the grid manifesto (clone of v1)
The GRID FRAMEWORK could be understood as a mental model of how a grid can be operated and organized. One big challenge for any grid-like construct is the lack of working routines, guidelines and rules, other organizations have. The proposed mechanics are a minimal viable set of routines and concepts to support the setup of a grid-like organism. All of the proposed routines and concepts are a mashup of ideas and findings open for evolution. So consider the GRID FRAMEWORK as a collection of thoughts for the organization of a grid, which is about to meet its evolution. Only rare aspects are meant to be rather static concepts - most ideas are the starting point for adaption, tweaking, re-finement.
The GRID FRAMEWORK should be applicable to various intentions like …
Requirements reflected here:
The GRID FRAMEWORK consists of some core concepts and assets articulated as GRID MECHANICS:
Values are highly connected to the purpose of an organism. A good value can be verified, if you can start a sentence with ‘I believe in or that …’ followed by the position the value is about. A good value will transport more meaning than a question which is only valid in a week. Values are paradigms articulating what is right or wrong in the eyes of the beholder. But drinking ‘pepsi instead of coke’ would not be a real value. Values are about the underlying rational which lead to forms of behaviour or decision making. Values can be applied to verify, if an action is good or bad according to the values rational. Which makes values abstract.
They determine the boundaries of what would make sense to put on an agenda or not. Values help to articulate the broader mission of a team or initiative and therefore sharpen the focus.
Values are the result of reflection, positioning and also of Zeitgeist. They can be extremely abstract and so it makes sense to also articulate examples and anti-values to clarify them.
Based on values it becomes easier to create a list of attention areas, which might be only relevant for a certain time-frame to act on behalf of a value. Values will not change every other day, so it is important to not mix-up values with actionable items on an agenda.
Values are not a strict concept of ultimate consensus in a way, that a value requires 100% of consent by any individual of the group. A list of values is even more driven by the accumulation of single values which found supporters. Let’s say ‘freedom of speech’ is important for one individual, but ‘quality and reliability of information’ would be another valued idea, then both aspects could make it into a list of values. If the co-existence of values in consequence would create a moral conflict or confusion, then values needs to be weigthed by the group, based on arguments, discussions, consensus. Which also implies, that not all values are equivalent regarding impact, importance, priority. Think of the laws of robotics by Asimov - the third law is valid as long as it does not conflict with the first or second law. The same goes for a set of values: each value makes the assessment of what is right or wrong even more complex.
But that’s a fair trade-off.
The AGENDA (like the GRID’s AGENDA) is a more fluent list of actionable areas. The AGENDA ITEMS are determined by the overall prupose of the grid organism, which then is of course connected to its VALUES.
AGENDA ITEMS
Agenda items describe the area of action. For instance, ‘environment & sustainability’. These items are too broad to be derived into one project, but can describe the boundaries or ambitions of what needs to be tackled. One agenda item can have many sub-items.
AGENDA SUB-ITEMS
Agenda sub-items can belong to one or many agenda items. One sub-items articulates a challenge which requires attention or action or could be articulated as benefitial opportunity connected to agenda items. Because of this, all agenda sub-items in sum represent the most differenciated list of challenges for the identification of valid projects, initiatives or ideas. If you think in problems and solutions, then the agenda sub-items represent the problem-list and ideas, initiatives or projects/experiments reflect the solution-side of things.
Together - the agenda items and all sub-items can be evaluated against values. Based on the work ‘against’ the agenda, a grid can assess its output and relevance.
B.O.G.I. is the ‘battle of glorious ideas’. The purpose is the identification of candidates (=ideas) to work on. This can be applied to a stage-gate-like innovation funnel approach as well as to a structured brainstorming. How rigid this approach is used is up to the people using it.
Some intentions behind the BOGI (battle of glorious ideas) are simple to explain:
Perhaps you already got the point. The BOGI is a small framwork for the qualification and attention handling of all possible ideas.
Finally, each idea can become a project / experiment or initiative. Initiatives - as important areas of action - receive higher attention and obviously are connected to efforts (invest). That’s why the selection of where to spend time and work becomes important for every (physically and ressource-wise limited) organism.
The ambition is to create the highest impact based on the minimal invest needed. So to support this ambition, selection and focus setting is inevitable.
The BOGI is one instrument in that context, but it also allows the openness for many new ideas and the joy of idea-discussion.
Best-practice
You can easily set up a BOGI-Board, in Trello or any other tool for instance, and share this with your grid. First you should define some stages (columns), so that you can move cards from left (lowest invest, highest degree of blurryness) to the right (highest invest, solid planning). You should add a stage for killed, archived or parked candidates of the BOGI.
Per idea you should name one person who is responsible for that candidate as its promoter. Each idea needs an advocate to not get lost or to not be ignored. Of course it works that the advocate is the person who suggested the idea, but that is not a must. You should find your own rythm for the BOGI-discussion. A regular session (could be a video-meeting) by which ideas are assessed based on a) the intro and b) the discussion + c) voting. Each idea should be presented in under 10 minutes. Followed by a short discussion. If you limit your session time, then you can go through n ideas. In the end of each session you should give all attendees the chance to vote with (for example) three votes for the candidates of the stage. Votes can also be applied to candidates already discussed before. The candidates with the most voting-points (let’s say the top-3 or however you want to limit this) will make it to the next stage. Meaning, they passed the first gate.
Later stages can be formalized even further towards criterias (when to pass a gate), for instance if you want to build something, then you will have pre-requisites to tackle before a realization phase will be possible. But it really depends on the way you want to work with it or how rigid or open you want to design the process.
Based on the BOGI, if it is connected to the AGENDA + INITIATIVES/EXPERIMENTS you can easily measure how much impact you are creating, based on your organisms mission.
Initiatives are ‘projects’. Each initiative - similar to the BOGI-ideas - requires at least one promoter / advocate. Initiatives in best case are the result of a BOGI idea and therefore passed several preparation steps already.
Initiatives have a clear goal and measures regarding the expected outcome to answer the question ‘how successful was the initiative?’. Since initiatives represent the highest areas of invest taken for one idea / ambition / solution, it is important to measure if it is on track or not. The status should be brought back to the grid, so it makes sense to a) identify one of the initative team members to report the progress to the grid and b) to follow-up on the progress or any impediment. The grid acts as supporting environment towards initiatives. So any kind of support could be requested here.
Initiatives are tightly connected to the challenges articulated on the AGENDA.
So based on initiatives the grid becomes active towards the sum of challenges.
It is not necessarily the case that an initiative is limited to grid members only. When you think of an initiative which would cause the spinning-off of a start-up, then of course an initiative transforms itself to become something else, but triggered by the grid. That is the only way to think the grid as a non-exclusive network which has a practical connected to its surrounding. So to summarize - initiatives are not strictly grid-internal projects.
HOW initiatives are organized is up to the respective grid. It can be helpful to discuss this for various types of endeavours, because an initiative can be connected to dozens of possible shapes and complexity levels. In regards to the GRID MECHANICS it is sufficient to first of all differentiate the initiatives compared to other grid activities and concepts.
Experiments can be ‘projects’, too. But experiments are no initiatives.
Since the initiatives follow a clear scope, goal and are connected to agenda items, each initiative is well prepared and excecuted more structured. Experiments do not have to be that formalized and can also be connected to an idea which is not paying out in terms of dedicated agenda items. Grid members can start experiments and can try to find peers, followers, contributers to support an idea.
Experiments shall therefore allow a very free approach to creation, doing, collaboration and teamwork. By having the concept of experiments the overall setup guarantees a higher flexibility and openness besides initiatives only.
Within the BOGI-approach ideas can be separated from initiatives to experiments at a cetain stage. This allows that the BOGI makes use of its full potential in early stages and later maintains the focus separating serious ambitions from cool ideas with other potential. That is not written in stone and can be adapted to the respective grid. But it makes sense to maintain both, serious ambitions and cool experiments.
Any organism has limitations in the ability to describe what is needed, to set an agenda which is relevant on a broader scale. Experiements allow the chaotic and losely structured occurance of new findings, network dynamics and the coverage of the unexpected.
That’s also why experiments are not less important compared to initiatives.
In addition, experiments allow more ways to set up a group of individuals, to organize todos, to act without clear goal, but perhaps in a flow. Because of this experiements are great to adapt to new collaboration techniques or social standard for the organizations of working on ideas.
Experiments can be started by each individual. It is not a must to wait for some sort of consensus or support. But of course, depending on the experiments complexity, it can make sense to promote an idea like any other to the grid to get support. For the grid’s intellectual progress it is important that the insights or outcome of experiments are shared. But there is no mandatory rule.
Sub-grid are grids on a nano-scale. If you got the idea of the grid as a network, then you quickly get the idea of how necessary subnets are.
Sub-grids are part of a grid, but more specialized. The specialization could be based on a certain profession, like an art sub-grid for artists, or caused by a focus on AGENDA ITEMS. Think of a sub-grid primarily focussed on ‘sustainability’ for instance.
The purpose of sub-grid is to represent a higher degree of specialization (connected to more specialized topics) than a more generic grid structure could offer in the required depth. If you think of a sub-grid which is driven by mathematical questions, then it quickly becomes obvious that this is perhaps not for everyone. It is important to mention that sub-grids are embedded into the grid-concept to allow higher specialization for specialized individuals and their topics, but not to draw artificial boundaries. Sub-grids shall not exclude others from a dialogue, sub-grids shall allow a more detailed dialogue!
To make this happen, sub-grids shall share findings, challenges and outcomes with other sub-grids or the grid as such. Within a sub-grid, there needs to be at least one individual who takes accountability to remind the sub-grid members to not form an isolated entity. Even if this might happen (which does not have to be bad in any case), there should be the ping for attention towards the broader concepts and agenda.
All sub-grids together maintain the co-existence of multiple perspectives, but also can enrich each other towards a broader skill-base, intellectual foundation and practical aspects. An example for that would be, that given the case there is a sub-grid for art and a sub-grid for technology, then ethical questions could be raised in the melting pot of these two sub-grids in a more practical way than it is possible in a theoretical discipline alone. New projects could evolve by these two sub-grids influencing each other with different view angles, formal techniques and traditions.
Sub-grids therefore are a huge source for any kind of challenge within the grid when it comes to the intellectual foundation.
The membrane or the outer-grid is the non-distinct area surrounding the grid. It contains contacts, partners, team-members of initiatives and potential grid recruits. Because initiatives have impact (in best case of course) beyond a grid, it is helpful to have a sense for the direct social environment. The grid is designed to be a construct which is open towards its evolution, that’s why the inclusion of the ‘outer-world’ is conceptually important.
Initiatives or recruitment processes are directly connected to the interaction related to the membrane, beyond the respective grid boundaries.
But also very indirect interactions take place all the time of course. On an interpersonal level, based on information through any kind of of channel and because the overall agenda which is driven by the world’s status quo.
That’s why the desciption of the membrane is important as a mental model - there is no real inside and outside of the grid. The grid is a fluent construct without any hard boundaries. It has no org-chart, it has no real inventory list, is has no geographical reference system.
That is never to ignore nor to forget. A grid itself is just the idea which can only be defined in a network status. Like a huge network of machines, which constitutes itself only through the temporal connection / participation, through the exchange of information.
Each GRIDSTER can join the discussions, the BOGI, the collaboration on projects IF s/he wants to. The foundation is based on intrinsic motivation and the buy-in to values and agenda items. Each GRIDSTER is able to decide how much time & effort s/he is willing to spend. That is why many GRIDSTERS will be temporarily or infrequently active perhaps. And this is absolutely ok.
The membrane therefore consists also of the potentially huge group on temporarily in-active GRIDSTERS.
The measure of interaction between the membrane / the Outer-Grid and the grid could be used as indicator for various interesting aspects. One aspect could be to verify if the grid degrades or if the grid is growing based on interactions, activities etc.
A gridster is a person actively connected to the grid, a grid member if you like. Because the grid is not a concept to explain how companies work, a gridster is not an employee or any kind of staff. The grid is thought as a network and a social sculpture, that is why gridsters recruit gridsters in a phase of grid-growth.
Even though a grid is not an exclusive undertaking, at least a few criteria need to be fulfilled, so that new recruits can become gridsters:
The onboarding of new gridsters can vary from grid to grid of course. Proposals for some onboarding best-practices or proposals will be added in a separate section.
Grid core
The grid core is the team of people maintaining the grid through their action. It is a group of people who discuss the grid improvement opportunities, orga related todos, things which work out or do not work out.
This group manifests itself through activity and participation. There is no formal set of rules to identify the grid core, as it is driven by the interaction and contribution. Grid functions can be an enrichment of this. Grid functions are role-based focus areas for people to take actions on as a service to the grid. For example, administrative, legal, social or support functions can be a possible enhancement. Functions are not decided top-down to prevent a bureaucratic misusage of a grid. But it is not strictly defined how many functions are needed, which power (to determine certain aspects) functions really have or who defines who fulfills a function. This under-definition of how functions work express the priority of other construct. An agenda is more important than ego, ideas are more important than functions. The grid shall value individuality and the human collective in the same way. The ‘system’ is not regulating if and how a function is needed, this highly depends on the organism and the power of its ideas.
Functions are optional. Functions are valid, but they need to serve the community, not determine it. If done right, functions can also be an opportunity for individuals to learn and do progress in new fields of activity and within the social collective.
Tools are not primarily important for the GRID or the GRID FRAMEWORK. But some tools support the routines and concepts better than others. In the GRID we found, that a tool-belt for certain aspects is helpful …