Brainstorm help on defining full working team structure

[wolftune]

Background context

We’ve used a form of sociocracy-like circles to get to a semi-functioning list of current roles and circle groups broken into “main”, “outreach”, and “website” circles, but it’s got definite issues.

I’m reading more about Sociocracy 3.0 to learn best practices from that as a new starting point for an overhaul.

I also have lots of thoughts that I’m struggling to organize, see my draft list of updated roles — this is focusing on aspects the current structure misses.

Moving forward from here

While we could just focus on using Sociocracy concepts to evolve our structure, I want to identify unfilled roles with adequate specifics in order to recruit new team members for specific roles.

An attempt at a driver statement:

Roles are not complete, defined well enough, or filled adequately. So, it’s sometimes unclear who should be taking care of what, what things are needed that nobody is handling, what expectations are for team members, or how to address situations where expectations aren’t being met.

We need a complete list of all the roles that, if filled, would get Snowdrift.coop fully launched with all key concerns addressed and all roles supported, sustained, and with clear succession plans.

Requesting discussion help

While we could discuss tweaks in our current setup, I’d like to have a clear generic chart to use as an example. Consider any similar organization, what are all the roles they have? Some use language like “CEO”, “CFO”, “COO”, “CTO” etc etc. We may not use that, but we need analogous or at least coverage of the same accountabilities. Maybe we can find some examples to use as models?

We could also just pick more specific tensions, get a big brainstormed list, and then work through that to try to get a proposed starting point.

My vision is to have something that looks like it may be complete, recruit to fill it all, and then use Sociocracy concepts to let it evolve from there.

Who’s up for helping here?

[photm]

In case anyone stumbles upon this: The discussion at
the governance issue Update role definitions and roles (Formerly “Compile complete list of roles for thriving team”) is very relevant to this. Quoting from there, the next steps are:

• Define clear priorities, find out what needs to happen now

That’s our goal over at Driver statement for better milestones and roadmap etc.

• Decide what to do about it, e.g. define roles + recruiting strategy

I wrote Proposal forming: Coming up with creative actions to address important drivers to introduce a way to do this collaboratively. (While reading it, translate meeting/agenda to forum/posting.)

• Do this as soon as possible. (This includes discussing as little as possible until you can get to the do-this step.)

The consent decision process is useful for this, as it produces a clear moment when an actual decision is reached that we can then implement. Plus since it’s inspired by sociocracy 3.0, it is very much designed to make decisions quickly, instead of making perfect decisions.

• Repeat and evolve.

This is what reviews (see the consent decision process) are for. They’re not working currently (the consent decision process should’ve been reviewed at the end of march, we didn’t do that), we should fix this soon. We should also consider using the peer review S3 pattern for evolving roles.

I think having this overall perspective in mind can help appreciating the importance of the individual pieces. In particular, after writing this, I think we should speed up our process here and there.

[alignwaivers]

Yeah this is definitely a topic, wish I had more insight here but glad it was brought up. @photm glad you brought up the relevant documentation we already have on it too.

Here was something I personally found somewhat valuable to contextualize or working structures: We are probably almost entirely functional with some degree of matrix, yes?

• |Simple Structure |Simple structures do not rely on formal systems of division of labor, and organizational charts are not generally needed. If the firm is a sole proprietorship, one person performs all of the tasks that the organization needs to accomplish. Consequently, this structure is common for many small businesses.|
• |Functional Structure |Within a functional structure, employees are divided into departments that each handles activities related to a functional area of the business, such as marketing, production, human resources, information technology, and customer service. |
• |Multidivisional Structure |In this type of structure, employees are divided into departments based on product areas and/or geographic regions. Jim Pattison Group, for example, has nine product divisions; Food and Beverage, Media, Entertainment, Automotive and Agriculture, Periodical Distribution and Marketing, Signs, Packaging, Forest Products and Port Service, and Investments and Partnerships.|
• |Matrix Structure |Firms that engage in projects of limited duration often use a matrix structure where employees can be put on different teams to maximize creativity and idea flow. As parodied in the movie Office Space, this structure is common in high tech and engineering firms.|

I’ll help with this, at the very least with helping to document (after we discuss today) and get it posted