
Why You Should Care About Holacracy - kanamekun
http://firstround.com/review/heres-why-you-should-care-about-holacracy/
======
pnathan
In my (somewhat limited - 6 teams, 4 different institutions, two flat teams)
experience, these sorts of "no manager" approaches are a _flaming disaster_.
You might argue that they didn't do it right - I argue that the burden of
proof is on the disruptor to prove their betterness.

The ground reality is that someone can hire you, fire you, give you a pay
raise, and is the person of record in the court cases when they arise (as they
do). That person _is_ the ruler in the fiefdom - it's purely cultic and
deceptive to say otherwise.

~~~
natrius
Holacracy isn't about getting rid of managers. Keep an open mind and keep
reading about it.

------
smacktoward
Whenever I read these types of posts, I always feel like I'm listening to a
lecture by Leon Trotsky on the theoretical perfection of Communism.

"You may not be interested in Holacracy, but Holacracy is interested in you."

 _> How do you hire, promote, and fire at a Holacratic company? How should you
prioritize what work to do or decide who does what? The rest is up to you._

Those seem like big things to leave out of a management methodology...

~~~
beat
Yeah, it reminded me uncomfortably of Trotsky as well - not in how it works,
but rather how it is _supposed_ to work if you just ignore critical details.

C&C isn't just a 20th century management methodology. It's been around since
the beginnings of civilization. It's hardwired into our parenting, education,
and government models. A small, committed team can try organizational
structures that run counter to everything we've been taught for our entire
lives - but does it scale?

More than Trotsky, this makes me think of Bakunin, Kropotkin, and other
anarcho-syndicalists. This sort of "classical anarchism" also focuses on the
problems and failures of the C&C hierarchy, but attempts to deal with it by
rejecting the hierarchy altogether, beyond local control - if you can't punch
your boss in the nose anymore, there's too much structure. Society is then
organized into direct democracy around the means of production - farms,
factories, businesses that elect their leaders locally and can remove them
from power at any time.

Anarcho-syndicalism was put into practice in the Spanish Civil War, when the
workers simply stopped answering to their bosses and instead ran things for
themselves. And it got _crushed_. If there was one thing the fascists and
communists (both strong C&C structures) could agree on, it was that the
anarchists were the enemy. And when your little farm commune got visited by a
thousand soldiers with tanks and artillery, you got wiped out, no matter how
pure the ideology.

I can imagine a similar problem with Holocratic businesses - traditional
businesses might well be uncomfortable dealing with such an organization, when
they can't trust the authority of the leadership of the Holocratic structure.
And if you try to keep a Holocratic structure internally while maintaining
traditional outward-facing executive leadership, you're sooner or later going
to have a problem of "because the CTO said so". The question of who has the
power to fire in a Holocratic organization? You'll get your answer soon
enough.

And there's the rub, isn't it? If you have an organization large enough to
transition from anarcho-syndicalism to a deeper C&C structure, but try to do
software-enhanced anarcho-syndicalism (which is kinda what Holocracy is), then
you're going to have a hidden, obscured C&C structure riding along inside your
Holocratic cloud. And real, final power will be with C&C, which in turn
derives its authority from the owners/board, which in turn derive authority
from common law and social convention. But with everyone knowing that there's
a metaphorical gun to their heads, Holocratic decisions will be made with the
unspoken acknowledgement that someone can/will get fired over bad decisions.
So much for transparency.

Of course, this is all theoretical.

~~~
pja
_Anarcho-syndicalism was put into practice in the Spanish Civil War, when the
workers simply stopped answering to their bosses and instead ran things for
themselves. And it got crushed. If there was one thing the fascists and
communists (both strong C &C structures) could agree on, it was that the
anarchists were the enemy. And when your little farm commune got visited by a
thousand soldiers with tanks and artillery, you got wiped out, no matter how
pure the ideology._

"War is the state’s killer app." Ken MacLeod, The Stone Canal.

------
rayiner
> One of these Responsive methodologies is Holacracy, defined as “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 achieving control by distributing power.”

That's not a definition.

------
proksoup
It seems like this author has confused "C&C" with "management which is out of
touch with employees and provides no clear guidelines" and "holacracy" with
"good management which is in touch with employees and provides clear
boundaries and guidelines and power structures".

The author says "No one knows who gets to decide what." is a trait of C&C,
which holacracy solves.

This article has confused my own understanding of the term "holacracy" quite a
bit.

Maybe there is a good definition of the term elsewhere?

------
trhway
if you can't see who's bottom of the spine to kiss, it doesn't make you the
one.

One can look at the Borg for the example of ultimate flat organization - they
have only Queen - and they have highest possible communication/collaboration
at the level beyond wet dreams of the open floor office zealots.

Anyway, i'm eagerly expecting our management to start pushing on us Lean Agile
Scrum Holacracy in the near future. We've already been Leaned, Agiled,
Scrummed and as for getting Holacratized ... we'll adapt too. Resistance is
futile anyway.

~~~
Retra
"It's 'LASH'. Like a whip. It evokes 'snappy', or 'fast', which is exactly how
we run our company; we are flexible, have long reach, and no rigid structure.
All of our successful employees learn to use a whip, just to make the analogy
explicit."

------
geofft
One thing that's missing in this description: who gets to decide how much
people get paid?

~~~
HillRat
Even one of its adherents agrees that Holacracy's inability to address
compensation is “like buying Microsoft Office without Microsoft Word”
([http://recode.net/2014/10/03/holacracy-or-hella-crazy-the-
fr...](http://recode.net/2014/10/03/holacracy-or-hella-crazy-the-fringe-ideas-
driving-the-las-vegas-downtown-project/)), though I'd argue that it's more
like buying a typewriter without a keyboard.

------
marssaxman
Aside from the fact that this appears to be yet another cuckoo-pants
management cult, I just cannot stand the name - it is obviously spelled wrong,
and should either be "holocracy" or "hollacracy".

~~~
hcayless
I suppose it's technically correct, even though it's a little goofy. The first
part is from the neuter form of the Greek adjective ὅλος (holos), meaning
"whole". The neuter form (used as a noun here I assume) would be "holon" and
the plural of that, "hola". So holacracy would be "rule by wholes". Better
than rule by a-holes, I suppose...

~~~
cefstat
Being a native Greek speaker, I find "holacracy" (ολακρατία) at least weird;
it sounds completely wrong. If I wanted to combine the two words I would
automatically use "holocracy" (ολοκρατία). I can't think of any example where
Greek uses the plural form of a word in combination with -kratia.

