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Antti
Tarvainen

31 / 12 / 2009

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Leonidas Hour

In a traditional company, the more important the decision the higher up in the chain of command it is made. The consequences of a decision trickle down to the lower levels, each level interpreting what they need to do based on what they hear from above. Feedback then rises from the lowest levels and is used by the top to generate new decisions. Those decisions trickle down and so on.

The problem with this is that the feedback received at the top is distorted by misinterpretation at each level. False premises lead to bad decisions and frustration at all levels. The organization may never realize how much more they could do if they understood each other and made the right decisions.

At Leonidas we are set to reverse this. One of our tools is the “Leonidas hour”, a weekly one-hour meeting that anyone can attend to. Here’s how it works.

• Before the meeting, anyone can suggest a topic.
• At the beginning of the meeting, everyone who suggested a topic briefly introduces it.
• We select the topic by consensus or – if there’s none – by voting. Then we discuss that topic.
• The goal of the discussion is to make a decision. Sometimes there’s not enough information or not enough time for that. That is all right – it is better to make no decision at all than to make a bad one. But there should be a genuine attempt to solve the problem, not just hot air.
• If there’s time after the first topic, we tackle the next topic, and so on.

The idea is to have everyone at the same place at the same time so that decisions can be made quickly. Since everyone is there, and everyone can question any idea, people will leave the meeting with an understanding of the “why” of the decisions as well as the “what”.

Of course, the effectiveness of Leonidas hour relies on people’s ability to discuss things effectively. It requires trust, candor and willingness to improve – which happen to be the values of Leonidas. As long as we follow those and give ourselves time to make good decisions, we should do well.

So how are we doing? We’ve had four Leonidas hours so far. The topics were

• new office: furniture, who sits where, etc. (twice)
• this blog: themes, posting schedule, topics (twice)
• our Protosonni service: what can we do to improve it
• communication tools: how should we use Google Wave, email, wiki
• Leonidas hour: how can we improve it

So far our experiences have been mostly positive. There’s a feeling that we all can contribute, and that we make better decisions.

Probably the most difficult problem we noticed was with the schedule. Since we are working on different projects, it is hard to find a weekly time that suits everyone – and the one we found tends to interrupt the most productive work time. Another thing we would like to improve is focusing on decision-making. The discussions advanced more slowly than we anticipated. It may be a matter of preparation.

To address these issues, starting from January, we are going to replace weekly Leonidas hours with longer ones every two weeks. We will also prepare topics better. If a topic doesn’t have an initial suggested solution, it is not ready to be discussed. We use Wave to prepare the topics: if someone has a topic but doesn’t have an idea for a solution, he can write a wave and hope that someone else comes up with a solution. Or if anyone has objections to a suggested solution, he can raise them in Wave. The theory is that this will enable better discussion during the actual Leonidas hour – we will see how that works.

We will certainly keep making changes to the concept as we get more experienced with it. Maybe at some point we will drop Leonidas hour altogether and replace it with something different. The point is not any specific technique, but making good decisions and improving continuously.