I do holacracy - leadership decomposed, redefined

Leadership is a key element in any organization. While it is defined in several ways almost all leadership concepts work with the following core elements:

building trust, credibility
defining a purpose, a vision, setting values
building sustainable systems to process stuff
supporting people in finding motivation, and fulfilment

This is easy to read but harder to practice. While Holacracy often receives the true critique that it is complex, in reality any cooperation and leadership model has similarly complexity and practical hardships if all elements of it are practiced honestly and at once.

Within its closed system Holacracy incorporates a set of functions that build up to an evolutionary leadership function. I differentiated the following groups incorporating evolutionary leadership sub-functions:

1. Directing functions
- Evolutionary purpose
- Policies

Directing functions help in asking the right questions. Are we heading for the purpose? Are we aligned? Are we acting according to the policies? Purposes and policies have an evolution as tensions surface.

2. Structural and process functions
- Circle and role structure
- Governance and operation processes
The structure of circles incorporating each other and the roles result in an aligned tree of purposes. Changes in the structure are also evolutionary. The processes ensure the evolutionary operation.

3. Roles enhancing purposeful cooperation
- Lead link - holding the purpose of the circle
- Facilitator - running the meeting and putting out fire
- Secretary - steward of all records
- Rep link - representing the circle, holding the purpose one level up 

These roles must be filled to run the circle. It is key that the lead link may not overlap with the rep link and the facilitator. Otherwise the lead link may turn out to be a single point of failure or a role-holding Partner with too much power. 


4. Self-leadership, self-management
- Autonomous work,
- Tension driven proposal
- Right to vote
- Right to take individual action


Self-management is also a key concept in Holacracy. Work is to be done in a GTD manner. For that the roles are a hundred percent empowered by the Holacracy Constitution. Roles have authority to do their work and to impact the way the circle is run.


As you see holacracy is not dealing with people. It is channeling personal energies via roles and processes for the purpose. People lead themselves. Also it does not describe a system further then basic cooperative decision makings and election.

All these do not build up traditional leadership. These are a set of balanced functions that enhance the organization to make changes and steps in small increments, validating them all the time. People have space to grow up and act as adults and learn as children.

I do Holacracy 10. - meetings, what are they for?

One day a colleague came to me and asked when should their (bizdev) circle members talk about all those customer and market news they have discovered if there is no place for that in the governance and the tactical meeting agenda.

Well, I didn't have a ready answer. I asked about his tension and his suggestion to resolve it, and it became clear that they needed a... tadaaam... meeting to share information.

It became clear for me that day that holacratic meetings are primarily for collective decision making. Tactical meetings help the transformation of tensions to activity. Governance meetings help to transform tensions to conscious forms of cooperation. And you may hold several other meetings to:

- Share information, discuss learnings from the customer, the market or your field

- Brainstorm, capture ideas

- Analyze, build strategy

- Interview, coach, train, etc...

For me these meetings seem to be primarily for channeling information among the participants. These are conversations and definitely not decision making forums.

If a circle works in a constantly changing environment the members will have a higher need to share updates. Sales or product development will need more meetings than accounting where policies mostly cover the flow of information.

From another point of view if you have tensions based on risks, you better evolve them to policies. If you find tensions based on loosing opportunities, you may suggest more intense communication. 

One thing is for sure. Once you tried holacratic meetings you will find a healthy need to have every meeting facilitated by "someone", decisions captured by "someone" (like a secretary). I have written "someone", because both the facilitator and the secretary have a specific mission that is related to decisions made in the circle. 

What are your meeting experiences in holacracy?

I do Holacracy 9. - learnings of the first months

Actually the first months lasted for half a year. If you prepare to deploy Holacracy by yourselves you will have to prepare for a hard and complex change management process. If you haven't practiced or heard about change management meet these fine penguins and their melting iceberg...

This half a year (between 2013 q4 and 2014 q1) was a kind of experimental interval. Our reasons to go for holacracy were these:
- We needed a kind of organizational operation system anyway.
- As an IT company, we were familiar with agile
- We looked for a lean solution
- We looked for a scalable solution
- We wanted empowerment
- We were on the brink of growing above 30 which is the first level where complexity usually rises and becomes a risky obstacle.

I was very conscious (and fearful) about the latter one, which made me hurry.

I would say the level of deployment is around 33% now. The supporting processes, like HR, finances, bizdev and some more are governed and managed via governance and tactical meetings and defined as circles. These supporting processes in our case include less employees but more roles and more policies than the core activity.

My learnings about holacracy during this time:
- Applying it is a fundamental paradigm shift.
- I would compare the complexity of holacracy deployment to reorgs, workshops, trainings and coaching of every employee of the company in the same period of time with very high intensity.
- It is painfully hard to do without help, but it is possible
- You need a sponsor. An owner, or a board member, and you got to be the champion.
- The speed of deployment depends on the speed how the skill of facilitation spreads.
- Elections are scary first, but it's no big deal.
- Processing tensions by integral decision making - in my opinion - is worthy of a Nobel prize in itself. Reducing the number of tensions in the company periodically gives the company the acceleration of a TESLA sport car. Although...
- you have to realize that first things will come first. Tensions won't let you make shortcuts or procrastinate on critical issues.
- It is not a good system for bad apples. Transparency is evolving fast.

For me the biggest proof is that over this half a year we grew in number from 30 to 40. We didn't even feel any of the typical problems that arise when your company grows and complexity occurs in a higher level. We managed to reduce complexity by consciously working on the tensions. And this was only the beginning. The best is yet to come...

I do Holacracy 8. - getting tactical

The tactical board is something I first saw in Vienna during a Holacracy teaser workshop. It contains three sections:
- Key accountabilities relevant for the circle
- Metrics that indicate the circles performance toward the mission
- Projects and next action.

So after defining all things there were to be defined in the circle, I ordered a bunch of corkboards, pins and post-its. Sometimes post-its need pins as well. It's hard to stick to the new way of things, isn't it.

Again it is important to note that according to the holacracy constitution the lead link supposed to create the metrics, KPIs, strategies for the circle. I decided to work it out through a workshop to maximize personal involvement.

I called for a workshop, where we brainstormed over accountabilities and metrics for the circle. I strongly advise you not to have more than 7 things listed. Please feel free to collect as many as you find, but later cut it down to maximum seven, possibly less.

Once you collected them, the best is to test them right away! Have we done "A", "B", or "C" accountability the past month? And the past 90 days? Does the question sound good? Is the answer relevant? Is it really indicating growth, or any move forward? If not, why is it misleading? Learn from testing, like IT developers do!

It encountered a situation where I had to define the main difference between metrics and accountabilities. It may sound dull once you learnt it, but the first time everything is new. So whenever you answer by stating it is done, or it is not done, than it is an accountability (or a project). When you write down numbers that indicate the performance of the past month, you have written metrics

After having all the accountabilities and metrics you should collect all the next actions and projects. This is a paralel work. Distribute post-its, pens, pins. On every post-it write the name of the project or next action, and also the role accountable for it.

How did you do it? Did you use boards or online tools?

I do Holacracy 7. - facilitation tips

There are some key factors for effective meeting facilitation even when the holacracy constitution inclues the meeting steps. Even when people seem to be open and willing to participate.

Defining circles, roles and stategies may take longer, may need more questions and a longer response time. Integrating relevant responses may take time as well.

Procrastination is an evil thing. It can steal your time even when you have minutes or seconds. Therefore I focus on minimizing question and answer time. 

If you have a day to answer, you tend to use the whole day for thinking, if you have five hours, you tend to use all of it hours. But if you have only 60 seconds, surprisingly you are able to give almost the same quality answer or decision. The reason is that most of the time we already have our ready preferences, reasons and answers unconsciously.

To get fast access to these ready answers I usually give a 60 second timeframe when the answer is a list of words and a 120 minutes timeframe when I ask for a sentence.

About collaboration tools: I love to use a whiteboard when listing values, ideas. To prioritize I ask the circle members to stand up, grab a marker and mark the preferred words on the board. Post its are great as well. A snapshot of the whiteboard posted to a g+ community supports the participation of group members who join via hangouts or skype.

About understanding each other: In my experience the first thing to take into consideration, that some people focus on solving problems and some focus on setting goal. According to Bobb Biehl's work goal setters prefer to add new elements to the current system, while problem solvers prefer to fix already existing element the same time. Therefore their tensions are not understood easily by the other. While supporting the integrated decision making process you need to help the folks with different paradigms to respect and to understand each others tensions.