This is a terrific and extremely valuable perspective on Holacracy, the future of work, and the evolution of organizational development. Thank you, Andy and the whole team at Medium for leading the way!

As Medium has demonstrated, Holacracy is both hugely valuable as a robust model for how things can be different, and at the same time Holacracy is also not sufficient.

One way to think about it may be to compare using early web programming to publish your thoughts on the web in the late 1990’s to using Medium today. Back then, the WWW existed, and new tools existed that allowed anyone in the world with an internet connection to publish anything they wanted and share it with the whole world. It was an amazing and monumental development, and yet you needed to learn a lot to participate. In addition to reading and writing, you needed to learn how to code.

Back then, the people who said that the WWW would transform the media landscape and allow everyone to become publishers weren’t wrong (although many skeptics thought they were). But, at the same time the tools had to evolve a lot before we got to this point. As Clay Shirky puts it, “this stuff doesn’t get socially interesting until it gets technologically boring.” It takes time to unlock the full potential new technology.

Holacracy, including both its system of self-management and its ‘Glassfrog’ software, are expert systems. While Holacracy gives us a glimpse of what’s possible, it’s also inaccessible and mostly useless for the vast majority of people and organizations out there.

It’s not wrong, necessarily. It’s just a highly technical solution that only works in limited situations where an entire organization is motivated to do the work of learning Holacracy on top of their regular job. But, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a ton of good ideas baked into it. Holacracy is a powerful approach to self-management in a networked era. It is a glimpse of the future.

Just as I can publish my thoughts to the world on Medium today without having to give a single thought beyond writing these words, I predict that years from now most people inside most organizations will govern their own work, who they work with, when they work, and what they work on, with similar ease. And Holacracy will be a small, but important, footnote.