How Decisions Are Made in Pax Fauna
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Pax Fauna and Pro-Animal Future’s internal decision-making structures are based largely on Holacracy, a governance system for organizations that aims to overcome the worst effects of both traditional command hierarchies and the consensus-based structurelessness that some activist groups attempt to replace it with.
Single Ownership: Each decision and responsibility in the organization should have a clear primary owner, such that if a responsibility is neglected or a decision backfires, there is no confusion about who should take accountability for it. This isn’t at all about seeking blame. Rather, it aims to prevent a tragedy of the commons where important decisions or tasks suffer because nobody is clearly responsible for them. This kind of clear responsibility over tasks could, for instance, make it easy to identify that a particular person had too much on their plate, and that responsibilities need to be reshuffled to prevent this happening again. If a situation makes it clear that a task or decision didn’t have a clear owner, the solution is to celebrate this discovery, add the task or decision to a new or existing role, fill the role, and move on as usual.
Pairing Responsibility and Authority: The person responsible for achieving a certain outcome must have the power they need to achieve that outcome. We make it a top priority to avoid situations where someone is held accountable to achieving an outcome, but lacks the authority to make the decisions necessary to achieving that outcome. A role’s accountabilities simultaneously define both the outcomes that role is responsible for and the areas in which that role is most empowered to act freely.
Separating Role from Soul: the basic unit of Holacratic organizations is not a person, but a role. Roles are defined by a purpose statement, a list of accountabilities that other roles can expect that role to fulfill, and rarely one or more domains of authority in which the role-holder can restrict the actions of other roles. Partners are generally free to take independent actions & decisions unless doing so would impact a domain assigned to another role through the governance process.
Self-Management and The Advice Process, detailed below.
Pax Fauna and Pro-Animal Future are made up of roles nested inside of other roles. When a partner (partner: any person working within the governance system, whether as a volunteer or full-time) fills a role, they are called the Role Lead for that role (e.g. Media & Content Lead). Roles can be filled by more than one partner, and one partner can hold more than one role. When a role decides to subdivide its accountabilities and create roles inside itself to focus on aspects of its mandate, that parent role becomes a Circle. The Circle Lead continues to hold the mandate of the original role, and that mandate is subject to the governance process of the circle’s supercircle. The mandates of roles within the circle are subject to the circle’s governance process. (Supercircle: any circle that contains another circle, in the sense of its relationship to its subcircle.)
To understand how an ideal Holocratic organization operates, it helps to imagine how such an organization comes into being and takes shape. Any organization starts with an idea, consisting of the purpose for starting an organization, and a plan for how that organization will achieve its purpose. This mission statement becomes the mandate of an organization, and the organization is born, at first, as a single role defined by this mandate. Just like any role, this one is defined by a purpose statement and a set of accountabilities. These just happen to be synonymous with the organization’s mission statement. For that reason, this initial role is called the Mission role. At its moment of inception, this role can be filled by a single member, or shared by more than one member. As the organization begins to work, it soon senses, through the humans it uses as sensors, that it needs more specific work to be done. It responds by creating roles within itself to which it delegates specific responsibilities necessary to the overall mission, along with the power and authority needed to carry out those responsibilities. Thus the first role becomes a circle, the Mission Circle. The original members of the organization can spread themselves out across these roles, in which case it represents a more specific division of responsibilities among them. Or, they can find new members to fill these roles, in which case they expand the organization and its capacity. As the organization’s work develops further, some of the roles created within the Mission Circle might further sense that in order to best fulfill their accountabilities, they should again subdivide their mandates into more specific roles, becoming circles in the process. And so the structure of roles nested within roles is born, where roles that contain roles are called circles, and circles that contain circles are called the supercircle of the circles they contain, while those contained circles are called the subcircle.
In this manner, responsibility and power gradually emanate out from the Mission Circle, which holds the widest mandate, to its subcircles and their constituent roles holding narrower, deeper mandates, as shown in the graphic below:
The responsibility to fulfill elements of the organization's mission emanates from the Mission Circle. The mandate of a role or circle is subject to the governance process of the circle it fits inside, which means a circle could have its mandate changed by its parent circle if that parent circle senses a change in the needs that originally led it to create that circle.
So, if a Holacracy organization just looks like a traditional corporate pyramid from the side, what’s the difference? The answer is the principle of self-management.
In a traditional corporate hierarchy, someone’s superior has authority over both what they are expected to do and how they must do it. In Pax Fauna, your role’s parent circle (through a collective governance process) has authority over the what but not the how.
Put differently, each role or circle has decision-making authority commensurate to the breadth or focus of its mandate. A circle with a broader mandate is responsible for taking in wider information and reacting to it by changing the accountabilities or goals of its roles and subcircles. It does not have the authority to micromanage how those roles go about accomplishing the accountabilities and goals it has delegated to them. Circle leads are responsible for providing the role leads in their circle with the support and resources they need to accomplish their mandate, and removing obstacles thereto, because those mandates are necessary for the circle’s wider mandate. (If they were not, the circle would retire those roles, or wouldn’t have created them in the first place.)
While we strive to have as many decisions as possible made by a single role lead, this does not mean decisions are made in a silo. Role leads are expected to consult anybody inside or outside the organization who might have information vital to making an effective decision. How they go about this, and how much time they put into it, is up to the role lead. It is up to them to sense how important this decision might be to the organization, and to what extent advice will result in a better outcome for the organization. If they misjudge, that will become clear when the decision results in a bad outcome for the organization– a bad outcome for which they will be responsible. This provides the incentive for partners to seek diligent advice when necessary. The limits on their and other partners’ time balances this incentive.
When a partner comes to you seeking advice, try as much as possible to adopt the following mindset:
Advice Giver: My colleague is asking me for advice on a decision they are making. They are responsible for the outcome of this decision. They probably have information I don’t have. If they think it is useful for me to understand every facet of the decision and every piece of information in order to provide effective advice, they will share that with me. Otherwise, I will try to help them by answering the questions they ask, asking clarifying questions where necessary. I’ll remember that once I’ve shared my advice, the decision is theirs. I’ll trust that if they make a different decision than the one my advice seemed to indicate, it’s because they weighed all the information from their perspective and made the decision they thought would best serve the organization. If I strongly disagree with their decision, I can simply report my thoughts to them or register a prediction about what the outcome of the decision will be to help us honestly evaluate the eventual outcome. Then I can take comfort in the fact that if the outcome is bad, it’ll be their responsibility, not mine.
Advice Seeker: I want the best outcome for the organization. More of the right information from people with relevant perspectives or expertise will get a better outcome. A decision that can only impact the organization in minor ways is worth less of my and other partners’ time than a major decision. Based on how important this decision is, I’ll decide how much time to spend soliciting advice. If the initial advice invokes stronger reactions than I expected, I might need to seek more advice than I first thought. People who are impacted by a decision usually want to give input on it and that’s usually because they have relevant info. But ultimately, this decision is my responsibility. I shouldn't misuse the advice process just to put off making a stressful decision.
The advice process can look like almost anything; it’s up to the advice seeker. Some ways to seek advice include:
Create a feedback form in Google Forms
Run an informal poll on Slack with emoji reactions
Put it on a meeting agenda
Schedule an ad-hoc meeting just for advice on this decision
