Here's Why You Should Care About Holacracy - 1 views
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For the first time in over a century, we’re beginning to see credible alternatives, and most of them point to this idea of responsiveness–that an organization should be built to learn and respond rapidly by optimizing for the open flow of information; encouraging experimentation and learning in rapid cycles; and organizing a network of employees, customers and partners motivated by a shared purpose.
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Holacracy is simply the first fully formed alternative to C&C that real companies are using successfully. Is it the only replacement? Should everyone switch to it immediately? Definitely not. There will be many other operating models to choose from in the near future.
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anies with traditional hierarchy can only change as fast as their leaders can handle it.
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To avoid chaos, it actually forces you to define roles and accountabilities far more rigorously than the old C&C system
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Responsive organizations also risk falling prey to the tyranny of consensus and backtracking to old systems of authority. That’s why clear rules and protocols–like those outlined by Holacracy–are so vital and tend to work well.
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to explain Holacracy, let’s look at what changes it makes
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Holacracy forces a company to revisit its rules, roles, objectives, and authorities in short cycles. This prevents you from over-planning upfront.
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you know that companies create products and services that are reflections of themselves. So it makes sense that in order to rapidly iterate your product, you should also rapidly iterate how your organization works.
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By constantly iterating, Holacratic companies can relieve new tensions caused by changes so they can learn and adapt fast.
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Working on the right thing is as–if not more important–than how hard you are working.
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It’s not a waste to build multiple versions if it helps you find the right one.
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In Holacracy, teams are renamed “circles,” and they can be created or destroyed anytime.
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Circles only have the authority to change things that are in the domain of their authority.
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People identify 1-1 with their title, making them imprecise and inflexible.
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Holacracy fixes this problem by decoupling “role from soul.”
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You can have more roles than employees, and it’s expected that people will fill multiple roles within several circles.
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While Holacracy may have a hierarchy of circles, it tries to decouple the humans from that hierarchy as much as possible.
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work which can be done wholly within a formal team is much easier than work that requires participation from multiple teams.
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Holacratic orgs tend to spend more time arguing about who should be able to decide and why that wasn’t clear to begin with
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The most effective way to solve any problem is to put together all of the people with the skills required to solve it.
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Writ large: Distributing decision-making isn’t easy. It goes against generations of learned behaviors and deep-seated mental models.
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Each circle has a single role called Lead Link who has authority over assigning people to other roles in the circle.
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Holacracy makes it easy and relatively friction free to create new circles, rearrange people within them, tear it all down and start again.
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Holacracy deals with this by creating rules around proposals that favor the proposer over objectors.
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ritualistically squashed.
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Thus, proposals are deemed “safe to try” as long as everyone agrees that they’ll help gather valuable data. “Safe to try” is a key idea in Holacracy.
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The only valid objections are A) this circle doesn’t have the authority over the domain you’re changing or B) there is proof the change will cause material harm to the business before it could be mitigated.
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You can’t simply object because you don’t like an idea or have a better one.
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Of course, most of the rules are tribal. “Because that’s how we’ve always done it,” is a common phrase at traditional companies.
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the rules have to be written down so anyone can look them up and quickly figure out who owns what and what the policies really are.
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Glassfrog is the name of the software you use to help you run a Holacratic company. It’s theoretically possible to run Holacracy without it, but it would be hard.
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Glassfrog helps you document your organizational structure, circles, roles, accountabilities, policies, etc. It also aids in running meetings. Finally, it provides an ongoing record of changes made to the organization.
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For a distributed org to function, much more needs to be done in public, where it can be easily discovered by others.
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. The point isn’t to pre-determine what works for everyone. It’s to give you a basic structure that helps you make the rules transparent, easy to change, and to increase the rate at which you change them.
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The biggest challenge is dealing with how wrong everything feels at first.
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ou have to give the new system a real try, which means using it to relieve tensions, reinvent itself and solve the problems it creates.
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Holacracy “feels” weird to most newcomers.
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In Holacracy, the power goes to the process itself, making it difficult for individuals to take advantage of their positions.
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They also agree that Holacracy is not a panacea or definitive replacement for C&C.
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There is no way to design a permanent org structure where the right people can work together with as few dependencies as possible.
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f you choose to follow their lead, remember that distributing authority isn’t binary–it’s a spectrum.
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not let the problems you know you will encounter get in the way.