Glossary
Key terms and definitions for self-governance and Role Based Management.
Accountability
Accountability is the obligation to answer for one's actions and results. In role-based governance, it also names an ongoing activity a role owes others.
Agile
Agile describes a team, practice or organization that works in short cycles and adjusts its plan to feedback, following the values of the Agile Manifesto.
Agile Methodologies
Agile methodologies such as Scrum, Kanban and Extreme Programming split a project into short iterations and revise the plan after each one based on feedback.
Brian Robertson
Brian Robertson is the American entrepreneur who developed Holacracy, co-founded HolacracyOne in 2007 and set out the method in his 2015 book Holacracy.
Change Management
Change management is the set of actions that help the people affected by an organizational change understand it and adopt it in their daily work.
Checklist
Aviation, surgery and project management run a checklist to take every step in the same order, every time, from a written record.
Circle
A circle is a group with its own mission and the authority to decide in its domain. It contains the roles its members fill and coordinates with other circles.
Consent
Consent is a decision rule under which a proposal passes once nobody raises a reasoned objection, even if not everyone prefers it.
David Allen
David Allen is the American productivity consultant who created Getting Things Done (GTD), a method for organizing tasks he set out in a book in 2001.
Decision
A decision is a choice that commits a person or a group to a course of action. Role-based organizations settle in advance who makes which one.
Design Thinking
Design thinking is a problem-solving method that starts by observing users, then tests quick prototypes with them before anything is built for real.
Domain
A domain is the area a role controls on its own, such as an asset, a process or a type of decision. Anyone else asks that role before acting within it.
Facilitator
A facilitator runs how a meeting unfolds, from the agenda to who speaks when, and leaves the content of the decisions to the participants.
Feedback
Feedback is information given to someone about the effect of their work or behaviour, based on facts, so they can keep what works and adjust the rest.
Feedback OSCAR
The OSCAR method structures constructive feedback in four steps: specific observation of facts, consequence, action to take and expected results.
Frédéric Laloux
Frédéric Laloux is a Belgian former McKinsey consultant who described self-managed teal organizations in his 2014 book Reinventing Organizations.
Governance
Governance is the set of rules that determine who holds authority over what in an organization and how its decisions are made, checked and changed.
Governance Meeting
A governance meeting is where a team changes its own structure by creating, amending or removing roles and policies and by filling elected roles.
Holacracy
Holacracy is a self-management method that gives authority to roles grouped into circles rather than to managers, under rules written in a constitution.
Horizontal Organization
A horizontal organization, or flat structure, has few or no management layers and spreads responsibility and influence evenly across its members.
Indicator
An indicator is a metric, such as the number of orders shipped per week, that a team compares with a target to see whether a role or a member is on track.
Meeting
A meeting in Role Based Management is a structured session where team members share updates on their roles, resolve tensions and decide together.
Muda
Muda is any activity that uses up resources without creating value for the customer. The Toyota Production System sorts it into seven categories.
Note
A note is a written record of an idea, a decision or an action to take. People write notes in meetings, while reading, or to follow up on work.
Org Chart
An org chart is a diagram of an organization's positions or roles, the people who fill them and the reporting lines between them.
Poka-Yoke
Poka-yoke is a Lean device or design choice that makes a mistake impossible, or catches it the moment it happens so it goes no further.
Purpose
A purpose names what a role brings to the organization. The person holding the role checks it to decide on situations its accountabilities leave open.
Quaker
A Quaker is a member of the Religious Society of Friends, a Christian movement whose meetings decide without voting, a practice that inspired sociocracy.
Role
A role is a piece of recurring work with a purpose and accountabilities. Whoever holds it can hand it over without changing jobs.
Sociocracy
Sociocracy is a way of governing an organization through linked circles that decide by consent, where a proposal passes once no member has a reasoned objection.
Tactical Meeting
A tactical meeting is a regular team meeting where members share progress, raise what blocks them and agree on the next actions for current work.
Task
A task is work that a single member takes on for a role, often with a deadline. It ends once done, unlike an accountability, which repeats.
Taylorism
Taylorism breaks work into timed tasks and separates the people who design it from those who carry it out. The engineer Frederick Taylor published it in 1911.
Teal Organization
A teal organization is a self-managed company where teams decide on their own work, on the model Frédéric Laloux described in 2014.
Tension
A tension is the gap between how an organization works today and how it needs to work. Teams process it in a governance or a tactical meeting.
Toyota Production System
The Toyota Production System (TPS) is Toyota's way of producing only what is ordered, with minimal waste, built on just-in-time and jidoka.