Curating Content To Support Learning About Humanity's Transition

The Liminal Learning Portal

This content was posted on  13 Aug 21  by   The Hum  on  Facebook Page
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In a self-organising team we want to be dynamic and adaptive, not stuck in one narrow role definition… But all of this flexibility can create uncertainty: who is responsible for what? Who do I ask when I need specialist advice? And, if there’s no linear career progression, how do I know if I am developing? 🤔

💡 Today we want to share different approaches to the roles and tasks dilemma.

Roles and Tasks in self-organising teams can be:
👆 1 person-1 role: Can be efficient, because people develop specialization in their area, and they can make decisions on their own. But it lacks resilience and adaptability.
🖐 Micro-roles: each person has multiple roles. Break the work down into smaller pieces. Eg, instead of having one Head of Marketing, we can have the Newsletter Ninja, and the Captain of Social Media.
✌️ Shared Roles: create a lot more flexibility by intentionally sharing a single role between two people, either as equal partners, or in an apprentice relationship. This creates opportunities for people to learn. It’s less efficient than one person doing it all, but more flexible and resilient.
🙌 Working Groups: more than 2 people. Working groups can be permanent -with ongoing responsibility for an area- like “marketing”. Others temporary -for a specific project- eg, organising an event. Temporary WG are a great place to try out new ways of working, work with new colleagues, or practice some new skills.

No matter what form you choose to distribute your tasks, please make sure that:
✅ the mandate (responsibilities and boundaries) is clear,
✅ that anyone can easily find who is working on what,
✅ that there’s clear and transparent documentation so tasks can be handed off to a new person when circumstances change.

How do you distribute tasks and roles in your team?

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