Week 1, 2021 — Issue 133
Humanocracy: First Signs, First Principles, and First Movers
Each week I share three ideas for better ways of working. And this week, those ideas all serve to introduce the concept of Humanocracy.
Why am I writing about this? I recently finished Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them by Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini. Here’s what you need to know:
1. First Signs
The way we design organizations — relying on formal hierarchies and rigid rules — is fundamentally at odds with reality. Hamel and Zanini write: “As a system matures — as bureaucratic management has over the past hundred-plus years — performance gains get harder and harder to come by…[O]ver time, a system’s lack performance becomes limited less by processes and practices than by paradigms and principles.” And so while bureaucracy has served us well, we now need a fresh start. The signs are everywhere: from dismal employee engagement to decreasing corporate longevity. We’ve reached the end of bureaucracy.
2. First Principles
Hamel and Zanini continue: “To be more innovative, adaptable, and inspiring, our organizations need new DNA. They need to be rebuilt on human-centric principles. Tweaks to existing systems and processes…will never produce nonlinear improvements in organizational effectiveness. For that to happen, we need to go back to first principles.” Specifically, the seven principles of Ownership, Markets, Meritocracy, Community, Openness, Experimentation, and Paradox. Roll them all up and you get Humanocracy: a system of governance created to serve, rather than exploit, the people within.
3. First Movers
As you can imagine, humanocracies look nothing like the bureaucracies of old. How could they? They’re built upon fundamentally different principles! But that doesn’t mean all humanocracies look alike. Far from it. Companies as diverse as Haier, Nucor, and Michelin are profiled in the book*, and they all look and function very differently. Partly, this is because these companies are at different stages of their journey. Partly, it’s because Humanocracy is not an organizational OS the likes of Holacracy or Sociocracy. Rather, it’s the foundation upon which such OSs can be built.
Humanocracy (the governance system) is the opposite of bureaucracy.
Humanocracy (the book) is a call to arms; a treaty, if you will, designed to prove that bureaucracy isn’t a foregone conclusion and that something better is, in fact, possible.
And so while the book is light on practical details**, it’s still a worthy read. Because as Thomas Paine wrote in 1776: “A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.”
Bureaucracy might be as close to conventional wisdom that we can get. At least in the organizational design space. But that doesn’t make it right. And now there’s a book to prove that.
That’s all for this week.
Until next time: Make it matter.
-Andreas
*Other organizations mentioned include the ATLAS Project at Cern, Buurtzorg, GE Aviation, Morningstar, Southwest Airlines, Svenska Handelsbanken, The British National Health Service, and WL Gore.
**It’s not that Humanocracy doesn’t provide guidance for how to implement change. Such guidance is included. But it’s on the lighter side. The focus is rather on paradigms and principles.
