Holacracy: How to Decentralize Your Company for Higher Performance with Brian Robertson

From Voice & Exit, 2015

Video Description

In this video from the 2015 Voice & Exit conference, Brian Robertson discusses the concept of holacracy. Robertson is the author of the book, Holacracy: The New Management System for a Rapidly Changing World.

During his presentation, he discusses how his frustrations with bureaucracy drove him to leave a job in the aerospace industry and launch his own business. After describing business organization as a technology, he describes his own perspective of the main stream organization paradigm, which he describes as a feudal-like structure, then goes on to describe a different kind of order that shows up when you have the right framework of rules. In this framework, free-agents can "interact and figure out how to best pursue their local purpose within an overall system."

Over 15 years as an entrepreneur, Robertson developed the concept of "holacracy" for organizations. He says this is a social technology, which is implemented in an open source document as a basic Constitution - or framework of rules - that let an organization operate without top-down control. He says it is designed to support individuals working in "flow." This constitution is a "metaframework," which leads to unique frameworks at every company where it's implemented. He says that the idea has been adopted by over 300 companies.

Some key steps and properties of a holacracy deployment:

1. CEO signs document ceding power to the Holacracy Constitution
2. Holacracy replaces job-descriptions with dynamic roles - updated every month (or sooner).
3. Individuals have full authority to do anything that is not prohibited by rules - truly distributed authority
4. Rapid iteration of roles, modeled after Agile programming.
5. Governance is handled by adoption of roles in "circles"

Examples:

Robertson's roles include:

Holacracy Spokesperson

Autonomous role to speak for his company.

Web Architect

Has a domain - like a property right - the web architect "owns" the web site. As web architect, he is free to do anything in pursuance of his purpose, provided he doesn't infringe on someone else's domain (or property).

Conclusion

In summary, the holacracy structure is very organic - "cells within organs within organ-systems," with autonomy, interconnections, and alignment at every level of scale. I didn't attend the conference in 2015, and I'm not going in 2016 (and I'm not affiliated with them in any way), but I highly recommend watching this and other Voice & Exit videos. I am definitely looking forward to the release of this year's videos!