Two playbooks to facilitate Holacracy® Meetings

Facilitating Holacracy® meetings is a demanding practice. These playbooks for both Tactical and Governance meetings provide Holacracy facilitators with the right words at the right time.

Originally published in January 2019 on the Liip blog, this article presents updated playbooks which include the election process and lots of new tips.

Why another cheatsheet?

The official cheatsheets for Governance Meeting and Tactical Meeting do their job in a wonderful way. Yet they lack depth of information about the mechanics and don’t cover the many corner cases a Holacracy facilitator has to face.

Facing that challenge myself, I started gathering all advices that I could find about Holacracy facilitation (notably from the Holacracy Blog, trainings and own practice) in two playbooks : some kind of verbose cheatsheets for the two meeting formats which I first shared and used internally at Liip.

Many people at Liip have told me not to keep them for ourselves so here you go:

Holacracy Facilitation Playbook — Governance Meeting
Holacracy Facilitation Playbook — Tactical Meeting

What’s inside

These facilitation playbooks cover all the needed steps and their mechanics for either the Tactical and Governance meetings.

They also provide concise phrases to introduce the process, to frame each step in terms of purpose and mechanics, as well as coaching advices.

How to use these playbooks

Print both facilitation playbooks for yourself.
Print more and leave copies in every meeting room.

Don’t read them aloud from A to Z while facilitating. They are resources from which you pick useful tips and phrases.

Don’t distribute them to your meeting participants. There’s no harm in them knowing about it. Yet it really adds a lot of details that normal participants do not need in order to participate at best to the meeting. Let them have the official cheatsheet cards, that’s in my opinion just what they need to follow the process.

Feedbacks and improvement ideas are very welcome!

Artwork: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?search=Theatrical+and+Circle+Life%2C+1893