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[MUSIC PLAYING] TODD SCHMIT: All right, let's shift to a worker-owned cooperative of CoLab.
JORDAN MILLER: Hey, everyone. My name is Jordan Miller, and I'm joined with my mates Jack Knibb and Oliver Fisher, and we're presenting on the CoLab Cooperative, just talking about a little bit of the work that we did with them this semester.
JACK KNIBB: All right. Yeah, so just a little background on CoLab. They are a member-owned worker cooperative that is operating in the tech industry. Their big focus is on creating purpose-driven technology specifically when it comes to web design and development user experience. And their model is contract-based with their clients. A big thing to note is that they've seen a lot of growth recently, which is the crux of the issues that we've been helping to tackle with. They've had some issues with distinguishing in their new size, which is much bigger, on what should be responsibilities left to the board and what should be left to project leaders.
And furthermore, they've had some issues as well with comparing themselves to other boards, and they might not have the same competencies. And so that's the two issues we're going to tackle today. And we've actually already shared with them a video to their board about a month ago on this topic.
First, just to outline the issues, I'm going to discuss how we can divide up these board responsibilities from project leader responsibilities. Then I'll pass it off to Oliver, and he's going to talk a little bit about adding new committees to make the board a little bit more efficient so they don't all have to be in at the same time. And then we'll hand it off to Jordan to tackle the last two parts on strategic planning and some board training resources.
So starting with, how do we break up these board responsibilities, through our research, one of the easiest and clearest ways to cut that line through the gray of who should handle what responsibility is through the Extensive Test. Essentially, as you can see on the right-- this looks incredibly vague, but I'll get into more detail very soon-- the test only needs to pass one of the three criteria. Either it affects a large enough number of CoLab members, it's a policy that will lead to the commitment of a substantial portion of resources, or it would have a significant long-term effect. And the reason why these terms are so vague is because it depends on every organization.
CoLab, we would recommend for them to have all the members vote on what these numbers should mean. So potentially, if the [INAUDIBLE] includes a large number of CoLab members, that could be 15 for CoLab. It all depends on what the members want. And then they can go through every single issue that they need to address, and they can confirm if it meets this criteria of the test, whether or not it should be a board-related issue, or it should be left to project leaders and others. The next slide?
And just to clear this up a little bit more, we looked at some traditional sociocratic cooperatives, and we looked at what they had listed down as some of their big board responsibilities. And I won't go through all of it, because I don't think we have time, but just to list a few, one would be creating and supervising a long-term strategic plan. Another would be evaluating project leaders' performance. And then another big one would be budgeting.
And just a few more recommendations before I hand it off to Oliver. Some other important things we noticed from these case studies was it's very important to keep the board or the mission circle small to keep it efficient. We also thought it was important to mention that there's a lot of value in having outside experts especially to handle maybe some of the inefficiencies and areas where CoLab might be lacking.
And finally, it's very important to keep a strong flow of information between the members and the board to make sure that, even with the Extensive Test, that everyone is not going over the responsibility. And now I'll pass it off to Oliver to talk a bit more about the restructuring with the committees.
OLIVER FISHER: Thank you, Jack. So to better organize CoLab's managers and leaders both within the board of directors and outside of them, we recommend the creation of a few different groups. The first would be a grievance council. And this would consist of both board members and non-members alike to adequately reflect the full diversity of CoLab's members.
The council would essentially act as a counterbalance to the board of directors and would deal with instances of perceived inequity and any violations with existing policies. And generally, the grievance council would have full leeway to adjudicate such matters. And possible responses could be bringing a terminated employee back or terminating an employee, or temporarily doing so. We have a grievance test on there. I won't go through it all right now.
And then with respect to the creation of committees within the board of directors, we recommend five key areas here. And the idea here is to create more nimble and dynamic groups that would meet more frequently than the entire board. And that would just make decision-making easier and faster, which are a few issues that we, with our partners, have targeted for CoLab.
Really quickly, those five groups include governance, finance and long-range planning, personnel, education, and then, more broadly, executive. And yes, I guess just the general point here would be the creation of groups that include both board members and non-members alike that help ease the decision-making process.
JORDAN MILLER: Yeah. So another thing that CoLab asked us to touch on was strategic planning. And just through some research, we discovered a pretty nice outlining of the process of strategic planning for a worker-owned coop like CoLab. And the first is the creation of a position of the facilitator.
So this would be someone who's impartial during the strategic planning meetings, and they would work alongside the position of recorder, who would basically-- their only role would be recording the ideas and not really contributing to the strategic planning meetings. And also the creation of a planning committee, which, the optimal size for a co-op of the size of CoLab would be around 8 to 15 people.
And we really saw five main phases of strategic planning, the first being, first of all, just agreeing to develop a plan. The second being fact gathering. So what does the cooperative environment look like both internally and externally? The third being evaluating your alternatives based off of a SWOT analysis and really outlining and choosing three to four strategic options when you're defining the plan.
And the fourth step-- creating goal statements, objectives, action plans, things like that. And fifth being finishing the job and starting over. So there's no such thing as a perfect strategic plan. The cooperative's going to make it, they're going to make mistakes. And so it's really important that, after you make the plan, you test it out over time and you go back, you make adjustments, and try to fit in the best of the cooperative as best as you can over time.
And to touch on board training, cooperatives, really, you have three main options. And that's creating your own board of directors training program. Particularly for CoLab, we recommend emphasizing and defining relevant ways to analyze their decisions based off of their particular core values. Second, they could also look at recruiting outside experts that really specialize in the fields that CoLab feels like they're struggling the most with. And third would be taking an established course or program, a couple of which we've outlined later in our Resources slide.
But really, overall, we think the first main step that CoLab should be taking with regards to training their board is completing a competitive analysis together, really diving into that question of who are CoLab's competitors and not to burden them with too much work. So we've read about this 80/20 rule, which, typically in industries, 80% of the market revenue comes from about 20% of the competitors. So this 20% would be the ones that you want to focus on when doing a competitive analysis.
We've also listed out a couple good questions to ask, and we also recommend an internal survey to get a gist of what the members are thinking at the moment. But as for that, we have a couple of our resource links, and that's our presentation.
[APPLAUSE]
TODD SCHMIT: Do we have a CoLab rep on the line? Margie or--
SPEAKER 1: Margie, yes.
MARGIE: Hi, can you hear me?
SPEAKER 1: Yes.
TODD SCHMIT: Yup.
MARGIE: I'm working from CoLab.
TODD SCHMIT: Go ahead, Margie.
MARGIE: Great. Thanks so much for that. That was really helpful. To give you a few updates, we got the video just before the last board meeting, and we were not able to get it on the agenda. So it's on the agenda for a board meeting this coming Tuesday to review this whole presentation.
And Mackenzie and I, who worked with the students, and we're on the board, are going to be probably pushing starting with doing some board training and identifying who would start a process of competitive analysis and the strategic planning.
They didn't get a chance to talk about a sociocracy. We're in the middle of so much change, implementing sociocratic policy as well as a number of new members, that I think we get bogged down in trying to figure out what to do first. And I think this presentation actually really helps us focus on really working on board focus and getting ourselves up to speed in doing a competitive analysis and strategic planning. So thank you. This was really helpful.
TODD SCHMIT: Thank you, Margie. Any questions? Comments for the group?
MARGIE: I think I have one question about the executive council. What kind of scope, if there's an executive council, are they given in terms of decision-making between board meetings? I'm imagining that they can't make the kinds of decisions that the board can make, but that it might be helpful to be able to task them with specific things that we know are going to happen in the next month.
Like, as soon as you get this together, go ahead and make a decision based on these criteria that the board will decide on. Do you have any other guidance about how the executive committee would work? This is a group that is very non-hierarchical and pretty resistant to the idea of having small groups make decisions for everybody.
OLIVER FISHER: Yeah. I mean, you're definitely right there. And having learned a bit about the flat hierarchy structure within CoLab, we tend to understand how there might be some tensions there. But I think, generally, the way that this team can be best utilized would be with this first bullet point here, with agendas and policy planning.
That really would come after entire board meetings, where certain ideas could be discussed, and then they would be delegated to I guess iron out the minutiae and the details after bigger ideas were discussed at entire board meetings. And then again, ironing out the details could occur within that smaller group in between your assigned dates. But you're definitely right. There could be tensions there. And these are all recommendations and by no means necessary. So it really is on an ad hoc or as needed basis.
TODD SCHMIT: So you're not thinking to have any independent autonomy or governance of the board, the executive committee itself?
OLIVER FISHER: I mean, not to the extent where the entire board would be stripped of their-- like, other board members would be stripped of their responsibilities, if that makes sense.
MARGIE: I didn't totally hear.
OLIVER FISHER: There shouldn't be a situation where the small group of executive members are making decisions that also belong to the realm or the purview of other board members, but we think that they could be useful in, again, planning and on ironing out details in between board meetings after such ideas had been discussed with the entire group. I don't know if you--
MARGIE: No, I think it's a good idea, because I think otherwise it ends up happening informally. And then that can get a little dicey. I'm going to do a little reading to see how sociocratic boards tend to handle that. So thank you very much. I think we will give it a try.
TODD SCHMIT: OK.
MARGIE: Thanks again. I'm sorry [INAUDIBLE] couldn't be here. But we will be presenting our whole thing to the board [INAUDIBLE].
OLIVER FISHER: Great.
TODD SCHMIT: Great.
JACK KNIBB: Great.
TODD SCHMIT: All right. Thanks, Margie. Thanks, team.
[APPLAUSE]
All right. We have a lot of examples in class where we talked about--
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Part of the Grand Challenges curriculum, Cooperative Business Management (AEM3260/5260) focuses on engaged learning with community and cooperative clients.
In May of 2022, ten student project teams presented the results of their semester-long work with community partners. Professor Todd Schmit evaluates.
Project title : Governance Processes for Worker CooperativesCommunity Partner : CoLab CooperativeStudent Team : Oliver Fisher, Jack Knibb, Jordan Miller
