Rob: Awesome, so you start your chapter on facilitating government with the Frank Herbert quote "Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty." This would suggest that in government, regulations are necessary to create a situation where liberty thrives, which would seem to oppose free market and libertarian thinking. What I try to do with my interviews is take an idea that you work with and then shift it to our culture and our world in a bigger way. What do you think?
BR: Most people would bucket me under the libertarian camp so, I have a lot of thoughts about that.
Rob: Okay, good.
BR: I wouldn't necessarily make the claim that regulation is useful at the governmental level. I would say that any situation, any free society needs some kind of governance process. That's not to say that government has to provide it, that's one place it can come from. But courts provide another important governance process. Courts help us define common law that lets us understand what's reasonable in contractual relationships and settle disputes. So there is some governing process that any society needs. Now I think we can debate whether that needs to come from a legislature or whether is can come from others places like common law, like non-profit institutions, or there's many different sources of creating that kind of feedback loop. So what I would say is that a company needs the same.
Rob: Are you saying then that holacracy and that kind of thinking might provide an alternative to the government as we know it?
BR: I have to be pretty careful here what claims I make. I think holacracy might have some interesting contributions to make when we look at society as a whole. Not to say that we should run out and replace our legislatures with holacracy directly. I don't actually think that. But I do think that, if we want an efficient society we do need a society that's subject to the forces of evolution, where a social entrepreneur can compete with governmental functions if they can provide a better job. I think what holacracy does is give us purpose-driven organizations. Whether they're government organizations or private sector, it really doesn't matter as much. Once you have an organization that's fundamentally purpose driven, I think holacracy integrates a lot of those distinctions. From my prospective, when you're running a company with holacracy, power ultimately resides with your purpose, not with your investors if you have them, not with the executive team, not with anyone else but ultimately it flows from - what are we trying to achieve in the world. Which makes the distinction between for-profit, non-profit and governmental a lot less meaningful. It's first and foremost a purpose driven entity. I think there's a lot to be said for that. I also think in terms of even just educating people on governance, the debate, do we need government, big top down government, more of it less of it whatever, I think is missing a point. Whatever side of that debate people fall on, I think most will agree there's a need for some kind of governance and it's just a question of does it come from an external agency, a government, or does it come from internal market controls or does it come from somewhere else.
I think holacracy is an example of a system that distributes governance. So it doesn't need to come from a big outside player to still get a system that is self governing. That can include feedback loops from outside that system itself. In fact there are examples of companies using holacracy that have invited outsiders to take part in their governance process to provide a feedback loop from their broader world. I think it just gives us other ways of looking at the topic of governance, and ones that are much more peer to peer decentralized and distributed which I'd argue is the way the world of moving. We're seeing a shift towards decentralized distributed peer to peer processes. Whether we're talking about how you book hotels now with Air BnB or cars with Uber or whatever, I think it's only a matter of time before we see some of the same happen with our, things we look at right now as governmental functions, if they can be better performed by more distributed decentralized ways. I think we need tools for that as well, and I think holacracy is one of them.
Rob: In researching Holacracy I found an article written by somebody advocating holacracy in government. Have you had any experience working with that in your consulting?
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