Alphabetical List Of All Patterns
- Adapt Patterns To Context
Adapt and evolve S3 patterns to suit your specific context.
- Adopt The Seven Principles
Align collaboration with the Seven Principles.
- Agree On Values
Intentionally evolve the culture in your organization.
- Align Flow
In support of continuous flow of value, move decision-making close to where value is created, and align the flow of information accordingly.
- Artful Participation
Commit to doing your best to act and interact in ways that enable effective collaboration.
- Ask For Help
A simple protocol for learning, skill sharing, and building connections, with respect for people's agency.
- Backlog
A backlog (to-do-list) is a list of (often prioritized) uncompleted work items (deliverables), or (drivers) that need to be addressed.
- Be The Change
Lead by example.
- Breaking Agreements
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.
- Bylaws
Secure S3 principles and patterns in your bylaws as needed to protect legal integrity and **organizational culture
- Check In
Help people to become aware of themselves and others, and to focus, be present and engage.
- Circle
A circle is a self-governing and semi-autonomous team of equivalent people who collaborate to account for a domain.
- Clarify Intended Outcome
Be explicit about the expected results of agreements, activities, projects and strategies.
- Clarify and Develop Domains
Explicitly clarify, and then regularly evaluate and develop a domain's design based on learning, to enable those with responsibility for the domain to account for it as effectively as possible.
- Clarify and Develop Strategy
A strategy is a high level approach for how people will create value to successfully account for a domain.
- Co-Create Proposals
Bring people together to co-create proposals in response to organizational drivers: tap collective intelligence, build sense of ownership and increase engagement and accountability.
- Consent Decision-Making
A (facilitated) group process for decision-making: invite objections, and consider information and knowledge revealed to further evolve proposals or existing agreements.
- Continuous Improvement Of Work Process
Reveal drivers and establish a metrics-based pull-system for organizational change through continuously improving and refining the work process.
- Contract For Successful Collaboration
Support successful collaboration from the start and build trust between parties by co-creating mutually beneficial and legally robust contracts.
- Coordination Meeting
Meet on a regular basis (usually weekly) for reporting on and coordinating work across domains.
- Coordinator
A person fulfilling the role of a coordinator is accountable for coordinating a domain's operations and is **selected for a limited term.
- Create a Pull-System For Organizational Change
Create an environment that invites and enables members of the organization to drive change.
- Daily Standup
Meet daily to organize work, facilitate learning and improve your productivity and effectiveness.
- Delegate Circle
Delegate making governance decisions affecting multiple domains to representatives selected by those domains.
- Delegate Influence
Distribute the power to influence, to enable people to decide and act for themselves within defined constraints.
- Describe Deliverables
Clearly describe any deliverables related to an agreement to support shared understanding of expectations.
- Describe Organizational Drivers
Describe organizational drivers to understand, communicate and remember them.
- Development Plan
A plan for how to develop more effective ways of accounting for a domain, agreed between delegator and delegatee.
- Double Linking
Enable the two-way flow of information and influence between two teams.
- Double-Linked Hierarchy
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.
- Driver Mapping
A workshop format for large groups to co-create and organize themselves in response to a complex situation of significant scope and scale.
- Evaluate And Evolve Agreements
Continuously evolve the body of agreements, and eliminate waste.
- Evaluate Meetings
Take time for learning at the end of each meeting or workshop.
- Evaluation Criteria
Develop well-defined evaluation criteria to determine if acting on an agreement had the desired effect.
- Facilitate Meetings
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.
- Fractal Organization
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).
- Governance Backlog
A governance backlog is a visible, prioritized list of items (drivers) that are related to governing a domain and require attention.
- Governance Facilitator
Select someone to facilitate governance meetings.
- Governance Meeting
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.
- Helping Team
Bring together a team of equivalent people with the mandate to execute on a specific set of requirements defined by a delegator.
- Invite Change
Clarify the reason for change and invite people to participate.
- Involve Those Affected
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 Work in Progress
Limit the number of work items in any stage of your work process.
- Linking
Enable the flow of information and influence between two teams.
- Logbook
Maintain a coherent and accessible system that stores all information required for collaboration.
- Logbook Keeper
Select a member of your team to be specifically accountable for keeping up to date records of all information the team requires.
- Meeting Host
Select someone to take responsibility for the preparation and follow-up of meetings, workshops or other events.
- Navigate via Tension
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.
- Open Space For Change
Invite everyone to create and run experiments for evolving the organization.
- Open Systems
Intentionally communicate with and learn from others outside of your system.
- Open Team
Intentionally account for a domain by invitation rather than assignment, and request that those invited contribute when they can.
- Peach Organization
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.
- Peer Feedback
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.
- Peer Review
Support each other to learn and grow in the roles and teams you serve in.
- Planning And Review Meetings
People meet at regular intervals (1-4 weeks) in timeboxed meetings to plan and review work.
- Prepare For Meetings
Prepare in advance to make meetings more effective.
- Prioritize Backlogs
Order all uncompleted work items with the most important items first, then pull work items from the top whenever there is new capacity.
- Proposal Forming
A (facilitated) group process for co-creating a response to a driver.
- Pull-System For Work
People pull in new work items when they have capacity (instead of having work pushed or assigned to them).
- Reasoned Decision-Making
Engage in productive dialogue by investigating different perspectives and the knowledge of participants, to reach agreement on what is considered viable, relevant, valid or empirically true.
- Record Agreements
Record the details of agreements you make, so you can recall them later, evaluate the outcome and evolve the agreement over time.
- Representative
Select a team member to participate in the governance decision-making of another team to enable the flow of information and influence.
- Resolve Objections
Use the information revealed by an objection to identify ways to evolve proposals, agreements and actions to a good-enough state.
- Respond to Organizational Drivers
Clarify organizational drivers (i.e. what's happening and what's needed in relation to the organization), and respond as required.
- Retrospective
Dedicate time to reflect on past experience, learn, and decide how to improve work process.
- Role
Delegate responsibility for a domain to individuals.
- Role Selection
A group process for selecting a person for a role on the strength of the reason.
- Rounds
In a group meeting, go around the circle giving everyone the chance to speak in turn.
- Service Circle
Outsource services required by two or more domains.
- Service Organization
Multi-stakeholder collaboration and alignment towards a shared driver (or objective).
- Support Role
Apply the role pattern to external contractors.
- Test Arguments Qualify as Objections
Utilize your limited time and resources wisely by testing if arguments qualify as objections and only acting on those that do.
- Timebox Activities
Set a time constraint to stay focused, bring consciousness to the time you have and how you use it.
- Transparent Salary
Create a fair salary formula and make it transparent.
- Visualize Work
Maintain a system that allows all stakeholders to review the state of all work items currently pending, in progress or complete.