CULTURE
Holacracy is a radically different management system that changes how an organization is structured, how decisions are made, and how power is distributed.
Business as usual
With Holacracy
Painful meetings with little or no structure
Led by the boss; vaguely actionable outputs Focused and coherent meetings
Structured facilitation; clearly actionable outputs
Rigid organizational structure
Encourages fiefdoms and silo mentality Evolving organizational structure
Continually updated via dynamic governance process
Organizational design centralized in the CEO
Structure doesn't reflect actual work patterns Local and distributed organizational design
Agile structure locally updated based on real-time data
Managers are decision-making bottlenecks
Energy wasted on defining the work and dealing w/ politics Clear structure for distributed decision-making
Authority distributed to clearly defined Roles
Distributed Authority
Holacracy is a distributed authority system – a set of “rules of the game” that bake empowerment into the core of the organization. Unlike conventional top-down or progressive bottom-up approaches, it integrates the benefits of both without relying on parental heroic leaders. Everyone becomes a leader of their roles and a follower of others’, processing tensions with real authority and real responsibility, through dynamic governance and transparent operations.
Processing Tensions
Holacracy harnesses the conscious capacity of those within to sense dissonance between what is (current reality) and what could be (the purpose): the feeling of a “tension”. When there’s lack of clear and effective channels for processing tensions, they fester into frustrations, burn-out, and disengagement. Tensions are only useful to the extent the organization can process them into meaningful change. Holacracy provides several explicit channels to process tensions.
Holacracy installs clear processes for “governance” and “operations” – in every team, at every level of scale. Governance is about working “on” the organization, and operations is about working “in” it – each has different mechanisms for processing tensions into actionable clarity.
Governance & Governance Meetings
With Holacracy, regular governance meetings structure and evolve how the work gets done – everyone leaves with clarity on who is accountable for what, with what authority, and what constraints. These change dynamically with every meeting, based on the real tensions sensed while doing the work. A structured process ensures the organization’s purpose is at the center. Governance Meetings:
Generate explicit and light-weight role definitions that are actually meaningful (e.g. HolacracyOne's governance)
Give everyone a voice, without the tyranny of consensus
Apply clear rules that prevent egos or politics from dominating
Focus a team on fast, incremental improvements in light of real data
Continually restructure the organization, one tension at a time
Operations & Tactical Meetings
Governance clarity enables most work to get done by clear roles using clear authority, outside of painful meetings and group consensus-seeking. On the ground, a team’s operational flow is synchronized by regular Tactical Meetings that facilitate rapid-fire triage of key issues. Anything in the way of getting the work done gets identified and processed into clear next-actions and target outcomes. In Tactical Meetings:
Every agenda item gets processed every meeting, on-time every-time
The focus is on next-actions, not endless analysis
Metrics are surfaced and checklists are reviewed – quickly
No one hides – radical transparency shows all progress, or lack thereof
http://holacracy.org/how-it-works