Hi,
Ever heard of the holacracy? That is an “innovative” way of managing a company and its team members. And guess what? Asana is the perfect tool for such companies! Let’s discover that discussion I had with Thomas Rypens, Asana Certified Pro, about how he set up Asana in an holacracy environment at his company.
Hope you find it entertaining!
Bastien, Asana Expert
iDO (Asana Partner: Services & Licenses)
The progress bars in your project are very cool! How did you make these?
I think @Thomas_Rypens did them with emojis 
Hey @Peter_Rice, indeed they are emoji’s.
Everytime we go over the project we copy and paste them. It’s a fun way of visualising it 
I watched your great video with @Bastien_Siebman and wondered why not make that custom field be a type of dropdown with those four or five different emoji statuses as the values? No copy/pasting needed.
Thanks,
Larry
I wondered the same thing and forgot to ask!
Great video 
- @Thomas_Rypens, you mention another 1-hr long video on Holacracy that I would be interested in. I’m fascinated by a few elements of this environment and I would be interested to learn more both to potentially adopt within our team or to have a path for future clients. Thank you 
Hi @LEGGO ,
This video mainly tells you how Holacracy is working in our environment and how it add to the things we do. Let me know if you have any questions, remarks or tips
Hi Larry,
Silly I didn’t even think of that. I’ll see if that works. Great tip!
I love it and I am a big believer of this sort of managing. Asana is the best way of bringing work and people together without linving with democratie. 
Hi, Thanks a lot for sharing! Do you have any tip how to display the roles and accountabilities in Asana? Is it somehow possible to finde a way to make easy accessible like in Glassfrog or Holaspirit? We are using Asana and we want to keep working with it. thanks!
The new Project Overview tab now has a section about Roles so you could have everyone has a member and write down their role there 
Each profile also has a role field in Profile settings but that is harder to see everyone’s role next to each other.
@Bastien_Siebman Holacracy in Asana was the first thing I thought of when seeing the Overview feature add! Pretty powerful spaces to make the Holacracy approach clearer for users.
Funny thing: My first look at Asana was back in 2014, when i took Holacracy training with Brian Robertson in Amsterdam, and we had a “field trip” to Springest -a company that was using it quite intensively- but then i thought it was overkill for my little company, and haven’t thought about it since.
Now: We’ve got an Intern on board who wants to lead a project of converting our Crop Planning & Management system (spreadsheet-based) for our Organic Market Garden to Asana, so i’m here on trial to find out if this is a viable proposition. Quick impression so far: easy enough to get started, delivers a lot of GTD power in surprisingly usable form… And while it also seems quite a scaleable solution, technically speaking, i’m concerned about the cost implications of up-scaling our app, in keeping with our (H’y influenced) philosophy of Radical Transparency.
Essentially: We’re a pretty flat org with a small staff (<15) responsible for the Crop Plan and its management, but a whole lot more people that we’d like to involve in crop planning for the community, at least to the level fo being able to review the plan, comment on it, and get active notification of changes. Some of these non-core people may assume Role(s) in the org (volunteers, typically), and to enable such people with Basic-level privs in Asana, i am not clear if they would tip the balance of our member-count over 15, and if there would be a cost implication of that.
So my question is: If the count of people we have using just Basic-level features goes over 15, and we’ve got a sub-15 count of users that need Premium features, is it only those Premium members (call them nP) that would factor into our monthly bill (i.e. nP * $10.99/mo.)?
Hi @Walt_Ludwick and welcome to the forum!
Cost is not dependent on what features a particular individual is using.
One question before I go further: do you have one particular email domain that the nP users use, and the non-nP folks would have email addresses with various different email domains that are not yours?
Hi @Phil_Seeman; thanks for the quick reply.
To your Q: As things stand, we’ve got a handful (4-6) of “insiders” (i.e. staff energising essential roles) in our own domain, another such handful of “insiders” using personal Gmails etc… And then there’s the whole community of "outsiders "with off-domain emails that we want to involve as subscribers to our CSA (Community Supported Agriculture), but they just need to browse, comment and receive email updates.
In reality: those who will play an active role in this Crop Planning application are just the farmer, the intern who is doing this implementation (when she moves on, it’ll probably be some other in the back office doing sys admin), an Agronomic Engineer that we consult… So counting me, that makes 4. All others, even “insiders” (whether with company email or not), will be interacting more like the CSA subscribers. But there’s no way this little operation can afford $10.99 /month for all those!
Bottom line: I’m here because i was given to understand that Asana offers a free service that can give us everything we now enjoy with Trello (free)… And for a nominal extra fee (“like, ten bucks a month”) we could get an optional extra that could deliver our current spreadsheet-based Crop Plan in a much more usable form -like a click-and-drag Gantt chart.
If such functionality is going to cost us much more than $10.99 though, then this could be a non-starter, i’m afraid… So if my expectations are misaligned here, Phil, i’d sure appreciate if you could set me straight!
Yours, Walt
Hi @Walt_Ludwick - I would suggest contacting Asana sales for advice on the best option for you (and if there is even an option that will be satisfactory to you) - your scenario is more complicated than I’m comfortable advising you on here.
OK Phil -thanks anyway! /walt
Hi @Thomas_Rypens, this is my jam! I like the way you help make agenda items actionable and transferrable between project boards within the tacticals. I saw on your board a governance section. Do you have a video on how you run governance meetings on Asana?