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A short summary on "How to Outlook"

Why outlook?

We deeply believe in autonomy and autonomous teams, but some collective focus and alignment is necessary to achieve overarching goals. The overall purpose of the company and the company Strategy is not always enough to achieve this, especially in the short term.

We have quarterly cycles in which Circle Leads (or other roles, if distributed away) must set or update strategies for their circles. Strategies are heuristics that guide prioritization in the Circle. Strategies must always consider the bigger picture. Existing circle strategies must be re-evaluated if the strategy of one of the outer circles changes.

Strategies are an important part of the way any Role set priorities. This is what the Holacracy Constitution says about this (Duty of Prioritization) :

  • When choosing what to work on in a Role, you must consider any official Strategies or relative prioritizations of that Role, of any Circle holding that Role, and of any Super-Circle thereof. You must then treat these official priorities as more important to the Organization than your own individual priorities or your own judgment of the Organization's priorities. Official priorities of a Circle are those defined by a Circle Lead (or by any other Roles or processes with the authority to resolve priority conflicts and define Strategies for that Circle).

What?

Every Circle lead is responsible for making sure that the Company Strategy (and changes to it over time) is translated into a specific strategy for her/his circle.

When?

Every episode. Every year. Every three years.

How?

How you arrive at a circle strategy can be different for every circle, but will in general:

  1. Contain elements of looking back / evaluating / learning

    2. The Objectives of evaluation are to:

    1. Surface valuable lessons in the form of outcomes, customer insights, and business intelligence, helping us gauge the tangible impact of our initiatives (and whether change of strategy might be needed)
    2. Get clarity on how we did during the last episode
    3. Identify improvements for the next episode
    4. Surface information valuable for the supercircles prioritization, or Gather information for the Circle Lead
  2. Contain elements of ideation / planning / prioritisation

    3. In an ideation process you review the (likely already) existing list of projects or epics and brainstorm about newly required initiatives given the (outer) circles’ purpose, year goals and strategy.

  3. Be presented during Voys PACE (Planning, Alignment & Cohesion Event)

    4. Whatever came out of the evaluation / ideation process must be presented.

    Each circle presenting at Voys PACE prepares (PACE Week - Requirements for the team and circle presentationsPACE Week - Requirements for the team and circle presentations ):

    • For Day 1, an evaluation with the following elements:
      1. What did you do?
      2. What did you learn?
      3. What can you demo?
      4. What did you contribute to the year goals?
      5. Your most epic fail (share your whoopsie and how you fixed it)
    • For Day 2, strategy with the following elements:
      1. What do you plan to do? Which projects/Epics are you planning to do?
      2. What do you want to learn?
      3. What does it contribute to the year goals?
      4. What do you need from others?

When not?

Ideations & Evaluations are optional tools and can take any form. As a Circle Lead you can decide that organizing sessions for this is not the right tool for helping you create a strategy or setting priorities. This could e.g. be the case if priorities for doing work are governed by other tools (e.g. a roadmap) or if priorities for doing work are for the most part set by the priorities of the super-circle.