Why I founded The Chocolate Guild at work
And how it became one of my greatest successes as a change agent
When I meet new people in work-related contexts, I like to introduce myself as “the founder and self-appointed Leader of the Chocolate Guild”. The Global Scrum Gathering Amsterdam 2023 was such an occasion, and it served as a reminder that I never wrote down the whole story.
In the first half of 2017, around 200 people of the R&D department at my workplace got reorganized into a variant of “The Spotify Model”. While nowadays this is rather outdated and more often than not an antipattern, back then this was a successful way of rebooting a struggling part of the company. (For the original sources about the Spotify Engineering Culture from 2014, see Henrik Kniberg’s blog posts and videos, part 1 and part 2).
The reorganization had some degree of autonomy: You could choose your Squad. This determined your Tribe. Depending on your skills, your Chapter was also set. But there was a 4th element, the Guilds, where there was nothing predefined and it was all in the hands of the people involved.
When I heard that we could do whatever we wanted, I immediately decided to found a Chocolate Guild. Considering that examples of the original presentation use work-related topics like “Leadership, Web Development or Continuous Delivery”, this was an unusual choice. That was intentional. I did not want to have a 4th organizational structure to be serious and only focused on work. I was a software developer and well-aware of the communication problems that came with my field.
Technology is
- abstract
- often frustrating
- dividing — either you are in or out
In contrast, chocolate is
- concrete
- something nice
- an easy conversation topic
This is exactly what we were missing — something that would lighten up the work day at the office, bring people together and build bridges between IT and non-IT. I had distributed chocolate before, including other work places.
My experience is that it is a great ice breaker. You get to know people before it becomes a must as part of a new work assignment. This is much better than suddenly having to work together with complete strangers. It also bypasses territorial defense mechanisms. Unknown people coming to your floor can inspire fear (“What are they doing here? Is something bad happening? Is my job in danger?”) If you bring chocolate, you can walk around everywhere. Even better, after a while, your face is known and you are categorized under “harmless person”.
As a software developer, I was used to some people never talking to me, except when they wanted something from me. This meant whenever a person outside of the usual connections came to me, it meant work, so I got trained to expect most unforeseen contacts to turn into something negative. I did not want to be seen as such a person. I wanted to be linked to nice experiences.
How does it work?
All I need is a channel on the internal chat tool of choice (nowaways Slack, but before we had another one). Here I post “new arrivals” and “open now”. Everyone can come anytime to my desk and open a new chocolate. Several times a week I also walk around to bring it to other floors. When I see a new face on my own floor, I introduce myself and suggest to enjoy some chocolate together.
How did it evolve?
I did not make up specific rules for how the Chocolate Guild would work. That I called myself its “Leader” was meant as a slight parody of all the Leadership titles that people collect at work but that ultimately are not contributing anything practical to solve problems.
What happened is that people brought chocolate to me from their holidays or their countries of origin. I got to taste more and better chocolate than I would ever have had I kept my own stack for myself. A side effect was that my network at my workplace grew impressively over time. New joiners even told me that had heard that I existed without knowing my name or my face! I could use the Chocolate Guild as a way to introduce people to internal sources of knowledge, tools, and training.
I also bring chocolate to professional meetups — and also events not related to work. It is a low-tech solution to the challenge of connecting to other people.
One of my greatest days was when I got offered chocolate from Pierre Marcolini that had been sent over from colleagues in Brussels. Belgian chocolate in general is known to be high quality — this one was without a doubt one of the best chocolate experiences of my whole life! I had been beaten as a specialist in my own field — and it was wonderful.
Hot Chocolate: You Sexy Thing (Live 1976)
