Legra Workshop 20220914 Metagov
Speaker 1: To the computer. So hello, everybody. Welcome to the third session of MediGov's practical governance concepts workshop. Today, we have Chris Ray and Rob Knight from Lagera who are gonna be walking us through an experiment. We're using peer to peer to do list in order to potentially write some piece of theater based around governance delegation. So we'll go ahead and pass it off to...
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Transcript
To the computer. So hello, everybody. Welcome to the third session of MediGov's practical governance concepts workshop. Today, we have Chris Ray and Rob Knight from Lagera who are gonna be walking us through an experiment. We're using peer to peer to do list in order to potentially write some piece of theater based around governance delegation. So we'll go ahead and pass it off to Chris. And if there's anyone in the chat who hasn't signed up and wants to participate, feel free to send me a DM either on Slack or in Zoom, and I can help get you sorted. So with that, I'll pass it over to Chris.
Thank you. Alright. So today, we're gonna we're gonna collaboratively write the script and stage directions for a very short play, one scene lasting about a minute, on the topic of distributed governance. And we're only going to have give ourselves about five minutes to do it all. So we're going to have to be really organized. So we're going to take ten minutes to organize ourselves first using Legra, which is a peer to peer multiplayer to do list app that Rob and I have prototyped. So for our first scene, I'm actually gonna I think I'll talk us through using the app. So there's only one thing happening at once. We kind of you can each take take turns to do it, and share your screen while you're creating and organizing an intention. So if things go well, we could then try a second scene where you where you self organize autonomously. And maybe I can also take part in that. I'll just facilitate for the first one. So the idea of the apps are very simple. If you're collaborating, you want some way to align your intentions with everyone else's. And the Allegra app uses a to do list interface with, two kinds of intent, where an intent could be a role or a responsibility with larger scope or small scope, just a little task. So there's, yeah, two types of intents. Personal intents where you're defining for yourself an intent that you're relying on yourself to fulfill. And you can also create, you know, another subintent or one or more subintents to break down something of larger scope into into, you know, smaller dependent parts giving you a defect dependency graph. And then the second kind of intent is a shared intent, which is a it's a shared object that appears on your to do list, but also on someone else's to do list. And the shared intent could only be created by consensus between you and only updated or declared complete by consensus. So one of you will be responsible for actually doing that intent, that shared intent. That's obvious. Somebody's got to do it. The other the other person who's involved in that shared intent has a less obvious role in respect of it. Is a kind of meta responsibility. You've got to invest the effort to be confident. You've got a shared understanding of what it is to be done and you'll be confirming that usage is complete. So most importantly, you're giving feedback during and upon completion, which ensures you're all gonna learn from surprises or misunderstandings. You're also accountable for the resources being used to do this, at least the, the time of the responsible person. So you're not just carelessly relying on someone else to do something. You're you're meta responsible for the fact that it's being done. You're accountable. And obviously different organisation cultures might attach different connotations to this kind of role of relying on someone else. You know, at one extreme, if it's a traditional enterprise management hierarchy, the person relying on you is your manager and a bunch of other things get bundled into that relationship. But even then, you know, even then reaching a shared understanding about something to be done, it's always by consensus. Not even your boss can force you to understand what they mean, what they
want you to do. And then, of course, in less hierarchical organizations, these consensual relations of relying on someone to do something can be more emergent, you know, back and forth. I rely on you. You break it down. You rely on me for part of that,
and so on. But overall, the connectedness of the graph of these intents with its edges of dependency and reliance, that's what's helped help keeping everyone's intentions aligned.
So,
let's let's jump in and do it. So we have to start somewhere. And, you know, there's many different patterns for this. We could all we could all elect a dictator and then they could they could break everything down and delegate. You know, if you would delegate, we could do all do it completely top down, but that's that's a bit boring. So the question is, what what happens if it's not like that? What if we have a bit of bottom upness or a bit of spontaneity? So I kind of need someone to just someone to volunteer, someone just needs to feel passionate enough about doing some parts of this, this playwriting we're doing today. There's there's a few different elements to it. We're it's only a minute long, but there's gotta be some dialogue. So we need at least one character, and someone's gonna have to write what that character says, give them a name. Every character has to wear a costume, so we need to describe what they're wearing and we need to say what the scene is and if there's any props in it. So if anyone's feeling especially excited about doing any part of it, now is your time to volunteer, and we'll start from there. And we'll see how the how this sort of network of of intentions emerges from there.
I'll take some dialogue or, I guess, dialogue of one character. Is that the slice that we're Well, I think
it's up to you, really. It's how how you wish to break it down. You could you could take on all dialogue if, you know
I wanna take on dialogue of a character.
Okay. Cool. Cool. Awesome. So let's do you wanna share your screen and kind of get into the Allegra app? And
Sure. I do have it. Let me pull it up. I currently have exactly one intent in place for attending the seminar. Oh. You haven't accepted it yet though.
Wait. I'm I'm gonna I'm gonna accept your intent right now. Yeah. I'm sorry. I was a bit distracted. I didn't see my inbox. Oh, that's wonderful. Okay. I've I've accepted.
Okay. So I guess I could select an intent. I'm the responsible agent. I'm relied upon by so we have this group here. Is this something where, like, is there, like, a abstract way to refer to the group of people who are relying upon me, or am I just gonna have to say, okay. My collaborators are all relying on me in this regard?
No. This is this is gonna force you to pick one person. You're gonna be forced to
pick one person. Well, you you asked, so you're gonna get it because you are the one who said said who's gonna do this? And I said me. Cool. So so I I guess that's you. I'm gonna name this intent, and I'll call it write dialogue for a character. So description is that I will write the dialogue. This is a little bit redundant, but okay. Dialog for a character in our short one minute theatrical play. Cool. How do I denote the fact that this is gonna be the Go ahead.
It's interesting to kinda talk talk about this. Like, how much detail do you have to put in? Because, really, the whole idea here is that you're not writing this as an objective intent so that anyone can look at it and kind of feel they're fully able to interpret it. This is just with me. You and I need to come to a shared understanding. So you can get you can get away with as little as you think is necessary for us to actually have that shared understanding. It if we've got lots of shared context
Yeah. What's interesting what's interesting, though, is that, like, we don't have much of a graph yet. So, like, the more graph there was, the more I would be comfortable removing metadata because it would be here. Right. So right now, I'm like, well, there's no nothing to link me back to. I if I could link back to, say, our short one minute theatrical play, I would probably have not written that. I probably would have referenced it. Similar to my question about our group. Right? Like, I'm inclined to say that I am gonna have some dependencies on someone who's gonna name my you know, name this character. That's gonna affect maybe what I think they'll say. And so I don't yeah. I sort of intuitively, I want more links, but I don't have things to link yet. Does that make sense?
No. Totally. It's there's always gonna be this, you know, kind of difficult emergence. If we've not collaborated before and we don't have any context about the different kind of roles we might play, it's gonna be, you know, hesitancy and probably more cautious to begin with.
So I mean, this is, I think, okay, as a starting point. And obviously I will start, I guess, writing dialogue at some point. But I I am like a little bit unsure about how to tangle this up with the other the other things that you're asking like if I let go and someone else say I don't know. Maybe I'll just say like I would like someone to name this character, and maybe someone to provide a a frame, or like a stage, or like something about the place this character is. And that way, once I have a name and a a sort of backdrop or a context, then that would be like the motivation and the the what like, the information that I would need to say start writing.
Right. So, so let I mean, why not go in and you'll see it updated. If you could go yeah. Click on the intent. Go and go and take a look at it. Actually, look at have the intent view. You can see we've got a little sort of event log at the bottom there, but also chat. So
Okay. So I can come in here and say I would love for someone to provide my care the character a name and possibly other IO info they feel is relevant
Yep.
And as a separate item, ideally, by a separate collaborator, I would like a backdrop or, you know, the context about this character, current situation. Okay. And besides fixing my fast typing errors, because, you know, thanks for that feature so I don't feel dumb, I will put that in there. Alright. So now I'm basically requesting that other people take the floor and and do some intents.
Right. And what's important to note here is that although in general, you know, others can can start to kind of browse a graph once they're part of it, right now, there's really just us two with this understanding. So in terms of kind of searching for other, you know, other skills, other resources to bring in, other people to come and collaborate with us, that's that's happening through well, it's actually it's happening through Zoom right now, but there's there's gonna be other channels for that. That's not it's not confined to to this context. We can add other followers specifically to to the intent. And, actually, I'm gonna I'm gonna add Val, because I just have a feeling that Val might be good at naming characters. So I'm I've added her give me. I've added her as a follower. And if you click on three where it says three followers, just above yeah. You'll now be able to see that Val's listed there as well as us. And Val, in turn, will have in her inbox a little open. There we go. Cool.
And the the mic the mic is happy to Yeah. I'd be happy to name a character and think of a little setting for them. I think that the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard would be a good place we could start our character, and and I've been thinking a lot about the new Little Mermaid movie that's coming out. So and I know there's the Charles River. So I'm envisioning a setting of Harvard, and there's some big important meeting happening. And Ariel the mermaid, you know, she she really wants to be a part of it. Perhaps there's, you know, some conversation that she's overhearing happening at the Berkman client center. Yeah. That's Cool. Should I make an intention?
Yeah. Absolutely. And what's interesting is yeah. So if you share your screen, and we will follow you.
Okay.
What's interesting is all of us actually now have the shared con context. We happen to be in a Zoom conference. So, potentially, you can get away with recording less in in actually, in the intent, because, you know, you and Zagreb have got this kind of shared, you know, shared understanding about Disney movies and and various stuff. So you you can see what what you can get away with. Can you share your screen? And
I'm trying. It's gonna make me quit Zoom.
Oh, no.
Enable it. I know. But I can I can quit it and
go backwards? Maybe maybe we can go back to Zagal sharing his screen and watch it from his perspective.
Yeah. Yeah.
If you want to propose propose to him.
Okay. Name the character and
How are you doing this time? I've I've I've lost track. I'm not I'm not keeping a close eye.
Yeah. We're thirteen minutes into the first block. Okay. So we're kind of getting into the doing. I think we should probably spend another, like, three or five minutes on this.
Cool. Cool. Awesome.
Okay. I sent an intention.
Amazing. So let's let's see if sorry. I was willing to accept it.
You can see it. Yep. Okay. Here it is. I'm accepting. Cool. Cool. I have a question. So thus far, the description, this seems like it's the it's somewhat of the content of the like, it's I'm I'm sort of trying to understand the the separation and or lack thereof between the intent as the sort of, like, networked, hey. I'm gonna do this thing Yeah. Versus the outcome, which is the, hey. I did this thing. So yeah. I don't know if you have comments on that. Like, I'm kinda feeling my way through it. But my immediate response then would be to say something like, okay, why don't we put that in the document that sent shared? Because it's available now. And so it'd be possible to take this and actually put it there, I think.
Absolutely. And may maybe you could add into this intent a link to the where where we're gonna put the output.
I yeah. I got this from Sent. It's actually in the other thread Yeah. Actually already. So Yeah. That brings up a question of of duplicating and the question of whether this reference itself is sort of yeah. Anyway, I'm can you put the material in our shared artifacts here? Okay.
Cool. And maybe we should have so let's what have we got now? We've got we've got somebody right we've got Sargon writing a script, and we've got the I mean, maybe we're just gonna have a one character, you know, just one character on stage. That's that's totally fine. It's only a minute a minute long. It can just be a soliloquy.
I feel like I would prefer an interlocutor. So maybe we could we could I I could propose that one other at least one other person steps up to to to, I guess, a voice or write for someone to have a a a conversation exchange with.
Cool. Well, that that sounds good. And, yeah, I'm I'm I'm rely I'm currently, I'm relying on you to be one character. So I guess I am gonna step up a bit into a sort of, you know, kind of leadery role here, and I'm gonna try and recruit someone else to do another character and rely on them. So I don't know. Who can I prevail upon? Rob, have you got spare capacity to
Yeah. Yeah. I'm happy to, to volunteer.
Because I rely on you to okay. In that case, if if you will just stop sharing your screen it's okay. I'm I'm gonna share mine. And let me share my Allegra. There's my Allegra. Cool. Hang on a second. I want the actual thing, not the oh, how confusing. Yeah. Sorry. You can see I've got quite a few different collaborations going on here. So I'm gonna actually create my own sort of personal intent here, which is produce the first scene. And I'm just relying on my I'm just relying on myself to do this. So, actually, by default, if I don't see anyone relying on me, it's me. This is just a personal intent that I'm gonna set as its sub intent, relying on Zaghelm for that. And I'm gonna create another subintent where I'm gonna rely on Rob
for
dialogue for a second character. And in fact, I'm just gonna kind of take a bit of leadership here and just decide what proposed what that character is, which is a, an intelligent very intelligent pup, of course, that happens to be swimming swimming by. And and please describe the color of the octopus. It doesn't actually need any other costume here. It's it's naked, but it's that's gonna be perfectly fine for this thing. So I've sent that proposal, And
Okay. I have received a proposal.
Oh, yeah. And I'm just getting myself up to date with this the other one. I can see cool. Awesome. Well, we've done a pretty good job of organizing. And, you know, I suppose at the moment, I'm I'm relying on a couple of people to produce the dialogue. It looks like most of the pieces are in place. Probably if something falls through the cracks, I'm gonna feel like maybe I it was my responsibility here. Like, it it looks I'm beginning to have this position in a in a kind of graph where it feels like maybe I ought to be trying to get a complete set of dependencies for delivering this thing. But let's let's just jump in and see how we do. And maybe I haven't done enough here. Maybe maybe I haven't organized enough, but we'll let's see how it goes. So let's let's, kind of turn our attention to, to the shared Google Doc and try and fulfill our intent and just see see what happens. Let's just take a few minutes to to get stuck in. In the background here, I'm already proposing that Zargan's intent to participate today is complete because even if you leave right now, as far as I can understand, you've you've participated and made an important difference being here. So don't wanna distract you from your hard work, of course, but there will be that thing inside the inbox for whenever you next take a break. That's really cool.
Woah. Sorry. It's not meant to be bad.
Oh, god.
Wow. Okay. Cool. Okay. Cool.
This is the problem with doing this in real time. Totally interpret things not as they were written.
Yeah.
Okay. Oh, yeah. I gotta put that here. There
Zach, I don't know if it's if it's clear Yeah. But I've I've sent an intent that I'm relying on in Allegra. I find having both windows open side by side is useful.
Oh, yeah. I'm I'm I was writing, so I wasn't looking. I'm back at Allegra. I'm not am I screen sharing? No. You're screen sharing. Okay. Let's see.
I'll I'll stop sharing, and you can share your screen if you like. So
Sure. I'm back in Allegra and kind of trying to find my way.
Okay. Cool.
Let's see. So this is what I've got here. So I should probably go back to my inbox, maybe. Yeah. That's still happening. Okay. Proposal, participate, got marked complete. Sent has initiated proposal. Introduce some fictional elements from the BKC on top of delegated governance. Okay.
Wow. Now you don't have to accept this, by the way. You could you could if if you're not clear what it what what is meant, you might want to kind of send a counter proposal as it were. Like, edit the description to be what makes sense to you or what you think is intended and send it back. And then it won't be acceptance. You will be pinging it back to sentence. Okay.
So so if I edit this, it will have a different effect?
Exactly. So try try editing the description, and you'll you'll find that
something. But this is still for me. So it's not really a counter proposal for him. It's an edit to this proposal.
Yeah. Okay. Ah, so in that case well, wait. Sent proposed it. So
I I'm I'm relying on this. I really I really feel like this needs to be part of the the play.
Yeah.
Yeah. And and I'm seeing if if Sargon will will match that reliance with an intent.
Yeah. Okay. So so Sargon's responsible here. But, you know, tweak you know, refining refining the scope of the responsibilities he sees it is Yeah. Is only gonna help. So
Why is Argham responsible for this one given that I'm writing the dialogue for the octopus? So if
this is a Oh,
I didn't realize that you're writing the the dialogue for the octopus. I don't I don't I don't have this in my graph.
We may find another dependency there.
Yeah. So I think, actually, for the moment, my instinct is to, like, reject this. If I could, I would probably just say, hey. I'm I don't understand. Maybe I'll just, like Yeah.
I just don't understand
what you are asking of me. Yeah. You maybe I should also note, like, he could follow you you may want to follow the intent associated with the octopus character. Because, yeah, so far, I'm just kinda ripping off the octopus. Yeah.
Ah, okay.
I was actually kind
of propose abandoning this this this intent. If you don't think this should should happen, where it's got active at the top, you can you can click on active and select
I I do need to add I can add him, I think, as a a follower to this Yeah.
You could
yeah. That's right. That would be the whole thing. Get him get him in the right intent.
Yes. So this is the Rob one. Right?
Yeah.
Okay. Cents on there now. Okay. So you're following that. I think what I'm think what I'm expecting here is maybe that we we might just need another character, someone who is from the conference possibility. I won't say we need it, but, you know, one option to bring in BKC content would be to introduce a character from the conference.
Yeah. And there's, like I am I can see different ways to do that. Like, again, if I'm if I'm beginning to take on this role of kind of, you know, gathering together people to do all the character writing, maybe that's for me to do. On the other hand, you're responsible for writing this octopus character, but maybe you just need a foil for your octopus or rather it's Rob who's writing Octopus, right? So Rob needs a foil for that. So maybe Rob should just rely on someone else to create this because it's really it's gonna be between Rob and this other person to try and get the the needed prompts from that third character. I'm kind of sort of stepping out of frame for a minute. I I had thought maybe we would run through a scene, pause, have a chat about it, and then go back into another scene. But I actually think we've fairly naturally, moved into a a new phase of more, you know, self organizing and kind of actually mixing up the doing of the organizing part with the with the actually fulfilling of the responsibility. So I I do think we should leave enough time at the end of the session to have a more of a discussion. But I'm I'm assuming we won't run through a second scene. We're just we're just gonna let this go
for a
few more minutes and then have a discussion about it.
Yeah. I really wanna talk about that because that's the thing that I'm finding the most challenging about this is the the the practical blending of the intent making and thing doing Yep. Feels a little force. I think it's great that we're all collocated, but we don't Yep. Need yeah. I I we can come back to it, but we wanna better We
we let's let's have a little time out and have a have a discussion of it because it it it it is it is an important issue. You know? I mean, this is very much forced because we're, you know, we're trying to introduce this new tool and use it to do something within an hour session. In reality, most collaborations we're involved with are gonna be spread over a lot longer time, and they're gonna be more asynchronous. So we probably will have more of a natural flow between, you know, the organizing where we're figuring out what we need to do or maybe figuring out where we need to rely on other people or, finding finding someone who may rely on us if we if we think we've got something to contribute and we wanna find out whether whether that does fit from their perspective. And that
That's actually Yep. Well, so that's what I was gonna ask is what do you think is the natural cadence or time scale, like, variation between sort of doing and sort of what we're basically is comapping our intents, which is awesome. It provides a legible artifact of the over time. But I'm I'm sort of I'm trying to get an intuition for how you see that activity interplaying with. Is it, like, you know, agile y sort of, hey. We do, you know, weekly or or biweekly sort of sessions to get together and update ourselves on our collective dependencies, or are you imagining it being, like, itself less standardized than that?
I think it's like I mean, certainly in in practice, I I'm using it in a less standardized way because because this is my to do list. Right? So I've and I've actually got more than one project that I need to get done in in life. And so I'm using this to have in one place all the various different responsibilities I've got, things I need to be done. And, you know, on on I'll share my screen again. Watch me. But, I mean, I mean, my my intent is if I don't filter it by organization, I've got, like, loads of stuff here. And within an organization, I'm I'm using it to, like, I'm using it to prioritize. So I can kinda drag and drop stuff or maybe just collapse that. Like, you know, overall, what have I got here? Well, actually, this one I've proposed that that's in your inbox to accept. I think I think you'll, you know, I'm very happy with your participation. It's complete from my perspective. But, you know, if I had a few different things here, this is where I might be trying to figure out what's more important, what's less important. But then I'm for a given responsibility, I can then shortlist it, which is putting it on this kind of, well, a shortlist. And the shortlist is my, you know, my most urgent or most important things. And I'm using this day to day to figure out, what am I doing today? And again, dragging and dropping, things to try and figure out, you know well, ultimately, it's the thing at the top of the list that I actually get on with. So for me, it's a oh, yeah. Thanks. Cool. I've seen that. So for me, it's a it's a daily thing. I'm certainly looking at it every time I sit down for a work session and figuring out what am I doing right now. I'm I'm looking at it at the beginning of a day and thinking about what my day might look like. I'm looking at it at the beginning of the week, actually, because I can already see some things that have actually always did that have appeared for that week. I'm trying to figure out what my time looks like. So I'm kind of using it on a few different timescales. And I I'm not sure there's an obviously correct one there. I think that that'll depend on different, you know, different work patterns.
Do you find yourself, like, going through messaging platforms or, or email even, as a way of populating it. So, like, a lot of what I'm experiencing with playing with this app is a little bit reminiscent of my email inbox. Obviously, it's
Yeah.
Somewhat overwhelming at times. But getting parsed these sort of essentially, someone sending me things like, you know, will you do a thing? Or they maybe they don't even ask something.
And and, obviously, if if it's an organization where I've got some influence and I can kind of encourage everyone to adopt the tool, like in Allegra. If I'm with Rob, I now know that Rob isn't asking me to do anything other than through the Allegra app. So if it's emails or if it's in our, you know, in our Mattermost instance or our Slack type thing, That might be relevant kind of background information or it's something more discursive, but it's not Rob asking me to do so. And so that's also helping me direct my attention. I I I know where I'm gonna find the things that I'm I need to do or where I'm being asked to to think about something that someone is doing.
Question for Rob then. Yeah. Do you need something like do you have to use, in addition to this, Jira or anything, a lot more software engineering oriented and so far as these intents translate into more technical work breakdowns?
Not right now. No. So we we switched over from using we were using just for our own internal development. We were using GitLab issues, and we switched over to using Allegra partly to beat our own dog food, but partly because it it actually makes sense to have everything in in one place. And what we also had was we had a big massive long kind of direct message chat on a Matamos server, and we discovered that we had months and months and months worth of conversation that we'd had that was just impossible to pass really. We we would frequently discuss doing something, and then action would be implied, but not really recorded as such. And so then a week later, I would say, did I say I was gonna do that thing, or did I did we decide that it was gonna happen or not? So having some something where at the end of that conversation, you have a just an easy way of knowing if you did actually decide to do it or not. Because if you did decide to do it, it would have gone in, like, as a shared intent. And if you didn't decide to do it, that means it it didn't go in.
So, yeah,
I guess to rip off that question a little bit, because if I were to kind of open this tool with, like, one of my teams and we were to say, like, just show them system, an intent would look a lot like a ticket. And I think they're saying, okay. This seems like kind of like a stripped down, like, Jira or something. And that's, like, a very superficial take of it. Right? And so if I were to say, like, well, no. It's actually different. I I it's for these, like, core reasons. I think one one of them is about, like, the process of, like, accepting an intent. Right? But I'm wondering. I feel like there's also something under the surface about how you expect people to work and collaborate together. In the same way, for example, it kinda reminds me of, like, Rome research where, like, Rome is, like, a very simple tool, but it actually demands, like, a very it demands your own process of actually interfacing with that tool. That is, like, something that's much more fluid and dynamic. It's hard to pin down down and nail that, and I expect there's something under the surface here as well. So I'm I'm curious if you guys can speak to that a little bit about, like, what does this demand of the people participating in the system? Do they have to conceptualize it themselves a different way than with a tool like Jira?
Yeah. I think I think in a way, it also I mentioned earlier a bit, like, the culture of of an organization to the extent that it's a preexisting organization with with an established culture The shapes will cause different parts of the tool to be most constraining. So, I mean, we have had very, very traditional hierarchical organizations testing out this app. So they've already got an org chart and and, like, people know who their managers are. So the manager is the relying agent pretty much all the time except for those interesting kind of cross functional, you know, someone from one team actually relies on another team and then suddenly realizes a relationship there that is interesting and important and isn't following the org chart. And that that alone is kind of an interesting learning for that kind of organisation because they're seeing that it's not quite siloed or tree like in the way that, you know, the org chart implies. But for them, I guess the main thing is just it's this discipline around the dialogue, the consensus required. The manager no longer gets to just fire off an email saying, please do this. And then assume that, if nothing else happens and then it doesn't get done, it's it's the team member's fault. Like, you know, I I'm the manager. I send an email like it's on you. This is now no. No. No. You're also responsible with that person you want to rely on to coming to a shared understanding with them and getting that thing accepted. So it's, in a way, it's a bit more friction there for a manager, but it's friction that's forcing them to to engage with the difficulty of communication. As as I said in my little intro, like, you've even my boss can't actually sort of unilaterally impose a shared understanding on me. I've got to come to that shared understanding with them. And I think good management practice, of course, assumes that, you know, even like Peter Drucker from the fifties has got, like, that as a core part of management practice, that kind of dialogue with your director. So but, you know, if you don't we go to another extreme and, you know, a very kind of flat non hierarchical organization, then there's very much stuff left unsaid here about what what is their process going to look like? I mean, today we had this, you know, we were sort of tentatively working our way towards how are we actually organizing this. And you can see there is there's definitely space there for for leadership, emerging leadership. If someone thinks they've got a good idea about, you know, actually to achieve this thing, I think it should be broken down in these ways, and he's willing to just kind of proactively step up and start doing that. If other people are willing to go with them and accept that, then you you will have this kind of emergent, you know, emergent leadership. I'm just I'm very interested in this as, you know, leadership, emergent leadership, plural leadership, distributive leadership. I I had a a background partly in organization development, and I'm always kind of super interested about how these kind of structures emerge. I don't think there's one, like, canonical answer for it.
And then here's just one clarifying question about that. So I noticed that there's isn't, like, the concept of, like, sub orgs, for example, in in Allegra. And is that, like, a intentional choice of where, like, you're optimizing around the merchant leadership and you're in, like, forget your current organizational structure. This is gonna happen by itself.
Is that kinda I think I I I talked about this a bit in the theory sort of theoretical short talk last last week. I'm interested in these sort of intermediate scale organizational structures. So it's larger than the team because I think within a team, you don't need a tool. Like, a team can spontaneously organize. You know, it's just a handful you know, if it's two pizza team, you know, that's that's the whole point. It's it's more natural. And, like, big scale in terms of, you know, constitutional level stuff or, you know, the kind of voting on major priorities or, you know, whether to grab that. That's there's lots to be said about that. And I it feels like there's a bit of a gap at the intermediate stage where it's too big for a team or it might involve different disciplines, different knowledges required, so it's gonna be cross disciplinary. How does that structure emerge or indeed get imposed? And I I don't think there's a sort of simple answer to it. And it's that's it. I mean, in a way, it's a research question for us. This this tool is helping us start to see that, visualize that. How how how in practice does it does that kind of structure tend to emerge?
Alright. Just very quickly go back to the the comparison with Jira because that's something that I've had plenty of experience with in the past. And going way back, if you go back to the early history of the agile software development movement, I think that people used to say a lot was something like a card is a placeholder for a conversation. And so the idea was that you would you would have these cards and you would stick them up on the wall. And it would have a very it's a really small little index cards, not not very large. And it would have a a brief one, maybe one line description of what the thing was and the names of the people involved. And normally, it would be two people. It'd be a the product owner who would be the person reported to and then be the the person taking responsibility for doing the thing. And they would have a conversation between themselves about what that thing looks like, what the acceptance criteria are, how it's supposed to work. And it wasn't really the business of the rest of the team or of the project manager or anybody else to to get involved in that conversation or to preempt that conversation. And I think we're we're following that kind of idea here, which is that you you work with the person who really has the need, and the person who's responsible is is in direct communication with them about what it is that needs to be done. And the manager's role is definitely still to to monitor all of that and to make sure that nothing is stuck and to make sure that, the priorities are being are being met and deadlines are being met and and things like that. But not necessarily to have what you what often tends to happen with Jira where you get a kind of quite lengthy written ticket, like the ticket will will have all of this information in it, with the idea being that that can then be assigned to anybody on the team because it contains so much contextual information. And you move then towards the kind of centralized model where the the project manager is just sort of assigning work out to a a a a range of different people. And that that has a couple of different failure modes. One is that it's it it centralizes. The other is that a lot of effort often goes into writing tickets that are then simply never implemented. They they they're just kind of wasteful, and you have months old tickets. And and until you get kind of Jira bankruptcy, and you have to delete them all. So we're we're aiming to have much more direct person to person communication between the person with the need and the person who's gonna take responsibility for meeting it. And management can be an intermediate role in that, or it can be a monitoring role across a bunch of collaborations that other different that other people are doing between themselves.
Makes sense. Thank you.
Val?
Oh, I just sent in the chat a question if it's possible for teams to see, like, the whole graphs, their their dependency graphs. Like, I know on our call last week, we talked about not being able to see, like, intents that you're not following, and, like, I think I've come around to, like, relinquishing that respond or responsibility of, like, seeing what other people are working on if they're not choosing for me to follow. But I think it'd be cool to like, from a maybe, like, retroactive perspective, like, once a project's complete or something just to be able to better understand where all the dependencies were and yeah. And if that's, like, a future feature, if it's at all, you know, part of what you're envisioning.
I'm I'm relying on Rob to, implement graph visualization again. Mhmm. We did have it in a in a alpha version. But, yeah, I agree with you. It's it's in a way, it was fun to test out. What's it like if you deny people that? Because it's it's something that they'll reach for very quickly if it's there. Mhmm. That kind of sense of orientation. And it's interesting to to get people to kind of experience some of the friction because the friction's there for a reason. It makes you think about how is it that you figure out who to you know, who has what kind of skills in your organization. Like how does that actually happen? But, yeah, I think inevitably it is an important feature to be able to to get that more global orientation. And, you know, it helps you make sense. How is what you're doing here really contributing to a bigger whole if you can literally see it?
Seth, do you wanna comment on your point about implicit feudalism?
I guess I'll keep it brief because we're this is still this will be an hour. Yeah?
Yeah. I mean, it's an hour. I'm I'm happy to stay on for a couple of minutes to to wrap the discussion.
Great. I I I just I just really like your point that in order to in order to break from a single leader, you are encoding in the software a bunch of dynamics, but it's not enough for that. People sort of have have to bring some values of flatness a little bit into the software maybe from from in person training. That seems to be a a pretty bold challenge for any constructive view of implicit views any constructive alternative to implicit view. How do we do that? And it and it seems aligned with I can't call it a trend because it's n equals one, but it seems aligned with what prosocial. World is doing where, basically, to use the software, you have to participate in, like, a three hour, you know, in person training with your group. And so it's really teaching the social skills that permit you in persons that permit you to use the software properly. Someone who made a reference to a software called Roamin that I haven't heard about before, but it seems a little bit the same way that that you need to have the philosophy in order to in place in order to use the software correctly. And that's that's intriguing. It sounds challenging. It sounds maybe a lot of people would call it a bad idea for the overheaded ads. But it's intriguing, and and maybe it's necessary for anything that's not, you know, a root model. One admin, everyone else, is non owner.
Yeah. No. For sure. I mean, in a way, the easiest sell for us is to sell to more traditional enterprise because if you come to this with a conventional management hierarchy, actually, this is just a very useful tool to to enforce good management practice, to ensure good communication between management and the world. So I think you're right. If that's not assumed, you do have to provide something in its place. And it's, having now watched a few different instances where it is a kind of, you know, artificial, artificial bringing people together for workshops. So there isn't any kind of existing understanding or culture. It's confusing. It's challenging. It's it is not obvious to people how to spontaneously self organize and produce these structures. So I I I think you're right. I think, for those people who are coming to this without a preconceived notion of how they how they organize, especially self organize or have, kind of, sort of, leadership, I think they will need some assistance, in in working that through and deciding how how they want to approach that, for sure.
Great. Well, let's go ahead and leave it there. Thank you, Chris and Rob, for leading the session and for everyone for participating and for the discussion. It was nice with the with the small group. I'm really happy we all got together, and we'll share the recording of this and the the sort of semi complete play that we produced later as well. So thanks, everyone, and look forward to the next time we meet. Take care. Cool. Oh, yes. Of course. Yes. Yes. And let's let's give a round of applause to Chris and Rob.
Thank you very much.
Absolutely. Yes. Okay. Bye, all.
Cool. Bye bye.