I'm really curious how having different roles undermines the culture shift to engaging roles, not souls. It is my experience that having different roles (as long as they have clearly distinguishable accountabilities) is preferrable to one role.

To answer your question, technically you might me able to do it. You can not change the governance of a sub-circle. However, you can move roles from a sub-circle to a super-circle.  If you are reallly sure that these roles are all affecting you and should be in the GCC, I think you could propose moving them from the product circle to the GCC. After that you would be able to collapse them into one.

I think you should think really hard about if you would want to do that though. Meddling in the governance of a sub-circle should never be required from a super-circle perspective, because there is a clear way of making it explicit what you want to expect from a circle.

You can ask something to a role in a sub-circle directly, but unlike if you ask something from a role to a role in the same circle, the role you're asking is not obliged to process it.

I don't know the long story about missing Lead Links, but that would be the problem here. Without it, there is no one who has to do anything with the accountabilities the GCC sets on the Product circles, so no tension about unclear governance has to arise there.

The development roles are filled by one person, but in reality largely executed by people outside the organization that that one person manages. The accountabilities are also unclear to everyone but him, because it's very technical language, and he's not someone bought in sufficiently to care about making those clarifications.

As Facilitator of every circle, I consistently hear some variation of “I don't know which role of his to engage, but it's a Matt thing”. Sometimes the tension-holder will try to figure it out so we can capture an output correctly “Engage <insert role> about…” and it winds up feeling like a waste of time, instead of the healthy practice it is. These roles were also the genesis of a Plain Language Governance policy, and continue to be hard to decipher.

My perspective as our Social Technologist: as a new holacracy (that is transitioning towards full adoption of the Constitution), the work around development was over-engineered in a way that's unnecessarily differentiated to the point of being counter-productive.

If all the roles in a circle are filled by one person, that does sound like the circle might not be nescesary

There are a whole bunch of other roles filled by other partners. But there are 7, the only ones related to development, all filled by one person.

Fred Magovern posted:

There are a whole bunch of other roles filled by other partners. But there are 7, the only ones related to development, all filled by one person.

HI Fred I have a question: if those monopersonal roles are not the only roles in the subcircle you refer to, even if you extract them and bring them up, what prevents them from being recreated in the next governance meeting of that circle? Especially IF the tensions that created them in the first place are still there and the accountabilities of the subcircle stay untouched? (unless that was the initial setup of the circle as designed during adoption)

I wouldn't extract them because they belong within Product. As a GCC tactical output, I've asked the Product Lead Link to process the tension.

These roles were not created out of tensions - they were part of our governance kick-off. But there is nothing stopping tension-driven changes that might further differentiate them. I trust how they will be differentiated from that more principled starting point will work much better though.

ah ok, then  "Matt" sounds like a very  good Lead Link candidate for the product Circle once you assign them), btw I don't think a Lead Link role can stay constitutionally unfilled where it is prescribed (5.2.2 and 5.3 don't say that explicitly but seem to imply it in my interpreation) .