@reef-external fully agrees with the goal of the proposal, and is committed to doing everything within our power to contribute to completing the group by December 15. In an effort to be more agile, we will implement the “pool” sub-structure for our different tasks, and with the addition of several new members to the group, we are confident that we will be able to improve our performance.
At the same time, the group insists on maintaining a sociocratic working method, with a single coordinator who reports to and from the coordination team.
Anyone is welcome to join Team External and/or any Team External pool. If you would like to join Team External or any specific pool, you are more than welcome and we believe your contribution will be of great benefit!
In line with the principles of sociocracy, we believe it is important to take everyone’s concerns into account in the final solution. So we are keen on listening carefully to yours as well. Looking forward to finding better ways to work together with Team Recruitment and Onboarding.
I am fully in favour of joining forces, i think we don’t have any other option and for me this goes beyond our two teams, but involves all reeflings.
I am also fully in favour of sociocracy and to me the way forward is as was requested in the last coordination group meeting: come with a proposal about the outreach activities and bring it to the PM of July 5th. All concerns related to this proposal can then be expressed and addressed (via ER or in the PM itself). We risk to loose money, so the concerns of all full members, not only of team external and team recruitment, should be addressed.
So as mentioned, to meet that objective, R&O has started the proposal, with the aim to send it out to the reefling by Friday evening: Login – Nextcloud
At this point I see two ways forward:
As foreseen now in the proposal, the goal would be to bring two options and do a selection process. More info on how a selection process works in sociacracy: https://www.sociocracyforall.org/selection-process/ The reason for this is because the talks we had last week didn’t lead to a proposal that both teams supported. I personally think this is the best way forward. What is missing now, is what you, team External, see as the best option when it comes down to the outreach activities.
We keep this proposal as such, and you or other fm bring your concerns/objections which then will be addressed and might lead to one of the following
a modification of the proposal
shorten the term
measure the concern
I really think we should keep in mind that we all have one and the same goal in mind and that is to sell these last remaining units as quickly as possible.We are not several teams, but one big team.
Hi @els, @reef-recruitment, @reeflings, in line with the principles of sociocracy, we believe it is important to take everyone’s concerns into account in the final solution. We are not in favour of two competing options and hope to find a solution that is acceptable for everyone. You can find Team External’s proposal here: Login – Nextcloud
I hope this is ok, i renamed both documents: one Outreach proposal - option 1 and the other Outreach proposal - optioin 2, to make it clear that it should lead to a consent of the leading option, and not to a consent of both proposals. I’ll also move them to the ‘proposal folder’ and add the links to the agenda of the PM.
I understand a selection process doesn’t maybe feel absolutely comfortable but as I said above: we are one team with one single goal in mind. Why should we be competing, and what would be competing for? For me it’s using everyone’s talents/capacities in the best way we can, to obtain the best result.
Coordinating the outreach activities is as valuable as distributing flyers, as valuable as updating social media, as valuable as having social activities organised so we can get to meet the em and am and vice versa,…
It’s not straightforward to realize an 8 million euro project by a group of individuals having mainly full time jobs and/or other time consuming occupations, having families,..). But this is serious, most FM have put all off their savings in this. All we do is give two different options, this isn’t about Els being better than Liesbet or the other way around. We have come at a crucial point where it’s up to the group to decide what the best way forward is. I am not going to be angry with anyone for going for option 1 (but i will question what people mean by ’ we want to do everything that is possible to be complete asap / we want to save every euro if we can’.)
As i won’t be there in the PM of the 5th, I am giving my feedback here.
My review of team external of the last few months that – in my opinion- lead to a suboptimal outreach.
With this I hope it can be read as constructive feedback to be taken into account if ‘option 1’ would be the selected option. (equally open to receive constructive feedback concerning R&O as I am really not claiming that R&O is the perfect team)
• Slow reaction on edgeryders post, leading to missed opportunities
eg latest example where the add on samenhuizen & Habitat groupé took 4 days to be done, just 2 days before the actual presentation. Moving it online might have attracted more people to the presentation.
• Insufficient proactivity/reactivity
e.g. The relaunching of presentations was announced by R&O in the coordination group meeting of 16/03, stressing this was impacting Team External. The redesign of the flyer was done end of april, the updated of the website done in june, the design of posters initiated on june 19th (initiated by Lee, not team external)
• Insufficient follow-up
e.g. flyering, news letters
• Efficiency / difficulties obtaining results
e.g. the proposal about outreach to be presented in the PM of 05/07, requested in the group coordination meeting of 17/06, which after several talks/meetings started end of June and finally led to the statement on July 1st that it wasn’t clear what was expected.
My concerns related to option 1:
A first concern is that I fear there will be no improvement of the outreach, as I don’t see how the above points are concretely tackled with this option.
A second concern is with Liesbet who indicates struggling with time now already (which I can understand). Option 1, where is explained that the coordination of all pools (except from the flyering), together with the distribution, follow-up, review and reporting of the respective pools will be done by the coordinator of Team External (one person being Liesbet). For me this will add quite some extra workload for her. I don’t see this very feasable / highly realistic (unless some major changes are happening in her life that I am not aware off).
A third concern is with adapting the way of working in team External now. This won’t go from one day to another. We have only a couple of months left to act. Reviewing the way of working now, after 3,5 months, seems to me too late. What you need now is a stable, routined team which is today already working (more) efficiently.
A fourth concern is with the stability of the team and assigning to them one of the most crucial tasks at this moment. Team external has gone through some changes in team set-up, and is one of the main teams integrating EM/AM. Assigning such an important task to a less stable team, seems risky. What you need is a stable, routined team which is today already working (more) efficiently.
A possible 5th concern . If I understand well, you want to create different pools for the different communications (newsletter, instagram + linkedin, website,..). I see it now as a problem to have communication spread over 2 different teams. This creates misalignment in communication. My concern is that you will create even bigger misalignment if you spread the communication over 4 different pools. And for me this will also be less efficient/more overhead for the coordinator.
I agree with everything @els has stated above, and I would like to make a few additional points.
1. Why is this important?
What is missing to me in both proposals is complete picture of what is at stake. These are the key elements to me personally:
Money: Proposal 1 seems to imply that it is “only” 600 euro per unit that are at stake. I disagree. First of all I think it serves us better if we can stick to absolute amounts. In this case we are talking about up to 12.000 euro that would come on top. While I agree that this is not much in the bigger scheme of our total budget, it is also not nothing. With a bit of bad luck with this entire Commission de Concertation débacle we have pissed away about 10% of our safety margin. So if we can avoid having to spend 12.000 extra just by getting our act together I think that would be an easy win.
Not having to revert to contingency plans: The window to complete the group before mid-December is almost closed. After that we are looking at possibly having to delay construction (which costs people who rent a lot of money). Almost all contingency plans come at a financial cost and/or a loss of control of who will be joining our project. Avoiding this to me this is urgent and important.
Choice: In theory our recruitment policy was built for optimising the group’s composition by having choice among several full membership applications. This is also not a detail to me.
Safety: Our coach Mark recommends us to build up a waiting list. This is therefore not only about completing the group, but also about protecting ourselves against a delay in the unfortunate case somebody would want to step out before the mortgages are signed.
Time: These recruitments activities are taking up a lot of energy and time (e.g. presentations). We could have had more participants if we would have had more effective outreach strategies (website updated in time, posters, a more engaging newsletter etc). I don’t mind giving a lot of time to The Reef, but things like this trigger quite some frustration in me.
More focused attention to the both the “outreach” and the “external relations” domain: At some point somebody made a joke about the so-called “Teams Ladida”, which sort of endearlingly suggested that some teams are more or less important than others. Five years in, funny as it was at the time, I will beg to disagree. Every domain is just as important. I observe that Team External meets every two weeks, and at the same that both domains could use more attention and frequently need some prodding from @els or me. As an example: going to the meetings with the neighbours I was surprised to hear that they had not yet been invited. When I reported back (19/06), I asked for a confirmation from Team External about the follow-up (e.g. because the neighbour continued to complain about shady business), and that point is still pending.
2. Background: what we have tried so far
I met with @joannes mid-May to discuss this topic. We agreed to set up a Helping Circle Outreach, on which I followed up myself one week later: HC Outreach.
We then discussed the issue at length in the Coordination Group of 17 June. While there was a lot of understanding for the specific circumstances of Team External, in my view there was a relative consensus that the current situation is sub-optimal. A proposal from both Team R&O and Team External was requested for the plenary meeting of 5 July on how outreach responsibility will held and results will be delivered.
3. The approach for tomorrow’s plenary
Unfortunately it did not work out to come to a joint proposal, and so now we are left with Proposal 1 from Team External and Proposal 2 from Team R&O. What both are proposing is to organise a selection process between them.
I’m afraid that approach doesn’t work for me. Selection processes work fine to appoint somebody to a certain role, or to make collective choices about equivalent options (ice cream or cake).
Again based on a recommendation from Mark, our guideline is that when a proposal comes to plenary it is based on wide consultation and that it is so pre-cooked that it is ready to be consented to in a short time. I’m afraid this is not the case for Proposal 1. What I was expecting from the proposal is that it would either propose to split the domains (possibly just creating a new Team Outreach, joinable by everybody from Team External), either that it would be very specific on how and by when the newsletter, the poster and all the other outreach activities will be managed differently. So even if the selection process would lead to Proposal 1, it would run into an objection right away, and we wouldn’t get much further.
So what I would propose is that we maybe do a quick round of feedback, so that we can get a overview on everybody’s views. In function of that I would ask the very concrete question of who is going to take responsibility for making the outreach activities happen.
I agree that getting feedback from the group on the outreach strategy is perhaps the best goal for tonight. To me the spirit of the proposal from Team External is that we should define a clear goal and invest our resources in data-backed strategies to achieve it.
Specifically, I would be interested to hear whether there is an interest in paying a marketing consultant to provide guidance on the strategy. Because personally, I care less about saving the €12,000 (€571/unit) than having good members in time for construction, and would gladly invest money to hire marketing professionals (a veeery common practice in cohousing development) so we could stop arguing and redirect that energy towards having more fun together as a community.
I understand if people don’t want to do that, in which case I believe Team External outlines a clear action plan of implementing data-driven strategies going forward. For example, I saw that flyering accounted for 1 out of 18 people who registered for the last presentation?
Also, I think it is worth mentioning, that Team External is criticized in part for failing to “sell” a product that for much of this year has effectively not existed (due to the redesign and shuffling of units.) It is not very logical to single out the outreach strategy when asking why the project is not complete.
I feel hopeful that now that there is a product, it is again possible to sell it.
sorry to be a pain in the ass, but you say you are open for concerns ,I have given them How to join forces on Outreach - #5 by els and i don’t really see them addressed in this new proposal, or being acknowledged. For me it can even be ‘i don’t agree with this’.
Nevertheless, the important thing is that we can put our energy in outreach and stop the discussions around it. So I am ok to give this a try, on the condition there is a review end of september to see how things are going/have improved.
What you mention in the proposal: ‘smooth interaction and communication needs to happen with R&O, in order to be efficient and effective’:
I am open to hear if you now already see things that can be improved, from R&O side?
Personally I prefer to continue communicating on Edgeryders (preferably not via signal), tagging team-external when it comes to impact on the outreach. So if you and/or sb from team external can daily check for er posts with tag team external, i think that can work perfectly. And then you dispatch the info in the necessary pools.
The coordination group meetings can help as well, and if there is really sth urgent/sth that really needs to be cleared out via a talk, off course we can do it.
Does this work for you?
Thanks a lot for the swift update of the proposal. I see it’s a little more specific now, so that’s progress! Liesbet told me on Signal that my feedback would be appreciated, so I figure I share it here …
My main concerns are the following:
Getting more focused attention for the “external relations” domain: in the proposal it says “Liesbet does not feel like the best person to take the lead in contacts with politicians, neither for organising events to promote cohousing.” So then who will? Other than that there are also no concrete proposals on how tasks will be attended to, which doesn’t fully work to me. All this to me seems to confirm the meaningfulness of creating a separate team for external relations only. If need be, just split the team pro forma, with the same people on both the Outreach and the External Relations Team?
Getting more focused attention to the “outreach” domain:
The specifications of what needs to be done for every task could be more detailed. The lead times for some tasks are for example not correct: for Samenhuizen it is important to put it online as soon as the date is known. The newsletter we used to send out 3 weeks ahead of a presentation. Please ask somebody from @reef-recruitment (who used to take care of all of these tasks flawlessly) or have a look at the Plan B proposal.
I would like to see responsibility to be clearly assigned for every task. The whole point of sociocracy is that you empower people to get things done, and that they do so self-responsibly. Why do we need a pool of people to update the website? To draft a newsletter? And why would a Coordinator get involved? I don’t see why the proposal would not come with a concrete list of who does what, ideally with one main responsible per task (with the possibility of helpers where needed).
Can you please integrate these concerns before bringing the proposal to the plenary? I can also make myself available for a call if that helps to clarify this or that.
Hi Liesbet,
It was easier for me to work directly in the document, but mainly small edits, precision and adjusting the DDL - please check if it seems feasible for you.
Thank you and your team for the effort so far.
As a final point of feedback: I left you a suggestion in a couple of threads to mothball a couple of Helping Circles (PR for the permit, site management etc) and to repatriate these HC’s tasks to the External Relations part of your team. Would it please be possible to address these suggestions in your proposal?