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General News    H2'ed 11/22/15

Transcript: Brian J. Robertson: Holacracy-- Alternative to Top-Down Management

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BR: Yeah one of our clients actually is the state of Washington. They have a department in the state government that is piloting holacracy now. They've just finished the first phase of their pilot, they're ramping up into the second. It's going quite well for them, and they've got some pretty impressive metrics and results from that. I think it's a great example of government trying to become more competitive, more dynamic, the department doing is the office of the CIO, their technology division. They're competing with Amazon and Microsoft and other pretty significant employers for people, for talent in the tech space in Washington, and that's really hard to do when you're a government entity and you're not paying the same wages. It's really hard to compete. Their approach is, lets make this the best place to work by giving people more voice, more power, and lets make it a model of lean governance, lean government, for providing services to organizations, or sorry, to their people, to their populace. I think there are some interesting opportunities for taking the functions, the service providing entities that right now are part of state governments and helping them operate more lean, more efficiently, more responsively and Washington right now is kind of leading the charge pioneering that.

Rob: You talk in the book about consensus versus role authority. Consensus was a major goal in Occupy, the Occupy movement, which attempted to operate using the ideas described in horizontalism. Where does consensus fit in with holacracy. From what I've read it's not something you think very highly of. Can you talk about that?

BR: Yeah, no I don't and it's from experience. Because one of my first explorations, experiments when I realized I don't want to outvote the low voltage light, to use my piloting metaphor. I wanted an organization that gave everyone a voice, and let everyone actually process their own tensions and experiences and to change. I thought, well you know, lets try a consensus based process.

What I learned was there's a huge difference between giving everyone a voice, and actually letting them drive meaningful change. And the two are sometimes even at odds if you have a consensus based process. the challenge is when you're using consensus as a decisions making tool, you're taking a lot of time and energy and space that frankly may not be worth it for most decisions, for one. And two, you have a risk of what I call the tyranny of the majority, it's the same risk we face in democratic government. If 51 percent of the people decide, hey you know lets take this certain minority class of people and give them no rights, we have a huge problem. that's not necessary just even if a majority agree with it. You have that problem even worse with consensus based approaches where now any one person can now deadlock an entire decision that might need to be made operationally. You end up, especially in a company setting, with the tyranny of consensus, where we experienced this in my company when we experimented with consensus. You cannot make decisions fast enough to be responsive and to make sure everyone that sense something can do something with it.

So, what I went looking for is, there's still a reason that I was pulled toward consensus. I wanted to make sure everybody had a voice and could process whatever they sensed into some kind of change. So how do you get that without the tyranny of consensus? The answer, we found, was a very different kind of decision making norm. To use an example, in society, you actually have a whole lot of autocratic decision making, so I have ultimate power over my personal life, and nobody else, I don't have to come to consensus with my neighbors when I decide what I want to do with my life. And if I did it would be a pretty serious violation of my sovereignty. And likewise, if I want to drive my car to the airport, I don't need to check with all my neighbors and make sure they're okay with it. But I better check with my neighbor if I want to take his car to the airport. We have this, one of the things that enables modern society are clean boundaries. We don't need a boss and we don't need a consensus because we know what I rightfully can control and what I can't. I can control my own self and I can control anything that I have a rightful claim to, and the same is true with my neighbor. We don't have that in most companies. So what holacracy does to get the benefits of consensus without the drawback is, first, it breaks up and it uses a process that gives everyone a voice, but not make to make specific decisions. It uses it to break up who controls what, and what do we expect from them along the way.

So, for example, my company does trainings. We wouldn't use a group process to decide what hotel to do our next training at. But we would use a group collaborative process to decide what role has the authority to decide what hotel we do our trainings at and what do we expect from them. Because if I'm our trainer, I might want to expect certain things. I want to make sure that my needs get met, so I don't have to do that by telling them exactly what hotel I want and coming to consensus with them, but I might want to say look, you choose whatever hotel makes sense to you, you lead that decision. But I want you to be accountable for taking the needs that the trainer has for the room, and making sure whatever hotel you select generally aligns with those needs as best you can. We use a collaborative process coming up with those basic expectations and authorities, and then an autocratic process for making specific decisions. But it's not top down autocratic, it's distributed, like society is. What's yours to lead, what's mine to lead, we know the difference, we know the boundary, and we know what we can expect of each other. Now just like in my neighborhood, I do have expectations of my neighbor, and we know what we can fairly expect from each other. And that works pretty well, we live pretty harmoniously together, we have great relationships. We don't violate each other's sovereignty and yet we have alignment, we have shared roadways, we have all these other things that work well together.

Holacracy is really bringing the things we've learned about basic collaboration in human experience into an organization. It's using a group process when that's appropriate, without violating the autonomy of somebody to lead their role and make autocratic decisions, using their best judgement within the expectations we've setup collectively. And one last thing I'll add there, even in that collective process, it's still not consensus. I don't get to block a decision because I don't like it, I have to provide an argument for why the proposed decision will cause harm in my area of the company. In what we call our governance process, this collective piece, it's almost in many ways the opposite of consensus in consensus means we have to convince everyone else that what we're proposing is the right answer. In our process, if somebody sees a need for a change, It's the other way around, if somebody wants to stop that change and say we have to talk about something else first, they have to prove why that proposed change will actually cause harm. So it doesn't matter whether they agree with it, they're bought into it, they like, all that matters is, can they say, "here's a reason that your proposal will cause harm in another part of the system." And if they can then that's something we do want to discuss and we want to find a bridge and integrate both needs. And if they cant, we don't want to get in the way of somebody else driving change to deal with whatever it is that they're sensing that needs to be better. It's kind of hard to wrap your head around sometimes but it basically gives you all the benefits of consensus without all the drawbacks.

Rob: I've gone almost 35 minutes into this interview without you really giving a big overview of what holacracy is and how it works. Hopefully tantalizing people with some of the really exciting ideas here. Let me do a brief station ID and then you can jump in a give a brief thumbnail description of it?

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Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect, connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.

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He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity

He's given talks and workshops to Fortune 500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful people on his Bottom Up Radio Show, and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and opinion sites, OpEdNews.com

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Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness (more...)
 

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