The first thing holacracy does is try to almost embrace the idea of experiencing tension. It's not a bad thing, it's an experience and in that experience is data about how we can evolve the organization and improve and do better and learn and all that. In most companies we have people walking around that are experiencing tension but they're not doing anything with it, which becomes stressful. And they can't do anything with it or it's too hard. In a lot of companies, if the boss doesn't understand what you're talking about, good luck trying to address the tension. Or if you have to go to a big long painful meeting and get everyone to buy in and get agreement then actually that makes it really hard to address a lot of the tensions. So the goal in holacracy is to drive the organization's evolution, the learning, the development of the company and it's processes and structure and systems to drive all of that, based on tensions sensed by everyone involved in the organization. SO the goal in a nutshell is that any tension sensed by anyone anywhere in the company has some place it can go to get processed into some kind of meaningful change. That's how companies evolve, it's through us. We're their eyes, their ears, we're their sensing organs of our companies so if can't process what we sense we have an issue with our organization's consciousness and responsiveness.
Rob: So take a little step back and we're getting into explaining what holacracy is. You describe in your book holarchy, and Arthur Koestler's and your ideas regarding bodies, organs and cells and how that relates to holacracy.
BR: Yeah so it's the type of structure holacracy uses and brings into an organization. It's funny, we go into companies today and it's like we stepped back into the feudal ages right? There are kings and barons and peasants and we think we need that in order to structure and make sure we have clarity and structure and alignment and all the other things. Management hierarchies can provide some of that, they provide some clarity, some structure, and some alignment. But we've long since learned in society there are other ways to make sure we're all cooperating effectively together, without having to have feudal lords, right? We have a framework of rules that most modern societies that allow us to connect and work together, and to not step all over each others property and all that. We actually see the same thing in nature. If you look at the way the human body works, there's no boss cell. There's no one boss cell that tells the others what to do and directs them. Even if we look at an organ, an organ isn't a boss to it's cells. The organ doesn't violate the cell membrane, it doesn't reach in and direct the cell on how to structure itself. Rather, what it does is take a cell that has it's own autonomy and it integrates it with other cells and kind of deals with the process flows between cells so that they're woven together into a larger functioning organ. That's how nature scales, that's how nature deals with complexity and crates some phenomenally complex adaptive systems. It's not with bosses that violate the autonomy of those they lead. It's actually with autonomy at every level of scale, and yet also alignment and integration. That's the structure that Arthur Koestler originally named a holarchy. And holocracy is governance by and of an organizational holarchy. Which is to say a system where there's autonomy at every role, every role in a company has real power, real leadership rights. It has property it controls in the company, it has real expectations as well. Yet, then we have teams that also have autonomy that can self organize. They can structure their own work, and their own processes.
That's the basic structure, instead of a management hierarchy of people who have the power to direct other people, holacracy is more about structuring the work than the people. It breaks them down by having functions that have a lot of autonomy and can self organize, that break themselves down to different roles that those functions need to get the job done who also have autonomy and can organize their own work. And then people show up and we fill rolls and we get stuff done in the company on it's behalf. It's a very different way of structuring a company.
Ironically it actually gives you more structure, more order, more clarity, more alignment than you get with a management hierarchy. It just gets there in a very different way, and one that tends to be a lot more flexible and gives more people more voice.
Rob: You talk a lot about autonomy. Where does that relate to individualism and where does individualism fit into holacracy? And you talk about the hero and the heroic leader, and there's a transition, there's a big change there.
BR: Yeah there absolutely is. In fact, I think this is something you were hitting on in the beginning. You can look at the journey with holacracy often starts when the CEOs heroic journey kind of reaches a new level, almost it picks up when that one ends. Although of course it's never fully the end. Then it starts the company on it's own organizational heroes journey if you will. I'd say it this way, a lot of the CEOs today that are adopting holacracy, and sometimes, by the way, it's not just CEOs, it's a department head or somebody like that. It's often the people who have reached a point where they're no longer tied up in having the status title, and wanting to be the boss that directs everyone. It's when they've kind of, they've been there, they've done that and they've got to do a certain peace, and what they want is what's best for the company and it's purpose in the world. It's a lot like the parents journey, right, going from leading our children lives by directing them, which we have to do when they're younger. But good parents aren't trying to direct their kids lives when they're adults. They recognize their journey is to actually to make themselves obsolete. They want their children to outgrow them and to not need a heroic boss leader figure, because they can stand on their own. I think the metaphor applies really well to the CEOs job, the entrepreneurs job, really, when they're building an organization.
You don't want an organization that's forever dependent on you being a hero of saving the day. If you want an organization that's going to outgrow you and outlast you like we want for our kids, you need an organization that can stand on it's own and ultimately that doesn't need any heroic leader at the helm, because the organization itself is self-sufficient-- it has all the processes it needs it has people throughout that are going to step up and lead their pieces of it. It becomes a self organizing enterprise when you do that well.
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