
Why Self-Organizing Is So Hard - based2
https://medium.com/nobl-collective/why-self-organizing-is-so-hard-247821591e67
======
jaggederest
Isn't the very point of self-organization and self-management that you can't
read how to do it in a book? It has to arise organically and be built through
shared interaction.

Especially for software companies, I've always found the idea of using
external workflow and management software to be a little bit abhorrent, like
wearing someone else's underwear.

It should be _your_ way of doing things, and software you use to help you is
just a way of codifying and automating that. In the same way we customize our
editors, we should customize our workplaces so that they reflect the unique
sets of people and activities they contain.

And of course, other people have pointed out the irony of a hierarchical
mandate for change to a non-hierarchical system. I am reminded of an
apocryphal story of drug testing at a university. They had a sampling of
senior executives, professors, and researchers go first, to prove that it
applied to everyone. When a substantial number of them failed, the testing
program was quietly shelved.

~~~
calibraxis
Decent forms of anarcho-syndicalism aim at advanced, complex industrial
societies. Therefore there can be lots of lit on running effective self-
managing teams, replacing today's managerial lit.

For example, how do you run a good consensus meeting? Start from scratch and
probably make elementary blunders, leading to sullen participants? Or grab say
Starhawk's book and arm oneself with common patterns?

A book is just transmission of info. Societies which do lots of consensus
transmit lessons somehow. (Via book, oral and/or experiential ways.)

(Disclaimer: I'm not very familiar with "holacracy", outside my simple google
search.)

~~~
jaggederest
> For example, how do you run a good consensus meeting? Start from scratch and
> probably make elementary blunders, leading to sullen participants? Or grab
> say Starhawk's book and arm oneself with common patterns?

I completely agree.

Where I diverge from the path I see a lot of people take is when you start
_believing_ in those books with a fervency, without going through the process
on your own. Use them to inform, not instruct.

A great example is the Toyota Production System book. People who go for
'kanban' and 'mura muda muri' and ape the terminology and methods have it all
wrong - the whole point is that it's a system they built for themselves. It's
great advice on _how to build such systems_ , but if you just take it off the
shelf and try to use it as is, again, it'll feel like someone else's underwear
since it wasn't built to fit _you_.

------
quadrangle
Superb article!

Holacracy is clearly yet another in the very long list of attempts to
synthesize a lot of great ideas into some ultimate solution which is then
prescribed, trademarked, marketed, and _proprietary_ so that the company can
authorize "official" trained people who take their official training courses
etc. The list of organizations like this is vast, and most of them offer
_some_ value and yet create fragmented and confusing overly-branded markets.
For just one random set of examples: Alexander Technique vs Feldenkrais etc.
etc.

Holacracy has some good ideas, but it is not a final end-point. It is just yet
another place in the long history of organizational ideas. See the complex
history of cooperative businesses for example.

Holacracy _must_ become entirely Open Source, i.e. the software and the
writings are all freely-licensed. The developers need to stop trying to
control ideas that are 95% not original anyway, just a branded spin on
existing ideas.

Anyway, this article at Medium does great job of dealing with things, and the
comments there are great too. Thanks

~~~
kirsebaer
Holacracy seems to be taking some good ideas and packaging them with strange
ideas, like saying that people should not talk about personal topics at work.

What about the Brazilian engineering firm Semco? Follows a non-hierarchical,
self-organizing structure. Thousands of employees, very successful. Described
in two books by CEO Ricardo Semler: The Seven-Day Weekend and Maverick.
[http://www.amazon.com/The-Seven-Day-Weekend-Changing-
Works/d...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Seven-Day-Weekend-Changing-
Works/dp/1591840260)

~~~
simonebrunozzi
He recently gave a very inspiring TED talk. That's how I've got to know about
Semco.
[http://www.ted.com/talks/ricardo_semler_radical_wisdom_for_a...](http://www.ted.com/talks/ricardo_semler_radical_wisdom_for_a_company_a_school_a_life?language=en)

------
iSnow
That memo sounds exactly like each "we need to embrace change"-memos I have
read in old-style enterprisey enterprise where some external consultants are
called in and make serious money by selling the latest and greatest management
methodologies.

And every two to five years, the circle starts again with a different approach
because people become numb to the bullshit language in which change is
mandated from above.

------
alexashka
Can somebody with some background explain why this Holacracy thing exists and
what problems it hopes to solve? Also, what is this self-management etc?

The article seems to presuppose that we are in the loop of what is happening
at Zappos - I for one have no idea.

~~~
quanticle
Holocracy, as I've seen it defined, is supposed to be a non-hierarchical way
of organizing a company. That is, teams are supposed to self-organize and
independently do what is best for the business as a whole. Another prominent
software company that practices holocracy is Valve Software, and their
employee handbook [1] is one that I've seen mentioned by multiple people as a
good implementation of holocracy.

The problem that holocracy is supposed to solve is that in a modern business
environment, market conditions shift too quickly to allow management to have
the sole responsibility for making decisions. Having self-organizing teams
that take responsibility for advancing business goals, and allowing employees
to shift between teams without getting permission from management first ("open
allocation") allows the company to develop an internal "marketplace of ideas"
which ensures that good ideas win out and bad ideas are killed before they
consume too many resources.

Now does it work in practice? I would say that it's too soon to tell. Very few
organizations have wholly embraced holocracy. Arguably the only one that's
truly embraced the practice is Valve. While the idea of a non-hierarchical
organization sounds great in theory, we must also remember that status
hierarchies are one of the few things that are common to every human
civilization. As a PM colleague of mine put it succinctly, "Middle school
lunch rooms are holocracies too." I would say that a holocracy can work, so
long as the corporate culture supports it... just like every other management
strategy.

~~~
bambax
Disclaimer: I have no idea what holacracy is or how it works, this is the
first time I heard the term.

But this:

> _market conditions shift too quickly to allow management to have the sole
> responsibility for making decisions_

rubs me the wrong way.

Making decisions and bearing the responsibility and accepting the consequences
of past decisions, is the sole task -- indeed the sole purpose of management.
If they cease making decisions then what good are they?

Now, if "holacracy" means that there is no management anymore, it may be fine;
however

\- the tone and the very existence of the memo seem to tell otherwise; there
is something extremely funny about "mandatory self-organization"

\- salaried positions are (to me) a little like a deal with the devil: you
give up freedom, in exchange for peace of mind and not having to make too many
decisions. This holacracy thing sounds like a trick by the devil in order to
not hold his end of the bargain.

~~~
robmccoll
A person or group playing the role of management would likely still exist. The
point is that it arises organically through natural leadership within the
organically self-assembling structure. In fact accepting the consequences is
much more real to this version of management in that the effects of poor
decisions are immediate. In a self-organizing structure, their power can be
swiftly removed by the masses. Meanwhile poor management in more rigid
structure can survive much longer and is frequently untouchable.

~~~
blumkvist
>In a self-organizing structure, their power can be swiftly removed by the
masses. Meanwhile poor management in more rigid structure can survive much
longer and is frequently untouchable.

Meanwhile in a self-organizing structure you can get the shaft, because a good
decision did not turn out too well.

I also don't see how this system solves the "politics" problem. I actually
think it makes it even worse. People will premeditate and ploy much more, if a
consensus is the only thing standing between them and power. As e result many
bad decisions will be made in the name of compromise and favors.

"A camel is a horse, designed by a committee."

------
bane
Self-organizing isn't hard at all. As a species, humans automatically self-
organize in any group great than about 4 or 5 people.

The problem is that people self-organize to optimize some instinctual pattern,
not to optimize towards business goals. The moment you start organizing
towards some other goal than what we naturally do, you are no longer "self-
organizing", period.

Holacracy and other mumbo jumbo choose to ignore this simple fact, and pretend
like anybody can do anybody else's job and you'll find that once you start to
map out how "self-organizing" organizations always work, they aren't in fact
self-organized at all.

It's actually quite maddening.

------
wahsd
I think this article highlights the real need for a managing layer. I know
that many people, especially in this forum, will bristle and pop an artery
just from reading that last sentence, but reality is that the problem does not
lie in management, it lies with inappropriate management.

There is an interesting article, I believe from the HBR, which outlines the
fallacy in today's perspective on management, especially in corporations,
where the negative perspective of managers was incubated. The problem lies in
that corporate culture sees management as a hierarchical and honorary title,
rather than a specific task and function.

What that leads to is coders who would rather simply code and build being
"promoted" to management, and hating it while also largely being unprepared
for it's specific skill set, and you have managers, who, much like
politicians, are more interested in the career and advancement than the actual
function of managing. A managers function is to leverage, organize, and clear
the path for the team they manage; their primary and sole purpose should be
structure and lubrication, not micro-managing and strategic direction.

------
natrius
The link to Blinkracy was especially useful for providing two things:

1\. A guide to introducing Holacracy to an existing organization

2\. A simplified form a Holacracy that doesn't turn off people who aren't used
to reading board game instructions

I highly recommend it. [https://www.blinkist.com/page19/holacracy-ebook-
download](https://www.blinkist.com/page19/holacracy-ebook-download)

------
bshimmin
"While we’ve made decent progress on understanding the workings of the system
of Holacracy and capturing work/accountabilities in Glass Frog..."

Sometimes I like to imagine how my grandparents would react to phrases like
this.

------
walterbell
_> "People aren’t ants (and organizations aren’t immune systems)."_

Yes, see also "sociobiology",
[http://www.firstthings.com/article/2001/01/against-
sociobiol...](http://www.firstthings.com/article/2001/01/against-sociobiology)

 _"..the science correspondent of the New York Times , wrote a front page
article for the newspaper, “Updating Darwin on Behavior,” outlining
sociobiology’s principal claim. In the older view, Rensberger wrote, the
insect societies of bees and ants and the hierarchies of monkeys were seen as
“evidence for the remarkable variety of nature.” Now, however, researchers
were coming to a “more profound conclusion.” Beneath the variety there lay
“common behavioral patterns governed by the genes and shaped by Darwinian
evolution.

..there is a book that cries out to be written -- a debunking of the whole
“genomania” upon which sociobiology was largely based. Perhaps we should think
of it as the astrology of the modern academy, with the fashionable microcosm
now replacing the heavenly spheres. Just as mysterious emanations from
celestial objects were once thought to shape character (with a role reserved
for free will), so today mysterious emanations from molecular objects are
thought to do the same (with a role reserved for the environment)._"

~~~
carapat_virulat
I never understood the “genomania” approach, it's pretty clear that in science
and technology we don't limit ourselves to the information contained in our
genes, I don't see why they should have any weight either in morals or social
organization.

I understand the value as descriptive tools, but even in social behaviors that
may be very influenced by genes, once you are aware of those patterns they are
very easy to detect and choose whether you decide to follow them or not, so
even if we were 100% determined by our genes, once we learn the way in which
we are determined we would be in the position to move in a different
direction. Genes can't help us decide what to do, we will have to make the
choice by ourselves.

------
danielweber
Oh, this "self-organize" reminds me of a company I worked at where the
management insisted on "only hiring people who are self-managing."

I realized, much later, that it was because management was _completely
horrible_ at management.

Why would a person who can manage and run themselves so well that they don't
need management come to work for us?

I wasted many fewer years of my life there than some other people (including
those management quacks) did, so I'm pretty happy about having escaped.

