A Pragmatic Approach To Enterprise Agility with Sociocracy 3.0

GOTO Berlin 2017

Many of the hard problems we face in organizations are not technical in nature, but related to the way we organize and collaborate. This only gets worse as organizations grow.

Over the last two decades, multiple agile methodologies and frameworks - like Scrum or Holacracy - emerged to resolve these challenges. However, they usually require a large change, and are rather prescriptive about the way organizations are supposed to do things.

Regrettably this rarely fits with the culture, context and constraints of organizations, leading to bad implementations - or even no implementation at all.

In a globalized world with high cultural diversity and ever increasing complexity of marketplaces and products, these kinds of prescriptions and large-scale change initiatives no longer appear to be the recommended approach.

In this session we will explore Sociocracy 3.0 (S3), a free and open framework based on a different paradigm: S3 is a comprehensive selection of 70 lightweight and independent patterns for agile collaboration. Patterns can be applied independently, and are based on seven simple principles, which help adapting patterns to your specific context. A pattern can usually be understood and implemented in less than 3 hours.

S3 provides you with a fresh outlook on agile collaboration: incrementally resolving your specific problems with small and low-risk experiments, and without breaking what you already do well.

You will see how S3's patterns can support you with different aspects of collaboration, and explore a few ideas how a more agile version of your organization might look like. Along the way, we will also discuss some common impediments to happy collaboration in organization, like organizational structure, culture, architecture and the software you use.

Finally, you will discover how to combine several patterns into a lightweight and hypothesis-driven approach to organizational change, which will help you tackle even those nasty recurring problems that keep on coming up again and again. It also provides for an excellent way of bootstrapping S3 into your organization.

Materials for S3 are licensed under a Creative Commons Free Culture license and are available here.

Prerequisite attendee experience level: advanced