Holacracy Community of Practice Archive, 2015-2019 Community Holacracy Web Site
Posted in Practicing Holacracy • By Fritz von Allmen • 01/10/2018

Question: do you have binding rules from outside your anchor circle?

When we adopted the Holacracy practice we quickly came to to a simple question that we fail to answer upon today: shall we transfer all "binding rules" into regular policies or should there be something "outside" our anchor circle that limits of what we can do or not.

I'm speaking of certain work regulations (how much vacation people have), binding security rules we have to follow because of laws etc.

I would like to know if you in your organization have to obey to certain limitations that come from outside your anchor circle thus established holacracy-processes (tensions, integrations) do not work because they basically affect a domain that's not hold by any circle yet limits your actions

2 Replies
Adam Banko
01/15/2018

We tried importing some rules from the environment and that had two issues.

1. Gave the impression that these are rules that we could change via Governance that lead to some awkward moments and disappointments.

2. All the other rules (laws) that we didn't show in our governance still applied and that lead to some more confusion.

What we ended up doing was asking the Legal role to create summaries and we linked to those as "Notes" in GlassFrog, sometimes we linked to them from Policies so people get the context. This way it was clear this is not part of Our governance, we don't control it, but it's there and available in GlassFrog.

I guess you could also have these as Policies as long as it's clearly stated, which rules are not part of our governance and just linked/copied here for convenience.

Fritz von Allmen
01/15/2018
Adam Banko posted:

We tried importing some rules from the environment and that had two issues.

1. Gave the impression that these are rules that we could change via Governance that lead to some awkward moments and disappointments.

2. All the other rules (laws) that we didn't show in our governance still applied and that lead to some more confusion.

What we ended up doing was asking the Legal role to create summaries and we linked to those as "Notes" in GlassFrog, sometimes we linked to them from Policies so people get the context. This way it was clear this is not part of Our governance, we don't control it, but it's there and available in GlassFrog.

I guess you could also have these as Policies as long as it's clearly stated, which rules are not part of our governance and just linked/copied here for convenience.

Thank you Adam, I like your approaches. It makes sense to link "outside rules" to Glassfrog and make all those rules visible to get a central overview.