CRiSP stands for Continuously Regenerating Its Starting Position. This means the OPO “remains ready and able” to change form as it evolves, taking on the shape that best fits the current conditions and contexts, and allowed to change shape as those conditions and contexts change. The architecture must remain both lean and agile. This is the new definition of “the learning organization,” — one in which the architecture has plasticity, enabling it to re-wire itself in response to change — the same way the plasticity of our nervous system enables us to learn.
CRiSP governance includes principles, proposals, precedents and procedures:
Principles are foundational guidelines that help prioritize between competing choices or help adjudicate conflict when rational argument fails to do so. Unlike polices and rules, principles can’t tell you what to do, but provide an overall compass by which you and others can evaluate options. Since principles are most often appealed to when the going gets tough, they should only be incorporated into your governance if you (the starting team) are all equally and fully committed to following them. If you are already thinking about principles as things that can be revised or replaced, then they are not really functioning as principles – they are acting as working values. Often, when a team is deriving the core value set for the organization as a whole, they discover that there is one theme, or one value that supersedes all others. This is the key hallmark of a true principle, as it serves as an “evaluative value” or a “meta-value” that can evaluate other values. These are the kinds of principles that can be helpful when setting up your governance. They should be broad enough to cover many different contexts, and rich enough to stimulate generative discourse during times of contention under duress. The best principles help us with practical judgement, and steer us away from ideology and dogma, so avoid creating principles that are overly zealous or righteous.
Proposals are statements that intend to revise, replace or add entirely new policies. A policy in CRiSP Governance is that every proposal must be accompanied by a real-life story that acts as a precedent that serves as a case in point that enable us to easily see why the existing policies are contradictory or inadequate. A CRISP governance means avoiding adding too many policies.
Precedents can often serve as providing new context for interpreting existing policies, without the need to add more policies. Maybe the wording on the existing policy needs to be tweaked to make it cover a wider range of interpretations or contexts. Once a proposal and precedent are submitted, you will need some procedures to decide on new proposals.
Procedures are governance practices such as majority vote, consensus, consent, and advice process. There are many new ideas for open participatory and peer-to-peer procedures, so the organization doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel here. The key characteristic is that it is an emergent governance. Procedures for changing principles might be different than those required for changing regular policies. Typically, however, principles are not subject so much to revision, as re-interpretation, in the same way that the US constitution is seldom changed, but is often reinterpreted as social contexts change. These simple protocols allow the OPO governance to evolve, stay CRISP, remain lean and relevant to current contexts.