Checklist vs. Metrics in a Holacracy Tactical Meeting
In organizations that are new to Holacracy, the distinction between checklist items and metrics in a Tactical meeting can be challenging. Often, this is because you can have the same exact phrasing for a metric and checklist item, which could be confusing for attendees and role-holders who are accountable for those very metrics and checklist items. Here’s an example:
Checklist Item-
Report Guru Role- Reports sent out (Monthly)
Metric-
Report Guru Role- Reports sent out (Monthly)
At first glance, this may seem a bit redundant. After all, why not just talk about this all at once? That’s because these are two distinctly different conversations, and breaking them up actually keeps us laser-focused and moving at a brisk pace through this portion of the meeting. To understand why this is the case, let’s look at how the team at HolacracyOne® approaches each term-
Checklist:
Checklists are used to have visibility over whether recurring actions are being done. The Facilitator reads the checklist of recurring actions. The relevant roles respond by “check” or “no check” to each item for the preceding period (e.g. the prior week).
Any circle member can request checklist items to be added the list, as long as they are for actions that have already been accepted by the role-filler as an action their role would take. In other words, checklist items may not convey new expectations on a role. If a circle member needs to add new expectations to a role, they need to propose adding an accountability via governance.
Metric:
Data chosen by the Circle’s Lead Link to provide visibility into the work of the Circle. For example, a Metric for a “Social Media” Role might be “Number of Twitter followers.” It is up to the Lead Link of the Circle to define and assign relevant metrics to the Roles within that Circle. Each role assigned a metric reports on it by highlighting the latest data.
Those are kind of long, so I’ve simplified the definitions in my own words below:
Checklist:
Checklists are the way we create visibility into whether role-holders’ recurring actions are getting done or not.
Metric:
If checklists show whether or not things are getting done, metrics reveal the degree to which things are getting done.
With those definitions in mind, let’s look back at our example from the beginning.
Checklist Item-
Report Guru Role- Reports sent out (Monthly)
Metric-
Report Guru Role- Reports sent out (Monthly)
When we look at the checklist item of “Reports sent out (Monthly)” we see that once per month the Report Guru role is responsible for reporting whether or not the reports for the prior month were sent out, and the item is captured as a positive statement- Reports [have been] sent out. If all reports that the role was responsible for sending were sent out that month, then the checklist statement is true and they’d respond with, “Check.” If not all of them were sent out (no matter how much under the expectation they were), the statement is false and they’d respond with “No check.” If a tension arises based on the information that comes up in Checklist, the person with the tension can either ask a quick clarifying question (like, “which reports didn’t get sent?”) or bring it up in Triage for a more in-depth discussion. This way, we don’t get bogged down in conversation at the beginning of the meeting.
Then, when we move to the Metric of “Reports sent out (Monthly),” the Report Guru is responsible for reporting to the group something like how many reports were sent out that month, or maybe even the overall themes from those reports. This brings up a great point, which is if your group has something captured with the same verbiage in both checklist and metrics, perhaps some refinement could be made to the language you’re using, to make sure that everyone understands what we’re looking at as we progress through these parts of the meeting. Going back to the reports example, these might be some useful updates:
Checklist Item-
Report Guru Role- All reports sent out for month (Monthly)
Metric-
Report Guru Role- Number of reports sent out last month (Monthly)
In upcoming articles, we’ll dive a little deeper into what makes “good” checklist and metric items, but for now I hope that this has been helpful in illustrating the distinctions between these two Tactical meeting agenda items.
