Proximate UG

Geschrieben von Alan Rachid am 20.01.2025

When Nico and Roy decided to start their own business, they wanted to use their many years of experience in the IT and consulting industry to improve many of the things that had bothered them at their previous employers. Proximate is intended to be a self-organizing organization with flat hierarchies and no rigid processes, which will serve its customers with honesty, curiosity and expertise in their digital transformation, so that they can do their work in the interests of the community and in the responsible use of natural resources. Our complete corporate vision is:

Due to our growth, we are currently facing challenges that we want to implement in the sense of a self-organising team structure. In this article, we look at one of these challenges and how we have solved it.

The problem: How can we find a standardized procedure for tasks without establishing rigid and overly complex processes?

With Alan, we were able to convince our first colleague to join us in putting our vision into practice. Another colleague will join us in March. We are slowly realizing that for certain tasks and decisions, we need something to guide us so that we can implement these tasks well and make a decision in everyone's interest. The best example of this is dealing with vacation planning: How can I record my vacation requests? How do I record my vacation? Who do I have to inform that I am on vacation?

We have already had to ask ourselves all these painful questions because, to be honest, we were already at the point where a colleague was absent and we didn't know why.

We could now introduce a process for requesting leave that ends with the approval of a superior. However, we don't want hierarchies in the company and a process for leave is simply too big for a company with 4 people. We are also convinced that rigid processes restrict our creativity and innovative thinking.

The solution: The concept of policies from the sociocracy

Sociocracy is a form of organizational structure and governance in which everyone involved has an equal voice and can actively participate in shaping decisions. Used consistently, sociocracy would provide a framework for how organizations work in a circular structure instead of departments and hierarchies, where colleagues are organized into working groups according to their skills, competencies and interests, all of which have the authority to make decisions independently within their circle. In the respective circles, colleagues act as role owners who have clear goals, tasks and responsibilities. However, as we are only 4 colleagues, this would be overwhelming and unnecessary for our current size. As a result, we draw from the toolbox of sociocracy and use the tools that are helpful for us.

Among other things, this is how we found the concept of policies. A policy is a set of rules and recommendations that we adhere to when we carry out a certain activity or make a decision. First of all, an agreement always has a tension that needs to be resolved. According to Sociocracy 3.0, a tension is defined as:

„A tension is a personal experience: a symptom of inconsistency between personal perception and expectation (or preference).”

In the above example of the vacation request, the tension would be "How do I take vacation and inform my team and customers about it?" If you want to find out more about Sociocracy 3.0, you can find the guide here.

Implementation: How do we reach a policy on tension?

We would probably never have come up with the idea of working with agreements on our own. We were familiar with the theory from the Sociocracy 3.0 guide, but we lacked a process for working with them effectively. The incredibly good learning platform from the New Work magazine Neue Narrative helped us here. The 9 Spaces platform contains a large number of instructions, workshop formats and mural templates for many topics relating to New Work, including a policy construction kit. We have derived our template for an agreement from this toolkit. Here we record the things that need to be done, what we recommend doing in addition and what we consider to be useful information for the relevant agreements.

Our process for creating and using a policy starts with a team member identifying a relevant tension in our way of working. Based on this tension, the person creates a draft policy based on our template. In our Proximate Weekly, we have an agenda item where we talk about adjustments to existing policies and new draft policies. The adjustments as well as the new drafts are collected on our central mural board with all existing and potential new policies. After the change requests and new drafts have been briefly presented, we vote on whether we all have any serious objections. If this is the case, we have accepted the new draft or change and it will be implemented immediately. If this is not the case, the drafters agree on a specific appointment for finding consensus.

As we do not yet have so many policies that we need to monitor compliance with them, we are not assigning specific responsibilities for this. We will probably have to think about something here as soon as we get more colleagues. Or we can use the good suggestions from the 9spaces platform for this.