In the past few months, what have you been experimenting with and learning from it, partner and co-founder at 8-bit-sheep, Leevi Kokko?
When 8-bit-sheep was started as a consultancy company, we chose to use some basic operational models and practices companies generally use. One example was appointing a chief executive officer, or CEO, for the company. We envisioned that we would rotate the role through the organization based on situations and company needs, and my colleague and I were the first two CEOs of the company for three years, 18 months each.
However, in our case, it turned out that this way of working led to a situation where the CEO had a disproportionate amount of company development and administration tasks on his desk, and that this arrangement actually slowed down the development and growth of the company. In a group with only half a dozen people, we learned that everyone needs to be more engaged and involved in creating, developing and fostering the company culture.
As a result, we decided to discontinue the role of a CEO in the company completely and started using a decentralized governance model, combining elements from holacracy and sociocracy. In practice, this means that we have what we call a governance meet every two weeks where anyone can propose a role to be set up or a project to be started. So far we’ve been able to divide the administrative and sales tasks easily and have people create and own the related processes.
I guess the biggest learning in all of this has been to understand that when we created the company, we should have been even more thorough about learning the needs we have as a community and then trying to set up practices that support those needs and goals from day one. We took some things for granted, where we should have challenged ourselves to think outside of the box – but the change has been wonderful, and we’ve really enjoyed the results as a community!
Thank you Leevi!
Small experiments and inspiration 