5 ms·

Why You Should Care About Holacracy

26 points by kanamekun 12y ago

marssaxman 12y ago
Aside from the fact that this appears to be yet another cuckoo-pants management cult, I just cannot stand the name - it is obviously spelled wrong, and should either be "holocracy" or "hollacracy".
- geofft 12y ago
  Speaking of the name, it's a registered trademark of HolacracyOne, Inc. There are "licensed providers" of Holacracy. I wonder what the financial incentives were for this author.
  - smacktoward 12y ago
    Not to mention that the post manages to work in a plug for a software package, too. "It’s theoretically possible to run Holacracy without it, but it would be hard."
    - sokoloff 12y ago
      Related: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
  - evolve2k 12y ago
    Holacracy is a US trademarked derivative of the more open concept of organizational 'sociocracy'. Search for 'dynamic governance' and 'sociocracy' if you want to get away from a trademarked version. Holacracy is to Sociocracy as SCRUM is to Agile.
- varelse 12y ago
  I refer to it as "Hellacrazy" myself...
- hcayless 12y ago
  I suppose it's technically correct, even though it's a little goofy. The first part is from the neuter form of the Greek adjective ὅλος (holos), meaning "whole". The neuter form (used as a noun here I assume) would be "holon" and the plural of that, "hola". So holacracy would be "rule by wholes". Better than rule by a-holes, I suppose...
  - marssaxman 12y ago
    Ah, interesting. It's been a very long time since I learned anything about Greek; I was imagining the root as "holos" as in "rule by the whole". Thanks for the clarification. I'll try to stop being annoyed by the word now that I know it's not actually wrong.
  - cefstat 12y ago
    Being a native Greek speaker, I find "holacracy" (ολακρατία) at least weird; it sounds completely wrong. If I wanted to combine the two words I would automatically use "holocracy" (ολοκρατία). I can't think of any example where Greek uses the plural form of a word in combination with -kratia.
- shalmanese 12y ago
  I feel like most startups practice hollacracy; everyone's in an open plan office and if anyone needs anything from you, they just holla atchu!
- mdekkers 12y ago
  ...or holacrazy
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
rayiner 12y ago
> One of these Responsive methodologies is Holacracy, defined as “a comprehensive practice for structuring, governing and running an organization. It replaces today's top-down, predict-and-control paradigm with a new way of achieving control by distributing power.” That's not a definition.
proksoup 12y ago
It seems like this author has confused "C&C" with "management which is out of touch with employees and provides no clear guidelines" and "holacracy" with "good management which is in touch with employees and provides clear boundaries and guidelines and power structures". The author says "No one knows who gets to decide what." is a trait of C&C, which holacracy solves. This article has confused my own understanding of the term "holacracy" quite a bit. Maybe there is a good definition of the term elsewhere?
geofft 12y ago
One thing that's missing in this description: who gets to decide how much people get paid?
- HillRat 12y ago
  Even one of its adherents agrees that Holacracy's inability to address compensation is “like buying Microsoft Office without Microsoft Word” (http://recode.net/2014/10/03/holacracy-or-hella-crazy-the-fringe-ideas-driving-the-las-vegas-downtown-project/ http://recode.net/2014/10/03/holacracy-or-hella-crazy-the-fr...), though I'd argue that it's more like buying a typewriter without a keyboard.
smacktoward 12y ago
Whenever I read these types of posts, I always feel like I'm listening to a lecture by Leon Trotsky on the theoretical perfection of Communism. "You may not be interested in Holacracy, but Holacracy is interested in you." > How do you hire, promote, and fire at a Holacratic company? How should you prioritize what work to do or decide who does what? The rest is up to you. Those seem like big things to leave out of a management methodology...
- beat 12y ago
  Yeah, it reminded me uncomfortably of Trotsky as well - not in how it works, but rather how it is supposed to work if you just ignore critical details. C&C isn't just a 20th century management methodology. It's been around since the beginnings of civilization. It's hardwired into our parenting, education, and government models. A small, committed team can try organizational structures that run counter to everything we've been taught for our entire lives - but does it scale? More than Trotsky, this makes me think of Bakunin, Kropotkin, and other anarcho-syndicalists. This sort of "classical anarchism" also focuses on the problems and failures of the C&C hierarchy, but attempts to deal with it by rejecting the hierarchy altogether, beyond local control - if you can't punch your boss in the nose anymore, there's too much structure. Society is then organized into direct democracy around the means of production - farms, factories, businesses that elect their leaders locally and can remove them from power at any time. Anarcho-syndicalism was put into practice in the Spanish Civil War, when the workers simply stopped answering to their bosses and instead ran things for themselves. And it got crushed. If there was one thing the fascists and communists (both strong C&C structures) could agree on, it was that the anarchists were the enemy. And when your little farm commune got visited by a thousand soldiers with tanks and artillery, you got wiped out, no matter how pure the ideology. I can imagine a similar problem with Holocratic businesses - traditional businesses might well be uncomfortable dealing with such an organization, when they can't trust the authority of the leadership of the Holocratic structure. And if you try to keep a Holocratic structure internally while maintaining traditional outward-facing executive leadership, you're sooner or later going to have a problem of "because the CTO said so". The question of who has the power to fire in a Holocratic organization? You'll get your answer soon enough. And there's the rub, isn't it? If you have an organization large enough to transition from anarcho-syndicalism to a deeper C&C structure, but try to do software-enhanced anarcho-syndicalism (which is kinda what Holocracy is), then you're going to have a hidden, obscured C&C structure riding along inside your Holocratic cloud. And real, final power will be with C&C, which in turn derives its authority from the owners/board, which in turn derive authority from common law and social convention. But with everyone knowing that there's a metaphorical gun to their heads, Holocratic decisions will be made with the unspoken acknowledgement that someone can/will get fired over bad decisions. So much for transparency. Of course, this is all theoretical.
pnathan 12y ago
In my (somewhat limited - 6 teams, 4 different institutions, two flat teams) experience, these sorts of "no manager" approaches are a flaming disaster. You might argue that they didn't do it right - I argue that the burden of proof is on the disruptor to prove their betterness. The ground reality is that someone can hire you, fire you, give you a pay raise, and is the person of record in the court cases when they arise (as they do). That person is the ruler in the fiefdom - it's purely cultic and deceptive to say otherwise.
- natrius 12y ago
  Holacracy isn't about getting rid of managers. Keep an open mind and keep reading about it.
trhway 12y ago
if you can't see who's bottom of the spine to kiss, it doesn't make you the one. One can look at the Borg for the example of ultimate flat organization - they have only Queen - and they have highest possible communication/collaboration at the level beyond wet dreams of the open floor office zealots. Anyway, i'm eagerly expecting our management to start pushing on us Lean Agile Scrum Holacracy in the near future. We've already been Leaned, Agiled, Scrummed and as for getting Holacratized ... we'll adapt too. Resistance is futile anyway.
- Retra 12y ago
  "It's 'LASH'. Like a whip. It evokes 'snappy', or 'fast', which is exactly how we run our company; we are flexible, have long reach, and no rigid structure. All of our successful employees learn to use a whip, just to make the analogy explicit."

26 points by kanamekun 12y ago

Aside from the fact that this appears to be yet another cuckoo-pants management cult, I just cannot stand the name - it is obviously spelled wrong, and should either be "holocracy" or "hollacracy".

geofft 12y ago
Speaking of the name, it's a registered trademark of HolacracyOne, Inc. There are "licensed providers" of Holacracy. I wonder what the financial incentives were for this author.
- smacktoward 12y ago
  Not to mention that the post manages to work in a plug for a software package, too. "It’s theoretically possible to run Holacracy without it, but it would be hard."
  - sokoloff 12y ago
    Related: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
- evolve2k 12y ago
  Holacracy is a US trademarked derivative of the more open concept of organizational 'sociocracy'. Search for 'dynamic governance' and 'sociocracy' if you want to get away from a trademarked version. Holacracy is to Sociocracy as SCRUM is to Agile.
varelse 12y ago
I refer to it as "Hellacrazy" myself...
hcayless 12y ago
I suppose it's technically correct, even though it's a little goofy. The first part is from the neuter form of the Greek adjective ὅλος (holos), meaning "whole". The neuter form (used as a noun here I assume) would be "holon" and the plural of that, "hola". So holacracy would be "rule by wholes". Better than rule by a-holes, I suppose...
- marssaxman 12y ago
  Ah, interesting. It's been a very long time since I learned anything about Greek; I was imagining the root as "holos" as in "rule by the whole". Thanks for the clarification. I'll try to stop being annoyed by the word now that I know it's not actually wrong.
- cefstat 12y ago
  Being a native Greek speaker, I find "holacracy" (ολακρατία) at least weird; it sounds completely wrong. If I wanted to combine the two words I would automatically use "holocracy" (ολοκρατία). I can't think of any example where Greek uses the plural form of a word in combination with -kratia.
shalmanese 12y ago
I feel like most startups practice hollacracy; everyone's in an open plan office and if anyone needs anything from you, they just holla atchu!
mdekkers 12y ago
...or holacrazy

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

rayiner 12y ago

> One of these Responsive methodologies is Holacracy, defined as “a comprehensive practice for structuring, governing and running an organization. It replaces today's top-down, predict-and-control paradigm with a new way of achieving control by distributing power.” That's not a definition.

proksoup 12y ago

It seems like this author has confused "C&C" with "management which is out of touch with employees and provides no clear guidelines" and "holacracy" with "good management which is in touch with employees and provides clear boundaries and guidelines and power structures". The author says "No one knows who gets to decide what." is a trait of C&C, which holacracy solves. This article has confused my own understanding of the term "holacracy" quite a bit. Maybe there is a good definition of the term elsewhere?

geofft 12y ago

One thing that's missing in this description: who gets to decide how much people get paid?

HillRat 12y ago
Even one of its adherents agrees that Holacracy's inability to address compensation is “like buying Microsoft Office without Microsoft Word” (http://recode.net/2014/10/03/holacracy-or-hella-crazy-the-fringe-ideas-driving-the-las-vegas-downtown-project/ http://recode.net/2014/10/03/holacracy-or-hella-crazy-the-fr...), though I'd argue that it's more like buying a typewriter without a keyboard.

smacktoward 12y ago

Whenever I read these types of posts, I always feel like I'm listening to a lecture by Leon Trotsky on the theoretical perfection of Communism. "You may not be interested in Holacracy, but Holacracy is interested in you." > How do you hire, promote, and fire at a Holacratic company? How should you prioritize what work to do or decide who does what? The rest is up to you. Those seem like big things to leave out of a management methodology...

beat 12y ago
Yeah, it reminded me uncomfortably of Trotsky as well - not in how it works, but rather how it is supposed to work if you just ignore critical details. C&C isn't just a 20th century management methodology. It's been around since the beginnings of civilization. It's hardwired into our parenting, education, and government models. A small, committed team can try organizational structures that run counter to everything we've been taught for our entire lives - but does it scale? More than Trotsky, this makes me think of Bakunin, Kropotkin, and other anarcho-syndicalists. This sort of "classical anarchism" also focuses on the problems and failures of the C&C hierarchy, but attempts to deal with it by rejecting the hierarchy altogether, beyond local control - if you can't punch your boss in the nose anymore, there's too much structure. Society is then organized into direct democracy around the means of production - farms, factories, businesses that elect their leaders locally and can remove them from power at any time. Anarcho-syndicalism was put into practice in the Spanish Civil War, when the workers simply stopped answering to their bosses and instead ran things for themselves. And it got crushed. If there was one thing the fascists and communists (both strong C&C structures) could agree on, it was that the anarchists were the enemy. And when your little farm commune got visited by a thousand soldiers with tanks and artillery, you got wiped out, no matter how pure the ideology. I can imagine a similar problem with Holocratic businesses - traditional businesses might well be uncomfortable dealing with such an organization, when they can't trust the authority of the leadership of the Holocratic structure. And if you try to keep a Holocratic structure internally while maintaining traditional outward-facing executive leadership, you're sooner or later going to have a problem of "because the CTO said so". The question of who has the power to fire in a Holocratic organization? You'll get your answer soon enough. And there's the rub, isn't it? If you have an organization large enough to transition from anarcho-syndicalism to a deeper C&C structure, but try to do software-enhanced anarcho-syndicalism (which is kinda what Holocracy is), then you're going to have a hidden, obscured C&C structure riding along inside your Holocratic cloud. And real, final power will be with C&C, which in turn derives its authority from the owners/board, which in turn derive authority from common law and social convention. But with everyone knowing that there's a metaphorical gun to their heads, Holocratic decisions will be made with the unspoken acknowledgement that someone can/will get fired over bad decisions. So much for transparency. Of course, this is all theoretical.

pnathan 12y ago

In my (somewhat limited - 6 teams, 4 different institutions, two flat teams) experience, these sorts of "no manager" approaches are a flaming disaster. You might argue that they didn't do it right - I argue that the burden of proof is on the disruptor to prove their betterness. The ground reality is that someone can hire you, fire you, give you a pay raise, and is the person of record in the court cases when they arise (as they do). That person is the ruler in the fiefdom - it's purely cultic and deceptive to say otherwise.

natrius 12y ago
Holacracy isn't about getting rid of managers. Keep an open mind and keep reading about it.

trhway 12y ago

if you can't see who's bottom of the spine to kiss, it doesn't make you the one. One can look at the Borg for the example of ultimate flat organization - they have only Queen - and they have highest possible communication/collaboration at the level beyond wet dreams of the open floor office zealots. Anyway, i'm eagerly expecting our management to start pushing on us Lean Agile Scrum Holacracy in the near future. We've already been Leaned, Agiled, Scrummed and as for getting Holacratized ... we'll adapt too. Resistance is futile anyway.

Retra 12y ago
"It's 'LASH'. Like a whip. It evokes 'snappy', or 'fast', which is exactly how we run our company; we are flexible, have long reach, and no rigid structure. All of our successful employees learn to use a whip, just to make the analogy explicit."