Category: Holacracy

  • My 10 Year Summary: What I Have Learned

    Contents 1. Introduction2. Background3. My Journey 3.1. The initial years (2012–2015) 3.2. The middle years (2016–2018) 3.3. The final years (2019–2022)4. Conclusions5. Afterword6. Acknowledgments7. Recommended Books 1. Introduction I started blogging ten years ago today (Sept 26, 2012). At the same time, I started searching for life-giving ways of working. This is a summary of my journey and…

  • Is Holacracy an environment extremely honoring and embracing of people?

    Here is an old but interesting article on Holacracy – The Self-Organizing Enterprise by Deborah Hartmann Preuss from September 2006. The article makes it clear the four main tenets of Holacracy comes from sociocracy. What’s interesting is that this article was published the year before Brian Robertson filed his patent application on Holacracy in June…

  • Analysis of Sociocracy and Holacracy

    This post is part of my series on organizing “between and beyond.” Other posts are here. The purpose of this post is to explore the history and key assumptions of Sociocracy and Holacracy®. The post is based on my previous posts about Sociocracy and Holacracy. The analysis is summarized here. Background I first heard about…

  • Holacracy and Arthur Koestler

    The organizational structure in Holacracy is a holarchy, a term coined by Arthur Koestler in The Ghost in the Machine. Brian Robertson writes in his book on Holacracy that: The type of structure used for organizations in Holacracy is not a traditional hierarchy, but a “holarchy.” Arthur Koestler coined the term in his 1967 book…

  • What is healthy power?

    The Healthy Power Alliance writes in its Healthy Power Manifesto that: “Healthy Power is the ability to do work over time in a way that is good for all the people and systems involved: the ecosystems, the human communities, the customers, the workers, the investors, the leaders, all of us. Healthy Power is circular, not…

  • Metaphors both reflect and influence our thinking

    Metaphors both reflect and influence our thinking. The computing metaphor, for example, is popular in Holacracy, where Holacracy is likened with an operating system,1 and people are viewed as sensors acting on behalf of the organization.2 Both Holacracy and Sociocracy treat organizing as a cybernetic problem.3 But our thinking has consequences. People are neither sensors,…

  • Holacratic tyranny

    People are viewed as sensors for the organization in Holacracy (and Sociocracy 3.0): “… individuals act as sensors (nerve endings) for the organization“ 1 “An organization … is equipped with sensors — … the human beings who energize its roles and sense reality on its behalf.“ 2 “One powerful way … is to harness the…

  • All roles in Holacracy are managerial roles

    Tim Rayner writes in the article “Medium’s Experiment with Holacracy Failed. Long Live the Experiment!” that: “Holacracy flattens organisations, getting rid of hierarchical power structures.” “It distributes power to individuals, who get to choose what projects they work on and are granted full authority to execute tasks as they see fit.” “The Lead Link heads…

  • Medium is moving beyond Holacracy

    Medium announced that they are moving beyond Holacracy. Below are some quotes from their post (in italics, my emphasis in bold): Recently we decided to move beyond Holacracy and wanted to talk directly about our experience with the system and where we go next. Our experience was that it was difficult to coordinate efforts at…

  • Sociocracy vs. Holacracy vs. Sociocracy 3.0

    Sociocracy is a governance method based on consent decision-making and cybernetic principles which was developed during the 1970s. Sociocracy significantly influenced the early development of Holacracy in 2006/2007. And Sociocracy 3.0 was introduced in 2014. Here’s my attempt to compare all three based on my reading of Gerard Endenburg’s first book on Sociocracy, Brian Robertson’s…