The Stormz Team explores the field of Collective Intelligence and its impact on organisations through a series of interviews and discussions with experts from our community of facilitators. Today, we have the pleasure of sitting down with Jean-Michel Gode, whom we met during an IAF meetup and who recently went through a Stormz training. His thoughts on management and change management issues truly inspired us. That's why we've decided to share it with with you.

Hello Jean-Michel, could you briefly present yourself and explain the purpose of Holacracy?

Of course! My name is Jean-Michel Gode. My job is to assist companies and organisations in implementing Holacracy.

Holacracy (from the Greek holons, the "whole) is a method of management and organisational governance inspired by holarchy: its purpose is to distribute the decision-making process at the most appropriate levels, as close to the field as possible. It gives authority and more autonomy to people who truly need it on an every-day basis. Its organisation is based on the decentralization of the decision-making process.

Holacracy has existed for ten years: it's therefore quite normal that it's becoming more famous and its use, more widespread, especially following its implementation by Zappos. Today, there are over 200.000 references on the subject in Google and other search engines. It's really impressive.

The interest for Holacracy relates, more generally, to the questioning of the traditional methods of management and organisation. People are increasingly aware of the limits and weaknesses of traditional organisational structures. Contrary to before, they also aspire to more meaning in their professional lives. The movement of the liberated companies, for instance, strongly contributed to this quest.

Who created Holacracy? Was there a founding book? And how does it relate to the Agile method?

I'd rather say that there was a founding adventure. Holacracy was founded in an experimental company by three software Agilists. Although there is no direct link with agile methods, there surely is an indirect influence.

One of its creators, Brian Robertson, was increasingly frustrated with the traditional modes of management. As an employee, he considered talents and human resources were badly managed and that it was difficult to follow through on your ideas. But also as a boss. Strongly influenced by the concept of the servant leader, he saw that he was himself becoming an obstacle to his company and to what he was trying to achieve. So he tried something new: he founded this laboratory company, Ternary Software, where every possible option as regards to decision making and management was tried. They kept what worked and threw out what didn't. After seven years, their company was noticed by the business media in the U.S. Holacracy was therefore created in the most empirical way possible, in a laboratory company by people who were simply trying to come up with a different type of organisational method.

There isn't any founding book. However, there is a reference book published once Holacracy was starting to gain notice: Holacracy, The Revolutionary Management System that Abolishes Hierarchy, by Brian Robertson, translated in fourteen different languages. There's also the comic book Holacracy: A new Technology that Reinvents Management by Bernard Marie Chiquet. Actually, many people read the latter before discovering the former, since the comic book is available online.

How does Holacracy work exactly? What is the vision of the group and its members?

In a traditional company, people with detailed job descriptions work together. In Holacracy, we differentiate people and their position, or function. We have to make sure that the different positions are well intertwined and complementary in order to create an efficient structure. The ground cell of Holacracy is what we call the Role, which comprises several aspects like the name, the mission or the day-to-day actions and activities. For instance, Making Stormz known to the whole world could be your mission, and Regularly publish articles on the blog, one of the regular activities you have to perform in order to achieve that mission.

The company itself defines its roles, which are then allocated to specific people. It's therefore possible to have several roles in the organisation, or that a number of people are designated for the same role. In a call center, for instance, dozens of people will have the role of operator.

The Accountabilities are the ongoing activities needed by the organisation to follow through on its missions. It's not the same thing as Responsibilities. If you don't live up to your responsibilities, it's bad. But with accountabilities, one only expects that things will eventually get done, whether it's by the role itself or by someone else.

In a traditional company, people can implement their idea if they have an explicit authorization. In Holacracy, people have the authority to do everything they want within the boundaries of their role. In others words, we transform a space where everything that isn't authorized is implicitly forbidden in a space where everything that's not explicitly forbidden becomes authorized. It's a significant shift.

Does Holacracy have any specific meetings? Like the rituals in the Agile method?

Of course. Holacracy has three main rituals. First comes the Triage Meeting, focused on operations. Simply put, it replaces the Monday morning routine meeting. People synchronize their projects together and plan the work to be done. But there isn't any in-depth, strategic thinking: its sole purpose is to schedule the work that has to be done.

Then, there's the Governance Meeting: to create roles, transform and interlink them. This meeting takes place within the same Circle, where all the different roles involved in the implementation of a common mission come together. The Circle also has its own mission and accountabilities, its expectations. A sales circle, for instance, will comprise several salesmen with specific roles: marketing, market research, customer loyalty, etc. It's also possible to be part of several circles at the same time.

And finally comes the most important meeting in Holacracy: the Strategic Meeting.

It's important to have in mind that all these circle meetings are systematically facilitated by people trained in Holacracy facilitation techniques.

What role does the Facilitator have in Holacracy? Is there any difference with traditional facilitation?

The traditional facilitators' role is usually to make everyone feel comfortable and foster the group's collective intelligence. In Holacracy, facilitation is the gatekeeper of the organisation's process and rules. It's there to solve the people's tension, meaning something that that person wishes to improve. It therefore focuses on every participant, one by one. For instance, other participants are not authorized to freely kick in and give their opinion anytime they see fit. A meeting in Holacracy might therefore be somewhat abrupt and rough. This might alienate some traditional facilitators who will see it as a rigid process lacking empathy.

But I don't think it's truly radical or violent. I'd rather say it's a martial arts type of facilitation: when you have to decide, you decide and take action. There are certain rules not to be questioned, and the process itself is non negotiable. Some people have a hard time getting used to the discipline and rigour of Holacracy, but we're not here to manage everyone's ego. We manage roles, not people. Holacracy is not designed to handle people's feelings, but to implement a process. These feelings should be managed somewhere else.

This is why the implementation of Holacracy often comes with an individual or collective coaching to help people become sovereign and rise up to their responsibilities. For instance, when a manager suddenly loses its hierarchical powers, we have to help him come to terms with this new situation and push him not to think as a boss anymore, seeing as how its employees have now become truly independent in their new roles. Some support has to be provided to that effect.

So Holacracy should be combined with a coaching process?

In its implementation yes, because there's still a need to foster the group and the collective dynamic. Holacracy only focuses on the structure, which is something rather abstract. Let me explain myself: if we consider the metro, we can focus on the metro plan, its blueprint, or on its users, the commuters. When you look at the plan, you're not considering the people inside.

Holacracy only looks at the structure, and doesn't take into account how people interact within. The interconnection of roles, or the structure of the organisation, has nothing to do with the life and relationships in that same organisation. That's why it's also important to take into account the people and nourish their collective purpose, but in another space, another context.

Could you tell us about the processes? Which ones do you follow for ideation, sorting, etc. ?

Our processes aren't focused on content production. They're designed to process the topics and issues: triage, for instance, will help process all the issues on the agenda in a very short time. To that effect, we ask all the leads on a specific project what he or she needs. This can be sorted out in five categories: give an information, ask for an information, say that an activity has to be created in the circle, ask someone to perform an action in one of its roles or implement a project with a specific goal to reach.

All of this takes place during the triage phase: this meeting is key to organize and schedule the work within a circle. There's very little room for raw reactions. Since everyone's autonomous in their own role, outside advice, help or everything that relates to emotional reactions are not taken into account.

The governance meeting also relies on very factual elements that come from the field experience. It implements a strict process, not unlike a sociocratic decision making process.

It's a decision making method where we make sure that there aren't any fact-based objections: we test all the objections to make sure that they're not solely based on opinion or conjecture. Everyone can suggest a course of action, that will be accepted only if there aren't any objections. This meeting defines the authority and power of everyone: it's extremely important in the sense that it defines, collectively, the boundaries of everyone's individual power. The ideal balance: a collective space to sanction individual responsibilities. One can only make some real progress in its individual role if its scope and boundaries were agreed upon collectively. The group's delegation of power enables us to act as autocrats in our given role.

And finally, a bonus question: Do you think Stormz might be useful in Holacracy? If yes, how so exactly?

To me, Stormz and Holacracy complement one another, a bit like a hammer and a screwdriver. Both are equally useful at different steps of the overall process. Simply due to the fact that Stormz is a tool designed to create content, whereas Holacracy produces very little content, apart from the governance meeting maybe.

Stormz could be used during strategic meetings, for which we don't really have a dedicated tool. And, of course, for all the work meetings: brainstorming, project management, workshops... all of which is scheduled during the triage meetings.

This is the end of the interview. Don't hesitate to come discuss it on our Facebook group! Do you think it would be a convenient and appropriate model? Do you have some doubts about it? If you think of any other topic you'd like us to cover and explore, or of people whom we should absolutely contact, our door is always open :)