Exquisite Organization

Holacracy is a comprehensive practice for structuring, governing, and running an organization. It replaces today’s top-down predict-and-control paradigm with a new way of distributing power and achieving control. It is a new “operating system” which instills rapid evolution in the core processes of an organization.

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Shifting Power

Holacracy places the seat of organizational power in an explicit process, one which organizes around an explicit purpose. This allows emergent behavior of the whole system, without being controlled by either a single heroic leader or even the collective group.

On Empowerment
On Governance

Harnessing Tensions

Tension, n.: The felt-sense of a specific gap between current reality and a sensed potential.

Holacracy provides channels so anyone who senses a tension can process it into organizational evolution. Humans become the sensors of a conscious organization, driving its continual evolution.

On Processing Tensions

Obsoleting Politics

With Holacracy at play, if an expectation isn’t explicitly defined via a governance process, no one has a right to expect it. This removes the need for organizational politics and centralized power to work around lack of clarity. The substitute is a clear process to identify what expectations are needed to express the organization’s purpose.

On Obsoleting Politics

Purpose-Driven Organization

The Holacracy governance process is not governance “of the people, by the people, and for the people” – it is governance of the organization, through the people, for the purpose.  It liberates an organization to find and express its deepest creative capacity – and us to find a healthy relationship with it that honors our own.

On Purpose as Driver
On Role vs. Soul

Inside HolacracyOne

HolacracyOne is a legally Holacracy-powered organization, with no employees (only partners), no managers (just distributed authority), and no owners controlling it (just investors along for the ride). All power vests in the Holacracy Constitution, and all partners take part in the organization's governance.

On the Legal Structure
See our Governance

In the Blog Syndicate content

Processing Our “Should’s”

Posted Feb 21, 2012 by Brian Robertson

The Holacracy operating system distributes power throughout an organization, by defining roles with the accountability and authority to make various decisions and take action – authority no one else can “trump”.  So, without a heroic leader to complain to, and without politics as a useful means of influence, then what do I do when a decision or action by one person triggers tension for me?  I get this question a lot when coaching organizations adopting Holacracy. More »

Obsoleting Organizational Politics

Posted Jan 25, 2012 by Brian Robertson

Despite the implicit nature of our expectations, we often apply them to others as if they were clearly the right thing, and sometimes even wield them over others as a weapon – especially when we’re frustrated.  That is, until we’re the target of someone else’s implicit expectations, and then we cry foul – “that wasn’t clear to me!”  Perhaps we declare the expectations unreasonable, or kick ourselves for not doing better.  And ultimately, what else can we do?  We must expect things of each other to work together effectively. More »

A Holacracy-Powered Legal Structure

Posted Aug 5, 2011 by Brian Robertson

One of the exciting things to me about working in HolacracyOne (the organization behind Holacracy) is that we eat our own dog food, as the idiom goes – we use Holacracy to organize the company.  Last year we took a major step forward in this regard – we adopted the Holacracy Constitution in our legal bylaws, and built a novel legal structure for the organization around that foundation. More »

The Power of Governance

Posted Jun 10, 2011 by Brian Robertson

Typically, power and authority in an organization formally rest with the guy at the top – the CEO, managing director, or whatever label is used. Theoretically power is delegated from there, however this process is often extremely fuzzy. More often, most people in the organization have little clarity about who has what authority to make which decisions, at least for many topics. And when decision-making authority is unclear, we see behaviors that make sense given that context but waste time and energy: steam-rollering over others, painfully-slow consensus-seeking, playing politics, etc. More »

 

Calling for a New Paradigm

 

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