My 5 Takeaways from a Holacracy Taster Workshop

Ranjitha Jeurkar

I recently had the opportunity to attend a Holacracy Taster Workshop.

Haven’t heard of Holacracy?

Most of us are used to organizations in which power is concentrated at the top. Holacracy is a method of decentralized management in which authority is distributed throughout the organization. (Here’s the link to a TED talk on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJxfJGo-vkI)

I went into the workshop imagining Holacracy to be a flat structure with consensus decision making. What I learnt was surprising — Holacracy does have a lot of structure, and gives each person the autonomy to get work done in their role.

Here are some of my takeaways. As a manager or a corporate leader, you can begin implementing these right away:

Have a documented process on how decisions are made

Often, teams that work together with the intention of taking collective decisions may get stuck because there is little or no clarity about who exactly has the decision-making powers. Does everyone in the team vote? What if the team is divided? Who, then, has the deciding vote? Is it that everyone in the team can offer input but the one person makes the decision?

Whatever be the decision making process, it is essential to have clarity about it — and to have it clearly documented can help save a lot of uncertainty and help clear up any confusions when they arise. To see how decisions are made using the Holacracy practice, view the Governance Meeting Process.

Process one tension at a time

Have you been in meetings where person A brings up a topic, and then person B brings in something that’s related to it, person C brings in something else that’s only tangentially related…and the discussion goes away from the issue that person A had raised originally? And at some point, you see that the entire meeting devolves into dealing with all of these issues at the same time? This happens more often than we realize.

One way of dealing with this is to establish a guideline of processing only one tension at a time.

When someone brings up a tension, the focus is on that tension alone. If anyone else has a tension arising from what’s being discussed, they write it down and add it to the agenda — and the group comes back to it once the original tension is processed. Apart from holding the group’s focus clearly, this way of processing can also help the participants of the meeting rest easy, knowing that their tension will be addressed in due time.

Encourage people to take responsibility and ownership for their roles

When people bring up tensions in a meeting, the Holacracy practice encourages them to take responsibility. The facilitator of the meeting asks: “What do you need?”

This question shifts the focus from complaining; the person in the role is able to take a deeper look, and assess what their requirements are to resolve the tension, and ask for the necessary support or resources.

Stop waiting for the perfect idea or solution

If your team or organization has ever held off from beginning a project because you didn’t have all the ideas, resources, or the perfect plan you needed for it, here’s a different perspective. Every organization, every role and every project is constantly evolving and it’s impossible to know what ‘perfect’ is. So rather than wait for the perfect plan, go ahead, try it out and wait for the tensions to arise (they probably will anyway!). And bring these tensions to the group to identify how to deal with them.

Learn to see objections as data

In common parlance, we see objections to a plan or proposal as disagreement or disapproval. But here’s a different way of looking at it: If someone on my team has an objection to my proposal, it’s probably because their unique perspective helps them see how the proposal may:

• Harm the purpose of the group
• Create new tensions in the group
• Impact the way their role or team functions

An objection can be an opportunity for integration — to include more perspective and make a proposal more well-rounded. The process encourages the facilitator to protect and encourage observations, knowing that they hold information that is critical to the working of the proposal, or the organization.