HolacracyOne Blog

Processing Tensions

Have you ever worked in or with an organization, and felt some tension about the way things were done?  Perhaps you saw an opportunity for improvement, or an endemic challenge that needed attention – in the organization’s actions, policies, processes, strategy, or structure?  It’s hard to imagine someone who hasn’t.  In organizational life we often sense potential futures that are different from present reality, and would be a step forward in some way.  But then what?  What can you do with these “tensions” you sense?More

Integrating For- and Non-Profit

Humans have a wonderful tendency to make distinctions where underlying reality has no such boundaries.  Some of these distinctions prove useful for a time and become unquestioned givens – new definitions or categories that we believe are reflective of a fixed reality, rather than temporary constructs of human meaning-making.  Eventually though, all distinctions outlive their usefulness – and when that happens, evolution’s challenge is to draw new boundaries to collapse and integrate what we previously thought of as fixed opposites.  One such distinction I see as no longer useful is the divide between for-profit and non-profit organizations.More

The Limits of Company Values

Earlier in my entrepreneurial career I set out to build a values-driven company, where deep human values would shape the culture and help define the organization.  I’m not talking about the corporate values statements you see posted on the walls of many large companies today.  More often than not, those have little bearing on day-to-day operations – they’re more corporate marketing material than anything deeply authentic to the culture, and I find myself generally wary of any values statement that comes with graphic design.More

Individual Action

What do we do when our best judgment tells us to go outside of our authority or against an established rule or policy?  Probably, we do what humans usually do:  we consider the situation, including what we understand of the existing rules, and we use the best judgment available to us to decide how to proceed.  And sometimes our best judgment tells us to break the rules.  Holacracy calls this taking Individual Action, and there are core rules built into the system for doing so; in other words, there are rules about how to break the rules.More

An Impersonal Process

Holacracy™ Governance Meetings use a structured decision-making process to rapidly integrate multiple perspectives, called the Integrative Decision-Making™ process (you can find the mechanics of the process in a handout in our Resource Library).  Despite the simple look of the process, learning to facilitate it effectively is quite a challenge.More

The Limits of Leadership Development

There are so many consultants and change agents today trying to transform organizations through leadership development initiatives.  If only we can get a significant minority of leaders to realize a new level of developmental capacity, surely that will lead to an organization capable of transcending its current challenges... right?More

Integration is a Continual Process

Holacracy expressly pushes against attempts to fully integrate all perspectives at any given moment in time, and yet over time it ends up integrating more than any other process I've witnessed.  Holacracy’s decision-making processes recognize it isn't actually possible to integrate all perspectives at any given time, nor desirable to try; no matter how much you integrate, there is always something more still to integrate, and more reality still emerging around you.More

Integrating Perspectives

Where there are multiple people there are multiple perspectives.  For a team working towards some aim, integrating diverse views provides a more accurate and complete map of reality, allowing more informed decisions and better navigation of the territory ahead.  Yet, on most teams, critical perspectives are often ignored or dismissed when they’re not shared by the leader or by the majority – it’s like flying an airplane and ignoring the fuel gauge just because other instruments don’t report a problem.More

Requisite Organization

Once an organization has all the basics of Holacracy in place, new questions about the organization’s structure often emerge: How do you know what circles an organization should have, and how many levels these should be organized into?  More

Beyond Serving Stakeholders

Why does an organization exist?  I see several distinct paradigms in operation today, each with a different general answer to that question.  Let’s look at some of these with an evolutionary lens, and then bridge to what may be next.More