Alphabetical List Of All Patterns

Adapt and evolve S3 patterns to suit your specific context.

Align collaboration with the Seven Principles.

Intentionally evolve the culture in your organization.

In support of continuous flow of value, move decision making close to where value is created, and align the flow of information accordingly.

Commit to doing your best to act and interact in ways that enable effective collaboration.

A simple protocol for learning, skill sharing, and building connections, with respect for people's agency.

A backlog (to-do-list) is a list of (often prioritized) uncompleted work items (deliverables), or (drivers) that need to be addressed.

Lead by example.

Break agreements when you are certain the benefit for the organization outweighs the cost of waiting to amend that agreement first, and take responsibility for any consequences.

Secure S3 principles and patterns in your bylaws as needed to protect legal integrity and organizational culture

Help people to become aware of themselves and others, and to focus, be present and engage.

A circle is a self-governing and semi-autonomous team of equivalent people who collaborate to account for a domain.

Be explicit about the expected results of agreements, activities, projects and strategies.

A clear understanding of people’s area of responsibility and autonomy enables greater efficiency, effective collaboration, and agility throughout an organization.

A strategy is a high level approach for how people will create value to successfully account for a domain.

Bring people together to co-create proposals in response to organizational drivers: tap collective intelligence, build sense of ownership and increase engagement and accountability.

A (facilitated) group process for decision making: invite objections, and consider information and knowledge revealed to further evolve proposals or existing agreements.

Reveal drivers and establish a metrics-based pull-system for organizational change through continuously improving and refining the work process.

Support successful collaboration from the start and build trust between parties by co-creating mutually beneficial and legally robust contracts.

Meet on a regular basis (usually weekly) for reporting on and coordinating work across domains.

A person fulfilling the role of a coordinator is accountable for coordinating a domain's operations and is selected for a limited term.

Create an environment that invites and enables members of the organization to drive change.

Meet daily to organize work, facilitate learning and improve your productivity and effectiveness.

Delegate making governance decisions affecting multiple domains to representatives selected by those domains.

Distribute the power to influence, to enable people to decide and act for themselves within defined constraints.

Clearly describe any deliverables related to an agreement to support shared understanding of expectations.

Describe organizational drivers to understand, communicate and remember them.

A plan for how to develop more effective ways of accounting for a domain, agreed between delegator and delegatee.

Enable the two-way flow of information and influence between two teams.

Delegate all authority for making governance decisions to self-governing circles, double-linked across all levels of the hierarchy, to transition from an traditional hierarchy towards a structure more suitable for tapping collective intelligence, ensuring equivalence and building engagement.

A workshop format for large groups to co-create and organize themselves in response to a complex situation of significant scope and scale.

Continuously evolve the body of agreements, and eliminate waste.

Take time for learning at the end of each meeting or workshop.

Develop well-defined evaluation criteria to determine if acting on an agreement had the desired effect.

Choose someone to facilitate a meeting to help the group maintain focus, keep the meeting on track and draw out the participant's creativity and wisdom.

Multiple constituents (organizations or projects) with a common (or similar) primary driver and structure can share learning across functional domains, align action and make high level governance decisions (e.g. overall strategy).

A governance backlog is a visible, prioritized list of items (drivers) that are related to governing a domain and require attention.

Select someone to facilitate governance meetings.

Teams meet at regular intervals to decide what to do to achieve objectives, and to set constraints on how and when things will be done.

Bring together a team of equivalent people with the mandate to execute on a specific set of requirements defined by a delegator.

Clarify the reason for change and invite people to participate.

Involve people in making decisions that affect them, to maintain equivalence and accountability, and to increase the amount of information available on the subject.

Limit the number of work items in any stage of your work process.

Enable the flow of information and influence between two teams.

Maintain a coherent and accessible system that stores all information required for collaboration.

Select a member of your team to be specifically accountable for keeping up to date records of all information the team requires.

Select someone to take responsibility for the preparation and follow-up of meetings, workshops or other events.

Pay attention to tension you experience in relation to the organization, investigate the cause and pass on any organizational drivers you discover to the people accountable for the appropriate domain.

Invite everyone to create and run experiments for evolving the organization.

Intentionally communicate with and learn from others outside of your system.

Intentionally account for a domain by invitation rather than assignment, and request that those invited contribute when they can.

Deliver value in complex and competitive environments through decentralization (of resources and influence) and direct interaction between those creating value and the customers they serve.

Invite any member of your organization to give you some constructive feedback on your performance in a role or in a team, about your general participation and contribution, or about any other area you wish to develop.

Support each other to learn and grow in the roles and teams you serve in.

People meet at regular intervals (1-4 weeks) in timeboxed meetings to plan and review work.

Prepare in advance to make meetings more effective.

Order all uncompleted work items with the most important items first, then pull work items from the top whenever there is new capacity.

A (facilitated) group process for co-creating a response to a driver.

People pull in new work items when they have capacity (instead of having work pushed or assigned to them).

Record the details of agreements you make, so you can recall them later, evaluate the outcome and evolve the agreement over time.

Select a team member to participate in the governance decision making of another team to enable the flow of information and influence.

Resolve objections one at a time by using the information they contain to make and evolve amendments.

Clarify organizational drivers (i.e. what's happening and what's needed in relation to the organization), and respond as required.

Dedicate time to reflect on past experience, learn, and decide how to improve work process.

Delegate responsibility for a domain to individuals.

A group process for selecting a person for a role on the strength of the reason.

In a group meeting, go around the circle giving everyone the chance to speak in turn.

Outsource services required by two or more domains.

Multi-stakeholder collaboration and alignment towards a shared driver (or objective).

Apply the role pattern to external contractors.

Utilize your limited time and resources wisely by testing if arguments qualify as objections and only acting on those that do.

Set a time constraint to stay focused, bring consciousness to the time you have and how you use it.

Create a fair salary formula and make it transparent.

Maintain a system that allows all stakeholders to review the state of all work items currently pending, in progress or complete.