Rob Kall Bottom Up Radio Show WNJC 1360 AM out of Washington Township reaching Metro Philly and South Jersey. Sponsored by Opednews and you can access this full recording at iTunes using my name Rob Kall and at Stitcher. I've been speaking with Brian Robertson who is the inventor of holacracy, a exciting new approach to management that is non hierarchical. So can you tell us Brian what holacracy is, how it's non hierarchical and how it works?
BR: Yeah absolutely so you can think of it in a nutshell as just a different way of running a company. If you think about the function that managers provide and the management hierarchy provides in a company, it actually has a lot of useful benefits. Management hierarchies have survived in their modern form for about 100 years in business for good reason. They provide alignment, they make sure we have some accountability, some way of breaking down the work so we can tackle large initiatives and not step all over each other in the process.
Holacracy gets those same benefits, it's doing the same functions as a management hierarchy, alignment, accountability, control, work breakdown. But it does it without the management hierarchy. It uses a different mechanism to get similar functions, and hopefully to get them better, and to stay more flexible at the same time. And it does that through a series of processes that are added to each team in a company. So, at the end of the day you have a very different way of running the business. And one that instead of using a management hierarchy uses a distributed peer to peer set of processes that allow everyone to part of what used to be the managers job. In the end you end up with a very different operating system. That's a metaphor I use. An operating system for a company, or a social operating system.
It's easy to hear no management hierarchy and think it must be unstructured chaos but it's actually not, it's more structure than a conventional management hierarchy. We just get to the structure differently, and it's a more flexible structure that can change as the organization learns and adapts and it can change driven by anyone, not just top down. Again, a very different approach to running a company.
Rob: So can you describe the basic elements and aspects of it, the circles, the roles, the links.
BR: Yeah. In one of the differences you'll see in a typical company, people have job descriptions. I don't know about you but, I think most people don't go to look at their job description regularly. When I ask sometimes, when was the last time you ran to your job description to figure out what you should do today? Most people couldn't tell you what their job description actually says. They're kind of useless bureaucratic artifacts. An holacracy replaces that with a way describing roles, that are much more grounded and real. Roles in holacracy are much smaller than a job description. Your job might include ten or twenty roles. And each role is a little chunk of work. So for example, I fill a blogger role. I might write one blog post a month, so it's a tiny chunk of my time, but it's a discreet function, the organization needs to get its' purpose back. So I fill a blogger role, I fill about twenty other roles in my company, and those roles changes regularly. Unlike job descriptions that are kind of out of date by the time they're printed usually, roles in holacracy are updated regularly by the team doing the work. And they're updated through a governance process that is basically a collective learning process so as we do work together we learn things. We learn there's a process hole that needs to be plugged or maybe a new role needs to be created to handle something that nobody is handling. Or I need to expect something from your role because it's important to my work. So all of those learnings in holacracy are getting coded into these role descriptions. So they stay very live, current, real, grounded.
That's one of the major difference and that's the core kind of building block of how holacracy structures work. You have roles that describe what's really needed and are updated regularly by the team doing the work. And those roles then sit within circles. A circle is kind of like a really big role, or a team, a function. The circle itself has a purpose that it's trying to pursue, it has some work to do. The circle has regular meetings, governance meetings, to invite anyone filling a role in that circle to show up and be part of that learning process, so that's where the roles get updated. And even those circles then sit within broader circles, so you have kind of this fractal structure, a lot like nature. Roles within circles within broader circles, and every circle is self organizing and updating the roles needed to do it's work. And then one of the other major pieces, when you fill a role within holacracy, you get the autonomy to do anything that makes sense to you to get the job of your role done. You can make any decision, you can take any action, unless it's explicitly against a policy created by that circle, or by another circle that's relevant somehow in that decision. Instead of most companies where you kind of need permission to act, whether from the boss or you need make sure that your whole team is bought in before you do something.
That's the operating culture of those companies today. Holacracy is very much the opposite, it's much more entrepreneurial. If you fill a role, use your judgement and drive it forward and do anything that makes sense to you unless there is a explicit rule against it. And then we learn together. We do create constraints, but instead of bureaucracy defined in advance fearfully, we're constraining action when we're learning together, hey there's a constraint here we really need to pay attention to. So they're evolving, they're constantly shifting, and they're defined by the people doing the work as they learn together. That's kind of the other aspect of this. I mentioned the governance process which is how we update those constraints, and how the roles come together and govern the other roles and their team. What you end up with is, again, a very different way to run a company that gives people a love more voice, a lot more input, and a lot more autonomy at the same time.
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