Holacracy

Holacracy is a method of self-management in which authority belongs to defined roles rather than to managers, under rules written in a constitution the whole organization adopts. The constitution also sets how roles are created and changed. The American entrepreneur Brian Robertson developed it in the 2000s at Ternary Software, his software company in Pennsylvania, drawing on sociocracy to fix the problems he ran into as head of that company.

How holacracy works

Work is split into roles, each with a purpose, accountabilities and sometimes a domain. One person usually holds several roles. Roles are grouped into circles, which can themselves contain other circles, up to the one covering the whole organization.

Each circle holds two kinds of meetings. Members change the circle's roles and policies in governance meetings and handle day-to-day work in tactical meetings. In both, anyone can raise a tension, a gap between how things work today and how they could work. A governance proposal passes unless someone raises a valid objection. This rule is close to consent in sociocracy.

Criticism of holacracy

Holacracy is heavy, which is the price of its precision. The constitution runs to many pages and the meeting formats are strict, so a team needs months to learn them. The online shoe retailer Zappos, its best-known adopter, rolled it out to the whole company in 2014. In 2015, 18% of its employees took the severance offered to those who preferred to leave. Many teams now borrow roles and tensions from holacracy without adopting the full constitution.