The Change Board

Over three sessions at the CYF Summit 2021, we talked about managing change at CYF. We talked about times we wanted to make changes and didn’t, and why that happened. We talked about change we disagreed with, or didn’t see the point of, and how we challenged that (or didn’t). It was a big discussion, and lots of great insights and experiences were shared, which we can talk about in more detail elsewhere, but in the last session, we worked on one clear plan to address some of the challenges and problems we had shared over the day.

So here is our Change Board: a place to collectively manage change at CYF. It's the project attached to this repo.

Propose change

1. Make proposals by opening an issue on this repo
2. Invite others to discuss your ticket and commit to action with a delivery date

Make change

1. Get +four people to test that the criteria are met and the change is equipped
2. Get on and do it

More details

Our change board is a place that can:

• Show upcoming changes and projects
• Propose changes
• Articulate the reasons for a change and structure productive debate
• Liberate CYFers to actually take action

The key piece we identified was that CYFers had a lot of ideas about what should be changed, but not as many about who can make those changes. As a volunteer org, the way things get done is that volunteers do them. There’s no other way to do things. We all know this really, but as CYF gets larger, it’s harder to really feel.

So we planned a Great Plan of Planning Plans! Here are the best bits:

Question: How can I make change at CYF?

Answer: These conditions must be met:

A CYFer says

• I want to do this
• Here’s why I want to do it
• Here’s how it serves our goals
• This is how much time I can put towards this change
• This is the help I need from others to get this done (if any)

Proposals without commitment of resources are kicked to an ideas board, but don’t make it onto the change board. Ideas are nice, but they aren’t actions.

Proposals aren’t about asking permission, they’re about gathering resources. It should be hard to stop people doing things if they have an idea, a good reason, success criteria, and are committing time to a project. Vetoes should be reserved for things that go against our goals, or create a risk to the org, and should always be explained.

We talked a lot about how making change is deeply connected to trust and fear. When we trust each other and know each other, we feel freer to try new things. But it’s hard to build trust at scale. We came up with a few ways to support trust:

Make changes in small teams with clear goals.

When people join a small group to work together on a clear project, trust and community are built through the work.

Structure the process of making change so it is more likely to happen:

Instead of “someone should do this” we say “I will do this”. Spend less time on what others should do and more on why we should do it.

Show upcoming changes and projects. Have a central, open board showing what people are working on.

So therefore, the Change Board must do these things

• Things that are being worked on are shown on the board
• The people that are working on them are named
• The reason they are doing it is explained
• There is a success criteria anyone can use to test the project
• The timeline of the project is shown

It's the project attached to this repo. Make proposals by opening an issue on this repo. Invite others to discuss your ticket and commit to action. Add a timeline and a roadmap will be automatically created. Good luck and have fun.