New Leadership:

The Loop Approach® has strongly shaped our own “operating system” at TheDive. Many of our rules for how we work are based on the Grundgedanken of this framework, such as:

• We work in Rollen und Kreisen.

• The roles we need are derived from the company’s purpose (so: “Which roles do we need to fulfill our purpose?”).

• We distinguish between creating a role and filling a role. At the same time, we strive not to think only in terms of roles, but also to keep the people who fill them in view (“Role versus Soul”).

Each circle has an individual set of operational roles needed to fulfill the circle’s purpose. In the marketing circle, for example, these are roles such as “Art Director” or “Social Media Channel Owner.” Each circle member fills a set of roles for which they are responsible. In addition to circle-specific roles, there are standard roles found in every circle. These are more about governing the circle and connecting it with other circles. For example, every circle has a “Transparency Lead” who ensures that relevant information is made available both within the circle and, if necessary, to other circles. There is also a facilitation role in every circle, so it is clear who is responsible for moderating meetings. And: until recently, there was also a Lead role as a standard role, responsible for the circle’s strategic direction and content leadership.

The Lead role essentially had three areas of responsibility:

Strategy: What strategic direction are we taking as a circle? What are our goals for the coming months?
People: Are all roles in the circle well staffed? Are feedback processes running?
Finance: How do revenue and expenses align? How do we plan economically?

All circle leads formed the so-called Lead Circle—or in other words: the (role-based) highest leadership circle at TheDive.

That’s the theory.

Over the past few years, we noticed that despite this fundamentally role-oriented leadership style, communication barriers began to form between the Lead Circle and the operational circles. As a result, information from the organization that was relevant to the company’s development sometimes didn’t reach the Lead Circle sufficiently. Conversely, there was also a recurring sense within the organization that the Lead Circle was somewhat distant from the rest of the organization.

A major factor contributing to this dynamic was economic decision-making processes. While we had always tried to keep financial decisions as participatory and flexible as possible, we repeatedly fell back on classic tools such as annual budgeting. This meant that many spending and investment decisions had to be made in the Lead Circle. In practice, we found that this significantly limited the circles’ economic autonomy.

We also observed a gradual overload of the Lead roles: the sheer number of responsibilities, the (unintended) centralization of many decisions, and a diffuse uncertainty about which topics actually belonged in the Lead Circle and which did not, all contributed to the role growing larger and larger. Another warning sign was that the scope of the role kept expanding, until the leads were increasingly seen as less of a role model for healthy ways of working across the organization.

These three leadership and coordination roles are organized into guilds, where they align across circles and the organization as a whole. They are called guilds (not circles) because they do not have the same standard roles as circles. For internal coordination, each guild has only a Process Owner, a Transparency Master, and a Moderator. The guilds thus take on a specific bundle of leadership and coordination tasks across the organization. All existing circles at TheDive are represented within the guilds.

In the new setup, centralization is applied deliberately where it makes sense (for example, shared financial infrastructure), and autonomy is strengthened where the highest expertise and collective intelligence reside.