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 a 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.

Keep an up-to-date list of things you need to address, so that you can remember them, and use that information to plan and organize your work.

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.

Explicitly clarify, and then regularly evaluate and develop the design of domains throughout the organization, based on learning, to enable those with responsibility for each domain to deliver value as effectively as possible to the customers they serve.

For the whole organization and for each domain, devise a strategy for how to create value, and develop it over time based on what you learn.

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

For each dependency, work with all stakeholders to agree on how to deal with it effectively, and act accordingly.

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

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.

Develop clear, well-defined metrics to assess your effectiveness in achieving objectives, and monitor them frequently to identify opportunities for improvement early.

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

Slice work in a way that allows for delivering value fast and frequently, to validate assumptions quickly, align with customer needs, and respond promptly to changing priorities.

Clearly describe any deliverables related to a policy to support shared understanding of expectations.

Describe organizational drivers to support understanding and communication about situations that are relevant for the organization to respond to, and for recalling why particular activities are undertaken and why specific decisions are made.

Develop a coherent set of constraints that enable the organization to easily adapt and grow to meet changing demand, customer requirements, and market conditions.

Determine what's required to respond appropriately to an organizational driver before deciding on an intervention.

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.

Free people up to decide and act for themselves as much as possible, so that they can deliver value fast and respond quickly to changes when necessary.

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

Regularly evaluate policies and adapt them as necessary to ensure they remain relevant and effective for fulfilling organizational requirements.

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

Share relevant information about financial performance with the organization’s members to build trust and accountability and support them in making informed decisions regarding their work.

Keep a dedicated, prioritized backlog for items that pertain to governance so that you can remember them and use the information to plan and organize your governance.

Select someone to facilitate governance meetings.

When you share responsibility for governance with others, hold regular, structured, and facilitated meetings to address a domain’s governance so that challenges and opportunities are addressed promptly, and policies are frequently evaluated and improved.

Separate responsibility for execution from decision authority when doing so helps increase effectiveness.

Make continuous learning an integral part of people’s responsibilities and work, so that they continuously develop their capacity to contribute effectively toward the purpose of the organization.

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.

Ensure that the effectiveness and integrity of the whole organization is monitored and maintained, so that the organization is able to sustainably and adequately fulfill its purpose.

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

Pay attention to the inner tension you experience in relation to the organization, investigate its cause, and if it reveals a situation that seems relevant for the organization to address, deal with it yourself or pass the information on to the person or group responsible for addressing it.

Create a fair salary formula and make it transparent.

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

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

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

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.

Meet with your team at regular intervals (1-4 weeks) in time-boxed 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 structured process for designing a proposal for an intervention that draws on the collective intelligence and diversity of perspectives to understand context and elicit ideas about how to fulfill a purpose.

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

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.

Document the purpose and details of significant decisions to ensure a clear record is maintained so that you can recall what was decided over time and understand the reasoning behind those decisions.

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

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

Use the information revealed by an objection to identify ways to evolve proposals, policy and actions to a good-enough state.

Respond to all organizational drivers you are responsible for, in order of priority, by fulfilling the requirements you determine necessary in each case.

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

Delegate responsibility for a domain to individuals.

A group process for selecting a person for a role based 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.

Ensure that people have a direct relationship to the costs and gains resulting from their work, so that they are incentivized to give their best, work effectively, and minimize waste.

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.

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