Role-specific SOS guidance

Advice mainly aimed at the three Core Roles of the Self-Organising System, to help carry out their mandates

How to achieve the purpose of your team (mainly for Internal Coordinators)

Why the Internal Coordinator role matters

Every role in a team plays a part in achieving the purpose of the team.

The Internal Coordinator (IC) role is there to keep everyone collaborating effectively, and healthily, towards this goal. This page gives you some suggestions for going about this role, and how to prioritise and coordinate the team’s activities.

Effective internal coordination helps XR:

It helps your team:

Overview of the role

The Internal Coordinator role is defined by its mandate and has these features :

Purpose:

Your role exists to ensure that the team is doing what the movement asks of it.

What you do:

You will need to keep in mind an overview of all the team’s work, how it fits together, and how it fits into the movement. That means things like

IC Skills

To fill the Internal Coordinator role you need to practise your skills in aligning people — each with their rich mix of motivations, skills and emotions — with roles — which are more formal.

Practise the art of balancing

Use existing mandates where you can. Create new ones where you see a need that is likely to be ongoing or recurrent, and where you want to ‘offload’ responsibility and accountability onto someone else.

It’s the IC’s role to hold all the parts of the team’s work. Usually that’s too much for one person. But mandates are a way of simplifying what the IC has to hold, because the details are someone else’s responsibility. So think of new roles as a way of lightening the load on you.

Tips for keeping on top of your role

Prioritising your team’s work

How do you decide which parts of the work of the team are higher priority?

If you expect that team priorities are likely to stay the same for several months, consider writing a team strategy that explains the Whys, Whats and Hows of those priorities.

You — or other team members — can also set priorities for the team by defining a team project, with a particular objective. A project may draw on input from one or more roles (the project itself doesn’t have a mandate, but the project team members bring the authority to make decisions from their existing roles and mandates). By asking for project updates at team meetings, you can keep everyone focused on the objective.

How far your Internal Coordinator authority goes

As IC, you are yourself accountable for stewarding and overseeing the team’s priorities.

You may make requests of role holders or sub-circles to work towards those priorities, and, if the request is within the accountabilities of their mandate, then you can hold them accountable for fulfilling the request.

Then the role or sub-circle with the mandate can decide how, and when, they meet your request. As IC, you do not have ‘power over’ roles and sub-circles to decide these things for them.

Remember that every mandate gives authority to its holder to decide how the purpose is achieved, and how the accountabilities are approached. (This is one way we ensure that we are based in autonomy and decentralisation.)

The only exceptions to this would be, if, say, they are accountable for a certain task to prepare an action, and they say they won’t do it until after the action — then you could say they are not doing what they’re not fulfilling their mandate.

Working with your Group Admin

You will find it much easier to coordinate your team effectively if you’ve got solid records about who is definitely in the team, or in its sub-circles, with what roles mandates, and when their appointments run to.

The Group Admin role exists to help you with this. You can also work with the Group Admin to align your communication channels in the team, sub-circles and project teams. Sometimes they may be able to help you with storing and sharing team meeting minutes and other records.

Getting support from other teams and roles

It’s largely up to you, with the consent of your team, to decide what roles you have in your team and how they help you — as described above. Here are some examples.

Summary

How to work with other teams (mainly for External Coordinators)

Why the External Coordinator role matters

The External Coordinator (EC) is crucial for integrating the work of your team with the wider movement. By bridging your team and external circles, you ensure that your team aligns with broader strategic goals and shares its insights, resources, and tensions with other circles. This alignment strengthens collective action, improves coordination, and promotes a regenerative culture across the movement.

Effective external coordination helps:

Overview of the role

The External Coordinator operates within the parameters of their team’s mandate to keep open lines of communication between their team and the broader movement. Specifically, the role entails:

While the EC does not have “power over” others, they play a pivotal role in helping resolve tensions between teams and aligning the circle’s work with movement-wide priorities.

EC Skills

Success in the EC role relies on several key skills:

Tips for keeping on top of your role

Cross-circle projects and project groups

For inter-circle and broader circle issues, it may sometimes be helpful to set up a Project Group to address the issue. It's important to understand the differences between creating a Project Group — which requires no changes to the distribution of power and authority (through mandates) — and a Working Group (or Circle) — which needs a mandate:

Proposing a Project: Proposing a project may not require a formal process. However, each project group should plan in a way that respects the group members' existing mandates. Considerations for project setup include defining objectives, aligning activities with roles based on mandates, coordination mechanisms and communication, and reviewing the project’s expected timeline.

Team boundaries and authority through mandates

Mandates as boundaries

A mandate defines the limits of your authority but also provides you with significant autonomy to take initiative within those limits. This balance supports decentralisation while ensuring that all actions align with the movement’s demands and values.

Collaborating across mandates

When your work affects another role’s mandate, collaborate rather than assume control over how that work is done. For instance, if you want to send an update to a group but it overlaps with someone else’s newsletter accountability, consult them first — ideally using the Advice Process. Their feedback may help tailor the communication to the group’s needs, ensuring it lands effectively without overloading members with too many updates.

Summary

By following these guidelines, an External Coordinator can support their team’s contribution to the movement, align their work with collective goals, and ensure productive cross-team collaborations.

How to build transparency and mitigate power (mainly for Group Admins)

Why the Group Admin role matters

The Group Admin (GA) is vital to supporting the movement’s commitment to decentralisation, transparency, and equitable distribution of power. By documenting and maintaining up-to-date records of team roles, mandates, and members, you help ensure clarity across the movement about who does what, with what authority, and how to engage with them.

Effective group administration:

This work ensures the movement can function without traditional managerial roles that tend to concentrate information and power.

Overview of the role

The Group Admin plays a key administrative and facilitative role within the team, defined by the mandate they hold. The GA’s core responsibilities include:

The GA role is indispensable for ensuring smooth operations and empowering the movement to embody its regenerative and decentralised culture.

GA Skills

Success in the Group Admin role requires a mix of organisational, technical, and interpersonal skills:

These skills ensure that the GA contributes meaningfully to the decentralised and transparent functioning of the team.

Tips for keeping on top of your role

Maximising transparency within the movement

The movement’s commitment to decentralisation relies on clear, accessible information:

Working with coordinator roles in your team and other teams’ admins

As Group Admin, collaboration with other roles and admins is essential:

Through these collaborations, the GA role becomes a cornerstone for transparency and efficiency in both your team and the wider movement.

Summary

By focusing on these areas, the Group Admin ensures their team and the movement as a whole can work together effectively, embodying regenerative culture and decentralised decision-making.