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Episode Transcript
Lisa: So first of all Brian, thanks for coming on the Leadermorphosis podcast. I wanted to, I guess, start with basics for any listeners who don’t know what Holacracy is. How would you describe Holacracy in its simplest terms?
Brian: Yeah, so I call it a framework for self-management. There are a lot of companies out there doing self-management, and it’s not like—sometimes Holacracy gets misunderstood as kind of a one-size-fits-all “do self-management specifically this way,” which I think is kind of missing the point. Every company out there doing Holacracy will have its own way of doing hiring, firing, compensation, budgeting—all these processes you need to be self-managed. Holacracy just gives you the underlining framework to make it easier to experiment and adapt with all of your other processes without having to go to a CEO to implement self-management. Which is the interesting paradox of so many journeys to self-management: they’re often driven top-down by a leader at the top who’s defining the new self-manage processes. Holacracy gives you a framework or a meta-system that invites everybody into the experimentation process as we update every other process in the business.
Lisa: So with that in mind, what would you say are the main advantages of using Holacracy as a framework versus either traditional way of organizing or, you know, trying to do self-management from scratch?
Brian: I can answer from my own pain and my best 10 years of the difference. What I mean by that: before Holacracy, I was just a CEO and I was looking for a self-managed way to run my business. So I kind of invented one, like so many other CEOs. If you read most of the stories today of companies that are doing self-management, they’re homegrown self-management systems, and they can work really well. But what I created worked well enough for my company and eventually became Holacracy, but what I realized is it took ten years of experimentation to get to something that felt like it was really getting traction and working.
What Holacracy has done is kind of package in ten years of experimentation. It gives you an off-the-shelf way of kick-starting your self-management journey. It’s not gonna do everything for you, nowhere near that, but it at least saves you a lot of pain of just the kind of experimenting that you don’t need to—reinvent the wheel. It’s taken a lot of wisdom and kind of distilled down. So it’s the time savings and some guide rails.
There’s a lot of freedom to self-manage, but within a framework that gives you some basic guide rails so you’re less likely to kind of go way off the rails and end up stuck somewhere with Holacracy. And then finally a community support.
One of my favorite metaphors—my background is in software—so if you think back to the early PC days or early microcomputer days, before we had a movement, we had crazy entrepreneurs and engineers tinkering in their garages. We had people custom building their own homegrown computers, and that really didn’t help anything spread until we had standard platforms, until Apple came out with a standard that everyone could start from and build on top of. And you still have this massive grassroots movement of people customizing on top of it—now they’re adding software that’s actually important.
I look at Holacracy as kind of the same for the self-management movement. It’s giving a standard platform that’s still highly customizable, but at least you’re starting from a standard. So now there’s—like we do a conference every year, and it’s a hundred and fifty people from all over the world showing up. They’re all using the same framework, so now they can compare best practices and how we hire or how we pay or whatever else, and they’re speaking the same language.
Just like a lot of open-source software today, Holacracy is an open-source framework. A lot of open-source software out there gives you this basic plugboard, like Linux or an operating system for your computer, that you can then start from and build on top of. And that’s what I love about Holacracy—it’s coming in with this framework that allows a movement, and that’s exactly what we’re seeing now with thousands of companies all over the world doing Holacracy as their framework for self-management. And it’s helped spread the self-management meme, the ideas, I think in a pretty major way.
Lisa: Yeah, I think so many people I’ve spoken to who have been on the journey to becoming a self-managed organization have said that it’s really difficult to step into nothing, that it can feel really daunting and it can feel like you have to scrap everything and start from scratch. So I think many, many people have found Holacracy really helpful for that—as you say, to not have to start from scratch, to have some alternatives to the traditional processes and structures mapped out that you can step into and then start working together and building from that.
But it’s interesting because already in what you’re talking about, you’re challenging a lot of misconceptions that I had about Holacracy or that I hear a lot of people talking about. So you mentioned that it’s not a one-size-fits-all, that it’s kind of a starting point and customizable. And I think these are a lot of the criticisms that people have of Holacracy—that they misconstrue it as it has to be all or nothing, and that’s it, it’s fixed and you can’t—there’s no flexibility. What are your thoughts on that? Is it frustrating to see those criticisms, and what would you say in response?
Brian: Yeah, you know, I kind of bucket criticisms into two buckets. There’s the ones that feel like they’re just based on misunderstanding, and those, when I read them, I feel sad. Sometimes frustrated, but in my better days I just tune into the sadness of it.
I had created a tool that can really help on a purpose that I really care about, which is changing the way people relate to power. And when I see people that otherwise really get the value of self-management, and then they’ve got these misconceptions—it’s like they think Holacracy is this rigid processor, it’s inhuman—there’s so many of these, and that’s just so sad because it misses the opportunity for them to get something out of the tool.
Even if they don’t use Holacracy itself, just learning how it works, I think, can help whatever you do with self-management. And a lot of people who come to our trainings come in with some of those misconceptions, but they’re still testing the waters. They don’t leave with those.
We had actually one reporter, it was funny—she wrote a whole scathing article on how Holacracy was inhuman. I mean, it got spread around, and so we actually reached out and we said, “Come to our training. Here’s a press pass, free on us. Just come to our training, it’s all we ask. Write whatever you want on the other side of it, just come and experience it.” And she did. And she came up to me afterwards and said, “Oh my god, I was so wrong.” And her experience was, “This is one of the most human ways I’ve seen to run a business.” And she wrote another article on the other side of it, which is cool, but didn’t spread anywhere near as much as the sensationalized “Holacracy is terrible.”
So those criticisms based on misunderstanding leave me sad. The other ones are the ones that are totally fair. I mean, I have criticisms of Holacracy right now. That’s why we version control this thing, and so every time we find real good criticisms, we can evolve it. And we’re a community helping us evolve the rules of the game to address the real criticisms that we’ve seen.
Some of them are challenges with self-management in general that I think we as a community in this work are still figuring out. And some of them are just the challenge of pain. But so when I read those, I get curious and excited. I want the criticisms that are real, that are actually not based on misunderstanding of what it is, but based in deep understanding and aware of the challenges of getting there or the limitations. Because those are the edges I want to push, and we’re gonna push those edges with people talking about them and challenging them. So those are the ones that leave me excited, but unfortunately the mix right now is sadly more of the former.
Lisa: Yeah, yeah. I think I relate to that. Every time I read an article like “How self-management nearly killed my startup” or something like that, and I think, “No, it’s not self-management that nearly killed that.” There’s so many other things, and it doesn’t have a conversation. So I feel your pain.
But I think—I don’t know if you read an article that a friend of mine, Tom Nixon, wrote called “Good Holacracy, Bad Holacracy”?
Brian: Yes, I do remember reading that one. I don’t remember the very specific content though.
Lisa: Yeah, he was someone that had—I mean, in it he kind of apologized for previous things he’d written criticizing Holacracy, because he sat down with a Holacracy coach and was really curious and open and said, “How is it from your perspective? Tell me about this.” And he asked some really challenging questions, and he found that really useful.
And he basically said that there are sort of—there’s bad Holacracy and good Holacracy. Bad Holacracy meaning people who are… you know, like any technology, right? It’s neither good or bad, it’s how you apply it. So bad Holacracy is where people have done it in a top-down way without involving people, or in a really dogmatic way. You know, I think those are perhaps the cases where we hear these complaints of “it feels inhuman” or “we didn’t have a say” or whatever.
Brian: Yeah, there were still some misunderstandings in it, but I won’t have a dialogue about those because there’s just some of these. But I love the general point, which is that it’s a social technology, it’s a practice. You can use it in ways that are really tragically bad, and then you can blame it for all the problems. It’s a tool, it’s a hammer. It can be really useful, but not if you club someone over the head with it.
And that’s the trouble with Holacracy—it’s counterintuitive how to use it. And this is where—and this isn’t my own invention, this was me experimenting for 15 years now and discovering some really fascinating things about this tool that we developed.
And it’s really easy to misunderstand, like the idea of top-down. Even that—people say “Holacracy has to be implemented top-down,” and I think that’s completely missing the point of what this is. And yet there is a top-down decision that goes into it, in the same way there is with any self-management—somebody at the top has to say, “I am giving up wielding power in a top-down, ‘do what I say,’ I’m the central locus of authority here.”
And Holacracy does take that—there is a top-down decision in the way there is with any self-management. But what Holacracy lets you do is that leader, without a framework, ends up falling right back into the leadership of how we do self-management. So it’s ironic that so many quote “non-top-down” approaches to self-management still fall right back on the existing management hierarchy.
Whereas with Holacracy, there is a moment where that leader at the top can say, “I’m adopting a constitutional process. This is how power works. I don’t have power anymore.” And you’ll actually see people, when this is done well, turning to the former CEO and reminding him, “You don’t have the authority to tell me what to do here anymore.” Which is a really interesting shift.
And what enables that is this separate framework. You’re giving power into another framework, and that framework invites everyone to participate. So the mistaken understanding is that the CEO is saying everyone has to quote “do Holacracy,” which is actually kind of nonsensical—Holacracy’s not something to do, it’s a framework for how power gets divided out.
So what the CEO is really doing is saying, “I’m removing power from the management hierarchy, and instead I’m putting it into a process. That’s where power formally is held.” If you try to ignore that, which is a mistake I think a lot of self-management companies make—they try to ignore it, pretend power doesn’t exist, they try to say it’s not in managers anymore without saying where power lies instead—then you get insidious power. You don’t get truly decentralized, distributed power in that. I mean, you do if you get lucky, but it’s really hard. I made that mistake early in my career.
So yeah, it’s so interesting how many of these misconceptions come from like good principles. Of course we don’t want to top-down direct people in what to do and call it self-management—that doesn’t make sense. But you do need to change the way power works, and it’s easy to confuse what Holacracy is doing for the latter.
Lisa: Yeah, I definitely—I’ve had a lot of conversations about, you know, tyranny of structurelessness and misconceptions that self-management means no hierarchy. And then I think you get into these really tricky spaces where you end up with a dark hierarchy or shadow hierarchy. And so I think it’s much healthier to accept that there is like a dynamic hierarchy in groups of human beings, that will naturally have experience or skill set or knowledge or authority or presence or something. And making that visible and conscious is much better than pretending it doesn’t exist, and yeah, as you said, insidious power surfacing.
Brian: Yeah, I think even better—Holacracy is actually less hierarchical than most self-management approaches. Ironically, it’s not even allowing these subtle hierarchies to just show up implicitly. What it’s doing is saying, “What’s explicitly defined? What roles do we need to get our purpose met, and which roles control what?”
So you have this really decentralized way where it’s really clear. You know, in—we do a lot of trainings, so when we’re choosing cities for our trainings, Rebecca leads that effort, and she clearly has decision rights, decision-making authority in that area. But when it comes to the content of our trainings, that’s my area—I decide that. When it comes to what hotels do we use for the training venue, that’s somebody else. And that gets really, really clear.
So you can think of those as little micro-hierarchies, but they’re not a command hierarchy. It’s not anyone commanding anyone else. It’s control of… it’s really decentralized property rights. It’s the same thing we have in society, where we don’t need a local baron because I know what’s my house to live in and what my neighbor’s is, and I know where the property line is.
And so it’s—I’m fascinated by how often people either fall into the tyranny of structurelessness or what I call the tyranny of consensus sometimes, which is where everybody has a voice and you can talk about anything, but you can’t make decisions and drag progress toward your purpose. Or on the other side, it’s really common to see structure or hierarchy of any sort as a command hierarchy—people who can tell people what to do.
Holacracy does use a hierarchy, but it’s not a command hierarchy. It’s a definitional hierarchy of broader circles that get to define boundaries around sub-circles. Or in other words, the broader circle gets to decide, “All right, what is marketing versus sales control? Who controls what?” They don’t get to tell them what to do with the control, just to define the boundary between them, which is a type of hierarchy. And people often confuse that for command hierarchy—people think that the broader circle can tell the sub-circle what to do or whatever, which is totally not the case in Holacracy. And it’s really—yeah, and this is one thing I love about it—this is all new territory for us humans organizing.
Lisa: Totally, and unlearning a lot of stuff in the process too. That’s really the harder part.
Brian: I see that at the beginning of every one of my trainings. The hard part of this isn’t the learning—it’s the unlearning.
Lisa: Yeah, yeah, exactly. What do you think about—because I’ve had a lot of guests on this podcast, for example, that have in their organization either they adopted Holacracy, you know, they did the whole thing, they did it, they’ve invested in it wholly, and then maybe later on they dropped bits and pieces and they kept the pieces that worked really well for them and they integrated other things and invented other structures and processes. And then some organizations that from the beginning just kind of picked and borrowed things, like, “Oh, integrative decision-making—I like that.” “Governance meetings—let’s do that.”
What are your thoughts about that? Is that—is that okay in your eyes? Because I think also I had a misconception or I had this idea in my head that Brian Robertson said that that’s not okay and that’s, you know, it’s all or nothing with Holacracy or “that’s not pure Holacracy.” Or what is your take on all of that?
Brian: I say do what’s useful, right? That’s the beautiful thing about—it’s open source, you can fork it and do anything you want with it. So hey, if somebody’s getting value out of taking a piece of Holacracy, great, go do it. If somebody’s getting value out of trying the whole thing and then going back to just, “Okay, we’re gonna customize the hell out of it,” great, do it.
And from experience, I can tell you this: the companies that I talk to—a lot of companies out there that have done this—the ones that are getting the best results and the most transformational results are the ones that say, “You know what, we’re gonna adopt the entire framework and we’re gonna customize on top of or within that framework, instead of trying to pick and choose pieces of the framework.”
And so I’m not saying you have to do that by any stretch—do what works for you. It’s more just a warning. When I see people trying to adopt it piecemeal, a little piece at a time, they often get really frustrated, and I think for good reason.
The issue is—think of it like a sport, like soccer. There’s a bunch of rules of soccer, and the rules all kind of work together. And if you just adopt one rule and say, “Okay, we’re gonna, you know, we get a point if the ball goes in the goal, but no other rules of soccer; we’re gonna custom craft something”—you might end up crafting a really fun game, maybe. But more likely than not, you end up with some really stupid sport, like people picking up balls and just walking into the goal. And like, how’s that any fun?
And then, of course, the message is, “Holacracy doesn’t work. This is a stupid practice.” And you’re right, that one practice alone is pretty stupid. But it’s when you combine it with all of the other rules that the whole system makes sense. It’s really hard to adopt one piece of a whole intertwined complex system and get value out of it.
It is possible—there are pieces that are separable and can be used, and I have a chapter in my book specifically about which pieces are more separable to use. But so the general warning is, “Be careful.”
And the thing about the framework—the desire to not adopt it wholesale is often from the misunderstanding that it’s a one-size-fits-all that’s gonna tell you exactly how to do your business. And it’s absolutely not that. It’s the opposite of that.
The most common question I get is one I don’t have an answer for, which is, “How does Holacracy do pay compensation?” The most common question I get, second to “How does it fire people?” or “do budgeting?” or something like that—next. And the answer to all of those is: Holacracy doesn’t give you an answer to any of those things. All it does is give you a framework for coming up with your own answer to that and then evolving it over time as you learn.
It’s just a customizable framework; that’s all it is at the core. So it does work better, typically, to adopt the whole customizable framework and then do what it’s meant to do, which is customize within and on top of it, while being really clear the power to do that customization no longer rests with the CEO at the top of a hierarchy—the power to do that customization rests in a governance process.
That’s the ultimate—the one thing we shift with Holacracy, that’s really all it’s doing: it’s saying power is shifting from a person at the top of the hierarchy to a governance process. The rest of it is just spelling out, “Okay, here’s the rules for how you change things in that governance process.” It doesn’t tell you what you should do with it—just, “Here’s the rules of how to go about the process.” And it gives you a language for the output of the process. “Here’s how you define a role and decide who has what power.” It doesn’t tell you who should have what power.
You can use Holacracy ironically if you want. You can centralize all power—you can create a role called “CEO” and give it every authority you want in the entire organization. I don’t know anyone that does that; it’d be dumb. Or you could have something that approximates any other form of self-management you want. If you look at what Morningstar does, you could mimic exactly Morningstar’s approach to self-management with Holacracy as the framework, because it’s not telling you how to do this; it’s giving you the framework and a meta-level to adapt your process for doing self-management and every other process in your business.
Lisa: Yeah, that’s really interesting. That’s clarified something for me in terms of my understanding. And you were starting to touch there on some sort of, I guess, guidelines or best practices for adopting Holacracy, you know, or what you’ve learned in terms of how to best set yourself up for success, I guess.
So what would you say are the prerequisites for introducing Holacracy into your organization? And how can you ensure that the road isn’t going to be super bumpy? Of course it’s going to be a learning process and an unlearning process, but what are some pitfalls that you can avoid?
Brian: Yeah, one of the pitfalls we actually just hit on. It seems so logical to say, “We’re gonna learn this a piece at a time,” so “We’re gonna do just the Holacracy tactical meeting process” or “the governance process” or whatever. And that’s one of the lessons we’ve learned again and again, is that really doesn’t work that well in most cases. And there are cases where it has, so cool. I mean, don’t let me stop you from experimenting. Just go in eyes wide open that usually results in playing one rule of soccer, and the experience of this game sucks.
So that’s one, but that’s not to say you have to do it all perfect. You know, think of how you get to actually play World Cup soccer—you start when you’re six, and you play the sloppiest, messiest game of soccer imaginable. You play six-year-old soccer. But you’re playing by all the rules as best you can, and just accepting you’re six.
Whatever you do is—one of the lessons we’ve learned is, if you really want to do this, adopt all the rules and just accept you’re gonna play six-year-old Holacracy. It’s gonna be sloppy, it’s gonna be messy. That’s part of the learning process—you don’t get to play World Cup your first time on the field. So you know, lesson one—do it. And even if you decide not to do Holacracy, you’ll probably learn through the journey. So that’s one lesson.
And the other is the misunderstandings. I watch out for them. Sometimes people read or hear about Holacracy, and they mistake it for a way of—a form of consensus. And it’s not. Done well, it should not be anything that looks like consensus. It’s distributed autocracy. Holacracy has more autocratic decision-making than a management hierarchy does. The difference is the way you get to define who makes which autocratic decision. And even that process is not using consensus.
So watch out for the habits to default back to consensus. I wrote about that some in my book, and our trainings go deep into what is this new paradigm of decision-making, because it is something new. It does give everyone a voice, but it is not consensus. So it’s a—I think it’s one of Holacracy’s biggest contributions, is this new mode of decision-making. So there’s that; watch out for that.
And of course, get help—get a coach, go to a training, do something. There’s a whole network of coaches that do Holacracy now. You can find them on our website, and there’s trainings all over in all different languages now around Holacracy. And it’s complex; this is one of the downsides of Holacracy. It’s such a major, full-system paradigm shift. Then it’s not something—as much as I would love people to go read my book, I have kind of a love-hate relationship with my book because you can’t just pick up a book.
It’s like trying to learn soccer from a book. You know, you don’t pick up a book on soccer and then say, “I’m an expert player—I’m gonna go do this.” You get a coach, you go to some workshops—out of them. So get help if you can, and accept it’s a five-year journey.
This was a great quote from David Allen—he’s author of “Getting Things Done” and he’s on my board, and has been a long-time Holacracy practitioner. And he had the insight when he first started with this—he said, “You know what? I think this is gonna be a five-year journey, so I’m not looking for a quick fix.” And his orientation to it was, “This is gonna take cultural change, habit change, and this is a five-year journey.” So just be patient and expect that—expect this to be a long-term thing, not a quick fix. And that applies for any kind of self-management, but I think especially Holacracy. If you get really excited—if you go in thinking you’re just gonna quickly do this and it’s gonna be great, you can be disappointed.
Your first six months with Holacracy should be frustrating. And if they’re not, you’re doing it wrong. If it’s not painful in the beginning, you’re probably practicing it the wrong way, because it is changing—it’s building new muscles. And we first used muscles you haven’t used in a long time, they hurt. Those are some top-of-head lessons.
Lisa: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I’m curious—so, it’s interesting what you said about that there are a lot of questions that Holacracy doesn’t answer, and that it’s a framework and people have to answer some of those questions themselves.
And you mentioned as well with this criticism that gets leveled at Holacracy quite a lot in articles I read and conversations I have with people—that Holacracy is really inhuman and kind of mechanistic. And I had a sort of brief experience of Holacracy myself like years ago, so I don’t know how it’s evolved since then in terms of versioning, as you said. But that was one of my questions that I was left with—was sort of—there was something that didn’t allow my humanness to come through in some way.
And I’m sort of wondering about, you know, it’s possible of course with any technology to just port over any toxic behaviors. Or, you know, you can still be a bad boss in Holacracy if you end up being a lead link somehow, and hopefully that doesn’t happen.
But I’m curious if you have any reflections or experiences from what you’ve learned or from stories you’ve heard of perhaps complementary practices that people have brought in to Holacracy to take care of some of that human stuff and the relations stuff?
Brian: Totally. I mean, so many thoughts. I love having conversations about this. So I wrote a blog post—encourage anyone listening who’s curious about this human stuff, if you google “human and Holacracy” and look for my name, you’ll see it.
This is probably the area I’m most passionate about. And I want companies full of love. I want companies where I love the people I work with, and I get to actually be in that energy and that emotion and that bond and that connection. You know, to me, Holacracy is the best path I found to creating an environment where that’s possible. And it doesn’t get you all the way there—it’s not designed to. It’s designed to get everything else out of the way that gets in the way of that at most companies.
But it’s easy to misunderstand. So one of the things that—one of the things Holacracy does in the governance meeting—it does ask you to park your own ego, to say, “This is not for you. You’re showing up in this governance meeting, and you’re putting your own desire to be heard, to whatever it is, secondary to serving the purpose here in this organization, in this meeting.” And there are rules in the meeting that kind of keep that in check, that keep people from taking over for their own personal reasons. And that can feel a little abrasive and inhuman at first.
And it’s the same thing that parents have to do, though, which is—hopefully as a parent, you know that your job is not to use your child as an extension of yourself to get your own needs met. Not so that—“I mean, hey, you want to be self-expressed, so you’re gonna do that through your child,” right? And hopefully as a parent, you realize, “No, I need to own my needs, I need to be self-expressed, but when it comes to my child, I’m putting that aside to be a steward of another entity’s journey in life.”
The governance meeting of Holacracy asks us to do the same. It says, “The organization here is the child. Our role is the parents of this organization—to be its steward for a while.” And the thing about the feeling—governance is one percent of your timeline. One percent of your organizational time is all that’s asked. It’s for one percent of your time to be able to set aside your own desire to express however—whatever ways you want, in service of giving your colleagues space to actually solve tensions and change the business structure for the purpose.
So for one percent of our time, we’re going to be in this super-disciplined process that keeps our own ego agendas out of it for the sake of the purpose and for the sake of our colleagues being able to actually drive change.
And there’s also in that—one of the other things I find so human and respectful—the rules of the same rules that feel inhuman at first are there to protect your colleagues’ space to actually have a voice to drive change with it. And this is the same lesson I’ve learned in my personal life, in my intimate relationships. I’ve learned, you know, when my significant other brings up a tension with me and with our relationship or the way we’re living together or whatever, and she expresses her tension, the worst thing I can do is say, “Oh yeah, well I have a tension too” and like start adding my own stuff and my own frustrations with her. That doesn’t work well. And I think anyone who’s been in intimate relationships or any—like, probably knows that.
It’s actually—it’s much harder to swallow my own desire to just jump in with my tension and just put complete attention on her, and say, “Okay, my job right now is just to express a love and a care by just listening, understanding, and helping her make whatever changes she needs so that she feels complete and can let go of the tension.” And that’s hard—that’s really hard. But that’s exactly what Holacracy is asking us to do.
And it’s got rules, and it’s a facilitated process in governance that’s enforcing that to make sure we do that, that we take one person’s tension at a time. And we don’t all jump in in service of having a voice—it’s, “We’re all gonna have a voice, but we’re not gonna all be in a Coliseum battle for attention.” You know, “If it’s your retention and it’s your turn and it’s your agenda item, I’m not gonna just jump in and take over because I want to talk—I’m gonna really be in service. What is it that you need?” And everyone else’s goal is to support you getting what you need here to dissolve your tension. And then we all have a turn. And I’ll get the same courtesy.
And to me, giving somebody else our presence and our holding them in their experience and their understanding, and then helping them resolve that experience or shift it—to me, that’s among the most human, kind, loving acts I know how to do. And it’s also among the most difficult. And what Holacracy does is help me do that by giving me a framework for it and a facilitator so that I don’t have to be superhuman and perfect. I kind of wish I had that sometimes in my personal relationships, because sometimes I’m frustrated and I don’t do the best nonviolent communication or whatever that I really want to do with my partner.
So it’s so fascinating to me—it’s the very things that make this the most human practice I know that get it misunderstood for being inhuman. Because we often conflate being human with being able to just express ourselves whenever we want and always, you know, get our voice heard. And Holacracy is asking us to do that, but in your turn, and to give your balance that with presence, with listening, and with helping hold somebody else’s space.
And it’s funny, that seems so inhuman. And it is, compared to the way we run companies today, especially in traditional organizations. I think most of your listeners will know the the color model, but most of the green organizations out there write from an Amex—and green will, they’ve almost elevated the exact thing that Holacracy pushes against and says, “No, it’s not about all jumping in and having a voice all the time; it’s about giving each of us a chance to have presence and attention that drive change.” Yeah, and you asked about other practices.
Lisa: Yeah, so nonviolent communication, for example.
Brian: Yeah, that’s that’s one that really is meaningful to me, and yeah, it’s been a transformative practice in my personal life. And Holacracy embeds so many of the principles of that—I’ve had NVC trainers come through my trainings, and on the other side say, “Oh my god, like did you intentionally build NVC into Holacracy?” Which is ironic when people that haven’t been into a deep dive in Holacracy often think it’s the opposite of that.
And the answer is—it wasn’t actually intentional. I didn’t intentionally put that in. I just experimented with what makes sense of what works, and we kind of landed on some of the same principles at an organizational level. So NVC is definitely one.
And another that I’m personally super inspired by is authentic relating. And there’s a whole—it’s not as heard, especially not in the self-management movement yet, but I’d love to change that. And there’s a smaller practices called authentic relating practices that came out of, originally, the Integral Center, which was in Boulder that does really interesting trainings in interpersonal processes.
And I think they’re in readily compatible. Holacracy doesn’t try to be everything. It’s—one of the things it doesn’t give you is a set of interconnection processes or interpersonal processes for dissolving charge with each other or getting to share their understanding of shared worlds. It does that only in a limited context around what we need to get work done together. But I think our cultures benefit tremendously from having a more—a different kind of culture than we see in the mainstream companies today.
And I think that you almost need that to do self-management really well. And I, in my company, I have this insanely amazing culture. I love the people I work with, and I feel so supported and I can barely express it enough. And that’s not just because of Holacracy; it’s because we’ve integrated other practices to create a certain kind of cultural dynamic. We’ve brought people in that want to be part of a more open-hearted, authentic way of relating together. The authentic relating practices, I think, kind of help give a practice to exercise that muscle. So yeah, totally encourage people to check those out if they’re interested. In fact, if you want to interview somebody about it, I’ve got a couple of people I’d love to connect you with that are also doing self-management in their companies.
Lisa: Yeah, yeah, that sounds really good. Thank you for sharing that. On that note, I guess I’m also curious, you know, from a personal perspective, the journey that you’ve been on since you published your book, for example, in 2015. And, you know, Holacracy is growing, as you said—a thousand organizations now, at least, practicing Holacracy. But what kind of personal work have you done, you know, as a founder? And what’s the journey like that you’ve been on?
Brian: It’s funny—I capture my own personal purpose as “I show people a radical new way to organize power.” And one of my board members is also a coach, and for purpose-driven entrepreneurs, one of the things he said to me, he said, “You know, the first person you have to really do your purpose on is yourself if you want to do really world-changing work.” Like, that’s not just a one-time journey—you have to revisit that occasionally.
And I find myself constantly revisiting it myself, constantly working on my own relationship to power, and finding the subtle ways in which, you know, I step into holding power in a way that is maybe not how I want to hold it. And that’s complex—I don’t just mean letting it all go. Part of my journey is really owning power, but in a way that doesn’t disempower others.
One of the common mistaken understandings people have of Holacracy is that it strips power away from the CEO or founder or managers, and that’s really not the point. What it does is raise power of everyone else in the system. So one of the things that I see managers often doing in a self-managed environment is letting go of too much power. And they’re looking at it as either they’re using power and that’s bad, or they’re letting go of power and that’s good.
And one of the things that my work—and I constantly have done this on myself—is realizing that’s a overly simplistic, reductionist spectrum. The question is, “Where, in what ways, and how am I using power?” I have just as much duty as anyone else to step up and own and lead in my roles, but I have just as much duty as everyone else to move into being a good follower when it’s somebody else’s role that’s making a decision or leading in a different area. And so navigating that is a constant part and practice myself.
And the other thing that for me has been a really powerful journey—some of what we’re talking about around the culture—I’ve always been interested in culture, but lately I found myself really… it’s almost like Holacracy gives me a baseline that gets all the egos out of the way, and now what can we build on top of that framework in the interpersonal connection space. And so I’ve started talking more about about that—I’ve started looking in a much deeper way of, “Now that we have this way of giving each other the gift of our presence and all that, can we improve the capacity of quality of our presence? How can we do all of that work?”
And I gave a talk at a… there’s a business conference in Madrid actually recently—it’s a pretty more conventional conference, like people all in suits and ties. I gave my standard keynote on Holacracy, but they asked me to stick around and listen to these other talks and then comment on them afterwards. And I watched speaker after speaker talk about, “How do we change people in companies?” and “How do we get them to align with the new corporate strategy or initiatives or whatever?” And it was a little depressing listening to it all—like, it was well-meaning.
But then they asked me at the end to comment on it. And my comment was, I’m reminded of a quote from Mother Teresa, of all people, who spoke at a business conference. And this is a little note back—Mother Teresa gave a talk at a business conference once. And she wasn’t scheduled to speak, but she was in the same town, and the conference organizers found out, so they invited her kind of like a last-minute deal. And this was a big business conference, like big conventional kind of business crowd. And she listened for a while—she got on stage, and it was also people talking about changing people.
And I just—why I remembered and shared this quote with this audience—and what she said was, “I don’t know much about business, but I know this: You want to change people? Well, do you know them and do you love them? Because until you know them and until you love them, you’re not gonna change them. And before you can do that, do you know yourself, and do you love yourself?”
And so, you know, I shared that quote, and I said, “We’re talking so much about changing environments and systems and processes around people, which that’s what my work’s about too—I get it, that’s important. And we need to balance that with these other shifts in our way of being. And you know, if we want more change, we need more love. And you can’t make someone love others—you can’t go to people and say, ‘Okay, we need more love in this environment, so your job is to love more.’”
What you can do is start revealing more authentically who you are—give people the opportunity to see you and to find something to love in you, and then do the same for them. Really try to see them and find a way of holding them with love. And like, you can do that. And as anyone in a business, you can just go change the way you show up. And that can be a virus itself.
And I think if we really want these new paradigm companies, as much as we need frameworks like Holacracy—there—I think it’s important—I’m a huge fan of Holacracy, I think it’s the best thing to happen to self-management in the past thirty years—and it is totally insufficient. It is not enough. We need more love, and no framework is gonna provide that, no process is gonna provide that. That starts with people choosing to show up.
And that’s been an area for me that—and I’m not—this is not an area I would claim a major amount of expertise, and I’m still in this journey. I’m still trying to figure out what gets in my way of showing up as open-hearted as I want to be, as loving as I want to be. You know, what’s in my way, and how can I work on myself to show up more that way? And I’ve been in that journey, and I want to be in that journey with other people who are in that inquiry together in the company, as we get work done together. How cool is that? I’m sorry—I’m on my soapbox.
Lisa: No, it’s very—it’s very compelling, and I’m right there with you. I think it’s like, self-management starts with the self, I think, and awareness and consciousness and—yeah. And then I really like what you say about getting to know people and knowing them and loving them and starting from there instead of making assumptions. And I think that’s a big step.
I started the conversation by saying that we were talking about criticisms of Holacracy, and you said that you had a lot of criticisms yourself, and that’s why you do versions. And so I’m curious to know, like, what are some of the current challenges or tensions, I guess—to use Holacracy—that have been raised from within Holacracy, or from some of the organizations using Holacracy? What are some of the things that you’re working on to kind of continue to tweak and make it, you know, even better?
Brian: So there’s some in the method itself—the rules of the game—and then there’s some in the way we deploy those rules. And I’d say at this point, probably 80% of the learning is in the latter. The rules of the game, they’re pretty damn good when you can do them well. That most common thing I hear from entrepreneurs or CEOs that have gone through to the other side and sustained the Holacracy option for a couple years is, “I would never go back. And the journey to getting there was so hard.”
And most of the ones that fail—I mean, almost every single case I can think of where they choose not to continue with Holacracy—it’s not because of something in the rules. When you really dig in with expertise, it’s because of the pain and challenge of making the shift to them, of getting the rules even in practice.
So a lot of the learning is on that. We’re experimenting with more agile ways of rolling this out. We do our coaching engagements with clients—because every company… this is one of the challenges—we kept designing something and realizing it was great for the company we designed it for, and not many other companies, because every company seems to run into their own unique challenges in the rollout.
So we started really shifting to creating as many tools as we can and having a bigger toolbox and a more agile approach to applying them. We’re skinning for other tools of how to help people with the habit changes and behavior changes that are needed. It’s especially hard when companies don’t have a coach, so we’re creating as many either free or cheap tools as we possibly can to help people that are in the do-it-yourself market have some chance of succeeding. Because it’s really hard to succeed with Holacracy when you’re completely doing yourself, when you have no training, no coach. It has succeeded, but the failure rate is like 97% probably. Without any training or coaching, it’s ridiculously hard to even know if you’re doing it right. So we’re trying to create tools for that.
We have a whole… one of the things we realized is intellectually getting it is not enough—there’s so many habit changes. So we created this whole habit change program of rolling out different habits and different lessons. We’ve built that into our software tool, GlassFrog. So we have all these like more focused habit change tools now.
And then when it comes to changes to the method, these are the ones I get really excited about, but it’s pretty geeky. The people that care about that level are pretty small. But they’re little things we’re finding—edge cases where the rules are too rigid for a specific case. So for example, there’s an election process in Holacracy that’s a, you know, minor, a little example. And right now, the rules do not let you do it asynchronously—you have to do it in a meeting, which works fine for most teams. But it really doesn’t when you’ve got like a team full of people on call center phones that like literally can’t get all together in a meeting, or sometimes just due to time zones.
So the next version of Holacracy—we’re actively working on now is Version 5—and we change that rule. Now there’s a way to do the election process asynchronously. And there’s lots of little tweaks like that, and most of them are—they’re only gonna be relevant for a small percentage of companies doing Holacracy. But for that small percentage, they really help—they make things just more flexible.
And there’s lots of little tweaks like that. You can actually see it—it’s maintained. Holacracy, the rules, the same way like an open-source software package—it’s on GitHub, which is the same tool used by a lot of open-source software. There’s a whole community drawn from people doing Holacracy everyday in companies that are feeding back the edge cases they found where the rules seem too inflexible or too loose. Sometimes it’s like, “We need a rule here because we just devolved into consensus swamp,” or whatever. And so we’re finding the edge cases and either making rules more flexible, carving them back.
And each version gets simpler as well—we find ways to get you less rules to still get you enough of the framework. So we’re actually seeing with each successive version, there are less words, less rules, it’s easier to read. Yeah, so that’s an interesting direction of the evolution of this as well.
Lisa: That’s interesting, because I know a lot of people say that that’s a barrier for them—that it’s quite technical language, which is understandable, I guess, because you come from the software world. So it’s good to hear that that’s part of the evolution, is making it more and more accessible.
Brian: Yeah, it’s—there’s an interesting misunderstanding there again, going back to my soccer metaphor. If you wanted to learn soccer, would you pick up the official FIFA manual and read it as a way of learning? If you did, it’s a hundred and forty-four pages of highly technical rules. If you wanted to learn soccer and you’ve read the hundred and forty-four page technical manual, the FIFA official soccer rulebook, you would probably conclude this is a really stupid game. It’s bureaucratic, it’s overly structured, it’s overly rigid—all the same things you hear about Holacracy sometimes.
But if you just get out in the field with somebody who knows how to play and you play the game, you don’t experience it that way. And the rules are in the background. What the rules do is make it so there’s not one person, call them the team captain, who makes up the rules as they go. And at any point it really kind of serves their interests, they can say, “There’s a rule against that—you can’t do it that way. You have to do it my way.”
Having a rulebook and saying, “We’re playing by these rules” gives you a framework that lets you not rest power on one captain, or on consensus—on, “No, we all have to agree. Whenever there’s something off, we’re gonna fall back to a big, slow consensus process.”
If you’ve never played a complex board game or sport, it’s awesome to have a rulebook, ‘cause you can go look up a rule when you need it. But God, it sucks to learn the rules that way. Like, I play a bunch of board games too, and I don’t want to—I don’t want to play a board game by reading the rulebook if it’s complex. I want to—I just find some friends that play the game, and they’ll teach me, and then I’ll look up rules when I need it.
So the same is true with Holacracy—don’t try to read the rulebook, don’t learn it that way. That’s just to give you something to hold power that’s not a CEO and a management hierarchy, and it’s there for a reference. And learn—if I’m playing the game with someone who’s played it before, you know, do it—learn by doing. That’s how you learn soccer, not by reading a rulebook.
Lisa: Totally. I’m having this like, strange experience now where I feel like I’ve been gossiping behind a friend’s back or something because I know that I’ve had conversations, even on this podcast, where I’ve been guilty of many of these misconceptions that you’ve cleared up. So I feel like I owe you an apology for misrepresenting Holacracy in my own work.
Brian: I love that. Gossiping behind the friend’s back—this is my secret plan, is just to be so friendly. I get it. Ironically, I’d be one of those people if I just encountered this in what I hear from an arm’s-length about it—I’d be skeptical as hell, you know?
Like, Holacracy is not the framework I would have built if I sat down to say, “Let me build a self-management framework.” It was the one that came out when I said, “I just want to experiment,” and I just listened to where the experiments were leading me. And a lot of it is kind of counterintuitive until you really see how it comes out in practice. And then it’s so intuitive and it’s so human. But getting there is a challenge.
So yeah, I love that you’re calling that out, and big, open-arm umbrella hug—anyone who wants to come to this is welcome. We love to have people, including people who are still really skeptical. I love it when people come into my trainings skeptical and they want to challenge it, and that’s how you learn best.
And frankly, I don’t want to push Holacracy because it’s my thing. I want self-management. I want a world where people have a new relationship to power—that’s my purpose. And I don’t care whether that’s Holacracy or something else. I think Holacracy is a really good tool—I have a vested interest in it, yes, of course. But I want it to be challenged, I want it to be better. I mean, that’s what drives its own evolution. So please, if anyone else is listening and is in the same experience that you just said, awesome.
Lisa: Yeah, I think it’s been very enlightening for me because I’ve always been a fan of elements of Holacracy, and I use a lot of it in my work and when I’m coaching organizations. But now I feel like I can sort of talk to people about that—that Holacracy doesn’t have to be this rigid, you know, one-size-fits-all thing, and it’s not a cure-all, and that there are complementary practices and things. And I like your invitation for people to adopt it and then, you know, create solutions for themselves to answer those questions that Holacracy intentionally doesn’t answer.
Brian: Totally, yes, absolutely.
Lisa: So are there any final words that you’d like to leave listeners with about Holacracy or self-management in general that you would like to share?
Brian: Yeah, so I mentioned my purpose and my company’s purpose is “evolve humanity’s relationship to power,” which—I mean, really—I think anyone who’s doing self-management today is doing a piece of something in that direction.
And I—my own sense is, this is such important work. It feels like such… I don’t know, I’m biased obviously, but I want to see a world where this isn’t just what we do in our companies. And I just—I feel a lot of appreciation and gratitude that I get to be part of this world, in this community, and contribute to it. And appreciation for anyone on this journey, whether with Holacracy or not.
And I want to know what happens when we have a society where people are not looking to the leaders to solve things and save the day, and looking to whatever—the politics, the government leaders—but are just going out and taking responsibility for building the world we want together, and using power together differently.
And yeah, I just—I love that movement, that purpose, and just invite anyone who’s interested—maybe Holacracy can be helpful in some way to you. And open-minded—come check it out. At the very least, you learn why you don’t like it and take something from it. Best maybe it’s… it’s not quite the evil tool that it is sometimes made out to be, or the one-size-fits-all solution. I think the opposite to that. It’s the perfect silver bullet to everything—it’s not. It’s none of those. It’s just a tool. You want to change people’s relationship to power—pick it up, try it out, it’s pretty useful.
Lisa: Brian, thank you so much for coming on the podcast and sharing all of those insights. It’s been really clarifying for me, and I really appreciate you taking the time.
Brian: Yeah, thank you for having me. I love getting to talk to people that are actively interested in self-management. It’s so near and dear to my heart. Thank you for making this happen and for having this podcast.
