How we use Holacracy

How Medium is managed differently from traditional pyramid hierarchy.

This is an unlisted post and shouldn’t be shared too widely (aka not outside of gandi people)

Everything is organized in circle:

On the screenshot above you can see how we also have extra concepts that aren’t really Holacratic per say but integrate very well. For instance, we have different guilds in the company focused on skills (web client which is more front end, IOS, Web services which is a bit more backend, data architecture) and we mimic the medivial way things were done better described here

In holacracy, the organization is centered around the concept of role, every responsibility is translated into a role and people are nominated through vote or Lead link designation to fill up those role

The core roles are :

• Lead Link who is in charge of representing the circle at the meetings of the above circle and will mostly proxy the requests between the 2 circles. It’s the closest role to managers in more traditional organization
• Rep Link is mostly use for communication within the circle or if for some reason you don’t want to raise tensions to the Lead Link
• Facilitator is like a MC except in the context of meetings, he’s the one who make sure the meetings go smoothly that there isn’t any down time, cross talk, useless conversation, force people to take actions when they have tensions.
• The Secretary is the one sharing his screen during the meeting, he takes notes of the action taken and also is in charge of scheduling meetings.

All the roles above have an expiration date. In this circle we set the expiration to 6 months so every 6 months we go through election to decide who will be responsible for all that and we tend to like change things around.

The other roles are more or less unique to the purpose of the circle.

There are 2 types of meeting, Governance and Tactical:

• The governance meetings are the meetings where we do elections and add/remove/change roles and policies (I have a screenshot on that bellow) It’s helping the circles to function. We usually do a Governance meeting once a month or so.
• The tactical one is where you take action and project with the idea that you will make the company move forward. One thing worth mentioning is that all those meeting last 1h. So in 1H for example we decided on 29 changes last Friday, 21 the Friday before … At my last company, it would have taken 5 days to decide on that many changes and I think that’s really what’s making holacracy a super powerful framework to manage a company.