A little bit

About Us

brian-robertson-presenting-holacracy-with-tom-thomison

Who we are

After years of incubating self-management methods within his own tech company, entrepreneur Brian Robertson co-founded HolacracyOne with Tom Thomison in 2007. Since then, HolacracyOne has been developing and sharing the self-management framework known as Holacracy.

We have helped hundreds of organizations adopt self-management, developed the Holacracy framework through several majors upgrades, and have created GlassFrog, a software tool supporting self-management.

We’ve supported organizations small and large, in a variety of industries — for-profits and non-profits, private organizations and governmental agencies, in the US, South America, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Australia.

Our Structure

As you can imagine, we use self-management at HolacracyOne. We’ve even integrated the Holacracy constitution in our legal bylaws. Not only can we say we’re using Holacracy, but for us this is a legal reality – enforceable in court if need be.

There are three components that enable our legally-grounded Holacracy practice. Together they encode the distributed power system of Holacracy into the organization’s legal DNA.

The Holacracy constitution

The Holacracy Constitution documents the core rules, structure, and processes of the Holacracy framework. It enables an organization wishing to use self-management to anchor that intention in concrete and specific processes. It levels the playing field by giving everyone access to the “rules of the game”.

Our operating agreement

HolacracyOne’s Operating Agreement (our bylaws) references and integrates the Holacracy constitution as the governing framework for our legal entity. It also defines our board structure, the compensation system for our partners, our investment structure, etc. Unlike the more generalized Constitution, our Operating Agreement was created solely to meet HolacracyOne’s needs; it was not intended to serve as a general template for others to use or rely upon. We share it for transparency, as a concrete example of the way we integrated Holacracy into our legal governance.

Our governance records

While our Operating Agreement and the Holacracy constitution provide the foundation for how the organization is governed, it is the output from that governance process which truly structures our day-to-day operations. HolacracyOne’s partners refer to these governance records frequently – they tell us what others can expect from us, what authority we hold, and the constraints we must honor. You can see HolacracyOne’s governance records and current operating structure in GlassFrog.

Our Purpose and Vision

We capture HolacracyOne’s purpose succinctly:

Evolve humanity’s relationship to power

We see organizations and businesses as the main drivers of development of our societies. The alignment of human effort toward specific purposes has got us from the stone age to where we are today.

Human effort has been organized in all sorts of ways to achieve its goals — these models of organization, or “social technologies,” have evolved over time. Today, most organizations are using variants of the ubiquitous “management hierarchy” invented during the industrial revolution. It is surely one of the most formidable inventions of the last centuries and has resulted in tremendous progress for humanity.

However, we believe it is becoming outdated. The speed and complexity of today’s environment require organizations to adapt faster than ever — in our experience successful organizations succeed in spite of their management framework, not because of it.

We are convinced that organizations can do better, be more agile, produce more and better products — if they can harvest more from the talents of their people. Likewise, we are convinced that people can flourish individually through their work. For best results, the relationship between organizations and people needs to be symbiotic.

We have developed the Holacracy framework through trial and error as a tool to serve our purpose. But on its own, it’s not enough. Like any framework, it needs to be utilized and built upon to express all its potential.

Self-management framework

Defines generic meta-level processes, such as:

How roles are defined

How to determine who is responsible for what

What can we generally expect from colleagues

Etc.

Synergic benefits with compatible approaches

Offers more structural flexibility

Provides foundational processes to lean on

Compatible approaches & processes

Address business specific needs such as:

How salaries are determined

Specific product development process

How to best structure our company

Etc.

Synergic benefits with framework

Increases framework stickiness

Creates a feedback loop for framework

At HolacracyOne, we are experts in the Holacracy framework. Other business innovators have expertise in approaches that we only know on the surface. We are building a network of business pioneers that can offer their expertise to organizations interested in new ways of working, while making sure they’re compatible with self-management.

Our Core Team

brian robertson profile picture

Brian Robertson

Chris Cowan

olivier profile pic

Olivier Compagne

Yoad Rowner