4 ms·

It's very similar in holocracy: the people who are natural leaders will fill the management needs of the organization; it's just more chaotic, less predictable,

It's very similar in holocracy: the people who are natural leaders will fill the management needs of the organization; it's just more chaotic, less predictable, and not as good. The lack of structure brings out the worst in human behavior. In my experience, it is a horrible system in which to exist. It's highly ignorant of psychology and behavior theory almost intentionally, and it creates far more drama and politics than any organizational system I've ever seen. It's not a good thing.

jmtame 11y ago
Are you speaking from experience? It seems that if you completely do away with job titles, the politics would go away right?
- detaro 11y ago
  Politics isn't tied to job titles. There still are people with different amounts of influence that try to influence others for their own goals. FWIW, Jeri Ellsworth (who was hired to do hardware stuff, didn't do well there and was fired in the end) described office politics at Valve "like back in high school". Not saying that it can't work, but it also is not without its flaws.
  - cthalupa 11y ago
    I wasn't aware of who Jeri Ellsworth was, but a cursory look says that she was fired by Valve. Were her comments before or after she was fired? I'm not sure that if it was after, we can necessarily count on it being objective. I've heard plenty of people make comments that aren't exactly the most accurate after they've been fired.
    - detaro 11y ago
      True, should have mentioned that (edited it in). Relatively certain it was afterwards.
    - calinet6 11y ago
      It's very difficult to deduce causality in that situation. She could have been fired due to not fitting in with the organization due to her valid concerns, or she could have brought up concerns due to bias from being fired. It is most likely somewhere in the middle, where her observations were somewhat truthful and somewhat biased.
    - dalke 11y ago
      http://www.develop-online.net/news/valve-s-perfect-hiring-hierarchy-has-hidden-management-clique-like-high-school/0115316 http://www.develop-online.net/news/valve-s-perfect-hiring-hi... , which is one of the parent posts, gives some of the timing details. Even if it were before, would you "necessarily count on it being objective"? It seems like an impossibly high standard, given how many people make comments that aren't exactly accurate before they've been fired.
      - cthalupa 11y ago
        > given how many people make comments that aren't exactly accurate before they've been fired That's certainly fair. I'm not making a comment one way or the other - I don't know her, I don't know the story, and I have no knowledge that leads me to believe one way or the other. I just naturally am a bit more skeptical of comments made about companies from employees who were fired. People at a company can certainly make untrue comments, and people who were fired can certainly make true ones. It's just that, in my experience, there's a higher chance of negative bias in someone who was let go from a company.
- pshc 11y ago
  Sorry, but that's not how large groups of humans self-organize. Many idealists have tried, but power vacuums don't stay for long, nor are they efficient.
- calinet6 11y ago
  Yes, I am speaking from experience directly with a holocratic organization.
  - jmtame 11y ago
    Thanks for replying, I was genuinely curious.
- gjm11 11y ago
  > if you completely do away with job titles, the politics would go away For anyone who finds this plausible, it might be enlightening to contemplate (1) the first "hacker koan" at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_koan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_koan and (2) this classic XKCD cartoonhttps://xkcd.com/592/ https://xkcd.com/592/ .
- DannyBee 11y ago
  Plenty of people are still status driven. So either you have to decide you want 0 of these people at your company, or else ... Honestly, my experience has been that structure is one of the key things that makes teams effective (not structure as in "rigid meetings/etc", but structure in the sense of "understanding what their role is and where they fit in") This doesn't strictly require managers, of course, but self-organization rarely works out that well either as the org gets larger (you have the same problems, they are just hidden and nobody is accountable) :)
zeidrich 11y ago
Yeah. It's essentially creating a power vacuum. People don't work without structure, ad hoc structures develop. The conjecture is that this is a good thing, that these ad hoc structures are more natural, and you will have natural leaders take lead where appropriate and this will be more effective. But the issue is structure deals with quirks in human behavior. It deals with the emotional side of it, it deals with the cliquish, tribal nature of our default social behavior. You can put a highly productive, less social person into a position, give him a set of tasks to do, evaluate him fairly and see him produce. In doing this, you need an objective manager, you need a fair structure, and it works. Without those things, the less social, highly productive person is easily sidelined. The person who takes leadership isn't given that position, they don't lead because they have been shown that they can motivate people to do great things, because nobody gives them that position. The people who get into leadership positions are those people who can convince other people to work with them on a personal level instead of on an organizational level. The really smart, less social person doesn't even get brought in to participate, and little power struggles happen between factions of people who want to be the person who directs the project, despite the fact that none of the people looking to do it might even be very good at doing it at all. The real problem with traditional management structures is that it often breaks down to this sort of system to start with. Where the people building the systems aren't very good at it, and where they invite their buddies to be management because management pays the best, and they want to help their buddies out. It's because you have poor systems, and because you have the wrong people managing. The issue with this is that rather than potentially falling short and missing the mark, they start with the worst of it.
- calinet6 11y ago
  > The real problem with traditional management structures is that it often breaks down to this sort of system to start with. This is exactly right. The traditional organization already falls prey to politics and games due to lack of good structure, not due to the idea of structure itself. You will get a system regardless of whether you intentionally create one or not. It's far better to get the one you intend and can develop, than an uncontrollable chaos.
swombat 11y ago
> The lack of structure brings out the worst in human behavior. Well, that's your experience, and you're entitled to it. I'm finding the opposite. Though describing holacracy as a "lack of structure" seems like a pretty serious mis-statement. Holacracy is extremely structured - way more, and way more explicitly, than most organisations. It's kind of like the classic traditional observation that "agile is basically no processes". Yeah, if you use agile as an excuse to throw out process, you might equate the two. But actually agile (at least at its beginnings) involved a lot more process and rigour than traditional waterfall development. Agile is not an absence of process. Holacracy is not an absence of structure. I guess humans will be humans - which means they will misinterpret, distort, exaggerate, etc, especially when exposed to newness. I have little comment about what holacracy is like to work in, because I haven't worked in one. But I started a business that now operates by principles fairly closely related to those underlying holacracy (though the implementation is fairly different). We have less structure than holacracy, however... and yet what I'm seeing is that quite the opposite of your statement, it is bringing out the best in people. Then again, I've not implemented a fake holacracy for all the wrong reasons. We're still in the relatively early days of this sort of culture. There are many more ways to get this wrong than right. Unless the people making this happen are truly committed to creating an open culture, and are doing it for the right reasons (i.e. this is the way they want the business to operate because it's good - not "well, this seems like a good tool to get people to be motivated without paying them nyeh nyeh nyeh dr evil laughter"... unless it's done right, it will probably be a horrible distortion of what it's meant to be. Kind of like what you describe. I think you should consider the possibility that the allegedly holacratic organisation you worked in just got it really badly wrong.
- calinet6 11y ago
  I think that's very true, and I appreciate your perspective. I have no doubt it's very truthful, and there are some great things about the openness that might be possible with a holocracy or something like it. I agree that the organization I worked in got it really badly wrong, but I also saw how the structure that was being followed (and there is a structure) sort of enabled that. It was a small organization and there were many other things going on that I think caused issues—so perhaps it's not 100% attributable to holocracy, and wasn't perhaps the best situation for it to be effective because of that. I'll admit it was anecdotal. But I don't trust a process that, when followed fairly closely, had what appeared to be many holes in its organizational model that were suboptimal.

jmtame 11y ago

Are you speaking from experience? It seems that if you completely do away with job titles, the politics would go away right?

detaro 11y ago
Politics isn't tied to job titles. There still are people with different amounts of influence that try to influence others for their own goals. FWIW, Jeri Ellsworth (who was hired to do hardware stuff, didn't do well there and was fired in the end) described office politics at Valve "like back in high school". Not saying that it can't work, but it also is not without its flaws.
- cthalupa 11y ago
  I wasn't aware of who Jeri Ellsworth was, but a cursory look says that she was fired by Valve. Were her comments before or after she was fired? I'm not sure that if it was after, we can necessarily count on it being objective. I've heard plenty of people make comments that aren't exactly the most accurate after they've been fired.
  - detaro 11y ago
    True, should have mentioned that (edited it in). Relatively certain it was afterwards.
  - calinet6 11y ago
    It's very difficult to deduce causality in that situation. She could have been fired due to not fitting in with the organization due to her valid concerns, or she could have brought up concerns due to bias from being fired. It is most likely somewhere in the middle, where her observations were somewhat truthful and somewhat biased.
  - dalke 11y ago
    http://www.develop-online.net/news/valve-s-perfect-hiring-hierarchy-has-hidden-management-clique-like-high-school/0115316 http://www.develop-online.net/news/valve-s-perfect-hiring-hi... , which is one of the parent posts, gives some of the timing details. Even if it were before, would you "necessarily count on it being objective"? It seems like an impossibly high standard, given how many people make comments that aren't exactly accurate before they've been fired.
    - cthalupa 11y ago
      > given how many people make comments that aren't exactly accurate before they've been fired That's certainly fair. I'm not making a comment one way or the other - I don't know her, I don't know the story, and I have no knowledge that leads me to believe one way or the other. I just naturally am a bit more skeptical of comments made about companies from employees who were fired. People at a company can certainly make untrue comments, and people who were fired can certainly make true ones. It's just that, in my experience, there's a higher chance of negative bias in someone who was let go from a company.
pshc 11y ago
Sorry, but that's not how large groups of humans self-organize. Many idealists have tried, but power vacuums don't stay for long, nor are they efficient.
calinet6 11y ago
Yes, I am speaking from experience directly with a holocratic organization.
- jmtame 11y ago
  Thanks for replying, I was genuinely curious.
gjm11 11y ago
> if you completely do away with job titles, the politics would go away For anyone who finds this plausible, it might be enlightening to contemplate (1) the first "hacker koan" at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_koan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_koan and (2) this classic XKCD cartoonhttps://xkcd.com/592/ https://xkcd.com/592/ .
DannyBee 11y ago
Plenty of people are still status driven. So either you have to decide you want 0 of these people at your company, or else ... Honestly, my experience has been that structure is one of the key things that makes teams effective (not structure as in "rigid meetings/etc", but structure in the sense of "understanding what their role is and where they fit in") This doesn't strictly require managers, of course, but self-organization rarely works out that well either as the org gets larger (you have the same problems, they are just hidden and nobody is accountable) :)

zeidrich 11y ago

Yeah. It's essentially creating a power vacuum. People don't work without structure, ad hoc structures develop. The conjecture is that this is a good thing, that these ad hoc structures are more natural, and you will have natural leaders take lead where appropriate and this will be more effective. But the issue is structure deals with quirks in human behavior. It deals with the emotional side of it, it deals with the cliquish, tribal nature of our default social behavior. You can put a highly productive, less social person into a position, give him a set of tasks to do, evaluate him fairly and see him produce. In doing this, you need an objective manager, you need a fair structure, and it works. Without those things, the less social, highly productive person is easily sidelined. The person who takes leadership isn't given that position, they don't lead because they have been shown that they can motivate people to do great things, because nobody gives them that position. The people who get into leadership positions are those people who can convince other people to work with them on a personal level instead of on an organizational level. The really smart, less social person doesn't even get brought in to participate, and little power struggles happen between factions of people who want to be the person who directs the project, despite the fact that none of the people looking to do it might even be very good at doing it at all. The real problem with traditional management structures is that it often breaks down to this sort of system to start with. Where the people building the systems aren't very good at it, and where they invite their buddies to be management because management pays the best, and they want to help their buddies out. It's because you have poor systems, and because you have the wrong people managing. The issue with this is that rather than potentially falling short and missing the mark, they start with the worst of it.

calinet6 11y ago
> The real problem with traditional management structures is that it often breaks down to this sort of system to start with. This is exactly right. The traditional organization already falls prey to politics and games due to lack of good structure, not due to the idea of structure itself. You will get a system regardless of whether you intentionally create one or not. It's far better to get the one you intend and can develop, than an uncontrollable chaos.

swombat 11y ago

> The lack of structure brings out the worst in human behavior. Well, that's your experience, and you're entitled to it. I'm finding the opposite. Though describing holacracy as a "lack of structure" seems like a pretty serious mis-statement. Holacracy is extremely structured - way more, and way more explicitly, than most organisations. It's kind of like the classic traditional observation that "agile is basically no processes". Yeah, if you use agile as an excuse to throw out process, you might equate the two. But actually agile (at least at its beginnings) involved a lot more process and rigour than traditional waterfall development. Agile is not an absence of process. Holacracy is not an absence of structure. I guess humans will be humans - which means they will misinterpret, distort, exaggerate, etc, especially when exposed to newness. I have little comment about what holacracy is like to work in, because I haven't worked in one. But I started a business that now operates by principles fairly closely related to those underlying holacracy (though the implementation is fairly different). We have less structure than holacracy, however... and yet what I'm seeing is that quite the opposite of your statement, it is bringing out the best in people. Then again, I've not implemented a fake holacracy for all the wrong reasons. We're still in the relatively early days of this sort of culture. There are many more ways to get this wrong than right. Unless the people making this happen are truly committed to creating an open culture, and are doing it for the right reasons (i.e. this is the way they want the business to operate because it's good - not "well, this seems like a good tool to get people to be motivated without paying them nyeh nyeh nyeh dr evil laughter"... unless it's done right, it will probably be a horrible distortion of what it's meant to be. Kind of like what you describe. I think you should consider the possibility that the allegedly holacratic organisation you worked in just got it really badly wrong.

calinet6 11y ago
I think that's very true, and I appreciate your perspective. I have no doubt it's very truthful, and there are some great things about the openness that might be possible with a holocracy or something like it. I agree that the organization I worked in got it really badly wrong, but I also saw how the structure that was being followed (and there is a structure) sort of enabled that. It was a small organization and there were many other things going on that I think caused issues—so perhaps it's not 100% attributable to holocracy, and wasn't perhaps the best situation for it to be effective because of that. I'll admit it was anecdotal. But I don't trust a process that, when followed fairly closely, had what appeared to be many holes in its organizational model that were suboptimal.