I added an edit here, pointing out that GitHub wasn't actually employing holacracy. That was my (pre-breakfast) sloppiness. My main point still stands, though. And Tom Preston-Werner describes his "management" structure here in pretty great detail so we do have some insight into what was actually going on inside GitHub: http://www.oscon.com/oscon2013/public/schedule/detail/29555
It's mistake to associate Holacracy to flat organizations — Holacracy is actually FARTHER AWAY from a flat organization than it is from a conventional hierarchy. It pushes very strongly about the looseness and lack of clarity around accountabilities in a structure-less org. It even pushes against the lack of clarity in conventional hierarchies as well. Overall, Holacracy instills more structure in an organization, not less.
Ev Williams, who uses it at Medium, puts it this way:
"Holacracy is the opposite of the cliché way to run a startup. People think "freedom, no job description, everybody does everything, it's totally flat, and that's cool because we're all down with those rules". But actually that creates tons of anxiety and inefficiency, and various modes of dysfunction, whether we have to build consensus around every decision, or I'm gonna do a land grab for power... People romanticize startup cultures, but I know it's fairly rare that people in startups say "this is it, it is amazing and everybody is super-productive and going along". So in Holacracy, one of the principles is to make the implicit explicit — tons of it is about creating clarity: who is in charge of what, who is taking what kind of decision — and there is also a system for defining that, and changing that, so it's very flexible at the same time." (source: https://medium.com/p/89fb713a8786 )
So... I'm afraid your assessment of Holacracy is really backward. I'm not saying Holacracy is perfect, but it's certainly not flawed in the ways you describe.
Comments
I added an edit here, pointing out that GitHub wasn't actually employing holacracy. That was my (pre-breakfast) sloppiness. My main point still stands, though. And Tom Preston-Werner describes his "management" structure here in pretty great detail so we do have some insight into what was actually going on inside GitHub: http://www.oscon.com/oscon2013/public/schedule/detail/29555
Catherine, you are confusing "Holacracy" for a generic term that means "flat organizations" and "lack of structure".
Holacracy® is a specific system with clear rules (available here: http://holacracy.org/constitution ), and is far more structured than what you describe in your article. See for example the structure of my organization running with Holacracy: https://glassfrog.holacracy.org/organizations/5
It's mistake to associate Holacracy to flat organizations — Holacracy is actually FARTHER AWAY from a flat organization than it is from a conventional hierarchy. It pushes very strongly about the looseness and lack of clarity around accountabilities in a structure-less org. It even pushes against the lack of clarity in conventional hierarchies as well. Overall, Holacracy instills more structure in an organization, not less.
Ev Williams, who uses it at Medium, puts it this way:
"Holacracy is the opposite of the cliché way to run a startup. People think "freedom, no job description, everybody does everything, it's totally flat, and that's cool because we're all down with those rules". But actually that creates tons of anxiety and inefficiency, and various modes of dysfunction, whether we have to build consensus around every decision, or I'm gonna do a land grab for power... People romanticize startup cultures, but I know it's fairly rare that people in startups say "this is it, it is amazing and everybody is super-productive and going along". So in Holacracy, one of the principles is to make the implicit explicit — tons of it is about creating clarity: who is in charge of what, who is taking what kind of decision — and there is also a system for defining that, and changing that, so it's very flexible at the same time." (source: https://medium.com/p/89fb713a8786 )
So... I'm afraid your assessment of Holacracy is really backward. I'm not saying Holacracy is perfect, but it's certainly not flawed in the ways you describe.
@oliviercp
I've explained the difference further in a blog post: "Holacracy vs. Hierarchy vs. Flat Orgs" https://medium.com/holacracyone-blog/d1545d5dffa7