What is this?

This site (or document) describes our operating model …the how we work, and why. This model is based on the open-source Crisp DNA, forked on github. We are using the Crisp model fairly vanilla, in recognition of their many years of evolving it. Although they may have a very different business, we share many of their values. If …in time, some things don’t fit, then we will just adapt and evolve.

The Agility Collective is a consulting company operating in Australia and New Zealand. Like Crisp, we do not aspire to be a typical consulting company. For example:

• None of the consultants are actually employed by The Agility Collective.
• We have no managers, or even a CEO. Instead we rely on self-organization and transparency. Almost everything is bottom-up, and anyone can drive any decision.
• Our main purpose is to enable consultants to be happy, and our Happiness Index is our driving metric. Strong revenue and delighted customers are a side effect, not a goal.
• The Collective doesn’t want to earn money from it’s consultants. It is in practice a non-profit company (although not formally so). Consultants keep most of what they earn.
• Our ownership model is designed to keep our stock financially worthless. There is no incentive to “cash in”.
• Consultants are 100% autonomous. They can do whatever they want (as long as they don’t hurt the brand or our house), and work as much or as little as they want.

Contents

Driving principles

(these principles drive almost everything at the Collective)

• What is The Agility Collective - the purpose of the company
• How we work - summary of our model, and some driving principles.
• Why this works - why this model serves us so well

Core structure and practices

(although these are core to our model, they are mostly just consequences of the principles above)

• Happiness index - how do we know if we are succeeding?
• Ownership model - how do people become owners, and what ownership actually means?
• Economic model - how does money flow through the system?
• How we make decisions - how do decisions get made when there is no manager?
• Recruiting - how do new people get in?
• Communication - how do we collaborate, sync, and improve?
• Bun protocol - how do we handle customer enquiries and route to the right consultant?
• Dashboard - how do we see the big picture?
• Office team - how do we handle admin and day-to-day operations?
• Board of directors - Local laws requires that we have a BoD. So how does our BoD work?
• Our business - what type of work we do
• Visions - How do you get a bunch of autonomous consultants to agree on a vision? Answer: have several.
• Sales - how do we actually sell consultants?
• Crisp unconference - how our bi-annual unconference works

Supporting practices

(relevant stuff, but not core to our model)

• Email conventions - how we get transparency without information overflow
• Hand signals - how do have discussions in larger groups?
• Industries that we avoid - why we avoid certain industries
• Hack summit - how we geek out together
• Crisplets - how do bottom-up initiatives get funded?
• Conflict handling - How do we make sure conflicts are constructive rather than destructive?
• Contracts - our internal contracts for membership to the Collective, ownership, etc.
• Building competence - how we learn from each other and improve
• Courses and event production - how do courses and events get produced?
• Brand building - how do we build the brand, both the for the Collective and personal brands?