I wrote about this new notion which claims to combine the agile organisation with a peer-to-peer workplace for British Airways Business Life in 2014, but judging from a recent Quartz article  (the link follows below), the concept continues to be influential – and controversial…

Taking its name from the Greek holon, meaning an autonomous unit, the very latest thing in organisational theory promotes a new and radical flattening of the pyramid. Embracing holacracy, as online shoe retailer Zappos has done, means moving from a traditional hierarchy to distributed leadership whereby managers and job titles are replaced by work teams (known as circles) who choose their own tasks. According to its often messianic proponents the system involves ‘thinking beyond shareholders and stakeholders’, ‘dispensing with parental heroic leaders’ and ‘baking empowerment into the core of the organization’ by ‘detecting dissonance and processing tensions’. There are a very few successful firms – the Gore company of Gore-Tex fame is one – who have been virtually managerless for decades, but critics of the holacracy movement claim that it only works for outliers – quirky SMEs, local or family companies on the margins – and can’t provide the sophisticated governance and discipline required in larger and more complex corporations.

Zappos is struggling with Holacracy because humans aren’t designed to operate like software