Demistifying Holacracy complexity : Roles
Purpose of this post: since the vast majority of web posts related to holacracy focus on its complexity, I’d like to spend a few words in helping people understand why the perceived complexity is there and how what we’ve been calling “simple” so far, is, in reality, more complex than we think.
I will start by agreeing with the generic premise of holacracy complexity: holacracy is not simple, it adds rules to a context that has matured in a total lack of clear syntactic rules for over a century. Therefore, at least on paper, holacracy is inherently more complex than hierarchical management.
Besides the rules that each organization gives to itself, in fact, there are basically no rules to hierarchical management per se. You may have a boss (if you are not at the top of the organization) and you may be managing team members (if you are not at the bottom), that’s it, the rest is made of best practices (project management theories), culture decks (“we believe in these values and if you are a good manager/team member you will follow them”) and a bunch of other documents (org charts, process documents).
In day by day organizational life though, we all know that we are subject to a plethora of implicit rules that emerge from that vacuum (think about it the next time you spend 10 minutes deciding whom of your colleagues you will put in the CC field of an email and in what order, and why….)
Those rules are commonly referred to as “management style”, they are not written, we all like to believe they do not exist, but they are there…They are a compendium of tacit behaviours your manager expects you to follow, the DOs and DON’ts that have emerged from daily organizational practice, they live in the back of your brain, where they emerged by competing with other principles in shaping the way you survive at work.
Now let’s assume for a while that those rules were all made explicit, would it still make sense to try to reduce them to the bare minimum? And how many rules would be too many or to few?
It is generally accepted that the fewer the rules the easier it is to follow them, but it is also accepted that if the rules are not well balanced in terms of depth and complexity, the fewer the rules, the higher will be the freedom/ambiguity of interpretation . On one hand such freedom is also a very good thing because it augments autonomy, one of the three pillars of intrinsic motivation for humans at work (the other two being: purpose and mastery). But with freedom comes responsibility, and fewer rules require a stronger culture to produce good results. And what is culture if not a set of implicit rules?
It looks like we are in front of a circular problem. By reducing formal rules to the absolute minimum a new problem arises: how do we enforce a good and positive culture that allows us to work with very few rules?
Culture can and must be communicated, but in order for it to stick on the basis of pure communication you would need such critical mass of well aligned culture agents, that people would feel a stronger discomfort when their actions are not aligned to culture, and would therefore act in coherence with what the organization culture prescribes. Great! But now how are we supposed to create that critical mass in the first place?
People need to have a clear idea, of what behaviours are admitted and encouraged and what are not. Acting in alignment with culture must make a measurable difference for individuals when they have freedom of choice, and this translates to rules that state exactly that.… In conclusion it looks like in order to end up with few explicit rules we need to start either from a pre-existing strong culture, or to create that culture by initially adopting more rules….
Holacracy proposes its own approach to solving this circular issue: if the organization wants to cut the dependency link between results and the mere luck of finding, chosing, keeping good managers (vs bad ones) it needs to adopt some rules that take those good qualities out of personal discretion and encode them into the organization’s DNA. If successful, such an approach would also produce a great side effect: it would avoid the transformation of good managers into bad ones (many of us has seen this happen under stressful circumstances)
This is what holacracy tries to do, it creates a context in which those with good leadership traits can still express them to their full potential while bad leaders loose the power to harm the organization and the people
Holacracy does this in many ways but I will focus only on roles in this post.
Let’s first look at how a generic team (circle) is structured in holacracy.
Holacracy organizes teams in a hierarchy of containment which is self-similar (holons) much like romanesco broccoli, this means that a team contains roles, but it is itself a role, teams and roles are basically the same thing conceptually. In other words if a team contains another team, the outermost team can expect the inner one to behave just as if it was a single role, with its accountabilities, as if just a single person was filling that role. This is a neat approach to hierarchy because it reduces complexity by treating the inner components as “blackboxes” from the operational/governance point of view of their containers (but holacracy is based on full transparency so anybody can read the accountabilities of any roles in the organization and engage other organization members freely ).
In order to put the aforementioned safeguarding rules in place holacracy then splits the manager role in 4 predefined role types, some (but not all) of these can be filled by the same person, so the downward limit to how small a team can be is very low (2 people: theoretically possible but ridiculous, 3 or more would be better)
Lead Link: the outer membrane of the circle, but a team member like others, he represents the entire team (and all contained teams) as if they were collapsed in one single role when interacting with the rest of the organization. He sits at the “border of the blackbox”, much like a traditional manager. He sets the strategy and defines priorities, but the existence of the lead link doesn’t limit in any way the possibility for team members to interact with members of other teams through the membrane, exchange information or even take on actions and projects at will, it is just a shortcut to optimize communication and an official point of reference. The lead link can assign people to the roles that perform work (defined roles) but cannot decide independently which roles must exist and which not (that’s up to the team to decide collectively, another rule to prevent bad management style from becoming a single point of failure for the entire team)
Rep Link: he is the inner membrane of the circle, and decides which of the tensions emerging inside the team are worth bringing to the rest of the organization to be dealt with. Why do we need him? Why do we need this split between Lead and Rep links? Think about the times when as a manager you have felt as if you were filling a sandwich position, your bosses were asking you to impose stuff on the team, while the team was asking you to solve issues that were conflicting with those orders… Now those two forces get separate channels to express their voice (Holacracy mandates that these two roles cannot be filled by the same person, and for a good reason…)
(notice how the Lead Link + Rep Link combination reflects the phospholipid structure of cells in byology and these two roles somehow realize the equivalent of osmotic pressure in the way the team communicates with the environment)
Facilitator: when meetings take place, the only way to allow everyone to voice their opinions, make proposals, raise objections, in an orderly fashion and contribute to their maximum potential, is to have someone govern the meeting process, this is the only way to prevent politics, personality traits, voice tones, from dominating the meeting flow and distorting final decisions. It must not be the manager, because leadership has nothing to do with process enforcement, it could be the secretary, however, especially in live meetings condensing the two roles into one may slow down meeting speed.
Secretary: in traditional management most of the rules to which team members conform, live in the head of the manager (management style), the manager can change them at any time at his own discretion (good managers usually involve the team in the process but it’s their choice). In holacracy implicit rules hold no weight, rules, when needed, are produced by an inclusive meeting process (called Integrative Decision Making) to which the whole team participate. The secretary is the custodian of both such team produced rules and the basic rules of the game which are mostly invariant (expressed in the Holacracy Constitution, an open source document). What do I mean by custodian? When there are doubts about rule interpretation he decides which interpretation is correct. The secretary usually assists the Facilitator in running meetings by updating official governance records in real time as they are modified during the meeting process.
Facilitators, Rep Link, and Secretary are elected by the team members, the Lead Link is usually appointed by the Lead Link of the containing team (much like a traditional manager is nominated by his boss)
The definition of the remaining roles that exist in the team are at complete discretion of the team itself, they are the roles needed to perform business and activities in the specific domain/market/environment where the organization operates, these are called the defined roles. Defined roles can be multi- filled (many people filling the same role) and one person can (and usually does) fill more than one role, even across teams. Team members meet every once in a while and adjust defined roles as they see fit by sensing and responding to what happens inside and outside the organization, entire teams can be destroyed or created in a single meeting (remember a team is just a role in the team that contains it because of the self similarity principle we mentioned before) this is the power that this specific ruleset brings to the table.
In holacracy teams are not segregated groups of people competing for attention and success, they are just the expressions of how work must be divided to satisfy the organization purpose. Anyone can belong to many teams at the same time, and put their talents at the service of the organization in many forms.
The existence of the roles is detached from assignment of people to those roles, a role sparks into existence as “unfilled”, which means as a chunk of work that the organization feels it needs to be performed, regardlessly of the people that are available in that precise moment.. When it feels that need it must write it down somewhere, because that very need is useful organizational knowledge.
Conclusion: still think holacracy is unnecessarily complex? You have the right to do so, this post wasn’t crafted to convince anyone of anything but just to explain, not all organization are ready or even strive for this amount of clarity and separation of concerns, some may not need it, some may fill that the shift is too strong, some may think it’s too much overhead. If you have time to experiment find your own way, if hierarchical management is still good for you, stick with it, if you want to adopt a complete replacement from day one, give holacracy a try.
Hi and thanks for reading, I am an italian holacracy coach, you can reach me via my website leapfrog.team or my linkedin profile.
The “Holacracy” name is a registered trademark of HolacracyOne LLC. but its underlying “substance” (rules of the game) is open source.
