Thought Shrapnel

I can’t believe it’s been 12 years since I published a series of posts entitled Minimum Viable Bureaucracy, based on the work of Laura Thomson, who worked for the Mozilla Corporation (while I was at the Foundation).

So what’s it about? What is ‘Minimum Viable Bureaucracy’ (MVB)? Well, as Laura rather succinctly explains, it’s the difference between ‘getting your ducks in a row’ and ‘having self-organising ducks’. MVB is a way of having just enough process to make things work, but not so much as to make it cumbersome. It’s named after Eric Ries’ idea of a Minimum Viable Product which, “has just those features that allow the product to be deployed, and no more.”

The contents of Laura’s talk include:

• Basics of chaordic systems
• Building trust and preserving autonomy
• Effective communication practices
• Problem solving in a less-structured environment
• Goals, scheduling, and anti-estimation
• Shipping and managing scope creep and perfectionism
• How to lead instead of merely managing
• Emergent process and how to iterate

I truly believe that MVB is an approach that can be used in whole or in part in any kind of organisation. Obviously, a technology company with a talented, tech-savvy, distributed workforce is going to be an ideal testbed, but there’s much in here that can be adopted by even the most reactionary, stuffy institution.

I’ve spent nine of the last ten years since leaving Mozilla as part of a worker-owned cooperative, and part of a couple of networks of co-ops. I’ve learned many, many things, including that hierarchy is just a lazy default, ways to deal with conflict, and (perhaps most importantly) consent-based decision making.

Which brings me to this post, which talks about ‘Minimum Viable Organisations’. The author, Dr Kim Foale, of the excellent GFSC. They call it a work in progress, and start with the following:

Basic principle: It should be easy (low emotional labour, low technical labour, zero cost) to start a project with a small group of people with shared goals.

The list of reasons Kim gives as to why groups ‘fail’ seems familiar to me, as it might do to you:

• Lack of care of people in the group
• Over-reliance on attendance at organising meetings as a prerequisite for being in the group
• As groups grow in numbers, making any kind of decision becomes more and more difficult
• Trying to fix every problem / having too broad a remit
• Poor record keeping and attention to process
• Misunderstanding and misuse of consensus processes

It’s worth noting on the last point that ‘consensus’ and ‘consent’ sound very similar but are very different approaches. With the first you’re trying to get full agreement, while with the latter you’re trying to achieve alignment.

What Kim suggests is all very sensible. Things like a written constitution, a code of conduct, a minimum commitment requirement, and a process by which members can change things. It’s an unfinished post, so I’m assuming they’re coming back to finish it off.

For me, the combination of having a stated aim, code of conduct, and working openly usually leads to good results. The minimum commitment requirement is an interesting addition, though, and one I’ll noodle on.

Source: kim.town

Image: Tomáš Petz

(I did a bit of digging and it looks like Kim’s using Quartz to power their site, probably linked to Obsidian. The idea of turning either my personal blog or Thought Shrapnel into a digital garden is quite appealing. More info on options for this here