What are decision settings?

Learn about decision settings: free decision mode and consent decision mode

Karolina Krawczyk avatar
Written by Karolina Krawczyk
Updated over a week ago

In order to evolve and grow, your organization must make decisions. Holaspirit allows you to choose between two decision-making modes for decisions to be made in complete transparency.


Decisions on Holaspirit

Holaspirit allows you to make decisions to develop the structure of your organization by acting on its governance (roles, circles and policies).

You can submit proposals or make changes such as:

  • Add, modify or delete a role or a circle

  • Turn a role into a circle or reduce a circle into a role

  • Restructure a circle by shifting its roles or policies

  • Add, modify or delete a policy

  • Hold an election for member(s) to be assigned to a role

  • Publish a publication (new or updated)

Decision-making on Holaspirit can be done directly during a meeting or asynchronously (outside a meeting) through proposals.

As a platform administrator, you can configure decision-making settings for your organization and choose between:


Free decision mode

The free decision mode is recommended when building your organization on Holaspirit. For example, when designing your organizational chart through the creation of roles and circles, this mode allows changes to be made without having to be consented by other members. All changes are validated and implemented instantly.

All members of a circle, as long as they are core members, can modify the roles and the various elements within it.

To ensure transparency in decisions of the circle, all evolutions are visible in the activity feed of the role/circle. All members of the organization can access information on the latest developments implemented in Activities on the role/circle page.


Consent decision mode

For a change in governance to be validated and applied to the organization, the consent decision mode requires that no member of the circle opposes an objection to it within the predefined time limit.

This decision mode differs from the consensus system, for which it is necessary to obtain a total unanimity before acting. To obtain the consent of the circle, no one must say no, whereas to obtain consensus, everyone must say yes.

However, there are exceptions allowing a user to modify the governance without prior validation:

  • When a core member of a role decides to turn the role into a circle.

  • When a member proposes an evolution that does not modify the content of the role.

The consent decision mode is perfectly suited to organizations that apply the principles of shared governance (Holacracy, Sociocracy, 3.0).

It also allows each member of a circle to participate in the evolution of the governance of their circle and to submit proposals for evolutions in a collaborative way.


Define your organization's Decision settings

👤 Only Admins can make changes to the organization's settings.

To edit your organization's decision-making settings:

  • Click on your profile icon and select Administration

  • Click on Decision settings

  • Select the decision mode that suits your organization

    • Decisions are made freely, without needing the circle member's consent

    • Decisions must be submitted to circle members for consent before being implemented

  • By selecting the consent decision mode, you can also choose:

    • The voting time limit defined for members on asynchronous proposals

    • To request a comment when objecting to a proposal

    • The publications type to which consent apply

  • Click Save

How to customize a circle's decision-making settings?

If you have different operating modes in your organization, you can personalize the decision mode applied to circles individually.

Circles can change their own settings independently of the ones defined for the entire organization. They can then decide to work with a consent decision-making deadline different from that configured for the organization, or even define a free decision mode with automatic validation of decisions for the circle.

📌 Note: When circles define their own settings, they become autonomous and the changes made to the organization settings, current or future, do not apply to the circle. Only Admins can still re-synchronize them with the organization's circle settings using the Circle dashboard.

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