A new direction for HolacracyOne: the Self-Management Accelerator

Hey there, I’m Olivier Compagne, and I’ve been with HolacracyOne since the early days, growing alongside this incredible company. This past year, I stepped into the role of Circle Lead for our General Circle — like a CEO, but with a Holacracy twist. My mission is to drive HolacracyOne into a fresh, new direction.

Following months of searching and experimenting, I now see a clear path forward and I’m excited to share it.

Why This Change is Needed

Despite its brilliance, the Holacracy framework remains widely misunderstood within the self-management movement. I view this gap as a clear sign that we’ve missed something.

Our focus on client work has hindered our participation in the global self-management conversation and addressing critiques. Also, spreading ourselves thin across various business lines has prevented us from creating comprehensive community content. Worse, we’ve allowed the media to shape the narrative about Holacracy, often as a caricature, instead of telling our own story.

Initially, focusing on client work made sense: we needed to drive Holacracy adoption, develop implementation methods, and generate revenue. However, our licensing program has grown, and we now have excellent licensed providers who excel at helping organizations adopt Holacracy. This means that HolacracyOne’s direct focus on client work has become less relevant. We’ve also dedicated a lot of energy to building GlassFrog, a self-management software compatible with Holacracy, but it has since successfully become its own separate company.

I think what made us successful in the past is not what will make us successful in the future. While this may sound a little scary, it’s a clear opportunity to focus on what is now most needed from HolacracyOne. 

As stewards of the Holacracy brand and the Holacracy licensing program, we have a unique opportunity and responsibility to make the Holacracy framework better understood and more accessible. We need the organizations ready to make that shift to be able to make it as easily as possible, and we need to better support our Holacracy licensed providers so they can in turn support organizations better.

Introducing the Self-Management Accelerator

Next Wednesday, July 17th, we’ll be launching a new platform called the Self-Management Accelerator, or SMA for short. Join our mailing list to receive the announcement (including launch special coupon codes!)

The SMA is currently running in closed beta version, where only members of our licensing program and existing members of our Holacracy Community of Practice are invited. We’re excited to open it to the public next week! 

What is the SMA?

The SMA is a platform dedicated to learning, sharing, and advancing research on self-management. It will be an open and freemium platform with discussion spaces, e-learning, live events, and a wealth of resources on self-management, including reserved discussion spaces for advanced conversations.

Its Purpose

The purpose of the SMA is to give a digital “home” to anyone interested in self-management, sharing experiences with peers, getting support from experts, learning how it works, and applying it in their organization. 

We want to centralize the conversation and resources on self-management and Holacracy. We plan to invest continually in curating and developing quality content, whether it be tools, videos, e-courses, or other resources. For example, we are remastering many older videos, locating original files on dusty hard drives in our partners’ garages, and editing them for higher quality and tighter content. 

Why “self-management” instead of Holacracy?

Because the Holacracy framework is our core expertise at HolacracyOne, we are seeding the SMA with a lot of Holacracy content, but the SMA is bigger than just Holacracy.

“Self-management” is an umbrella term that encompasses various methods, frameworks, values, and principles. Since there’s no authoritative definition of “self-management,” the term often gets used to describe a wide range of concepts, some of which even conflict with each other. This lack of clarity makes self-management seem like a nebulous and disorganized movement. Yet, a strong self-managed organization requires a robust management framework, not just a bundle of innovative methods.

We believe Holacracy is the best operating system for self-management available today. However, like a computer needs software to reach its full potential, a strong self-managed organization needs more than just Holacracy. It requires implementing specific processes and practices tailored to its needs to fully realize the possibilities of self-management.

In short, Holacracy needs self-management as much as self-management needs Holacracy.

As a result, we aim to reclaim the term “self-management” and bring clarity to it. That’s why the SMA focuses on self-management rooted in Holacracy.

A collaborative endeavor

While HolacracyOne is leading the creation of the SMA and will ensure its maintenance and development, we are fully dedicated to making it a collaborative initiative. 

Our closest partners are the members of the Holacracy licensing program. With their collaboration, we aim to develop a Holacracy learning curriculum even more comprehensive than what we currently have.

But as I said, there is more to self-management than Holacracy. We intend to collaborate with other experts in their respective fields on learning content and resources for other areas of self-management — there are many needs in the interpersonal space, for instance, with better relational and communication frameworks that are compatible with Holacracy. Or for individual productivity systems, like Getting Things Done, to better connect to an organizational environment. And that’s just the beginning!

A one-stop shop?

Yes, essentially we’re working on building the SMA as a one-stop shop for self-management. Some of you may be wary of this kind of centralization, and the potential risks it poses on allowing a diversity of perspectives.  

As a “decentralization junkie,” I share this general sentiment — it fits my personality style really well, and I think there is a lot of merit to decentralized development (surprised?). 

At the same time, practicing Holacracy has taught me that decentralization shouldn’t be a dogma. The self-management movement today suffers not from too much centralization but from excessive decentralization, leading to fragmented conversations. The SMA has the opportunity to become a structuring and focusing force in the self-management movement, which I believe is needed right now.

And yet decentralized

Ultimately, we envision the SMA as a decentralized platform with input from many stakeholders. Initially, HolacracyOne will drive the SMA to build momentum. Soon after, we plan to involve willing members of the Holacracy licensing program in its management. Eventually, our goal is to include other stakeholders to ensure a collaborative and distributed approach to its development and governance.

Take the next step

I’m inspired by this new chapter and the launch of the Self-Management Accelerator. By focusing on our unique strengths, I trust we can make the Holacracy framework and self-management principles much more accessible and impactful.

I hope you’ll check out the SMA when it launches! Here are the next steps:

• Launch Date: Planned for Wednesday, July 17th. The exact time is still TBD, and while delays can happen, we’ll keep you updated.
• Stay Updated: Join our mailing list to be the first to know about the launch.
• Launch Discounts: We’re offering discounts to our premium subscriptions to celebrate the launch. We’ll announce the launch on our other channels (Twitter, LinkedIn…), but the coupon codes for the premium areas of the SMA will be exclusive to our mailing list subscribers.