Wednesday, 22 January 2014

The Secret: "Holacracy" or "Holacratic" Part 1

The secret? Holacracy? Holacractic? It sounds Spanish, isn't it? Hola!

It is a new type of organizational structure that mostly associated with social technology. In short, it means no job titles, no managers and even no hierarchy. There is no who reports to who kind of environment. 

How about salary? Same across the company? That would be an interesting topic, right? I will cover that part in the later post. 

In essence, more technology based companies especially among start ups to adopt the notion of "Holacracy". +Zappos Page seems to be the front runner advocating such idea. I'm not sure whether this term is already registered in the dictionary since I have spelling error alerts on "holacracy" and "holacractic".

What I would understand is "holacracy" advocates a leaner organisational structure with equal distribution of responsibility and authority. +Tom Thomison suggested the idea of "holacracy" offers clarity in term of work, where the work lives, and how the work is performed — by what role, through what authority. 

He believes that with clarity, you could better manage your resources effectively. Subsequently, you would be able to make better decision using the right resources for any particular work. 

You can read his full article, "Holacracy = Clarity" at Holacracy.org.

In my opinion, only certain types of organization and types of work could really adopt the whole idea of "holacracy". Fresh technology companies or start ups with limited resources might find holacratic useful. 

In fact, I reckon it is a flexible structure in which usually I find it in project based works. In the project team, although we have a project manager, every body else in the team basically would share and complement each other towards the completion of the project. 

I could not imagine any government agencies adopt "holacratic" structure. If they do, say good bye to "bureaucratic", NOT! And I think we don't even finish implementing meritocracy. 


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