A little bit
About Us
Who we are
After years of incubating self-management methods within his own tech company, entrepreneur Brian Robertson co-founded HolacracyOne with Tom Thomison in 2007. Since then, HolacracyOne has been developing and sharing the self-management framework known as Holacracy.
We have helped hundreds of organizations adopt self-management, developed the Holacracy framework through several majors upgrades, and have created GlassFrog, a software tool supporting self-management.
We’ve supported organizations small and large, in a variety of industries — for-profits and non-profits, private organizations and governmental agencies, in the US, South America, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Australia.
Our Structure
As you can imagine, we use self-management at HolacracyOne. We’ve even integrated the Holacracy constitution in our legal bylaws. Not only can we say we’re using Holacracy, but for us this is a legal reality – enforceable in court if need be.
There are three components that enable our legally-grounded Holacracy practice. Together they encode the distributed power system of Holacracy into the organization’s legal DNA.
The Holacracy constitution
The Holacracy Constitution documents the core rules, structure, and processes of the Holacracy framework. It enables an organization wishing to use self-management to anchor that intention in concrete and specific processes. It levels the playing field by giving everyone access to the “rules of the game”.
Our operating agreement
HolacracyOne’s Operating Agreement (our bylaws) references and integrates the Holacracy constitution as the governing framework for our legal entity. It also defines our board structure, the compensation system for our partners, our investment structure, etc. Unlike the more generalized Constitution, our Operating Agreement was created solely to meet HolacracyOne’s needs; it was not intended to serve as a general template for others to use or rely upon. We share it for transparency, as a concrete example of the way we integrated Holacracy into our legal governance.
Our governance records
While our Operating Agreement and the Holacracy constitution provide the foundation for how the organization is governed, it is the output from that governance process which truly structures our day-to-day operations. HolacracyOne’s partners refer to these governance records frequently – they tell us what others can expect from us, what authority we hold, and the constraints we must honor. You can see HolacracyOne’s governance records and current operating structure in GlassFrog.
