“Lack of humanity with Holacracy”: Are you serious?
As you have probably seen, there is some bad press* going around on social medias, saying that there is a *lack of humanity* with Holacracy at play.
Holacracy is neither inhuman nor human, it’s just a tool, a framework, and a powerful one that incorporates and values individual sovereignty**. It is like a hammer: you may knock in a nail or hit someone else with it. It is your choice, you are the one deciding what to do with the hammer. Would you blame the hammer for being inhuman? Or would you blame the person using that hammer to hurt someone else?
If you value humanity as much as I do and are willing to develop functions that are in the service of people development, you can with Holacracy, by adding as many Apps*** as you wish. And I pretend, based on my 7+ years of Holacracy practice and 50+ client implementations, that it will be way easier to add those Apps if you have Holacracy as an Operating System in place instead of any other form of conventional hierarchical management system.
With Holacracy, you will find and get what you’re looking for.
The unique challenge for humans is to get a right Holacracy practice, and yes it is difficult, believe me or not and for good reasons because otherwise it wouldn’t be a big leap, a paradigm shift. This is why we’ve developed a new approach to implement Holacracy that makes it easier for even blue collar to make it and find quickier the value they may get from using that tool they now have. I am defying anybody to provide fact-based evidence of any kind of inhumanity in the Holacracy Constitution.
In fact, it’s quite the opposite:
- no more orders
- no more subordination
- no more micromanagement
- no more implicit expectation
- no more grey area about who’s got which authority
- no more hopeless situation when you face a problem that would require that you change the power structure in place
- no more domination of extrovert people upon introvert ones
- politics, power games and dynamics become purposeless and obsolete
There is no such thing as *lack of humanity* in Holacracy. Rather, there is a lot of *lack of humanity* in our conventional way of organizing the work and Holacracy acts as a mirror that reveals it ruthlessly – nothing created by Holacracy, all was already there in opacity. Which is a good news as it’s now easier to fix something you face more clearly.
What’s the purpose of your organization? And what’s your purpose when you want to implement Holacracy? Are they related? Is the purpose of your organization for the sake of humanity? In this case, give Holacracy a try and I pretend from experience that your organization will express even more its purpose into the world, both externally and internally.
– A non utopian evangelist of Holacracy
*https://epeak.in/2016/12/21/zappos-is-struggling-with-holacracy-because-humans-arent-designed-to-operate-like-software/
http://corporate-rebels.com/Blog/zappos/
**Individual Sovereignty is the quality of a person or an institution to be obliged or determined only by his own will, in accordance with the purpose which it is called to express, within the limits which it can not exert control or cause a material impact within a property owned by another sovereign entity unless authorized to do so.
***Apps: “Applications”, referring to Holacracy as an Operating System where you can put Apps on top of it
