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My team is a bit strange. We hardly have any defined roles and processes, and yet, a lot of work gets done. Sometimes, there is some confusion around responsibilities, but our people have learned how to reach out to each other and negotiate boundaries between focus areas. We tried drawing various org charts, but even with only 12 people, we found that a recorded video of a team discussion explains more than any number of diagrams with circles or squares.
Most importantly, when I delegate work to someone, I ask a human being. I asked my friend Sergey to automate some of our business processes because I fully trust his programming skills as a developer and his business insights as an entrepreneur. I specifically did not delegate this work to our Business Process Architect, because A) we don't have one, and B) we don't want one. We have Sergey.
And here we encounter the fundamental problem at the heart of Holacracy, the trendy corporate governance framework that is known for causing some turbulence at Zappos, Medium, and other forward-thinking companies.
According to founder and creator Brian Robertson, Holacracy is like an operating system, but for organizations instead of computers. It is yet another version of the organization-as-machine metaphor that has led the world of business to adopt and implement far too many misguided, command-and-control practices. This is the sentence from the book Holacracy that made me cry out in despair:
Roles are the most basic building block of Holacracy’s structure. When we distribute authority, we distribute it not to individual humans, but to the roles that they fill.
Oh. My. God.
This means that, if my business operated under Holacracy, I wouldn't simply ask my pals Lisette or Andy to configure a new team collaboration tool. Instead, I would create a new Role, define its Purpose, its Domain, a list of Accountabilities, organize a Governance Meeting to get the new role instantiated, get someone to fill the new role, and then hand over authority for the new tool to the new role, rather than the person. After all, Holacracy doesn't authorize human beings; it authorizes roles. Or, in other words:
Holacracy doesn't empower people, it empowers processes.
It all makes perfect sense, if your metaphor is that of an operating system delegating a job to a subroutine. Instead of giving the work directly to an object, you define an interface, write a class, implement the interface, instantiate an object, and activate the object through the interface. That's basically how Holacracy works. Only a software engineer can come up with that.
I felt like being part of a code, operating within an algorithm that is optimized for machines, but not for humans. Instead of feeling more whole, self-organized and more powerful, I felt trapped. The circles I was being part of did not feel empowering at all but taking away my natural authenticity as well as my feeling of aliveness. It was fully unnatural and we were disciplined by rigorous protocols and procedures.
-- Julia Culen, "Holacracy: Not Safe Enough to Try"
There are two types of environments where we often find a similar top-down attitude toward authorization: governments and enterprises. In such systems, work is usually assigned to departments, business units, or functions. Not to individuals. And experience tells us that processes beget more processes. Unsurprisingly, both kinds of environments are known for their stifling bureaucracy and slowness to change. They are definitely not known for adhering to the first principle of agile organizations: individuals and interactions over processes and tools.
Therefore, it shouldn't surprise anyone that a strong sense of bureaucracy is mentioned again and again among those with actual experience in Holacracy organizations:
Holacracy requires a deep commitment to record-keeping and governance. Every job to be done requires a role, and every role requires a set of responsibilities. While this provides helpful transparency, it takes time and discussion. More importantly, we found that the act of codifying responsibilities in explicit detail hindered a proactive attitude and sense of communal ownership.
- Andy Doyle, "Management and Organization at Medium"The average employee is already overworked and undertrained; asking them to learn the management equivalent of Dungeons and Dragons on top of their workload is foolish, if not inhumane.
- Bud Caddell, "The Fatal Gap Between Organizational Practice and Organizational Theory"
Call me a hippie or a humanist, but I prefer working with actual people, not roles or processes. I don't hand over the keys of my apartment to just any person with the role Cleaner. I give them to Anna, because I trust her with the responsibility of cleaning my house. Likewise, I don't give the admin passwords of our critical business systems to just any person volunteering for the role System Admin. I gave them to Lisette and Andy, because they have built the credibility to take good care of our technical environments.
Holacracy insists that we delegate work to roles, not to people. But every expert I know seems to agree that social systems can only work when there is trust. And organizations can only switch from hierarchies to networks, and from management to leadership, when power and influence are obtained through reputation rather than titles.
That makes me wonder: In organization operating under Holacracy, how are role descriptions (instead of human beings) going to develop trust in the system? And how are processes (instead of people) ever going to earn a reputation among their peers?
I would argue that Holacracy is exactly the opposite of what organizations need in the 21st century. Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos, agrees with me that organizations should be run like cities, not like computers. So why did he insist that Zappos is managed with an operating system?
In a city, anyone is allowed to start a coffee bar. There's no need for someone to report a Tension, organize a Governance Session, follow an extensive Meeting Process, launch a Coffee Circle, and define the accountabilities of the Barista role. Perhaps they start coffee bars this way in Pyongyang, North Korea. But in the cities where I like to hang around, when people want to open coffee bars, they just do it. And they may get clients (or not) depending on trust and reputation in the wider social network, not because of some arcanely scripted governance process for instantiating coffee bars. They're people, for heaven's sake, not objects.
Delegating the governance process itself, in other words, acknowledging people's freedom to decide how they are governed at the local level, is often referred to as the Subsidiarity Principle. It is widely seen as a crucial pillar of good governance. A governance structure and process that is adequate to deal with local issues should not even exist at a higher level. Holacracy ignores this important principle. It mandates the entire governance process, in a command-and-control manner.
In a society, people can do anything except a few things that are well-documented and reserved by the next higher governance layer. It is a bottom-up approach. Holacracy, because it uses the operating system metaphor, works top-down: subcircles and subprocesses cannot do anything except that which is explicitly assigned via Roles with a Purpose, Domain, and Accountabilities. Holacracy is offered as a governance framework with a Constitution of more than 40 pages. (The U.S. Constitution contains merely 20 pages.) It seems to me the exact opposite of small government.
My team is strange and I want to keep it that way. If Lisette decides that her job title is Zookeeper, and Chad says that he is our Project Bottleneck, then so be it. And when my team experienced a tension (without capital T) between some team members, they resolved it with a spontaneously organized virtual pillow fight, rather than following a dehumanizing script from a Constitution.
When we want employees to produce innovative products and services, we should also allow them to innovate with management and governance structures and not outsource this aspect of the work to a software firm. I will allow no formal governance process to tame our passionate, creative minds. I am convinced that Holacracy would be the death of innovation by bureaucracy.
