Holacracy has always made me a bit uneasy, and I’ve had difficulty pinpointing why.
My first take looked at the contradictions inherent in a CEO commanding that their company adopt a system which itself does not condone managers or commanding. That article was more about the process of adopting self-management than about any particular self-management structure. But I think Holacracy is an enabler (even if unintentionally) of quick adoptions that are more likely to have these contradictory properties.
Inspired by Chris Clark’s article about potentially moving beyond Holacracy, it occurred to me that there is perhaps a fundamental tradeoff at work here. A central goal of Holacracy is to make it easier and faster for organizations to adopt self-management (in part by providing “off the shelf” solutions). The part of me that wants to encourage the world to move beyond traditional power structures loves the idea of speeding up that process. And yet I think this approach contradicts a core truth: that how things are done is often far more important than what is done or how quickly it is done. For example, the ownership and responsibility generated in the process of co-creation is often more impactful than the objective merits of the solution itself. (See: Peter Block)
So by shortcutting its way to a solution, Holacracy bypasses some of the vital ownership-, growth-, and community-building functions that a slower, more imperfect process of creating a solution together would have supported. This seems to be a fundamental downside of any technique to speed up or short-cut growth. That is, the tradeoff for getting something more quickly is that it’s less robust, less integrated, and less whole.
This is not an argument that Holacracy is “bad” — these are legitimate tradeoffs, and different contexts will call for different approaches. But that’s also part of the point. Truly understanding your context takes more time than adopting an off-the-shelf solution.