Create Proposals

When we decide to respond to an Organizational Driver by doing Governance , it’s time to start forming a proposal.

Creating Proposals involves more than just starting to write about a potential solution. The goal is to tap into collective intelligence, build a sense of ownership, and increase engagement and accountability by involving stakeholders and people who have experience with or strong opinions about the topic. Or in other words, if your opinion and ideas were considered when the proposal was created, it’s much easier to give your consent during Decision Making on the proposal afterwards.

Co-Create Proposals

Bring people together to collaboratively create proposals. There are many ways to do this, they typically follow a similar pattern though:

Agree on the driver

It’s important that we understand the Driver, as we tend to think about solutions before we actually understand the problem we want to solve. Make sure that the driver is clear to everyone in the group and consent that we’re accountable to handle it. This usually happened already in Understand and assign Drivers.

Who: In the circle accountable for the driver, usually in a Governance Meeting or the Chat channel of the circle.

Explore the topic and understand constraints

  • Prepare information gathering questions like Do we’ve a budget? Who is affected? and What do we already have? to learn about constraints.

  • Prepare generative questions to see what possibilities we’ve to address the driver, like What’s the simplest thing we could do?

  • Answer these questions, for example in:

    • Online surveys sent to all affected and interested people

    • Brainstorming sessions

    • a discussion forum thread (or multiple when it’s a bigger topic)

Who: A smaller group might prepare the questions, surveys, etc. The accountable circle should consent to this, before proceeding. Usually coordinated in a Governance Meeting or the Chat channel of the circle.

Generate ideas

  • Come up with ideas that offer a full solution to the driver.

  • Prioritize and merge ideas. It’s not either or, it’s both an more.

Who: Same as above

Design a proposal

Taking the ideas we had so far and combining them into one proposal.

Who: Often done by a smaller group, which is selected by the accountable circle. We call this group Tuners

In more detail

One way to co-create proposals is to use S3’s Proposal Forming pattern.

s3 proposal forming1
s3 proposal forming2
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