Experimenting with Holacracy (kinda)

Let’s start with the caveat (the best way to start “a thing” I find). I was only part of the Holacracy for a few months before leaving the organisation so this is based on about 6 months leading up to the implementation and then 2–3 months “living” with Holacracy.

Nielsen Norman Group Style Summary:

It was bloody fabulous and a significant improvement on what we had before. The improvement wasn’t necessarily attributed to the Holacracy but the Holacracy structure helped (A LOT).

This isn’t a “how to do Holacracy” article, it’s just a story. I very greatly admire Jason Fried and all of his teachings (REWORK built the foundations for my leadership style & general attitude to work) but after disagreeing with him on the value of Holacracy, I thought I’d put pen to paper to air my experience. There have been many articles written about the pros & cons of Holacracy (this ain’t one of those). Very few of these articles seem to have been written by people who’ve actually tried Holacracy. While my experience was brief, non-empirical and inconclusive, it was experience of actually trying to build and maintain a holacratic practice, so with that in mind, I thought I’d share brief summary (though less-brief than the summary above).

The journey to Holacracy when someone sent me an article (around early 2015) about Zappos’ Holacracy adoption. I bought and consumed the book and while it sounded very strange, it also acted as a beacon of hope (as a side note, this lead onto reading Reinventing Organisations which I’d highly recommend). I thought about and vocalised my interest in Holacracy within my team. For a bit of context, prior to adopting a Holacracy I “managed” a team of 17 User Experience Designers and Researchers.

At the end of 2015, I’d put a proposal together for changes to my team. I “knew” adopting a Holacracy was a pipe dream so I broke my proposal down into (the 3 outcomes aren’t part of a scale or linked BTW, the only link is a gradual shift towards greater open-mindeness):

1. What I’d like to happen = Holacracy
2. What I propose we do= Closer alignment to Lean methodologies
3. What I’d secretly be satisfied with = Actually following Scrum

Not for a second did I think that the organisation I was working for would be brave enough to embrace Holacracy so it sat on my pipe dream list.

Fast forward 6 months and I’d been privileged enough to have Eleonora Zucconi, Luke Chircop, Frances Maxwell & Dan Beeston at the help of our US ship. I pretended to be in charge but the reality was, these 4 people were captaining our UX vessel. To my astonishment (and elation) they’d come to me asking if I’d support the adoption of a Holacracy just within the UX function on our organisation (I know Brian Robertson strongly advises against “micro-holacracys” within organisations but we wanted to just play with it).

Of course, I wholeheartedly approved such an idea so long as we tactfully sold the idea into the organisation and we did our best to mitigate any damage that the adoption caused.

Then, in true holacratic style, I absolved whatever power I had into the Holacracy. We still had to pretend we had a hierarchy (HR would’ve shat themselves) but so far as we were concerned, I no longer had any special powers (I retained the right to wear my underpants outside of my trousers) and we sought to build and document our holacratic structure with an egalitarian mindset.

Now before I go any further, there were some very important factors that enabled us to get to this position, and I ought to be honest about them. The team in question had a very special relationship. I trusted (and trust to this day) each and every one of the initial cohorts implicitly and totally. In an effort to level the paying field and ensure I was not seen as superior, I needed to make a gesture that would put the control in the hands of the team as a collective, not with me alone. The way I chose to do that was by divulging my salary (something I think I could’ve been sacked for). Truth be told, a moth earlier I’d bee on a leadership training course and the chairperson had raised the problem that lack of salary transparency caused. When you walk into a room or join a new team, you can’t help but try to evaluate everyone:

Is Susan more important than me?

I wonder if Gary is above or below me in the organisation

Do I earn the least amount of money here?

So basically, it was my employers’ fault for putting the idea in my head. Anyway… I say this not to sound impressive and brave (though of course, I am both of those things ; ) but to highlight the importance of making a gesture to prove you want egalitarianism, not just with a gesture actually, but by writing your own death warrant and then leaving your team to sign it at their desecration.

Anyway, where was I….

We started off drafting what we thought the purpose of our organisation (the UX team) ought to be. This would then guide the creation of the respective circles within it. We were mindful throughout that if we presented something that looked totally alien to the rest of the business, it would be shot down before it took it’s first breath. Thus, we ensured that we stayed true to our actual vision of perfection but packed and PR’d it in a fashion that was palatable to those for whom “Holacracy” was an ancient form of Eastern homeopathy.

We then set about forming these conversations was by following the structure of a Holacracy Governance Meeting. Credit goes to Eleonora for getting this going. This was really our first foray into Holacracy and still forms my fondest memories of working within a Holacracy. For anyone who thinks Holacracy has no structure (and most people seem to) I suggest you sit as a fly on the wall of any well versed Holacracy’s Governance Meeting. We all fell in love (OK, maybe love is a tad strong) with the structure of these meetings. Combined with the trust and patience we’d developed this structure meant:

• No more willy waggling (there appears to be an inverse correlation with the amount of willy to waggle and the proclivity to willy waggle) to get your “Oh so important” opinion across.
• No more wasted hours either bickering about something irrelevant, agreeing in deferent words, going so far off topic that meeting attendees actually expire.
• No more secret or hidden agendas.
• No more “Yeah, hey guys. I thought we’d just get together for 6–7 hours and just chew the fat, y’know, just have a brain jam or do some blue sky dreaming”.

The Governance Meetings, in short, were a blessing. We also tried (and failed) to introduce Tactical Meetings (not really understanding their significance). Our findings could probably be summarised as follows. When establishing your Holacracy (while you’re all learning), stick to just Governance Meetings (and lots of them). I loathe meetings as much as the next person (for the reasons aforementioned), but when all of your meetings become fun and productive, I promise, you’ll want to spend all day in a fucking Governance Meeting.

We took it in turns to be the chairperson of the meeting so we all had a stab at it. We learned that the subject matter for the Governance Meeting and the Holacracy knowledge/experience of the chairperson had a dramatic effect on the success of the meeting. Very quickly we tried to “interpret” the rules of the meeting which left us swimming uphill in a soup of tepid treacle (while blindfolded (and gagged)). I short, until you really get the meetings, follow them to the T (but in reality, go off-piste so you learn this lesson for yourself).

After about a month of tinkering, we’d hatched a plan that we thought would best support the team. Then (stupid, I know) we thought “Oh shit, we should probably let the team in on this”. So before taking this new utopian vision to our illustrious leaders, we followed the advice process and individually, interviewed the team to understand what their perception of our problems were. We then sanity checked our plan with their concern and realised…

“Ah fuck! We’ve got it all wrong”

Yup, we’d all gleefully gone of and designed something we wanted but clearly hadn’t properly understood the problem. I know; we’re supposed to be the UXers!

Caps in hand, we went back to the drawing board and devised a new plan. With hindsight, perhaps this plan could’ve been devised in closer collaboration by the team but truth be told, we thought that it would take forever to get everyone on board and up to speed (feel free to know exclaim “WHAT YOU’VE DONE IS NOWHERE NEAR A HOLACRACY”). Nonetheless, our iteration on the plan seemed groovy and (broadly) had buy in from the team.

Now you’re thinking: “So it all went beautifully and you’re now a fully fledged Holacracy, right?”

Things that went wrong

1. It can take a long time to unlearn the authority you once had. I’d often (completely innocently) make decisions while we were forming on behalf of the team without bringing the decisions into a Governance Meeting. This was largely because the decision affected others outside of the Holacracy and while we were learning, I a) didn’t want to damage the objective view of what we were trying to do by making tardy decisions b) found that as we were learning the ropes, things took longer to decide. This was a fault of mine and one that was quickly aired (tension processed) and addressed. That said, I think I slipped up a few times subsequently.
2. Not involving everyone on the journey. I’m not sure if we had done this from the start whether it would’ve ground to a halt but clearly, attempting to develop a Holacracy Constitution on behalf of a team isn’t necessarily within the spirit of a Holacracy. That said, we knew the Constitution could always be changed and we were all happy to embrace that.
3. We tried to mess with the system. As mention before, we tried to a freeball a lot (especially when Eleonora wasn’t around to keep us in check) and chaos would usually ensue. I wouldn’t necessarily say you shouldn’t try to go off-piste, it’s almost worth it to learn the lesson, just know that it worked best for us when we followed it to the letter.

So that’s about it for now. As I say, I left shortly after the adoption of our micro-Holacracy so maybe in the future, one of the remaining cohorts can write a post on how things went subsequently.

I’d also like to give thanks to John Hayes who was my boss at the time. I think it’s fair to say that John and I didn’t always see eye to eye but the fact all of this was able to happen is credit to the immense amount of trust & freedom he afforded me/us.

So, in summary (I know, another bloody summary), what we didn’t wasn’t 100% Holacratic. In fact, it was probably about 1% Holacracy & 20% Teal 79% well intended fumbling. We know that. That said, the little bits of Holacracy we used seemed to work (for me at least). I’m still not entirely sure there isn’t room for a bit of singleminded ego driven “I’m gonna fucking do this, like it or not” to get the ball rolling. Maybe that’s just me :)