Holacracy is Bullshit

I really wish people would dial back on the gloating promotion of their own pet theories and maybe wait until a little bit more information is available before jumping to conclusions.

Management has a purpose - but companies poor treatment of engineers over the years has blinded many engineers to this. A great manager ensures their people are pointed in the right direction, makes sure that they're not running into roadblocks, and frees up their people from dealing with bullshit so they can be the best they can be. This really doesn't have anything to do with "oppression", or whatnot.

Managing is orthogonal to engineering - and saying either is worth more than the other is simply wrong. If we can decouple the ideas of "managing" and "building" with systematically being valued / paid more or less than others, we'll have progress. Right now, most are erring on one side or the other.

I've never really given this issue much thought, but it sounds reasonable. Illusions can be dangerous, including the illusion of equality.

I was instantly reminded of the famous commandment in Animal Farm : "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others". It now seems almost naive to pretend that there wouldn't be people in the organization with vastly more power than others.

All that said, until very recently I was someone who admired GitHub's flat hierarchy from afar. If they were being naive, then so was I.

Want to be a really progressive start up.. become a COOP.

I think that a holacracy, like most things dealing with human beings and their behavior, is dependent on the specific human beings in question with regard to whether or not it will succeed.

On a slightly meta level, it is interesting why the startup/development culture seems to flock to articles like this, saying "such-and-such thing can never work as a solution to people problems because it didn't work here" - we see this crop up on HN constantly, pro- and anti-, with things like working from home, pair programming, etc. Maybe it's too much to ask that we say "different things work for different groups of people"?

If you notice that the cars you build tend to rust, and that water causes rust, you might say, "well, we're going to build cars that don't encounter water," and you'd be rightly laughed out of town. Office politics doesn't happen (or not) because the founders wrote it into their business plan. Office politics happens because offices are occupied by humans.

I'm completely lost here: so the way to solve the problem of people with a lot of power oppressing people with little or no power is to replace the oppressive people with power with better powerful people?

Isn't this quite close to the idea that somewhat progressive dictators are good?

EDIT — Kinda ad hominem-y: "Until November 2012, she ran the Obama campaign's technology office in San Francisco where she recruited technology volunteers to build software for the campaign."

github can keep their managerless system, they just need to adopt a shop steward system like unions have. This is somebody who can advocate for employees during disciplinary meetings with management, arbitrate petty disputes that don't need heavy handed management involvement with threats of termination, and anonymously bring problems to management if the grieving employee doesn't want to be identified. This person is elected and wields zero power.

It's the only thing I remember liking from being in a union once and would work for github. This girl could have gone to the steward, then the steward could complain about the founder's wife harassing employees to HR without identifying the employee to management for silent discipline, when they try to get rid of you for complaining or whatever personal vendetta (it can happen).

    "When you allow a power vacuum to emerge someone will fill 
    it, and it’s usually the people who have traditionally 
    held power (rich white men)."

Near as I can tell, the only thing I can see that supports this likelihood is base rates. A greater percentage of the participants in a tech holocracy are likely to be white men (because they are well represented in tech), so when you have 70-80 white male marbles in a bag of 100 marbles, the probably of picking a white male marble is 70-80%. Is there some other force other than simple statistics that increases the probability of a white man taking over power in excess of their representation in the population in question?

Which you have an incentive to keep, as you do not want to immobilize your good engineers, as per the Dilbert principle.

The problem is not holacracy itself. Plenty of companies are doing just fine using decentralized and autonomous organizational methods, including Valve and Flying Wild Hog.

The problem lies in having a culture of apathy and immaturity. Not having managers doesn't mean one should not be able to forward complaints to an appropriate person and have the situation handled.

Also, ironically, in the GitHub debacle, it was a woman who rose up and disrupted the power balance.

But this is seldom what the owners of the company (who invested capital) want. They don't want people to run things, they want people to run things on their behalf (and get rich from the process). And even if they were sympathetic to this idea, it's very hard to grow such a company at all stages (in small group it's very prone to hostile takeovers and later there is no incentive to grow, since the power of individuals is always the same compared to number of people).

I don't see transition to democratic workplace happening unless lots of people give up any hope to have more power than other people. Interestingly, in political system, this largely happened, although it's still not enough and there is resentment from some.

In the first place, the problem became as serious as it did because it involved Github's management, such as it was. Secondly, the founder involved in the incident was put on leave, and an apology was promptly and unreservedly issued. It is easy to imagine a more hierarchical organization circling the wagons, instead. In the end, Github may be an example of serious problem with a founder that was handled as well as possible.

There are a lot of ways software development does not fit within traditional management structures. For example, if you take traditional project management tools and try to predict a non-trivial software development schedule with them you are going to have a bad time. So we invent new, usually less-structured tools.

You can't do entirely without those structures, but minimization of hierarchy is the logical way to adapt management to the challenge of keeping software development orderly and making a business out of it, if that's your aim. If there is a deeper problem at Github it is likely that they didn't follow some of the other rules of thumb for software development organizations, like "don't hire jerks."

So, on the one hand, we have what we might call the Lord of the Flies narrative - that Github's pseudo-anarchic non-management just enables people's worst traits to come to the surface; it doesn't remove power imbalances, it just hides them and makes it harder to challenge illegitimate use of that power because it's harder to identify.

On the flip side, we have what we might call the Milgram Experiment narrative - that authority positions are naturally corrupting, making belief in good management seem utopian; sure, we'd all like to be managed by someone that we respect, admire and trust, but we're just as likely to be managed by someone that we fear, pity or loathe, and the explicit hierarchy turns out to be just as hard to challenge as the implicit one and often even more so.

Lots of people seem to have decided that one of the above is the greater evil, and are willing to risk the other. Github is in the minority of companies that (hitherto) has seen the latter as the greater evil, or at least that is how the company has presented itself (I don't work there and don't personally know anyone who does, so I really can't comment on anything other than the rhetoric).

What we need is, boring though this may seem, some kind of balance between the two. In an anarchic company, people are going to over-step the boundaries (e.g. by reverting a co-workers commits due to a personal dispute). Some authority needs to police this. However, that authority only really needs to be reactive - it should punish wrongdoers rather than order people around on a daily basis. Most of the time, people do the right thing and can be left to get on with it, and hassling them while they do it is harmful.

To get overly philosophical, I think we can have the best of both worlds by borrowing the concept of 'complex equality'[1], which comes from the book Spheres of Justice by Michael Walzer[2]. In a nutshell, he suggests that we can avoid power imbalances by ensuring that natural and legitimate imbalances within different 'spheres' do not spill over into other ones. In the context of tech companies, we might have, say, a 'discipline' sphere where managers are in charge, a 'technical' sphere where engineers are in charge, a 'design' sphere with designers in charge, and so on. Being the top engineer doesn't give you the right to overrule a designer on a design question, and being a top manager doesn't give you the right to overrule an engineer on a technical question. If we're dealing with a personal conflict, this falls under the jurisdiction of management, and they should have full authority to resolve it. If we're dealing with a technical debate, that should be resolved by engineers. Resource allocation should be handled as democratically as possible.

Once you think in this way, it becomes obvious why some companies and projects fail: managers demanding authority over technical matters (e.g. estimates, software development workflow), engineers demanding authority over design (I'm sure we can all think of examples), or anyone demanding authority over management practices. These are all likely to lead to abuse and mismanagement; in any case they are unlikely to be optimal. What companies need is formal structure, but structure that constrains authority rather than simply entrusting it to managers and thereafter hoping that they turn out to be, against the odds, good ones.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_equality [2] I am dimly aware that Walzer is controversial in some circles. I know nothing about him apart from the book, so please do not take anything I say as an endorsement or condemnation of any of his other views, which are beside the point here.

Six months ago, I switched my company (over 50 full time employees in 3 cities) to Holacracy.

I'm here to tell you that I'm 100% convinced that it's a huge step forward in terms of any organizational system I've come across.

There's nothing 'flat' or 'manager-less' about it. It's a complex and intricate system that leads to greater clarity, less politics, and better distributed decision making.

Accountabilities are clearer, meetings are more efficient, and more voices are heard. Holacracy explicitly avoids design/decide by committee.

If you're running a company with more than 10 employees, I highly recommend you take a serious look at Holacracy. It's the best decision I've made by far, and I'm never going to work for, or start another company without running it this way.

If you're earnestly curious, drop me a note and I'll be happy to talk about it more with you.

I agree with this. However, in my experience, bad managers are really good at politics, and their aptitude with politics biases many organizations towards bad management. Holocracy isn't so much a knee-jerk reaction to bad managers, it is a knee-jerk reaction to bad politics. I would posit that if bad managers were never promoted, people wouldn't have the same holocratic ideals. They would just switch teams or switch companies, and be done with it. They can't do that, because sooner or later, Bad Manager Bob comes back as Bad Director Bob.

Holacracy is not Bullshit.

The "GitHub Debacle" seems to be more an issue of a lack of professionalism and an unwillingness to confront serious problems (a bully non-employee spouse in the office creating trouble for what sounds like a good employee) before they came to a head.

Managers can = leaders, but the two are not mutually exclusive.