9 ms·

Holacracy is Bullshit

86 points by _pius 13y ago

dictum 13y ago
>In the wake of this, I’m starting to think all of the problems we’re seeing with Silicon Valley these days—the ineptitude at politics, the clumsiness with handling inequality in SF, the lack of gender and racial diversity in the industry—are actually rooted in a systemic failure to understand how power works I'm completely lost here: so the way to solve the problem of people with a lot of power oppressing people with little or no power is to replace the oppressive people with power with better powerful people? Isn't this quite close to the idea that somewhat progressive dictators are good? EDIT — Kinda ad hominem-y: "Until November 2012, she ran the Obama campaign's technology office in San Francisco where she recruited technology volunteers to build software for the campaign."
- Touche 13y ago
  Managers aren't powerful people. Their job is to see powerful people's will is done, in a way that will minimally piss off the workers. So a good manager is one that can pull the wool over your eyes enough that you do the things those in power want.
- dangerlibrary 13y ago
  I think the point is more that bureaucracy exists, in the best case, to distribute power throughout an organization. Delegation of authority necessarily means a reduction in power at the top. As an ideal, picture a "separation of powers" system - you no longer have a co-founder managing HR disputes in which they are the defendant, for example.
- grmarcil 13y ago
  I think your read on this is a little strong. The point is that a power structure is going to emerge in an organization eventually, and a formal, out-in-the open power structure is less likely to be abused than the sort of off-the-record de facto power structure that will inevitably emerge in a "no management" type company. Just because people have power doesn't mean they are "progressive dictators" or "oppressing people".
- mpyne 13y ago
  > Isn't this quite close to the idea that somewhat progressive dictators are good? No, it's quite close to the idea that progressive power structures are good, as opposed to anarchy followed by "obviously everything will end up being progressive now that I've torn down the structure of power".
  - icebraining 13y ago
    But isn't that why the people behind the Holacracy concept have a whole structure (with pretty pictures!) that is supposed to replace the managerial layer? http://holacracy.org/how-it-works http://holacracy.org/how-it-works I have no idea if holacracy is bullshit or not (it does feel like a concept invented to sell training classes), but claiming it replaces managers with nothing is plainly false.
    - mpyne 13y ago
      If I'm understanding the linked article correctly, she wasn't claiming holacracy guts management, she was claiming that it introduces a power vacuum. And from what I can tell in that pretty picture you provide, she's probably actually right. E.g. who sets the "strategic direction" for the company? Who guides the unending governance meetings to decide who the managers will be that day? Who decides which spouses get to work on company property without pay, and which employees are allowed to date other employees? The way those things get resolved will show you who's really in charge.
      - dragonwriter 13y ago
        > E.g. who sets the "strategic direction" for the company? The circle whose focus is strategic direction. > Who guides the unending governance meetings to decide who the managers will be that day? Unending governance meetings and "decide who the managers will be that day" both seem like signs of a circle with a poor governance process (probably, one that is trying to force things into a non-holarchic structure.)
        mpyne 13y ago
- grmarcil 13y ago
  Also, can you expand on what you are digging at with your "kinda ad hominem-y" line? The technology arm of Obama's campaign was generally viewed in a very positive light, as far as I remember. And not the same thing as the brains behind the Obamacare debacle. So I'm not sure what the dig is. Is it because she is a recruiter rather than an engineer? Still not sure how that would disqualify her opinion in this case.
  - icebraining 13y ago
    I read it as someone close to the maximum representative of hierarchy (the President of the whole US) having an incentive to discredit less hierarchical systems.
    - dictum 13y ago
      Exactly. A second facet of that is that Catherine seems to be arguing[0] that organizations with no hierarchy give the false impression of power for employees and society at large. Doesn't a similar situation happen with democracy: people can vote Obama, Romney or Absolutely Not Viable Other Candidate and get the false impression of being represented[1]. In the same vein, wouldn't democracy be bullshit? [0]: Both in this reply and the previous one, I'm speculating entirely — the post seems like an intro to a future more detailed explanation of why holacracy does the things this intro mentions it does. [1]: Many times people will get most of what they want (as happens in a company, holocratic or not). Both my argument and the author's argument concern the exceptions to the rule: the times when people don't get what they want, or are completely run over.
- saraid216 13y ago
  That's not remotely what the author offers as a solution. What she's saying is that "rule of law" is actually kind of a good idea.
- mlieberman85 13y ago
  Your argument is fallacious. You've cherry picked a single line from her argument and misrepresented it. Her argument is against holacracy, not against management. What I got out of the article is that when you have a system with no conventional management structure you end up filling the vacuum with people who take advantage of it. In this case some of the people at GitHub who have been accused of harassment would have been dealt with earlier if there was a better management structure in place.
dobbsbob 13y ago
evil rich white men article though an evil rich woman was the power vacuum filler. github can keep their managerless system, they just need to adopt a shop steward system like unions have. This is somebody who can advocate for employees during disciplinary meetings with management, arbitrate petty disputes that don't need heavy handed management involvement with threats of termination, and anonymously bring problems to management if the grieving employee doesn't want to be identified. This person is elected and wields zero power. It's the only thing I remember liking from being in a union once and would work for github. This girl could have gone to the steward, then the steward could complain about the founder's wife harassing employees to HR without identifying the employee to management for silent discipline, when they try to get rid of you for complaining or whatever personal vendetta (it can happen).
rootedbox 13y ago
Holacracies still have a vested management power structure.. Basically you still have owners / top-tier management who's goals may not align with workers. Want to be a really progressive start up.. become a COOP.
jsmcgd 13y ago
Hierarchy may be superior but I think it might be a bit early to declare holacracy a failure. Presumably there are a multitude of successful holacracies that we aren't hearing about because they are actually working.
- aaron-lebo 13y ago
  Valve is a prime example of this. Though, I'm guessing Gabe Newell has a ton of defacto power, and you hear plenty of complaints from people that minor bugs and issues go unhandled because they aren't sexy to work on.
  - sanswork 13y ago
    Jeri Ellsworth's accounts of working within Valve and the issues with the structure there were pretty widely published after her firing. She mentions a fair few more problems then just unsexy bugs being ignored it's worth a listen.
- kaishiro 13y ago
  Agreed. I won't hold them up as a paragon, having only heard anecdotes, but Valve seems to be an example contrary to Github. Could be completely wrong - would love to here from some Valve guys about how traditional HR issues are dealt with there (the answer may just be, "through HR" :) )
  - thenmar 13y ago
    I'll have to find this later when I have time, but there was at least one story about HR problems at Valve that came out not too long ago. The author basically said that while nobody has "official" power, a cabal of a few individuals who were particularly adept at acquiring and exercising political clout within the organization ran things and made decisions.
    - rhizome 13y ago
      And probably as long as a company is small enough, people who work there can just accept a hidden structure just as well as they can accept an articulated one as long as it doesn't cause too many problems for them.
debacle 13y ago
I think that a "no managers" system can work either with a very small number of employees (<15) or in a company of very, very talented people, but if you need to hire fast, you're going to sacrifice hiring quality, and wind up with people who may not be the best. The "GitHub Debacle" seems to be more an issue of a lack of professionalism and an unwillingness to confront serious problems (a bully non-employee spouse in the office creating trouble for what sounds like a good employee) before they came to a head.
- glesica 13y ago
  > ...very, very talented people... But what does that mean? People who are very, very good at building software aren't necessarily good at interacting with others or following basic social rules. Same goes for any field (replace "building software" with "practicing law", for instance). Tricky to hire only people who are very, very good at everything necessary for a healthy culture.
  - debacle 13y ago
    But if you aren't in the kind of bind that a company like GitHub is in, or any company that needs to grow quite fast, you can hire and fire at your leisure, creating the team that you need.
    - eterm 13y ago
      > you can hire and fire at your leisure That's very US centric advice, in many countries you absolutely cannot fire someone "at your leisure".
doktrin 13y ago
> When you allow a power vacuum to emerge someone will fill it, and it’s usually the people who have traditionally held power I've never really given this issue much thought, but it sounds reasonable. Illusions can be dangerous, including the illusion of equality. I was instantly reminded of the famous commandment in Animal Farm : "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others". It now seems almost naive to pretend that there wouldn't be people in the organization with vastly more power than others. All that said, until very recently I was someone who admired GitHub's flat hierarchy from afar. If they were being naive, then so was I.
- buro9 13y ago
  It's not that you can't have flat hierarchy, it's that you have to ensure that it's supported by transparency and process to then prevent it actually being a mask for another power structure. That is the major failing with a lot of the companies doing this. The belief that everyone shares the same ideals and it will work itself out without requiring very strict constraints and process. All that happens is that the inequalities are layered behind façades, becoming a lot harder to address and resolve than if a traditional power structure was used.
  - saraid216 13y ago
    > It's not that you can't have flat hierarchy, it's that you have to ensure that it's supported by transparency and process to then prevent it actually being a mask for another power structure. To wit, this is the actual democratic experiment that people keep thinking they refer to when talking about America. "Holacracies" aren't impossible. It's just that they're hard. Brady's point is more that many people refuse to admit this and, accordingly, run into the worst problems posed rather than having ways to deal with them as they arise.
carlosdp 13y ago
They definitely need to work on things, but I don't think that this debacle means GitHub's decentralized model is invalid. They experienced rapid growth and there are bound to be some aspects that slip through the cracks, doesn't mean they should give up trying to retain a flatter hierarchy as they expand. I hope they don't anyways, it's a core reason GitHub is one of my favorite tech companies.
neom 13y ago
Not to change the subject: Having just come out of a totally flat org that was pushing hard for 100% Holacracy I have to say if I didn't leave for other reasons it would have been that. It can be incredibly incredibly difficult to get things done in this environment and sadly made me feel like every day I had to wake up and battle my coworkers because everything was by committee. I'm all for collaboration, but I also believe at the end of the day someone has to be accountable and responsible for actions taken or not taken.
- icebraining 13y ago
  But that's not what Holacracy pushes for. The organization is supposed to have people with power to decide certain stuff and be accountable for it. It's just not supposed to have a single hierarchy that ends in the CEO and which concentrates all power, but a bunch of "circles" that have role-specific powers. http://holacracy.org/constitution http://holacracy.org/constitution It seems that everyone is blaming the process without following it. Not that I claim that following it would have good results - I have no idea if it's a good system or not.
  - nomade0 13y ago
    You got it right. I work with Holacracy and I can confirm... everything you read Holacracy being blamed for, as in Catherine Bracy's article, is actually not against Holacracy. They think it's against Holacracy, because they mistakenly believe that Holacracy simply means "flat org". Then they build an entire argument around this error... Since the Zappos story, people talk about "holacracy" here and there. In reality, there are few organizations actually using Holacracy® — the system defined in the constitution you link to. Github isn't part of them, Valve either. Zappos and Medium are.
vezzy-fnord 13y ago
The problem with management isn’t managers, the problem with management is bad managers. Which you have an incentive to keep, as you do not want to immobilize your good engineers, as per the Dilbert principle. The problem is not holacracy itself. Plenty of companies are doing just fine using decentralized and autonomous organizational methods, including Valve and Flying Wild Hog. The problem lies in having a culture of apathy and immaturity. Not having managers doesn't mean one should not be able to forward complaints to an appropriate person and have the situation handled. Also, ironically, in the GitHub debacle, it was a woman who rose up and disrupted the power balance.
saosebastiao 13y ago
The problem with management isn’t managers, the problem with management is bad managers I agree with this. However, in my experience, bad managers are really good at politics, and their aptitude with politics biases many organizations towards bad management. Holocracy isn't so much a knee-jerk reaction to bad managers, it is a knee-jerk reaction to bad politics. I would posit that if bad managers were never promoted, people wouldn't have the same holocratic ideals. They would just switch teams or switch companies, and be done with it. They can't do that, because sooner or later, Bad Manager Bob comes back as Bad Director Bob.
- glesica 13y ago
  But I think the point the article is trying to make is that people who are good at politics will end up with power whether you officially have a flat structure or not. So then management needs to be used as a way to keep the whole thing in check. I'm not sure how best to do it, but I think it's a good point.
xrd 13y ago
This public spat is good for the investors (a16z) at GitHub. Investors want structure and accountability, and holacracies don't have that. They may get better results (I'm on the fence) so GitHub is probably on a long leash, but this will be a topic when Ben Horowitz and the executives at GitHub sit down for their quarterlies. Wait, holacracies don't have executives...
jowiar 13y ago
To me, Github's structure is largely an overreaction to the culture flaws elsewhere. Belief that managers are more valuable than doers, and thus paid more. Belief that engineers are infinitely replaceable. Belief that one should be paid proportionate to the number of people below them in the org chart. Management has a purpose - but companies poor treatment of engineers over the years has blinded many engineers to this. A great manager ensures their people are pointed in the right direction, makes sure that they're not running into roadblocks, and frees up their people from dealing with bullshit so they can be the best they can be. This really doesn't have anything to do with "oppression", or whatnot. Managing is orthogonal to engineering - and saying either is worth more than the other is simply wrong. If we can decouple the ideas of "managing" and "building" with systematically being valued / paid more or less than others, we'll have progress. Right now, most are erring on one side or the other.
- hapless 13y ago
  Managers' higher pay isn't some kind of conspiracy squatting in the industry. It's the result of market forces. Those outside pressures will not evaporate simply because we do not like them. Pay grades are telling us things we do not wish to hear: - engineers are more replaceable than their managers - management staff are consistently difficult to find
  - jowiar 13y ago
    Is the market saying that? There were higher starting salaries coming out of my CS undergrad than my management masters. That was 5 years ago, and I don't think things have shifted away from engineers since. Look at the acquihire prices engineers are getting these days...
    - hapless 13y ago
      That is another unpleasant lesson: credentials don't make the man. Your master's degree in management appears to be much less valuable than experience.
  - deeviant 13y ago
Torgo 13y ago
After Jeri Ellsworth was fired from Valve, she had said that the "flat organization" of Valve masked an informal but very real hierarchy that was made up of elites and their cliques. I realize that flat organization is not the same thing as holarchy, but it could be that they both are trading formal hierarchies for informal ones rather than dispensing with them.
- __pThrow 13y ago
  This "rings true" to me. That getting rid of formal managers and formal management just lets "petty office politics" rule more than usual.
- pron 13y ago
  Found it[1]. She says, "The one thing I found out the hard way is that there's actually a hidden layer of powerful management structure in the company, and it felt a lot like high school... There's popular kids that have acquired power within the company, then there's the trouble makers and everyone in between." [1]: http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2013-07-08-valves-flat-structure-leads-to-cliques-say-ex-employee http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2013-07-08-valves-flat...
neom 13y ago
Manager != leader. Managers can = leaders, but the two are not mutually exclusive.
Xdes 13y ago
I was expecting the article to educate me on why holacracy is less effective than hierarchy. However the argument that "holacracy does not work because rich white men fill power vacuums" is fluff.
stantona 13y ago
I wonder if the frat house culture, the opulent office, the drink up debauchery and the "holacracy" may create a delusional sense of grandiosity that permeates from the company level to the employee? Just a thought.
3pt14159 13y ago
Actually, if you look at the situation, it was the very nature of having a Founder involved. If there were no Founders or other powerful people, then that wife's all edged bullshit never would have taken off. Holacracy is not Bullshit.
- hapless 13y ago
  In other words, holacracy as a concept is incompatible with a startup's typical ownership structure?
  - dragonwriter 13y ago
    I don't think so; operational/management structure and ownership structure don't have to interact the way they did here. OTOH, without formal rules and control mechanism to assure that those rules are respected, the ownership structure is naturally going to impact the operational/management structure, which will make holarchy unlikely with any ownership structure (other than ownership through an identical fractal network of teams as the intended operational structure.)
matthewmacleod 13y ago
This is fucking stupid, given we have almost literally no information about what has happened at Github, nor the extent to which any events were due to an absence of hierarchy. I really wish people would dial back on the gloating promotion of their own pet theories and maybe wait until a little bit more information is available before jumping to conclusions.
- awakeasleep 13y ago
  Yep. This has been driving me crazy. Bad actors and unstable people are found in EVERY organization, no matter what the hierarchy or lack thereof. A falling out at GitHub proves nothing! This is a datum, not a statistical study. How many traditionally run organizations have completely imploded and gone bankrupt, or been involved in HR lawsuits? I find it completely asinine that people will use GitHub's problems to push their pet theories.
- 1qaz2wsx3edc 13y ago
  With correlation and causation unknown, I feel like I'm taking crazy pills reading this article.
- jiggy2011 13y ago
  I don't understand why everyone is so excited about this. Any company with more than about 10 employees is going to have some BS drama like this going on. Did people think github was different because it has a cat/octopus thing for a logo?
- jowiar 13y ago
  Regardless of the details, that things escalated to the extent they did can almost entirely be attributed to it being nobody's job to resolve this earlier. Engineers get paid for shipping code. Executives ensure that the company is moving in the right direction, and often the concerns of one engineer are rounding error. People need to be able to say: "If things happen, I will go to this person, whose long-term success at this company is entirely determined by the success of this particular half-dozen of us."
- pron 13y ago
malandrew 13y ago
"When you allow a power vacuum to emerge someone will fill it, and it’s usually the people who have traditionally held power (rich white men)." Why? If there is a power vacuum, exactly what forces support rich white men filling those roles? Why can't woman or person of a different race fill the role? Near as I can tell, the only thing I can see that supports this likelihood is base rates. A greater percentage of the participants in a tech holocracy are likely to be white men (because they are well represented in tech), so when you have 70-80 white male marbles in a bag of 100 marbles, the probably of picking a white male marble is 70-80%. Is there some other force other than simple statistics that increases the probability of a white man taking over power in excess of their representation in the population in question?
- tsax 13y ago
  Yes, but all such questions can lead to un-PC conclusions, therefore you may want to keep quiet.
  - brvs 13y ago
    Like what?
    - tsax 13y ago
      Just game out possible trails of thought. The most 'offensive' one may be true. That's all I'll say.
- cyborgx7 13y ago
  Internalized racism and sexism.
  - thenmar 13y ago
    How do you begin to open a discussion on these topics with people who not only lack the necessary education to talk about them accurately, but already have a disdain for words like "feminism" and "privilege"?
mbillie1 13y ago
Eh. I worked at a reasonably holacratic/flat organization (a high-profile agile consultancy, actually), and when I say it was flat, I didn't know who my boss was, or who to give notice to when I quit. It was honestly very flat, and in no sense did this mean "secretly rich white guys ran the show." It did lead to a bit more cliqueyness than might otherwise have been desired. I think that a holacracy, like most things dealing with human beings and their behavior, is dependent on the specific human beings in question with regard to whether or not it will succeed. On a slightly meta level, it is interesting why the startup/development culture seems to flock to articles like this, saying "such-and-such thing can never work as a solution to people problems because it didn't work here" - we see this crop up on HN constantly, pro- and anti-, with things like working from home, pair programming, etc. Maybe it's too much to ask that we say "different things work for different groups of people"?
- leccine 13y ago
  I guess flat organization means that you build the company bottom up but unfortunately companies don't work efficiently this way. Why? My most recent experience with flat organization revealed the fact that people judged by the perception of their merit not the real value or expertise. Since everybody is biased towards certain things, based on your gender, race or background, this makes flat organizations vulnerable of people forming cliques and jinxing other people's work outside their group. Politics get even stronger in such an workplace, now you need to make these groups happy instead of just going to the right manager or exec to get something sorted. These groups can promote broken ideas, screw other other groups and have subpar performance and blame it on other groups. Without management and data collected (how long does it take to deliver a feature, how many support hours the company need to spend on a product they wrote etc.) it can get nasty very quick. Summarizing: I don't think that flat organizations are any better than hierarchical structures, I have experience with both and I believe that flat workplaces suck more especially above a certain size (200-300+ people).
- alukima 13y ago
  I think I work at the "high-profile agile consultancy" you're talking about. I've been there two months and I still have no idea who I talk to about X, where X is a variety of things. Before getting staffed on a project I spent time working on whatever I wanted to learn. At several points I wondered if there was someone I should check in with. It felt so weird to just do what I wanted without having to get permission or justify it to someone. That said, I don't think I could ever go back to reporting to a manager, especially a non-technical manager. >Maybe it's too much to ask that we say "different things work for different groups of people"? I couldn't agree more. I think the flat model works at my company because harassment wouldn't be tolerated by anyone. I turned down positions at startups because their culture was too fratty. Even if they had a management system I wouldn't have felt comfortable bringing up issues.
binarymax 13y ago
My father, who I consider to have been one of the "real" hippies, told me that he couldn't deal with hippie communes. He claimed that when the group becomes large enough and everyone should be considered equal, a jerk comes in to take advantage of the situation, starts managing, and fucks everything up.
- pron 13y ago
  The dynamics of the counterculture communes has been studied, and it is of interest as counterculture was certainly a forefather to modern day Silicon Valley. See here: * http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/01/how-silicon-valley-became-the-man/ http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/01/how-silicon-valley-became-the-m... * http://vimeo.com/73536828 http://vimeo.com/73536828 esp. 54:10 and on
rjknight 13y ago
The problem with management isn’t managers, the problem with management is bad managers. So, on the one hand, we have what we might call the Lord of the Flies narrative - that Github's pseudo-anarchic non-management just enables people's worst traits to come to the surface; it doesn't remove power imbalances, it just hides them and makes it harder to challenge illegitimate use of that power because it's harder to identify. On the flip side, we have what we might call the Milgram Experiment narrative - that authority positions are naturally corrupting, making belief in good management seem utopian; sure, we'd all like to be managed by someone that we respect, admire and trust, but we're just as likely to be managed by someone that we fear, pity or loathe, and the explicit hierarchy turns out to be just as hard to challenge as the implicit one and often even more so. Lots of people seem to have decided that one of the above is the greater evil, and are willing to risk the other. Github is in the minority of companies that (hitherto) has seen the latter as the greater evil, or at least that is how the company has presented itself (I don't work there and don't personally know anyone who does, so I really can't comment on anything other than the rhetoric). What we need is, boring though this may seem, some kind of balance between the two. In an anarchic company, people are going to over-step the boundaries (e.g. by reverting a co-workers commits due to a personal dispute). Some authority needs to police this. However, that authority only really needs to be reactive - it should punish wrongdoers rather than order people around on a daily basis. Most of the time, people do the right thing and can be left to get on with it, and hassling them while they do it is harmful. To get overly philosophical, I think we can have the best of both worlds by borrowing the concept of 'complex equality'[1], which comes from the book Spheres of Justice by Michael Walzer[2]. In a nutshell, he suggests that we can avoid power imbalances by ensuring that natural and legitimate imbalances within different 'spheres' do not spill over into other ones. In the context of tech companies, we might have, say, a 'discipline' sphere where managers are in charge, a 'technical' sphere where engineers are in charge, a 'design' sphere with designers in charge, and so on. Being the top engineer doesn't give you the right to overrule a designer on a design question, and being a top manager doesn't give you the right to overrule an engineer on a technical question. If we're dealing with a personal conflict, this falls under the jurisdiction of management, and they should have full authority to resolve it. If we're dealing with a technical debate, that should be resolved by engineers. Resource allocation should be handled as democratically as possible. Once you think in this way, it becomes obvious why some companies and projects fail: managers demanding authority over technical matters (e.g. estimates, software development workflow), engineers demanding authority over design (I'm sure we can all think of examples), or anyone demanding authority over management practices. These are all likely to lead to abuse and mismanagement; in any case they are unlikely to be optimal. What companies need is formal structure, but structure that constrains authority rather than simply entrusting it to managers and thereafter hoping that they turn out to be, against the odds, good ones. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_equality http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_equality [2] I am dimly aware that Walzer is controversial in some circles. I know nothing about him apart from the book, so please do not take anything I say as an endorsement or condemnation of any of his other views, which are beside the point here.
StavrosK 13y ago
Oh God, "holacracy"? It's too late to change that, isn't it? It should be "holocracy"...
jballanc 13y ago
If you say "we don't have office politics at our company" the reality is that you do have office politics and it's completely unrestrained due to the blind eye turned on it by "management". If you notice that the cars you build tend to rust, and that water causes rust, you might say, "well, we're going to build cars that don't encounter water," and you'd be rightly laughed out of town. Office politics doesn't happen (or not) because the founders wrote it into their business plan. Office politics happens because offices are occupied by humans.
hoodq19 13y ago
Waaaaay too soon to be writing off holacracy. Fad or not, it's at the crawl stage (crawl-walk-run). And to compare it to business-as-usual running-- when it's as broken as it is-- is premature.
asgard1024 13y ago
I've always found these attempts for "holacracy" as efforts to square the circle. There is actually a solution to this problem - it's called democracy. Every person gets the same amount of power - one vote, and they can decide things (or decide they don't care). This is compatible with hierarchies, both formal and informal, but the authority is challenged all the time (which is a good thing). Some companies work like that, they are called worker cooperatives, but they are rare. Any eventual power cliques have hard time to be stable in such environment, because the power is equally distributed by default and according to a fixed, well-known rule. This actually allows participants to focus on production rather than politics. But this is seldom what the owners of the company (who invested capital) want. They don't want people to run things, they want people to run things on their behalf (and get rich from the process). And even if they were sympathetic to this idea, it's very hard to grow such a company at all stages (in small group it's very prone to hostile takeovers and later there is no incentive to grow, since the power of individuals is always the same compared to number of people). I don't see transition to democratic workplace happening unless lots of people give up any hope to have more power than other people. Interestingly, in political system, this largely happened, although it's still not enough and there is resentment from some.
cbracy 13y ago
I added an edit here, pointing out that GitHub wasn't actually employing holacracy. That was my (pre-breakfast) sloppiness. My main point still stands, though. And Tom Preston-Werner describes his "management" structure here in pretty great detail so we do have some insight into what was actually going on inside GitHub: http://www.oscon.com/oscon2013/public/schedule/detail/29555 http://www.oscon.com/oscon2013/public/schedule/detail/29555
- nomade0 13y ago
  Catherine, you are confusing "Holacracy" for a generic term that means "flat organizations" and "lack of structure". Holacracy® is a specific system with clear rules (available here: http://holacracy.org/constitution http://holacracy.org/constitution ), and is far more structured than what you describe in your article. See for example the structure of my organization running with Holacracy: https://glassfrog.holacracy.org/organizations/5 https://glassfrog.holacracy.org/organizations/5 It's mistake to associate Holacracy to flat organizations — Holacracy is actually FARTHER AWAY from a flat organization than it is from a conventional hierarchy. It pushes very strongly about the looseness and lack of clarity around accountabilities in a structure-less org. It even pushes against the lack of clarity in conventional hierarchies as well. Overall, Holacracy instills more structure in an organization, not less. Ev Williams, who uses it at Medium, puts it this way: "Holacracy is the opposite of the cliché way to run a startup. People think "freedom, no job description, everybody does everything, it's totally flat, and that's cool because we're all down with those rules". But actually that creates tons of anxiety and inefficiency, and various modes of dysfunction, whether we have to build consensus around every decision, or I'm gonna do a land grab for power... People romanticize startup cultures, but I know it's fairly rare that people in startups say "this is it, it is amazing and everybody is super-productive and going along". So in Holacracy, one of the principles is to make the implicit explicit — tons of it is about creating clarity: who is in charge of what, who is taking what kind of decision — and there is also a system for defining that, and changing that, so it's very flexible at the same time." (source: https://medium.com/p/89fb713a8786 https://medium.com/p/89fb713a8786 ) So... I'm afraid your assessment of Holacracy is really backward. I'm not saying Holacracy is perfect, but it's certainly not flawed in the ways you describe. @oliviercp
kabuks 13y ago
I don't know how Github runs, but it sounds nothing like Holacracy. The author is confused (as are many people on this thread). Six months ago, I switched my company (over 50 full time employees in 3 cities) to Holacracy. I'm here to tell you that I'm 100% convinced that it's a huge step forward in terms of any organizational system I've come across. There's nothing 'flat' or 'manager-less' about it. It's a complex and intricate system that leads to greater clarity, less politics, and better distributed decision making. Accountabilities are clearer, meetings are more efficient, and more voices are heard. Holacracy explicitly avoids design/decide by committee. If you're running a company with more than 10 employees, I highly recommend you take a serious look at Holacracy. It's the best decision I've made by far, and I'm never going to work for, or start another company without running it this way. If you're earnestly curious, drop me a note and I'll be happy to talk about it more with you.
Zigurd 13y ago
The problem at Github isn't a good example of the supposed deficiency of holacratic enterprises. In the first place, the problem became as serious as it did because it involved Github's management, such as it was. Secondly, the founder involved in the incident was put on leave, and an apology was promptly and unreservedly issued. It is easy to imagine a more hierarchical organization circling the wagons, instead. In the end, Github may be an example of serious problem with a founder that was handled as well as possible. There are a lot of ways software development does not fit within traditional management structures. For example, if you take traditional project management tools and try to predict a non-trivial software development schedule with them you are going to have a bad time. So we invent new, usually less-structured tools. You can't do entirely without those structures, but minimization of hierarchy is the logical way to adapt management to the challenge of keeping software development orderly and making a business out of it, if that's your aim. If there is a deeper problem at Github it is likely that they didn't follow some of the other rules of thumb for software development organizations, like "don't hire jerks."

86 points by _pius 13y ago

>In the wake of this, I’m starting to think all of the problems we’re seeing with Silicon Valley these days—the ineptitude at politics, the clumsiness with handling inequality in SF, the lack of gender and racial diversity in the industry—are actually rooted in a systemic failure to understand how power works I'm completely lost here: so the way to solve the problem of people with a lot of power oppressing people with little or no power is to replace the oppressive people with power with better powerful people? Isn't this quite close to the idea that somewhat progressive dictators are good? EDIT — Kinda ad hominem-y: "Until November 2012, she ran the Obama campaign's technology office in San Francisco where she recruited technology volunteers to build software for the campaign."

Touche 13y ago
Managers aren't powerful people. Their job is to see powerful people's will is done, in a way that will minimally piss off the workers. So a good manager is one that can pull the wool over your eyes enough that you do the things those in power want.
dangerlibrary 13y ago
I think the point is more that bureaucracy exists, in the best case, to distribute power throughout an organization. Delegation of authority necessarily means a reduction in power at the top. As an ideal, picture a "separation of powers" system - you no longer have a co-founder managing HR disputes in which they are the defendant, for example.
grmarcil 13y ago
I think your read on this is a little strong. The point is that a power structure is going to emerge in an organization eventually, and a formal, out-in-the open power structure is less likely to be abused than the sort of off-the-record de facto power structure that will inevitably emerge in a "no management" type company. Just because people have power doesn't mean they are "progressive dictators" or "oppressing people".
mpyne 13y ago
> Isn't this quite close to the idea that somewhat progressive dictators are good? No, it's quite close to the idea that progressive power structures are good, as opposed to anarchy followed by "obviously everything will end up being progressive now that I've torn down the structure of power".
- icebraining 13y ago
  But isn't that why the people behind the Holacracy concept have a whole structure (with pretty pictures!) that is supposed to replace the managerial layer? http://holacracy.org/how-it-works http://holacracy.org/how-it-works I have no idea if holacracy is bullshit or not (it does feel like a concept invented to sell training classes), but claiming it replaces managers with nothing is plainly false.
  - mpyne 13y ago
    If I'm understanding the linked article correctly, she wasn't claiming holacracy guts management, she was claiming that it introduces a power vacuum. And from what I can tell in that pretty picture you provide, she's probably actually right. E.g. who sets the "strategic direction" for the company? Who guides the unending governance meetings to decide who the managers will be that day? Who decides which spouses get to work on company property without pay, and which employees are allowed to date other employees? The way those things get resolved will show you who's really in charge.
    - dragonwriter 13y ago
      > E.g. who sets the "strategic direction" for the company? The circle whose focus is strategic direction. > Who guides the unending governance meetings to decide who the managers will be that day? Unending governance meetings and "decide who the managers will be that day" both seem like signs of a circle with a poor governance process (probably, one that is trying to force things into a non-holarchic structure.)
      - mpyne 13y ago
grmarcil 13y ago
Also, can you expand on what you are digging at with your "kinda ad hominem-y" line? The technology arm of Obama's campaign was generally viewed in a very positive light, as far as I remember. And not the same thing as the brains behind the Obamacare debacle. So I'm not sure what the dig is. Is it because she is a recruiter rather than an engineer? Still not sure how that would disqualify her opinion in this case.
- icebraining 13y ago
  I read it as someone close to the maximum representative of hierarchy (the President of the whole US) having an incentive to discredit less hierarchical systems.
  - dictum 13y ago
    Exactly. A second facet of that is that Catherine seems to be arguing[0] that organizations with no hierarchy give the false impression of power for employees and society at large. Doesn't a similar situation happen with democracy: people can vote Obama, Romney or Absolutely Not Viable Other Candidate and get the false impression of being represented[1]. In the same vein, wouldn't democracy be bullshit? [0]: Both in this reply and the previous one, I'm speculating entirely — the post seems like an intro to a future more detailed explanation of why holacracy does the things this intro mentions it does. [1]: Many times people will get most of what they want (as happens in a company, holocratic or not). Both my argument and the author's argument concern the exceptions to the rule: the times when people don't get what they want, or are completely run over.
saraid216 13y ago
That's not remotely what the author offers as a solution. What she's saying is that "rule of law" is actually kind of a good idea.
mlieberman85 13y ago
Your argument is fallacious. You've cherry picked a single line from her argument and misrepresented it. Her argument is against holacracy, not against management. What I got out of the article is that when you have a system with no conventional management structure you end up filling the vacuum with people who take advantage of it. In this case some of the people at GitHub who have been accused of harassment would have been dealt with earlier if there was a better management structure in place.

dobbsbob 13y ago

evil rich white men article though an evil rich woman was the power vacuum filler. github can keep their managerless system, they just need to adopt a shop steward system like unions have. This is somebody who can advocate for employees during disciplinary meetings with management, arbitrate petty disputes that don't need heavy handed management involvement with threats of termination, and anonymously bring problems to management if the grieving employee doesn't want to be identified. This person is elected and wields zero power. It's the only thing I remember liking from being in a union once and would work for github. This girl could have gone to the steward, then the steward could complain about the founder's wife harassing employees to HR without identifying the employee to management for silent discipline, when they try to get rid of you for complaining or whatever personal vendetta (it can happen).

rootedbox 13y ago

Holacracies still have a vested management power structure.. Basically you still have owners / top-tier management who's goals may not align with workers. Want to be a really progressive start up.. become a COOP.

jsmcgd 13y ago

Hierarchy may be superior but I think it might be a bit early to declare holacracy a failure. Presumably there are a multitude of successful holacracies that we aren't hearing about because they are actually working.

aaron-lebo 13y ago
Valve is a prime example of this. Though, I'm guessing Gabe Newell has a ton of defacto power, and you hear plenty of complaints from people that minor bugs and issues go unhandled because they aren't sexy to work on.
- sanswork 13y ago
  Jeri Ellsworth's accounts of working within Valve and the issues with the structure there were pretty widely published after her firing. She mentions a fair few more problems then just unsexy bugs being ignored it's worth a listen.
kaishiro 13y ago
Agreed. I won't hold them up as a paragon, having only heard anecdotes, but Valve seems to be an example contrary to Github. Could be completely wrong - would love to here from some Valve guys about how traditional HR issues are dealt with there (the answer may just be, "through HR" :) )
- thenmar 13y ago
  I'll have to find this later when I have time, but there was at least one story about HR problems at Valve that came out not too long ago. The author basically said that while nobody has "official" power, a cabal of a few individuals who were particularly adept at acquiring and exercising political clout within the organization ran things and made decisions.
  - rhizome 13y ago
    And probably as long as a company is small enough, people who work there can just accept a hidden structure just as well as they can accept an articulated one as long as it doesn't cause too many problems for them.

debacle 13y ago

I think that a "no managers" system can work either with a very small number of employees (<15) or in a company of very, very talented people, but if you need to hire fast, you're going to sacrifice hiring quality, and wind up with people who may not be the best. The "GitHub Debacle" seems to be more an issue of a lack of professionalism and an unwillingness to confront serious problems (a bully non-employee spouse in the office creating trouble for what sounds like a good employee) before they came to a head.

glesica 13y ago
> ...very, very talented people... But what does that mean? People who are very, very good at building software aren't necessarily good at interacting with others or following basic social rules. Same goes for any field (replace "building software" with "practicing law", for instance). Tricky to hire only people who are very, very good at everything necessary for a healthy culture.
- debacle 13y ago
  But if you aren't in the kind of bind that a company like GitHub is in, or any company that needs to grow quite fast, you can hire and fire at your leisure, creating the team that you need.
  - eterm 13y ago
    > you can hire and fire at your leisure That's very US centric advice, in many countries you absolutely cannot fire someone "at your leisure".

doktrin 13y ago

> When you allow a power vacuum to emerge someone will fill it, and it’s usually the people who have traditionally held power I've never really given this issue much thought, but it sounds reasonable. Illusions can be dangerous, including the illusion of equality. I was instantly reminded of the famous commandment in Animal Farm : "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others". It now seems almost naive to pretend that there wouldn't be people in the organization with vastly more power than others. All that said, until very recently I was someone who admired GitHub's flat hierarchy from afar. If they were being naive, then so was I.

buro9 13y ago
It's not that you can't have flat hierarchy, it's that you have to ensure that it's supported by transparency and process to then prevent it actually being a mask for another power structure. That is the major failing with a lot of the companies doing this. The belief that everyone shares the same ideals and it will work itself out without requiring very strict constraints and process. All that happens is that the inequalities are layered behind façades, becoming a lot harder to address and resolve than if a traditional power structure was used.
- saraid216 13y ago
  > It's not that you can't have flat hierarchy, it's that you have to ensure that it's supported by transparency and process to then prevent it actually being a mask for another power structure. To wit, this is the actual democratic experiment that people keep thinking they refer to when talking about America. "Holacracies" aren't impossible. It's just that they're hard. Brady's point is more that many people refuse to admit this and, accordingly, run into the worst problems posed rather than having ways to deal with them as they arise.

carlosdp 13y ago

They definitely need to work on things, but I don't think that this debacle means GitHub's decentralized model is invalid. They experienced rapid growth and there are bound to be some aspects that slip through the cracks, doesn't mean they should give up trying to retain a flatter hierarchy as they expand. I hope they don't anyways, it's a core reason GitHub is one of my favorite tech companies.

neom 13y ago

Not to change the subject: Having just come out of a totally flat org that was pushing hard for 100% Holacracy I have to say if I didn't leave for other reasons it would have been that. It can be incredibly incredibly difficult to get things done in this environment and sadly made me feel like every day I had to wake up and battle my coworkers because everything was by committee. I'm all for collaboration, but I also believe at the end of the day someone has to be accountable and responsible for actions taken or not taken.

icebraining 13y ago
But that's not what Holacracy pushes for. The organization is supposed to have people with power to decide certain stuff and be accountable for it. It's just not supposed to have a single hierarchy that ends in the CEO and which concentrates all power, but a bunch of "circles" that have role-specific powers. http://holacracy.org/constitution http://holacracy.org/constitution It seems that everyone is blaming the process without following it. Not that I claim that following it would have good results - I have no idea if it's a good system or not.
- nomade0 13y ago
  You got it right. I work with Holacracy and I can confirm... everything you read Holacracy being blamed for, as in Catherine Bracy's article, is actually not against Holacracy. They think it's against Holacracy, because they mistakenly believe that Holacracy simply means "flat org". Then they build an entire argument around this error... Since the Zappos story, people talk about "holacracy" here and there. In reality, there are few organizations actually using Holacracy® — the system defined in the constitution you link to. Github isn't part of them, Valve either. Zappos and Medium are.

vezzy-fnord 13y ago

The problem with management isn’t managers, the problem with management is bad managers. Which you have an incentive to keep, as you do not want to immobilize your good engineers, as per the Dilbert principle. The problem is not holacracy itself. Plenty of companies are doing just fine using decentralized and autonomous organizational methods, including Valve and Flying Wild Hog. The problem lies in having a culture of apathy and immaturity. Not having managers doesn't mean one should not be able to forward complaints to an appropriate person and have the situation handled. Also, ironically, in the GitHub debacle, it was a woman who rose up and disrupted the power balance.

saosebastiao 13y ago

The problem with management isn’t managers, the problem with management is bad managers I agree with this. However, in my experience, bad managers are really good at politics, and their aptitude with politics biases many organizations towards bad management. Holocracy isn't so much a knee-jerk reaction to bad managers, it is a knee-jerk reaction to bad politics. I would posit that if bad managers were never promoted, people wouldn't have the same holocratic ideals. They would just switch teams or switch companies, and be done with it. They can't do that, because sooner or later, Bad Manager Bob comes back as Bad Director Bob.

glesica 13y ago
But I think the point the article is trying to make is that people who are good at politics will end up with power whether you officially have a flat structure or not. So then management needs to be used as a way to keep the whole thing in check. I'm not sure how best to do it, but I think it's a good point.

xrd 13y ago

This public spat is good for the investors (a16z) at GitHub. Investors want structure and accountability, and holacracies don't have that. They may get better results (I'm on the fence) so GitHub is probably on a long leash, but this will be a topic when Ben Horowitz and the executives at GitHub sit down for their quarterlies. Wait, holacracies don't have executives...

jowiar 13y ago

To me, Github's structure is largely an overreaction to the culture flaws elsewhere. Belief that managers are more valuable than doers, and thus paid more. Belief that engineers are infinitely replaceable. Belief that one should be paid proportionate to the number of people below them in the org chart. Management has a purpose - but companies poor treatment of engineers over the years has blinded many engineers to this. A great manager ensures their people are pointed in the right direction, makes sure that they're not running into roadblocks, and frees up their people from dealing with bullshit so they can be the best they can be. This really doesn't have anything to do with "oppression", or whatnot. Managing is orthogonal to engineering - and saying either is worth more than the other is simply wrong. If we can decouple the ideas of "managing" and "building" with systematically being valued / paid more or less than others, we'll have progress. Right now, most are erring on one side or the other.

hapless 13y ago
Managers' higher pay isn't some kind of conspiracy squatting in the industry. It's the result of market forces. Those outside pressures will not evaporate simply because we do not like them. Pay grades are telling us things we do not wish to hear: - engineers are more replaceable than their managers - management staff are consistently difficult to find
- jowiar 13y ago
  Is the market saying that? There were higher starting salaries coming out of my CS undergrad than my management masters. That was 5 years ago, and I don't think things have shifted away from engineers since. Look at the acquihire prices engineers are getting these days...
  - hapless 13y ago
    That is another unpleasant lesson: credentials don't make the man. Your master's degree in management appears to be much less valuable than experience.
- deeviant 13y ago

Torgo 13y ago

After Jeri Ellsworth was fired from Valve, she had said that the "flat organization" of Valve masked an informal but very real hierarchy that was made up of elites and their cliques. I realize that flat organization is not the same thing as holarchy, but it could be that they both are trading formal hierarchies for informal ones rather than dispensing with them.

__pThrow 13y ago
This "rings true" to me. That getting rid of formal managers and formal management just lets "petty office politics" rule more than usual.
pron 13y ago
Found it[1]. She says, "The one thing I found out the hard way is that there's actually a hidden layer of powerful management structure in the company, and it felt a lot like high school... There's popular kids that have acquired power within the company, then there's the trouble makers and everyone in between." [1]: http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2013-07-08-valves-flat-structure-leads-to-cliques-say-ex-employee http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2013-07-08-valves-flat...

neom 13y ago

Manager != leader. Managers can = leaders, but the two are not mutually exclusive.

Xdes 13y ago

I was expecting the article to educate me on why holacracy is less effective than hierarchy. However the argument that "holacracy does not work because rich white men fill power vacuums" is fluff.

stantona 13y ago

I wonder if the frat house culture, the opulent office, the drink up debauchery and the "holacracy" may create a delusional sense of grandiosity that permeates from the company level to the employee? Just a thought.

3pt14159 13y ago

Actually, if you look at the situation, it was the very nature of having a Founder involved. If there were no Founders or other powerful people, then that wife's all edged bullshit never would have taken off. Holacracy is not Bullshit.

hapless 13y ago
In other words, holacracy as a concept is incompatible with a startup's typical ownership structure?
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  I don't think so; operational/management structure and ownership structure don't have to interact the way they did here. OTOH, without formal rules and control mechanism to assure that those rules are respected, the ownership structure is naturally going to impact the operational/management structure, which will make holarchy unlikely with any ownership structure (other than ownership through an identical fractal network of teams as the intended operational structure.)

matthewmacleod 13y ago

This is fucking stupid, given we have almost literally no information about what has happened at Github, nor the extent to which any events were due to an absence of hierarchy. I really wish people would dial back on the gloating promotion of their own pet theories and maybe wait until a little bit more information is available before jumping to conclusions.

awakeasleep 13y ago
Yep. This has been driving me crazy. Bad actors and unstable people are found in EVERY organization, no matter what the hierarchy or lack thereof. A falling out at GitHub proves nothing! This is a datum, not a statistical study. How many traditionally run organizations have completely imploded and gone bankrupt, or been involved in HR lawsuits? I find it completely asinine that people will use GitHub's problems to push their pet theories.
1qaz2wsx3edc 13y ago
With correlation and causation unknown, I feel like I'm taking crazy pills reading this article.
jiggy2011 13y ago
I don't understand why everyone is so excited about this. Any company with more than about 10 employees is going to have some BS drama like this going on. Did people think github was different because it has a cat/octopus thing for a logo?
jowiar 13y ago
Regardless of the details, that things escalated to the extent they did can almost entirely be attributed to it being nobody's job to resolve this earlier. Engineers get paid for shipping code. Executives ensure that the company is moving in the right direction, and often the concerns of one engineer are rounding error. People need to be able to say: "If things happen, I will go to this person, whose long-term success at this company is entirely determined by the success of this particular half-dozen of us."
pron 13y ago

malandrew 13y ago

"When you allow a power vacuum to emerge someone will fill it, and it’s usually the people who have traditionally held power (rich white men)." Why? If there is a power vacuum, exactly what forces support rich white men filling those roles? Why can't woman or person of a different race fill the role? Near as I can tell, the only thing I can see that supports this likelihood is base rates. A greater percentage of the participants in a tech holocracy are likely to be white men (because they are well represented in tech), so when you have 70-80 white male marbles in a bag of 100 marbles, the probably of picking a white male marble is 70-80%. Is there some other force other than simple statistics that increases the probability of a white man taking over power in excess of their representation in the population in question?

tsax 13y ago
Yes, but all such questions can lead to un-PC conclusions, therefore you may want to keep quiet.
- brvs 13y ago
  Like what?
  - tsax 13y ago
    Just game out possible trails of thought. The most 'offensive' one may be true. That's all I'll say.
cyborgx7 13y ago
Internalized racism and sexism.
- thenmar 13y ago
  How do you begin to open a discussion on these topics with people who not only lack the necessary education to talk about them accurately, but already have a disdain for words like "feminism" and "privilege"?

mbillie1 13y ago

Eh. I worked at a reasonably holacratic/flat organization (a high-profile agile consultancy, actually), and when I say it was flat, I didn't know who my boss was, or who to give notice to when I quit. It was honestly very flat, and in no sense did this mean "secretly rich white guys ran the show." It did lead to a bit more cliqueyness than might otherwise have been desired. I think that a holacracy, like most things dealing with human beings and their behavior, is dependent on the specific human beings in question with regard to whether or not it will succeed. On a slightly meta level, it is interesting why the startup/development culture seems to flock to articles like this, saying "such-and-such thing can never work as a solution to people problems because it didn't work here" - we see this crop up on HN constantly, pro- and anti-, with things like working from home, pair programming, etc. Maybe it's too much to ask that we say "different things work for different groups of people"?

leccine 13y ago
I guess flat organization means that you build the company bottom up but unfortunately companies don't work efficiently this way. Why? My most recent experience with flat organization revealed the fact that people judged by the perception of their merit not the real value or expertise. Since everybody is biased towards certain things, based on your gender, race or background, this makes flat organizations vulnerable of people forming cliques and jinxing other people's work outside their group. Politics get even stronger in such an workplace, now you need to make these groups happy instead of just going to the right manager or exec to get something sorted. These groups can promote broken ideas, screw other other groups and have subpar performance and blame it on other groups. Without management and data collected (how long does it take to deliver a feature, how many support hours the company need to spend on a product they wrote etc.) it can get nasty very quick. Summarizing: I don't think that flat organizations are any better than hierarchical structures, I have experience with both and I believe that flat workplaces suck more especially above a certain size (200-300+ people).
alukima 13y ago
I think I work at the "high-profile agile consultancy" you're talking about. I've been there two months and I still have no idea who I talk to about X, where X is a variety of things. Before getting staffed on a project I spent time working on whatever I wanted to learn. At several points I wondered if there was someone I should check in with. It felt so weird to just do what I wanted without having to get permission or justify it to someone. That said, I don't think I could ever go back to reporting to a manager, especially a non-technical manager. >Maybe it's too much to ask that we say "different things work for different groups of people"? I couldn't agree more. I think the flat model works at my company because harassment wouldn't be tolerated by anyone. I turned down positions at startups because their culture was too fratty. Even if they had a management system I wouldn't have felt comfortable bringing up issues.

binarymax 13y ago

My father, who I consider to have been one of the "real" hippies, told me that he couldn't deal with hippie communes. He claimed that when the group becomes large enough and everyone should be considered equal, a jerk comes in to take advantage of the situation, starts managing, and fucks everything up.

pron 13y ago
The dynamics of the counterculture communes has been studied, and it is of interest as counterculture was certainly a forefather to modern day Silicon Valley. See here: * http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/01/how-silicon-valley-became-the-man/ http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/01/how-silicon-valley-became-the-m... * http://vimeo.com/73536828 http://vimeo.com/73536828 esp. 54:10 and on

rjknight 13y ago

The problem with management isn’t managers, the problem with management is bad managers. So, on the one hand, we have what we might call the Lord of the Flies narrative - that Github's pseudo-anarchic non-management just enables people's worst traits to come to the surface; it doesn't remove power imbalances, it just hides them and makes it harder to challenge illegitimate use of that power because it's harder to identify. On the flip side, we have what we might call the Milgram Experiment narrative - that authority positions are naturally corrupting, making belief in good management seem utopian; sure, we'd all like to be managed by someone that we respect, admire and trust, but we're just as likely to be managed by someone that we fear, pity or loathe, and the explicit hierarchy turns out to be just as hard to challenge as the implicit one and often even more so. Lots of people seem to have decided that one of the above is the greater evil, and are willing to risk the other. Github is in the minority of companies that (hitherto) has seen the latter as the greater evil, or at least that is how the company has presented itself (I don't work there and don't personally know anyone who does, so I really can't comment on anything other than the rhetoric). What we need is, boring though this may seem, some kind of balance between the two. In an anarchic company, people are going to over-step the boundaries (e.g. by reverting a co-workers commits due to a personal dispute). Some authority needs to police this. However, that authority only really needs to be reactive - it should punish wrongdoers rather than order people around on a daily basis. Most of the time, people do the right thing and can be left to get on with it, and hassling them while they do it is harmful. To get overly philosophical, I think we can have the best of both worlds by borrowing the concept of 'complex equality'[1], which comes from the book Spheres of Justice by Michael Walzer[2]. In a nutshell, he suggests that we can avoid power imbalances by ensuring that natural and legitimate imbalances within different 'spheres' do not spill over into other ones. In the context of tech companies, we might have, say, a 'discipline' sphere where managers are in charge, a 'technical' sphere where engineers are in charge, a 'design' sphere with designers in charge, and so on. Being the top engineer doesn't give you the right to overrule a designer on a design question, and being a top manager doesn't give you the right to overrule an engineer on a technical question. If we're dealing with a personal conflict, this falls under the jurisdiction of management, and they should have full authority to resolve it. If we're dealing with a technical debate, that should be resolved by engineers. Resource allocation should be handled as democratically as possible. Once you think in this way, it becomes obvious why some companies and projects fail: managers demanding authority over technical matters (e.g. estimates, software development workflow), engineers demanding authority over design (I'm sure we can all think of examples), or anyone demanding authority over management practices. These are all likely to lead to abuse and mismanagement; in any case they are unlikely to be optimal. What companies need is formal structure, but structure that constrains authority rather than simply entrusting it to managers and thereafter hoping that they turn out to be, against the odds, good ones. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_equality http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_equality [2] I am dimly aware that Walzer is controversial in some circles. I know nothing about him apart from the book, so please do not take anything I say as an endorsement or condemnation of any of his other views, which are beside the point here.

StavrosK 13y ago

Oh God, "holacracy"? It's too late to change that, isn't it? It should be "holocracy"...

jballanc 13y ago

If you say "we don't have office politics at our company" the reality is that you do have office politics and it's completely unrestrained due to the blind eye turned on it by "management". If you notice that the cars you build tend to rust, and that water causes rust, you might say, "well, we're going to build cars that don't encounter water," and you'd be rightly laughed out of town. Office politics doesn't happen (or not) because the founders wrote it into their business plan. Office politics happens because offices are occupied by humans.

hoodq19 13y ago

Waaaaay too soon to be writing off holacracy. Fad or not, it's at the crawl stage (crawl-walk-run). And to compare it to business-as-usual running-- when it's as broken as it is-- is premature.

asgard1024 13y ago

I've always found these attempts for "holacracy" as efforts to square the circle. There is actually a solution to this problem - it's called democracy. Every person gets the same amount of power - one vote, and they can decide things (or decide they don't care). This is compatible with hierarchies, both formal and informal, but the authority is challenged all the time (which is a good thing). Some companies work like that, they are called worker cooperatives, but they are rare. Any eventual power cliques have hard time to be stable in such environment, because the power is equally distributed by default and according to a fixed, well-known rule. This actually allows participants to focus on production rather than politics. But this is seldom what the owners of the company (who invested capital) want. They don't want people to run things, they want people to run things on their behalf (and get rich from the process). And even if they were sympathetic to this idea, it's very hard to grow such a company at all stages (in small group it's very prone to hostile takeovers and later there is no incentive to grow, since the power of individuals is always the same compared to number of people). I don't see transition to democratic workplace happening unless lots of people give up any hope to have more power than other people. Interestingly, in political system, this largely happened, although it's still not enough and there is resentment from some.

cbracy 13y ago

I added an edit here, pointing out that GitHub wasn't actually employing holacracy. That was my (pre-breakfast) sloppiness. My main point still stands, though. And Tom Preston-Werner describes his "management" structure here in pretty great detail so we do have some insight into what was actually going on inside GitHub: http://www.oscon.com/oscon2013/public/schedule/detail/29555 http://www.oscon.com/oscon2013/public/schedule/detail/29555

nomade0 13y ago
Catherine, you are confusing "Holacracy" for a generic term that means "flat organizations" and "lack of structure". Holacracy® is a specific system with clear rules (available here: http://holacracy.org/constitution http://holacracy.org/constitution ), and is far more structured than what you describe in your article. See for example the structure of my organization running with Holacracy: https://glassfrog.holacracy.org/organizations/5 https://glassfrog.holacracy.org/organizations/5 It's mistake to associate Holacracy to flat organizations — Holacracy is actually FARTHER AWAY from a flat organization than it is from a conventional hierarchy. It pushes very strongly about the looseness and lack of clarity around accountabilities in a structure-less org. It even pushes against the lack of clarity in conventional hierarchies as well. Overall, Holacracy instills more structure in an organization, not less. Ev Williams, who uses it at Medium, puts it this way: "Holacracy is the opposite of the cliché way to run a startup. People think "freedom, no job description, everybody does everything, it's totally flat, and that's cool because we're all down with those rules". But actually that creates tons of anxiety and inefficiency, and various modes of dysfunction, whether we have to build consensus around every decision, or I'm gonna do a land grab for power... People romanticize startup cultures, but I know it's fairly rare that people in startups say "this is it, it is amazing and everybody is super-productive and going along". So in Holacracy, one of the principles is to make the implicit explicit — tons of it is about creating clarity: who is in charge of what, who is taking what kind of decision — and there is also a system for defining that, and changing that, so it's very flexible at the same time." (source: https://medium.com/p/89fb713a8786 https://medium.com/p/89fb713a8786 ) So... I'm afraid your assessment of Holacracy is really backward. I'm not saying Holacracy is perfect, but it's certainly not flawed in the ways you describe. @oliviercp

kabuks 13y ago

I don't know how Github runs, but it sounds nothing like Holacracy. The author is confused (as are many people on this thread). Six months ago, I switched my company (over 50 full time employees in 3 cities) to Holacracy. I'm here to tell you that I'm 100% convinced that it's a huge step forward in terms of any organizational system I've come across. There's nothing 'flat' or 'manager-less' about it. It's a complex and intricate system that leads to greater clarity, less politics, and better distributed decision making. Accountabilities are clearer, meetings are more efficient, and more voices are heard. Holacracy explicitly avoids design/decide by committee. If you're running a company with more than 10 employees, I highly recommend you take a serious look at Holacracy. It's the best decision I've made by far, and I'm never going to work for, or start another company without running it this way. If you're earnestly curious, drop me a note and I'll be happy to talk about it more with you.

Zigurd 13y ago

The problem at Github isn't a good example of the supposed deficiency of holacratic enterprises. In the first place, the problem became as serious as it did because it involved Github's management, such as it was. Secondly, the founder involved in the incident was put on leave, and an apology was promptly and unreservedly issued. It is easy to imagine a more hierarchical organization circling the wagons, instead. In the end, Github may be an example of serious problem with a founder that was handled as well as possible. There are a lot of ways software development does not fit within traditional management structures. For example, if you take traditional project management tools and try to predict a non-trivial software development schedule with them you are going to have a bad time. So we invent new, usually less-structured tools. You can't do entirely without those structures, but minimization of hierarchy is the logical way to adapt management to the challenge of keeping software development orderly and making a business out of it, if that's your aim. If there is a deeper problem at Github it is likely that they didn't follow some of the other rules of thumb for software development organizations, like "don't hire jerks."