Part 2: Permission Cultures

(for Part 1)

Doing my due diligence on Holacracy, started deliberately looking for the negative sentiments. This is not always a fun exercise but it has to be done because anything I can find on Google can also be found by my colleagues so I better have good answers when these questions come up.

Read a lot of articles, also read the excellent responses written by others (example).

Additionally I was inspired by Ruben Timmerman of Springest. I found his post “8 key challenges of implementing Holacracy” especially challenge #6 very useful.

I started to notice some patterns in specific negative reactions to Holacracy. Patterns that I couldn’t find reference to online so I thought I would share them, seek feedback and make sure I am not just seeing shapes in the mist.

Explicit Permission Culture

This refers to a specific type of cultural baggage about how individuals relate to authority structures.

The question of when an individual can legitimately execute an action is strongly influenced by cultural (organisational\religious\ethnic) norms. For the sake of argument imagine these norms exist on a spectrum, with one end of the spectrum representing “any action is permissible unless explicitly forbidden by legitimate authority” and the other representing “any action is forbidden unless explicitly permitted by legitimate authority”.

An example of this would be building permissions, some legal jurisdictions allow a land owner to build whatever they like as long as it does not violate existing regulations while others will require all plans to be submitted for case by case approval. Another example is the contrast between driving your car to work versus flying an aircraft, hint you don’t file a flight plan before you get in your car.

My reference of these differing cultural viewpoints is not to comment on the pros or cons of either but to highlight how these views may affect an individual’s reactions to Holacracy.

My assessment is that the culture of the people who created\discovered Holacracy is at the extreme “everything is permissible unless explicitly forbidden” end of the spectrum and Holacracy as a concept and practise reflect this.

This assertion may come as a surprise to some who would correctly point out the intricately prescriptive detail of the Holacracy constitution, however I would suggest this level of detail is an inherent requirement to provide the required structure with in a permissible unless forbidden context. Personally I have no problem with this as it aligns with my cultural bias and I can’t envisage a system that combines self-managed teams and centralised permission first culture.

The problems start when individuals with an explicit permission cultural bias try to understand Holacracy.

In Nellie Bowles recent article on Re/Code we find some interesting behaviours attributed to Holacracy.

Holacracy® is a workplace management technique invented by software engineers as a non-hierarchical corporate system that seeks to eliminate employee and management egos. There are no titles, no chatter about personal life allowed, no bosses who can tell anyone what to do or when. It is a unified, organically evolving organization that moves toward a singular purpose…

“In terms of conversations, it streamlines what you talk about,” he said. “Any time you talk, you have an objective. You don’t talk for the sake of talking. You will rarely hear someone give a general update. So, if, let’s say, he decides to talk about his divorce,” Joseph said pointing to his friend across the table, “I can cut him off and say, ‘Hey, that’s not relevant.’”…

I wondered if this aspect of Holacracy was why Downtown Project leaders were not more articulate in the aftermath of the suicides. Over the last two years, three prominent Downtown Project affiliated entrepreneurs have committed suicide. I wondered whether this obsession with efficiency and streamlined speech may have made people feel more isolated.

If we were to believe the author Holacracy among other things explicitly forbids water cooler talk in the office. Apart from the understandable desire of the author to use the whiff of scandal to attract readers I believe another factor is that the author has an explicit permission cultural bias e.g. that without a legitimate authority explicitly telling you that office chitchat is ok it must be forbidden.

This same bias can be detected in Steve Denning’s Forbes article.

In holacracy, the only explicit feedback mechanisms alluded to in the Holacracy Constitution are vertical. There are no explicit feedback mechanisms from the customer i.e. the people for whom the work is being done. This is not to say that members of any circle are formally excluded from sensing a “Tension” from failure to meet customer needs of which they happen to become aware and then take action to resolve that “Tension”. But it is also true that the explicit focus of the Holacracy Constitution is entirely internal. The customer is simply not in the picture.

It should be very understandable that an explicit permission cultural bias is present in large sections of the community, just think of the formative experiences of the average school student in any developed country.

My thoughts on how to stop this cultural land mine from blowing the legs off a Holacracy deployment is to add a section to my, as yet uncreated, training package to make explicit the permission culture spectrum and help individuals to reflect where they sit on it.