HOLOCRACY

An Extreme Take on Restructuring: No Job Titles, No Managers, No Politics

It's true with a lot of conflicts at work in general — what looks like interpersonal conflicts are often conflicts of organizational "roles" with competing goals. Because the two are fused in conventional organization, those conflicts are seen as interpersonal, and politics is often just a covert way of going about them.

Holacracy is a distributed authority system – a set of “rules of the game” that bake empowerment into the core of the organization. Unlike conventional top-down or progressive bottom-up approaches, it integrates the benefits of both without relying on parental heroic leaders. Everyone becomes a leader of their roles and a follower of others’, processing tensions with real authority and real responsibility, through dynamic governance and transparent operations

Governance clarity enables most work to get done by clear roles using clear authority, outside of painful meetings and group consensus-seeking. On the ground, a team’s operational flow is synchronized by regular Tactical Meetings that facilitate rapid-fire triage of key issues. Anything in the way of getting the work done gets identified and processed into clear next-actions and target outcomes. In Tactical Meetings:

·         Every agenda item gets processed every meeting, on-time every-time

·         The focus is on next-actions, not endless analysis

·         Metrics are surfaced and checklists are reviewed – quickly

·         No one hides – radical transparency shows all progress, or lack thereof

Holacracy is a real-world-tested social technology for agile and purposeful organization. It radically changes how an organization is structured, how decisions are made, and how power is distributed. Holacracy leads to...

Lean & Adaptable Organization: Dynamic steering applied to organizational design. The process focuses on minimally sufficient improvements, to address concrete tensions and move forward.

Highly Effective Meetings: Different meeting processes for Operations & Governance guarantee a rigorous focus on the work. The result: clear outcomes, no waste of time, no ego domination.

Clearly Distributed Authority: Managers are no longer needed, the leadership function is now distributed. The result: faster, more appropriate decisions by more engaged and autonomous workers.

Purpose Driven Work: Beyond stakeholders and shareholders, Purpose is the bottom line of holacratic organizations. And it's not just talk: the purpose is structurally reflected in everyday work

Tactical Meeting Process 

Check-in Round Goal:  Notice what’s got your attention, call it out, let it go.  Sacred space: no cross-talk. Get present, here and now; grounds the meeting.  

Checklist Review Goal:  Bring transparency to recurring actions. Facilitator reads checklist of recurring actions by role; participants respond "check" or "no- check" to each for the preceding period (e.g. the prior week).

Metrics Review Goal:  Build a picture of current reality. Each role assigned a metric reports on it briefly, highlighting the latest data.

Project Updates Goal:  Track updates to key projects of the circle.  The Facilitator reads each project on the circle’s project board and asks: “Any updates?” The project’s owner either responds “no updates” or shares what has changed since the last meeting. Questions allowed, but no discussion.

Agenda Building Goal:  Build an agenda with placeholder headlines.  Build agenda of tensions to process; one or two words per item, no discussion.

Triage Issues Goal:  Get through all agenda items in the allotted time. To Resolve Each Agenda Item:

1. Facilitator asks:  “What do you need?”

2. Agenda item owner engages others as-needed

3. Capture any next-actions or projects requested & accepted

4. Facilitator asks:  “Did you get what you need?”    

Closing Round Goal:  Harvest learning from the meeting.  Each person can share a closing reflection about the meeting; no discussion.

This past November, the CEO of Zappos, the successful online shoe retailer, called the company’s employees together for an all-hands meeting and made an extraordinary announcement: Zappos would become a “holocracy”, to achieve full-on holocracy-hood by December 2014. Instead of the customer-focused yet relatively conventional hierarchy, he was revamping the organization into a new structure with no job titles and no managers, in which all work is done in circles.

-          Sally Helgesen in S+b and http://holacracy.org/how-it-works

Swim-Lane Diagrams

Swim Lane (also called Rummler-Brache) Diagrams are process flow diagrams which also trace the interconnections between processes, departments and teams.

This approach focuses on the interconnections between departments and teams, and helps you spot more clearly issues and possible improvements you can make with the system.

Here is a simple manufacturing example showing what the swim lane diagram for the manufacturing process can look like the following:

Once the diagram is complete, it is easy to see who is responsible for what and it is also easy to start identifying potential inefficiencies. The diagram technique helps you break down your process so you can spot the bottlenecks, redundancies, and other causes of inefficiency, and so get on with improving your business process.

Creating and Using Rummler-Brache Diagrams

The first step to spotting inefficiencies and making improvements is to break down your organization's processes into manageable level of detail.

If you are trying to find strategic inefficiencies, then analyzing every process in detail is unnecessary and cumbersome. Here you might assign each main functional area to a swim lane and look at the interchanges in and between them. This would help you spot disconnects between functional areas of the business.

If you were trying to diagnose inefficiencies in your hiring and recruitment process then you would look at specific roles, departments and perhaps some key individuals and assign these to the swim lanes.

For a comprehensive approach, you may start by analyzing the processes and organization using high level swim lane diagrams. Then, once you have spotted areas you need to focus on, you can drill down there using more detail diagrams.

List the participants in the far left column of the diagram. Assign each of these participants to a horizontal band (swim lane). It is helpful to assign the swim lanes in sequence, with the first column assigned to the participant who provides the first input. (For customer facing processes, this is often the customer.)

List the step or activities required at each stage of the process. Follow through the process sequentially. Remember you are mapping how the process is currently being done – not how you think it should be done. The key to creating a useful diagram is to keep it as simple as possible. Try not to include too many loop backs (unless you are focusing on exceptions) – and keep the process mapping moving forward.

Analyze the diagram for potential areas of improvement. Are there any gaps or steps missing? Is there duplication? Are there overlaps, where several people or teams perform the same task or activity? Are there activities that add no value?

Once you have identified potential areas for improvement, the next step is to decide how to address the issues and make changes. Rummel-Brache diagrams can also be used at this stage to map out the proposed process changes. As with any proposed changes in the organization, the pros and cons need to be analyzed, and any change that follow must be carefully planned.

For example, if you are considering removing duplicate processes, you must first look at whether there is a legitimate need and also what would be the impact of removing the duplication.

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