, offline, after the meeting)

Ex:

1. List questions
   • what is jenkins?
   • what do you mean by dev process?
2. Consider questions
   • what are the constraint regarding budgeting?
   • How many steps to spin up a jenkins instance?
3. Ideas
   • train
   • automate
   • use SaaS
4. Select motivated tuners
5. Proposal

Consent Decision Making

You have a proposal, let’s have a consent

Structured approach:

1. Consent to driver
2. Present proposal
3. Clarifying Q?
4. Brief response (give a short word or phrase to summarize or know if they like it or not) [optional?] facilitator
5. Any objections? -> gift
6. Resolve objections facilitator Check if it’s: Safe enought and Good enought to try then it’s ok
7. Vote
8. Celebrate
9. Consider Concerns (if there is time left) + note them or share them

Ex: Objection: What if Jan goes on holiday what may happen?

• Re-appoint tuners & tune the proposal to resolve the objection, include the objecter in the solution design

How did it help?

• More alignment
• More focus
• Step by step approach (Safe enough to try & good enough for now?)
• Give structure
• Everyone has an opportunity to say something

Tips

• Postopone solution thining, let’s keep the structured ways, ask them to note on post-it
• Do not assign, pull, not push, if no volunteer maybe you are doing to much –> Use kanban board with a wip limit on the number of drivers
• facilitator facilitate
• Keep collection questions and answering them after one by one
• Keep the same team

Questions

• What about people that are not in the group that will object later on?

  We just move forward and create a new driver if the objection is a real problem

• How long does it take to have consent

  It needs 2 weeks to have a consent

• Does the tuner have a kind of spike to try out thing and propose solution?

  tuning phase takes up to two weeks

• % time

  1h / week for decision a bit more for the tunners

• tuners could be involved in the execution of the process but it’s not mandatory