Why Self-Organizing Is So Hard

Especially for software companies, I've always found the idea of using external workflow and management software to be a little bit abhorrent, like wearing someone else's underwear.

It should be your way of doing things, and software you use to help you is just a way of codifying and automating that. In the same way we customize our editors, we should customize our workplaces so that they reflect the unique sets of people and activities they contain.

And of course, other people have pointed out the irony of a hierarchical mandate for change to a non-hierarchical system. I am reminded of an apocryphal story of drug testing at a university. They had a sampling of senior executives, professors, and researchers go first, to prove that it applied to everyone. When a substantial number of them failed, the testing program was quietly shelved.

Holacracy is clearly yet another in the very long list of attempts to synthesize a lot of great ideas into some ultimate solution which is then prescribed, trademarked, marketed, and proprietary so that the company can authorize "official" trained people who take their official training courses etc. The list of organizations like this is vast, and most of them offer some value and yet create fragmented and confusing overly-branded markets. For just one random set of examples: Alexander Technique vs Feldenkrais etc. etc.

Holacracy has some good ideas, but it is not a final end-point. It is just yet another place in the long history of organizational ideas. See the complex history of cooperative businesses for example.

Holacracy must become entirely Open Source, i.e. the software and the writings are all freely-licensed. The developers need to stop trying to control ideas that are 95% not original anyway, just a branded spin on existing ideas.

Anyway, this article at Medium does great job of dealing with things, and the comments there are great too. Thanks

And every two to five years, the circle starts again with a different approach because people become numb to the bullshit language in which change is mandated from above.

The article seems to presuppose that we are in the loop of what is happening at Zappos - I for one have no idea.

The problem is that people self-organize to optimize some instinctual pattern, not to optimize towards business goals. The moment you start organizing towards some other goal than what we naturally do, you are no longer "self-organizing", period.

Holacracy and other mumbo jumbo choose to ignore this simple fact, and pretend like anybody can do anybody else's job and you'll find that once you start to map out how "self-organizing" organizations always work, they aren't in fact self-organized at all.

It's actually quite maddening.

1. A guide to introducing Holacracy to an existing organization

2. A simplified form a Holacracy that doesn't turn off people who aren't used to reading board game instructions

I highly recommend it. https://www.blinkist.com/page19/holacracy-ebook-download

I realized, much later, that it was because management was completely horrible at management.

Why would a person who can manage and run themselves so well that they don't need management come to work for us?

I wasted many fewer years of my life there than some other people (including those management quacks) did, so I'm pretty happy about having escaped.

Sometimes I like to imagine how my grandparents would react to phrases like this.

Yes, see also "sociobiology", http://www.firstthings.com/article/2001/01/against-sociobiol...

"..the science correspondent of the New York Times , wrote a front page article for the newspaper, “Updating Darwin on Behavior,” outlining sociobiology’s principal claim. In the older view, Rensberger wrote, the insect societies of bees and ants and the hierarchies of monkeys were seen as “evidence for the remarkable variety of nature.” Now, however, researchers were coming to a “more profound conclusion.” Beneath the variety there lay “common behavioral patterns governed by the genes and shaped by Darwinian evolution.

..there is a book that cries out to be written -- a debunking of the whole “genomania” upon which sociobiology was largely based. Perhaps we should think of it as the astrology of the modern academy, with the fashionable microcosm now replacing the heavenly spheres. Just as mysterious emanations from celestial objects were once thought to shape character (with a role reserved for free will), so today mysterious emanations from molecular objects are thought to do the same (with a role reserved for the environment)."

There is an interesting article, I believe from the HBR, which outlines the fallacy in today's perspective on management, especially in corporations, where the negative perspective of managers was incubated. The problem lies in that corporate culture sees management as a hierarchical and honorary title, rather than a specific task and function.

What that leads to is coders who would rather simply code and build being "promoted" to management, and hating it while also largely being unprepared for it's specific skill set, and you have managers, who, much like politicians, are more interested in the career and advancement than the actual function of managing. A managers function is to leverage, organize, and clear the path for the team they manage; their primary and sole purpose should be structure and lubrication, not micro-managing and strategic direction.