I'm also interested, having spent a good amount of radio shows exploring psychopathy, sociopathy and narcissism, including corporate psychopaths, how Holacracy affects the impact and influence of this group, with their unrestrained egos and predations. And Brian, you talk about how heroic, hero leaders and how they're replaced. I've always been fascinated by Joseph Campbell's hero's journey. I'm curious. How does that fit into the transition to holacracy. Is there an organizational heroic journey? I did an interview with Chris Vogler, author of Writer's Journey, on how it could be possible to have bottom up stories with the people as heroes, instead of one super hero.
I've never given an intro that long in a radio show there's so much I want to cover with you and I"m so excited about doing this interview with you so. Lets get started. You start a lot of your talks with your story about your plane flight and Tony Hsieh's, I don't know how to say his last name
BR: (Shay) Tony Shay
Rob: Tony Hsieh's ideas about cities and companies, could you start off there and then we'll dive into this conversation hopefully cover some of the topics I mentioned?
BR: Yeah definitely, so thanks for having me. The story I started the book with actually is the one you're pointing to and it's become just a favorite metaphor of mine. I'm a private pilot and when I was learning to fly I had a flight that nearly ended in disaster- almost crashed the plane and it started when I was on the flight, it was a solo flight, no instructor with me I'm still learning. My low voltage light came on on the instrument panel. I checked every other instrument on that panel and every other one said everything was fine. It was the only instrument reporting anything anomalous. My heading was fine, altitude was fine, airspeed, everything else was fine. So I ended up ignoring the low voltage light and I figured it can't be that big of a problem because only one instrument is reporting anything off. It turns out that was a really really bad decision. I nearly crashed the plane. I ended up totally lost in a storm. No lights, no radio, no power. It was really bad. And it all started with just me ignoring one lone voice, and I realized I do this in my organization all the time. When I ignore one person who has a perspective, has some information, or maybe closest to the client or closest to some part of the business. You know we sense different things in companies, and if we don't have a system in our organization that lets anyone who senses anything use it to drive tangible improvement or action, we have an issue. We're risking crashing the organization.
That kind of sent me on a journey for - how can we better approaches to run companies? How can run our companies where everyone has a voice and yet we can actually let them use the voice to drive meaningful change, not just talk forever which is one of the risks when everybody has a voice, right? So I experimented for years and years and years in what lead to where holacracy is now. Yes. It's a very different approach to running a company, I'll let you drive that next question but I have a whole bunch of thoughts to share about some of the stuff we started with there.
Rob: You talk about the idea of evolution and how holacracy enables evolution in a company through discussion of tensions, could you do that transition from the idea of evolution to the- Because it seems to me like the discussion of tension in holacracy is one of the key things that happen to make a company function differently than it would in a usual hierarchical system.
BR: Yeah absolutely. We use the word tension to point to the experience that we have when we sense a gap between where we are today and some potential future that could be better. I think for a lot of people tension has kind of a negative connotation, but we don't actually mean it that way. I think it becomes negative when we can't do anything with the tensions we experience and sense. When we can actually act on the tensions and drive improvement then we release the tension. And when we can't we end up with tension as in the way it shows up in our body, physical pain and headaches and all the other stuff we associate with tension. But when we can actually work out the tension, it's a totally different story.
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