The Nitty Gritty Stuff (mostly for facilitators)

Regular Meetings

We have three basic types of meeting:

• Hive Mind - a time to process tensions and explore drivers

  • A time to look beyond the surface / exploring competing, dynamic drivers

  • The goal is to develop a shared understanding of the problem NOT solutions (yet) 

  • Ideally, it avoids getting into the nitty gritty (except as a means of understanding drivers)

  • Uses the Tension Hopper and Ideas Section as agenda material.

  • Moves a tension from Idea > RFP 

• Groundwork - a time to research / refine / consent to specific proposals 

  • Builds on a clear RFP developed in Hive Mind

  • Requires a concrete proposal as a starting point. 

    • People can submit a proposal without first going through the “Hive Mind” meeting, but it must include a driver statement and that statement should be reviewed and agreed to by everyone before considering the proposal. 

  • Gets into the nitty gritty.

  • Seeking a concrete agreement - who does what by when? (All things being relative).   

  • Uses the Proposals Section as agenda material.

  • Moves from Proposal > Agreement 

• Planning (and Retrospective) Meetings - a time to complete the “reflect-aim” part of the aim-act-reflect cycle

  • Uses the Road Map / Sprint Plan and log books as agenda material. 

  • Answers the questions

    • Given what we’ve done, where are we now? What have we learned?

    • Given where we are now, where do we want to be?

    • Given where we want to be, what are the next steps?

  • Is a fractal process

    • Huddle = daily planning

    • Sprint = (bi)weekly planning

    • Season = 3 month planning

    • Year = well… you know, yearly planning. 

  • The process primarily involves 

    • Prep work / review - looking at log books, individual reflection

    • Reconnect with higher level goals

      • Huddle looks to sprint plan

      • Sprint plan looks to season

      • Season plan looks to the Road Map and the coming year

      • Yearly plan looks at the Road Map overall. 

    • Gathering lessons learned (including an action plan to record / integrate the lesson)

    • Establishing / refining priorities

    • Documenting decisions (through mantras and Asana notes, etc.) 

How do we use Asana?

We use Asana a few different ways:

• To map out strategies, priorities and interdependencies between projects on the farm.

• As a holding bin and structure for processing tensions and new ideas.

• As documentation for project agreements and action plans

• As documentation for our standing meetings (basically our meeting minutes). 

• As our online Sprint Board

How do we translate our process and terms into Asana’s features?

The core item in Asana is a “task”. Each task has a number of fields built in, including a title, description, due date (with optional start date), assignee, project, and collaborators. It also has “milestones” which work almost exactly like “tasks” except that they can’t have a start date. 

We have also created some user-added fields including:

• Bucket

  • Admin

  • Nesting

  • Chores

  • Project

  • Groundwork

  • Relationships

  • Self-care

• Sprint Priority

  • Fixed date

  • Commitment

  • Nice if / Eat the elephant

  • On deck

  • [blank]

• Dev Status

  • Tension

  • Idea

  • RFP

  • Proposal

  • Agreement

  • Dropped

  • Done
    

How do we use Asana to map out strategies, priorities, and interdependencies?

Objectives > Milestones > Projects > Tasks

Functional Areas and Strategies

Just like we divide the work of the farm into functional areas, we also lean into the functional areas to help develop the overall strategy and priorities of the farm. 

In general, we create a set of objective goals and milestones for each functional area, which the guilds then use to develop specific strategies and action plans. We then coordinate these functional area strategies and plans through the Highgrove Road Map project in Asana. 

So, for example, the Chicken FA has the ultimate goal of producing enough eggs for 16 people feeding the chickens as much as possible for food produced on the farm. We have converted that into the objective goal of having 40 laying hens in two moveable chicken tractors. This goal is broken down into a series of milestones - having the first moveable chicken house ready, establishing the first flock, growing the flock to 20 laying hens, building the second moveable chicken house, etc. 

Each Goal and Milestone is represented by a separate Asana “milestone”. The milestones are included in both the functional area Asana project and the Highgrove Road Map project. (A duplicate “post-it” version is also maintained in the Great Hall).

The Road Map

We primarily use the list and timeline views to create a rough estimate of the sequence and timing of work on different milestones for the near term.

Projects are only included on the Road Map if:

• They are at the agreement level

• They are strategic (essential to accomplishing our milestones and goals)

• They are time/season dependent

• They are assigned to a project champion who will advocate for the project deadline.

Action Plans

Caretakers work with their guilds to create an action plan (which usually lives as a project in Asana) to accomplish the milestones that are on the horizon. . Within the project, we lay out the “big steps” necessary to accomplish the goal, with a set of subtasks necessary to accomplish the task. 

We use the Asana project as an agreement and can use the overview page to capture any important context for the project - basically laying out the “driver statement” in the overview and then using the task list as the action plan. The driver statement should provide:

• a clear purpose relative to the milestone

• a clear end state - we know what “done” looks like

• a tentative timeline / due date

Ideally, a project can be completed in the space of a season with “big steps” that could be done in a sprint or two (just for ease in planning). If much larger, it should be broken down into more discrete steps. We use the project subtasks in Asana (which we call tasks) to represent smaller chunks of work necessary to get the project done.

The Sprint Board

We maintain our sprint board in Asana and on the Ops Wall. The sprint board should act as a dashboard that helps us see in one place:

• Current sprint priorities

• Current operational necessities

• On-going project work

  • Loose ends

• On deck activities

• On the radar

  • Communications

How do we use Asana to process tensions and new ideas?

The Navigating via Tensions process is managed in its own project in Asana. 

• New ideas or tensions are added to the Hopper section at the top in the form of a question. 

  • The circle keeper for the Hive Mind meeting should double check the mirror on the ops wall to make sure any new ideas / tensions are migrated to the Asana hopper. 

• Each step of the process has its own section: IDEAS, RFPs, PROPOSALS, and AGREEMENTS. There are also sections for WRAP UP follow-up action items, DONE / DROPPED, and DELEGATED tasks. 

• General instructions for moving a tension through the process are included in the task list and designated by [ALL CAPS IN SQUARE BRACKETS]. 

  • Specific actions like [update the “dev status”] are included in lower case within square brackets. 

• Use the description section of the tension to capture notes on driver / problem statement, considerations, and success criteria. 

• Use subtasks of the tension to generate potential solutions. Ideally, this means that every project will be associated with a tension / idea that provides context for the project. 

  • Use the description section of the project task for notes on pros / cons of different potential solutions. 

  • When there is agreement to move forward on a project, use the description section for any agreed upon project specs and/or include files or links to any necessary details of the action plan. (Leave any pros / cons as context as the project moves forward.) 

  • For ideas that are dropped, use the description to provide a brief explanation of why the project was rejected and mark as “done.”

  • Use subtasks of the project to break action items down further if necessary. Try to avoid more than 3 levels of tasks / subtasks just to keep from getting too far into the weeds.