Fractal Governance Applied

Holacracy is a promising social operating system that deals with increasing complexity

Why should governments fail? Because leaders, whether self-appointed dictators or elected officials, are unable to identify what policies will be good for a complex society. The unintended consequences are beyond their comprehension. Regardless of values or objectives, the outcomes are far from what they intend. - Yaneer Bar-Yam

The democratic republic has outlived its usefulness. It had a good run. But most democracies have become captured by special interests, which have transmogrified governments into various flavors of corporatism and state capitalism, which are but fancy terms for good ole fashioned fascism.

“It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government,” Winston Churchill once remarked, “except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”

Really? Is this the best we can do? Such a fatalistic view gives us an excuse to accept the status quo, but it is a failure of imagination.

It’s time to rethink governance.

Upgrading Our Social OS

Holacracy is a strong candidate for a global-scale social operating system.

Never heard of it? Holacracy is an organization management system Brian Robertson and Tom Thomison developed to help businesses run without bosses. HolacracyOne is dedicated to “changing our relationship to power” and the system does just that, but that is exactly why some are skeptical. After all, command-and-control systems have been working for blue-chip companies and standing armies for centuries.

But now, more than 1000 companies worldwide have adopted Holacracy, jettisoning the traditional firm structure. Can Holacracy scale beyond the firm?

If you’re into cryptocurrencies, you already know that command-and-control hierarchies can be destructive and inhumane. Satoshi Nakomoto wanted to help us escape the inflationary Skinner box of central banking and build Bitcoin within a decentralized network. The idea was to work with a growing team of coders and miners to build out an ecosystem no single person could control.

Satoshi changed our relationship to power — for both developers and users.

Holacracy provides a governance framework that is decidedly holonic — roughly, systems within systems. In this way, a holacratic organization approximates a living organism as opposed to a machine to be “designed” or “run.” Practitioners aren’t arranged by managers as cogs within a traditional org chart, but rather define their own functional roles within wider spheres of activity, or “circles.”

Just as cells make up organs within organisms, people have roles within teams within organizations. And though certain cells and roles might hustle themselves into an “executive function,” both the organism’s and the holacratic organization’s brains are self-organizing.

How Holacracy Works

Holacracy makes an organization a complex adaptive system. Unlike command-and-control hierarchies, complex adaptive organizations respond with relative autonomy to stimuli that are, for lack of a better way of putting things, not quite right. Practitioners call these “tensions.” Every part of the organization wants to get things flowing, following constructal theorist Adrian Bejan. To resolve tensions is to get things flowing — that is, towards realizing the mission.

At the risk of oversimplification, let’s break it down:

• Mission. This is why the organization exists and is the end all roles serve. (Because large-scale societies don’t have missions, decentralization is vital.)

• Holacracy Constitution. Sets out the relatively fixed protocols and rules that compose Holacracy’s open-source social operating system.

• Tactical Meetings. A group process for addressing one-off, operational issues in a formalized way, relevant to some functional sphere of activity.

• Governance Meetings. A group process for creating roles, making policies, or assigning ownership of responsibilities.

• Information management. The inputs and output of circle meetings are recorded so anyone can see the rules, roles, and policies at any time.

The devil is in the proverbial details. And learning the system is rather like learning a team sport: You can’t learn the game from the rulebook. You have to get out there and practice. In doing so, partners can become Holacracy practioners — increasing organization efficiency while scaling.

But how far up can Holacracy scale?

Teams within Teams (within Teams)

Complexity scientist Yaneer Bar-Yam warns of the coming breakdown of the current order:

Why should governments fail? Because leaders, whether self-appointed dictators, or elected officials, are unable to identify what policies will be good for a complex society. The unintended consequences are beyond their comprehension. Regardless of values or objectives, the outcomes are far from what they intend.

But Bar-on suggests a solution.

It begins with widespread individual action that transforms society — -a metamorphosis of social organization in which leadership no longer serves the role it has over millennia. A different type of existence will emerge, affecting all of us as individuals and enabling us to live in a complex world.

To be successful in high-complexity challenges requires teamwork. Each team member performs one part of what needs to be done, contributing to the complexity and scale of what the team does while limiting the complexity each individual faces.

Holacracy — or something resembling it — might be a system that adequately deals with complexity through the application of superior team dynamics.

Scaling to Society

If Robertson and Thomison are to be believed, it’s possible for Holacracy to scale to the level of society. I think they’re onto something.

The duo draw influence not only from Robertson’s computer-science background, but also from integral theorist Ken Wilber. In his philosophical work, Wilber expands on Arthur Koestler’s holarchy, that is, the idea that systems can give rise to systems (that can give rise to systems) at different levels of description.

And with that, we come full holon. Robertson puts it well:

Anarchy comes from the greek “an”, meaning without, plus “arkhos”, meaning rulers. Anarchy doesn’t mean without rules, but without rulers. If you have the right rules, the absence of top-down rulers doesn’t remove order — it simply enables order to emerge dynamically from peer-to-peer interactions distributed throughout a system, one tension at a time. So by this definition, you could describe Holacracy as a rule system for humans working together in anarchy — with rules, but without rulers.

Hmm. I was told anarchy was all punk rock and molotov cocktails.

With the holonic structure of circles within circles, we can imagine a greater encompassing supercircle composed of members of lower-order circles. This is an abstract way of describing something similar to a subsidiarity rule, which means decision-making authority should be devolved to the most local feasible level.

Holacracy holds the promise of emergent subsidiarity.

Getting There from Here

By this point, you might want to know how to get there from here. With humility, I offer what can only be described as a set of interconnected cliches:

1. Start using it. Adoption shows its benefits better than any article.

2. Don’t half-ass it. Adulterated versions can create problems that tarnish Holacracy’s reputation and cause people to re-embrace Taylorite hierarchies.

3. Hold onto it. The longer you use it, the more wider ecosystems can develop.

4. Train others. The more we can reduce the time and cost of adoption, the better; Holacracy Constitution upgrades are cutting down adoption curves.

5. Collapse-readiness. When more hierarchies start hitting the fan, people will seek antifragile ways to organize what’s left of society.

I realize that the last point is a rather dark note on which to close. But keep in mind that as society becomes more complex, hierarchical governments running on the democratic operating system (DOS) will have a hard time keeping up with the information processing demands. Meanwhile, practitioners of Holacracy will be running their distributed organizations and changing their relationship to power. Can Holacracy’s protocols be scaled to the level of society?

Perhaps it holds the source code for a new era of rules without rulers.