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Posted in Practicing Holacracy • By Tyler Danke • 02/07/2016

Creating a new anchor circle

My wife Ruth Danke and I own the company Purely Poultry which is currently a General Company Circle with 8 core partners that has been using Holacracy for 4 months now. My wife and I want to start other businesses as well. We are looking to basically create an Anchor Circle called "Danke Enterprises" or something like that and have the Purely Poultry GCC be a sub-circle of the Danke Enterprises Anchor Circle. Does this need to be passed through the governance of the Purely Poultry circle?

Are there any other company anchor circles that have only 2 partners in it other than the rep link from a sub-circle? Does that mean then that the Lead Link of the Anchor Circle has to be the Secretary and the other has to be the Facilitator?

3 Replies
Juliane Martina Röll
02/08/2016

Hi Tyler: Re your first question: The way to do this practically is to 

  1. Rename the existing GCC to "Danke Enterprises"
  2. Create a new Role for "Purely Poultry" and make that role into a circle, moving the existing Roles into it

This can/must be done through the Governance Process of the existing circle.

(Or alternatively you and your wife could revoke the decision to work with Holacracy and set the organisation up anew, if that seems more easy.)

Juliane Martina Röll
02/08/2016

Re: your second question: I think we (Structure & Process, at that time called Röll & Korvenmaa) had a structure like the one you image: There was an Anchor Circle (called "Board") which had Cross-Links for me and my business partner (and two more roles, for the partnership system and legal). Then there was the Rep-Link from the GCC, where the work took place. And of course, a Facilitator and a Secretary:

Röll & Korvenmaa Organisational Structure, March 2014
Röll & Korvenmaa Organisational Structure, March 2014
(taken from http://structureprocess.com/bl...cracy-alltag-praxis/)

At this time, our Anchor Circle had no Lead Link. When this changed later, then indeed, the Lead Link became Secretary and the other partner the Facilitator (to avoid having the same person fill Lead Link AND Facilitator, which would be unconstitutional). 

Does this help?

Tyler Danke
02/08/2016

Your questions answered it perfectly. Thank you so much Martin!