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www.management30.com/business-guildswww.management30.com/corporate-huddles

Management 3.0 Workout © 2014 Jurgen Appelo

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An idea is a feat of association.

Robert Frost,American poet

(1874–1963)

Many organizations need to harmonize practices, procedures, and tools across teams and departments. They also need people to share knowledge and develop their craft by communicating across traditional organizational boundaries. This is the purpose and role of guilds and huddles.

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The façades on the Grand-Place in Brus-sels, Belgium, look amazing. In the past, they were literally the images of the guilds of Brussels, representing some of the finest crafts in the country. Nowadays, the former guildhalls offer expensive Belgian choco-lates to naïve tourists, who are unaware that the really good chocolatiers are situated on the Grand Sablon elsewhere in the city.

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208 Medieval GuildsIn the Middle Ages, professional workers were called artisans, and they often organized themselves in guilds. For several centuries, those guilds were formed around disciplines such as carpeting, carv-ing, masonry, and many others. Sometimes, these associations of artisans were very strict. They dictated the rules of business for arti-sans throughout an entire country. Sometimes they were organized in a more relaxed way, with their guiding hands only reaching as far as the city boundaries. No matter how they were organized, the guilds enabled people to learn a craft in master-apprentice working relationships, and they defined proper procedures and behaviors for all who practiced the craft.

Unfortunately, when common sense devolved into politics, preserv-ing power and making money became more important than sharing information and teaching students. With the help of the government, the guilds even became counterproductive in terms of innovation. It seems a classic example of management corrupting an idea that is intrinsically valuable but susceptible to abuse.

Ogilvie, “Guilds, Efficiency, and Social Capital”

Guilds [were] social networks that generated

beneficial social capital by sustaining shared

norms, punishing violators of these norms, ef-

fectively transmitting information, and suc-

cessfully undertaking collective action.©

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210 Communities of PracticeFortunately, good ideas rarely die. Nowadays, the artisans within a company sometimes organize themselves in a modern version of a guild called a Community of Practice (CoP). [Malone, The Future of Work pag:84] A CoP is a group of professionals who share a com-mon interest or area of work, a common concern, or a passion about a topic. They can be organized around roles, technologies, interests, and anything else. [Brown, “On Community of Practice”] Since communities of practice are usually informal and self-organized, and membership is voluntary, the people who are involved are of-ten passionate about their work. [Wenger, Communities of Practice loc:144] This observation is closely related to one of Gary Hamel’s “moon shots” for business, which says that companies should see themselves as “communities of passion”. [Hamel, “Moon Shots”]

The purpose of a CoP is for participants to learn and share ideas, document lessons learned, standardize ways of working, initiate newcomers, provide advice, explore new technologies, and maybe even apply some forms of governance. A CoP can cut across teams, products, business units, and other organizational boundaries. In doing so, it helps to strengthen the social network. Sometimes, a CoP is in place for the duration of just one (big) project. Sometimes, CoPs continue for as long as their members are passionate about an area of work that binds them.

Seely Brown, “Complexity and Innovation”

Communities of practice are groups of people

whose interdependent practice binds them into

a collective of shared knowledge and common

identity. […] When people work this way, barriers

and boundaries between people and what they do

are often insubstantial or irrelevant, since a col-

lective endeavor holds people together.

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In different contexts, people use different names for (roughly) the same idea, such as learning communities, tech clubs, centers of ex-cellence, improvement communities, professional associations, or simply user groups. The CoPs at Spotify, the popular on-line music company in Sweden, are actually called guilds. [Kniberg, “Scaling @ Spotify”] It is the term I like best because it has an affinity with craftsmanship that is already centuries old. We could be more pre-cise and call them business guilds to distinguish them from the bigger professional associations and user groups, which usually cover geographical areas instead of organizations. No matter what you call them, there are three things that business guilds all share. They cover a knowledge domain, a community of enthusiasts, and a set of tools and practices.

Though the work of guilds is primarily about learning through collaboration, their usefulness can extend to other areas as well. For example, an interesting aspect of business guilds is that they may enable workers to have a bigger impact on the products, ser-vices, and business strategies of the organization, similar to the influence craftsmanship guilds had on the policies and laws of their city councils.

Wenger, Communities of Practice loc:518

A community of practice is a unique combina-

tion of three fundamental elements: a domain of

knowledge, which defines a set of issues; a com-

munity of people who care about this domain;

and the shared practice that they are developing

to be effective in their domain.

Anioła, “Guilds @ BLStream”

Through guilds employees have an impact on the

way they are working in the company and the way

the company provides services to customers.

Business guildscover a knowledge domain,

a community of enthusiasts,

and a set of tools and practices.

212 Hierarchiesof GuildsBusiness guilds (or communities of prac-tice if you prefer) can form their own hi-erarchies, and they can be formed within existing hierarchies. For example, in an organization that spans multiple European countries, the guild for testing in Germany and the guild for testing in France could both be part of a bigger Eu-ropean guild of professional testers. [Gal-braith, Designing the Global Corporation] At the same time, each regional guild can be subject to different processes, rules, and rituals relating to how they are formed and governed. In some cases, an organization’s management will actively push for the formation of such communities. In other cases, they will leave it to their professional workers to organize themselves.

It is even possible for people from different organizations to join forces in one guild, or for multiple business guilds to form one guild across a city, so that people can col-laborate and share their knowledge and passions across organizational boundaries. [Anioła, “Guilds @ BLStream”] This doesn’t have to be complicated.

Sometimes it can be as simple as organiz-ing a “regulars’ table” in a coffee house, such as the Management 3.0 Stammtisch in Munich, where enthusiasts from various companies discuss modern management principles and practices on a weekly basis. [Happy Melly, “Planning a Revolution?”]

Football (or soccer for some readers) serves as a nice metaphor for cross-organizational guilds. The Dutch national football association (or “guild for football”) is called knvb. At the European level, there is uefa, of which knvb is part, while at the world level they are all part of fifa. The national football associations are subject to the national laws of their respective countries and are formed and governed in dif-ferent ways. (Except for Brazil, where people told me that fútbol itself is the law.)

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When guilds become institutionalized (formally recognized by man-agement), it is important to understand how conflicts of interest be-tween people, guilds, and management will be resolved. For example, the Dutch gymnast Jeffrey Wammes (a professional) was originally not selected by the Dutch Gymnastics Federation (the guild) to represent The Netherlands at the London 2012 Olympics. Wammes didn’t agree with that decision and took the case to court (the man-agement), where the judge decided that Wammes had a good point, and that the federation had to reconsider its selection process.

In organizations, similar conflicts can arise. Perhaps some people desire that a product is delivered on a certain date, but a guild tries to block it because the product does not satisfy certain quality crite-ria. Management will then have to make it clear to everyone which people are authorized to make which decisions and play the judge in case there are different interpretations of the rules.

It’s always up to the government (or management) to define the boundaries within which the guilds can make their rules but also to respect those boundaries. It is interesting to note that the judge did not simply overrule the decision of the Dutch Gymnastics Federa-tion and give Jeffrey Wammes what he wanted. Instead, the judge said the decision had been made badly and ordered the two parties to start over. Likewise, in organizations, management can be a force that nudges people and guilds into a collaborative mode without making the decisions for them.

Watch outfor

inefficiencyFreelance project manager tonio Grawe pointed

out to me that hierarchies of guilds can lead to inef-

ficiencies due to politics. For example, the rules of

football at the european level differ slightly from

the rules at the global level. Why? Because they’re

different organizations with different people and

different agendas. they do this because they can.

214 Business HuddlesFor some purposes, starting a business guild might sound like too much effort with too little benefit. Sometimes, you just need to make a quick decision as a group, or you merely want a brief update on the latest news and gossip within your community of creative network-ers. That’s where the corporate huddle comes in.

I remember lunch meetings at one of the companies where I worked that were among the most cringe-inducing practices our top man-agement ever inflicted upon its employees. Once every three months it involved gathering everyone in the lunch area for one hour, paying for pizza or French fries, placing some department managers next to a computer and projector, and aiming PowerPoint slides decorated with bullet points at 200 glazed eyeballs. What I don’t remember is anyone ever saying afterwards, “That was great! I wish we did this every week.”

Corporate huddles are all-hands meetings that allow for quick hori-zontal decision making among peers. They differ from traditional all-hands meetings in the sense that they are about peers informing each other and making decisions with each other, not managers informing non-managers about decisions that were already made without them. [Ashkenas, The Boundaryless Organization pag:157] Basically, you have a huddle when you get most members of a group in the same room and you invite everyone to contribute to a central discussion. That’s the easy part. The difficult part is to make these huddles work, and to have people say, “That was good! We should do this more often.”

You can increase the chances of your huddles being successful by rotating

the facilitator or leadership role of the hud-dle, by creating a regular schedule with an

expected cadence, by injecting an element of surprise or fun (for example with an outside speaker from The Netherlands, or with a small celebration), by keeping those

who were not able to attend adequately in-formed, by keeping the PowerPoint projector

locked away, and by not organizing it in a boring lunch or conference room. [Ryan, “Don’t Hate the Huddles”]

If you organize your corporate huddles well, there is a good chance that you will never need a traditional all-hands lunch meeting again because everyone in the community is already informed about the decisions that they made together. People report that better cross-functional communication, less micromanagement, and breaking down barriers between teams and departments are the ma-jor benefits of regular huddles. [Gardella, “The Verdict on Business Huddles”] And when you focus some of your regular informal hud-dles on a specific topic or discipline, such as designing products, gathering user requirements, writing technical documentation, or giving presentations, you have the start of what could soon become a fully-fledged business guild. Before you know it, you will be sharing insight and advice, helping each other to solve problems, discussing aspirations and needs, and developing shared tools, standards, and documents. [Wenger, Communities of Practice loc:153]

that allow for quick horizontal decision making among peers.Corporate huddles are all–hands meetings

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