Add definition of "Partner Relationship" and how partner status is granted

[brianjrobertson]

I've been working on Issue #77 and #78, and also looking for approaches to reinforce Holacracy's partner vs. employee paradigm, and resist (or at least help highlight) victim meaning-making patterns and projections on the company and other partners.

Well, I've now got a very rough draft of a multi-faceted new system. It needs more vetting, perhaps some more work, and likely trying it as a constitutional amendment within HolacracyOne for awhile. But first, I'm posting it here for feedback. I'll attach the draft text below, and here's a video walkthrough explaining the system.

[brianjrobertson]

DRAFT SYSTEM BELOW

Partner Pool & Partnership Circle:

The Organization must maintain a pool of Partners to take part in its governance and operations (its "Partner Pool"). To govern and execute on the work of building and maintaining a healthy Partner Pool, the Organization will have a special “Partnership Circle”. The Partnership Circle controls the Organization’s relationships with its Partners, as a Domain. It may add, terminate, govern, or redefine these relationships as it sees fit, within the constraints below.

Partnership Circle Membership:

The Partnership Circle has no Lead Link. Instead, the following parties may cross link into the Circle to help enact its Purpose:
· Any Role that assigns Partners from the Partner Pool into Roles.
· A representative elected by the Partners in the Partner Pool (the “Partnership Link”), to represent the Organization’s need for a healthy pool of Partners available to energize its Roles.

The election of the Partnership Link will use the Integrative Election process, unless the Partnership Circle has defined an alternate mechanism.

All the rules defined in the Constitution for an Anchor Circle with no Lead Link apply to the Partnership Circle as well.

Relationship Contracts:

The relationship between a Partner and the Organization will typically include mutual agreements to entice each party to enter and remain in the relationship, such as agreements around compensation, expected travel, or time a Partner will focus within the organization (altogether the “Relationship Contract”).

Either the Partner or the Organization may modify their Relationship Contract, but only by making a proposal to the other party. If the Partner seeks a change, the proposal must be made to all Roles within the Partnership Circle by default. If a Role in the Circle seeks a change, the person filling that Role must first ensure no other Roles see any Objections to the proposed change before making any agreements with the Partner. In either case, the Partnership Circle may delegate control of Relationship Contracts to a subset of its Roles, in which case those Roles will process any proposed changes on behalf of the Organization instead. Once either party asks for a modified Relationship Contract, the recipient may either accept the proposal or decline by sharing an Objection given their own Purpose or Accountabilities.

Terminating Relationships:

The relationship between a Partner and the Organization may be terminated at any time by either party, without any proposal or consent required of the other party. However, any role wishing to terminate a Partner’s relationship on behalf of the Organization must first gain the authority required to modify a Relationship Contract, as defined above.

If the Relationship Contract between the Organization and a Partner includes restrictions on terminating the relationship, or any other alternate arrangements around termination, those agreements trump these default rules.

Defining Behavioral Agreements:

From time to time, the Organization and its Partners may each desire certain agreements in how Partners will interact with each other or energize their functions as Circle Members of a Circle or Partners of the Organization (each a “Behavioral Agreement”). Behavioral Agreements must be limited solely to behaviors that are generally desired across many Roles or regardless of Roles, and to agreements that are behavioral in nature and don’t promise to achieve specific outcomes beyond the direct control of a Partner.

For a Behavioral Agreement to become a legitimate expectation of a Partner, a Role or Partner desiring that agreement must request it, the Partner gaining the expectation must accept it, and the agreement must be published in a referenceable location. Any party to a Behavioral Agreement may terminate it at any time by giving notice to all affected parties, and striking the agreement from the published record (or requesting an appropriate role do so). No consent of the other party is required to terminate a Behavioral Agreement, unless it’s included in the Relationship Contract.

The Partnership Circle may further adopt a Policy that requires certain Behavioral Agreements as conditions of anyone remaining in or joining the Partner Pool. With such a Policy in place, any Role in the Organization may terminate the relationship with any Partner who does not promptly accept that Behavioral Agreement upon request, or who later withdraws their agreement, with no proposals or further due-process required.

Segmenting the Partner Pool:

The Partnership Circle may adopt a Policy to divide the Partner Pool into defined segments, based on any differentiating criteria the Partnership Circle specifies, and may choose which of its current partner relationships fall within each segment. Once created, a segment behaves like its own separate Partner Pool and gains its own Partnership Circle to manage that pool, using all the rules herein, including the ability to create further sub-segments. A Partnership Circle that creates a segment loses the ability to directly impact any partner relationship within that segment, however it may still define Policies that apply to that segment.

When electing a Partnership Link to a Partnership Circle, the only Partners who may participate are those whose relationship with the Organization is managed by that specific Partnership Circle, and those serving as the elected Partnership Link within a directly-included segment. A Policy of a relevant Partnership Circle may change this default treatment.

When a Partner Pool includes segments, only Roles that assign Partners from a particular segment into Roles may cross link into that segment's Partnership Circle.

[dienkwik]

Hi, Brian:

I have several questions and I hope this is the place to ask them:

1. I vote for calling it the "People Pool". Partner has a shareholder feel to it, and not all organizations have people working in the organizations that are shareholders.
2. Where do this type of cross link only circles live in relations to the other "normal" circles, or how are they going to be visualized in GlassFrog? Are they going to be parallel circles to the anchor circle, each with its own special holarchy ? How will the sub segment partnership circles be visualized in relation to
   the broader partnership circle ? How would the relationship between the subcircle partnership link and the broader circle's partnership link and the fact that they are in fact are filled by the same partner be visualized ?
3. This cross link only circle is really interesting, however, at first glance it does make it a bit more complicated than before, because now you have to deal with parallel holarchies, if the answer to the first question is parallel holarchies.
4. The Partnership Link represents the organization's need for a healthy partner pool. It took me several passes to understand what this means. My initial reaction was why is it not written as representing the partner directly. I suppose you don't want the partnership link to represent the partners individually, but as a collective entity. So the partnership link would never represent, say John in engineering, and bringing his tensions into the governance. Rather, the partnership link acknowledges that partners such as John may feel the same tension as John, and to ensure healthy available partner pool, it would be a good idea to resolve this tension. Did I get it somewhat right ?
5. "If the partner seeks a change, the proposal must be made to all roles within the partnership circle". This sentence makes it sound like the partner can directly propose changes. From what I understand, the partner must still go through the partnership link to propose changes. The Partnership Link may invite the partner to join the meeting, but it doesn't have to. Perhaps, saying something like "if the partner seeks a change, the partner can convey the proposed changes to the partnership link to be brought and resolved in the partnership circle meeting" can make it more obvious ?
6. The content of the behavioral agreement does not need to go through IDM, I take it ? it just needs to be written by a role or a partner and then requested of another partners to be accepted? Is this different from accountability in that it applies to more than one role, to make it easier to make general expectations ?
7. If a behavior agreement is to be made for all circle members, than each of the circle member has to accept the agreement. Is this correct ? So, you can end up with a situation where some circle member agrees to the agreement and have to abide by the agreement,and others don't ?
   If you want to force everyone to accept the behavior agreement, then there has to be a policy stating this as a requirement of being a circle member ?
   Are we not allowed to do the same thing today in version 4.1 through policies ?
8. If I understand it correctly, all partnership links from all sub partnership circles are automatically partnership links for their respective partner pools in the broader partnership circle. Is this correct ?

That's it for now.

Thanks,

Dien.

[julianeroell]

Brian, are you proposing this as part of a new constitution, or as an app, or as something else?

[brianjrobertson]

@martinroell - the goal is to add this to the Holacracy Constitution v5.0, although the current text is written up separately as a constitutional amendment (app) that can be adopted with v4.1, so it can be tested and further refined.

[brianjrobertson]

@dienkwik - really appreciate all the great feedback and questions! I'll process further as soon as I have a chance.

[julianeroell]

If this became part of the constitution, we would not adopt it, and probably not advocate Holacracy further: this is much too complicated. The simplicity of "there is a domain on partner relationships" and "the organisation works out how to deal with that" serves us and our network much, much, much better: it is more flexible and more accessible.

(There is really good thinking in this. Could there not be a way to implement this as an app? As a specific way of doing partner relationships?)

[gudjon]

Great insights on the Partner Pool. (May I suggest Talent Pool?)

However, I second @martinroell here.
I have looked at Holacracy as an well optimized OS. -- Linux, rather than Windows. In any case, let's not build Vista.

This could be a great App for many (some?) organizations to adopt!

[ebabinet]

I really like the idea of the Partnership Link existing in all organizations by default. I felt this was a gap in the current constitution and couldn't imagine a scenario where you would not want one.

I second the confusion described in Dien's points 5 & 6. It's not clear to me how a Partner makes a change to a Relationship Contract. It doesn't sound like it is through the Relationship Link, but do they send out a proposal or attend a circle meeting? Is it processed through IDM?

I personally like the term "Working Agreement" better than "Behavioral Agreement", particularly for agreements that are entered into voluntarily.

I have mixed feelings about "The Partnership Circle may further adopt a Policy that requires certain Behavioral Agreements as conditions of anyone remaining in or joining the Partner Pool. "
This seems very controlling, particularly since such a policy could be adopted at any time. As a Partner, I would want some advance notice and opportunity to provide reaction to any such proposed policy.

[ebabinet]

Here's the reason why I prefer Working Agreement over Behavioral Agreement:

The term Behavioral Agreement is often used with children and students to encourage or prevent certain behavior on trips or at camp, or as a kind of "performance improvement plan" if a student has been misbehaving. It is a one sided contract that the student has to sign, or they can't participate. It is also used in medical contexts to make sure that patients adhere to their treatment plan and don't abuse their medications. So for me, the term has a somewhat negative and coercive connotation.

Working Agreements, on the other hand, is a term that has been used on Agile teams for many years, and refers to the types of voluntary agreements that team members create to establish team norms.

In the case of behaviors that are required to be in the organization (by Policy of the Partnership Circle), the term Working Agreement would not fit, but maybe those are not called Working Agreements and are just Policies or are automatically part of the Relationship Contract.

[brianjrobertson]

@martinroell and @gudjon: While I appreciate that this text in its current form is more complex than we want in the core constitution, I also feel strongly that this general approach or something a lot like it is needed in the core constitution.

It's not just an app, because it’s defining how you adopt people-related apps - i.e. which circle can adopt them and who gets to be included in that membership.  There's also a default treatment for those various functions (hiring, firing, comp changes, etc.) until you adopt an app. Those defaults can be changed of course with an app, but the part that's more core than app is locating where those changes can be made, and what roles & representatives get to be included in the decision-making.

And, I can tell you from lots of first-hand experience now: many Holacracy adoptions are significantly impaired by not having better defaults here, and by not having an encoded pathway for a partnership-related rep to be able to drive those changes to those defaults. There is a lot of tension that these changes will resolve.

So, my current focus is on finding ways to simplify and streamline this as much as possible to mitigate the complexity factor. And some of that will happen naturally as other new features get implemented - e.g. once we clarify how multi-filled roles make decisions, much of the special-case complexity in this text around that will vanish into that generic approach; and, once we clarify how circles without lead links generically work, some of the special-case text in here covering that will vanish. But still, that's just a start - I agree that further simplification here will be very useful.

[brianjrobertson]

@dienkwik: I'm going through your comments now:

1. Agreed, I think "People Pool" works better.

2. Good questions, and I don't know; the GlassFrog team will be tackling these, and I hope they'll be able to come up with some cool approaches to make this simpler via good technology and visualization support.

3. Yes, it's effectively a parallel holarchy, but this is needed anyway (see issue Allow Circles with no Lead Link #61) - there are a bunch of use-cases where two or more roles, circles, or entities might want to partner to form a joint-venture of sorts, with no single lead link or complete containment/ownership by any forming party.

4. You're spot-on; the goal of the company is to have a healthy partner pool, but not necessarily to satisfy every individual partner's desires - just like in a healthy human-to-human relationship, sometimes you just need to accept someone for who they are rather than try to change them, or accept that it's the wrong relationship if you can't do that and end it.

5. The intent is to allow partners to directly propose changes to their own relationship agreement in this case; they are representing themselves personally, and the partnership circle is representing the organization, and between the two parties they can agree to whatever makes sense to them, within any constraints acting upon the organization via governance of course.

6. Yes to all.

7. Yes to all.

8. Not quite; the elected partnership link from a sub-pool just gets to participate in the election for a link in the broader pool.

Hope that helps; let me know if it triggers any concerns or feedback...

[brianjrobertson]

@ebabinet: Thanks for the feedback; I'll change it to Working Agreement to avoid that connotation. I do like the focus on "behavioral", as I think that's a key distinction around what's valid in these agreements; but that's already in the definition/rules around these, so probably doesn't have to be in the label for the term.

[brianjrobertson]

@ebabinet: I also share your mixed feelings about "The Partnership Circle may further adopt a Policy that requires certain Behavioral Agreements as conditions of anyone remaining in or joining the Partner Pool.". I'm now thinking maybe it works best to switch this around, and explicitly disclaim that any Working Agreements required to join the organization do not apply to current partners unless they agree to them. That still leaves the organization the option to terminate someone's partnership if the partner chooses not to agree, but it requires facing that decision more directly and having a conversation, vs. just assuming everyone has implicitly agreed by not leaving.