Brian Robertson

Brian Robertson is the American entrepreneur who developed Holacracy, a system of self-governance where authority is distributed across roles instead of a management hierarchy. He co-founded HolacracyOne in 2007 to teach and spread the method, and published its reference book, Holacracy: The New Management System for a Rapidly Changing World, in 2015.

A method born in his own company

Robertson built Holacracy from practice. In the early 2000s he ran Ternary Software, a software company where he and his team tested ways to run the business without a boss handing out work. They borrowed from sociocracy, in particular circles and decisions by consent, and from agile software practices. The rules that came out of those experiments became Holacracy.

HolacracyOne then wrote those rules into a constitution, a document an organization adopts so that authority rests with these written rules rather than with its managers. It defines roles, circles, governance meetings and the way any member can raise a tension, meaning a gap between how things are and how they could be.

Adoption and criticism

The online shoe retailer Zappos made Holacracy widely known when it adopted the method across the company in 2013 and 2014. The publishing platform Medium, another early adopter, dropped it in 2016. Most criticism targets the weight of the rules: the constitution is long, the meeting formats are strict, and teams need months of practice before they run smoothly. Robertson answers that the formality protects each role holder's autonomy, since everyone knows exactly what they can decide alone.