Why GTD is not enough (if you work in a team)

Generating shared clarity with Holacracy

The following was written by Holacracy pioneer Brian Robertson as a foreword for the book “Getting Teams Done”, written by Marco Bogers and Diederick Janse. Getting Teams Done tells the story of how a manager and his team implement Holacracy to achieve increased clarity and flow at the team level, building on the principles of Getting Things Done (David Allen’s approach to individual clarity and flow). The book appeared in November of 2013 and is (currently) only available in Dutch. However, we loved Brian’s foreword so much that we decided to publish the original English text here, with his permission.

I’ve been a practitioner of Getting Things Done (GTD) for over ten years, and I love the clarity that practicing GTD has brought me. People often mistake GTD for just a cool way to organize lists, but I think the real secret sauce is that its distinctions and processes facilitate true clarity. The capacity to get clarity is the root of getting organized and certainly required for sustaining ‘mind like water’, as David Allen puts it. Once you can reliably and quickly generate clarity, productivity can’t help but flow from that ground.

When you work in a team though, good clarity individually is just not enough. If anything, it heightens the pain…