Hello friends,

Welcome to Theory of Change. This is episode five of the Anti-Pattern Editions, a 12-part season deconstructing and rebuilding tired management trends for people doing purpose-driven things.

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This week: Holacracy.

Supposed to be: the end of hierarchy.

Too often: a labyrinthine system of meetings and jargon that quietly rebuilds hierarchy with added paperwork.

Not all of Holacracy is nonsense, of course. You know me by now. There are useful parts and I’m going to help you get selective about what’s worth keeping.

Let's get into it.

⭕️ HOLACRACY ⭕️

"Power to the people." -- John Lennon

“Most people don’t know why they’re doing what they’re doing." -- Derek Sivers

What it’s supposed to be

Holacracy was popularised in the 2010s, especially in tech firms, promising liberation from managers and bosses. Instead of a pyramid, you’d have self-organising circles. Power would flow dynamically. Roles, not job titles, would hold authority. Decisions would happen through a constitutional process, rather than politics or personality.

It’s a neat pitch: no more bottlenecks, no more meddling managers, no more office politics. Just people doing what they’re good at, empowered by a system that scales without control freaks.

In theory, it’s democracy meets efficiency. But in practice…

Where it falls apart

Those of us who’ve lived through a Holacracy-adjacent rollout know the story arc. At first, there’s a rush of excitement: less sign-offs!

Then, slowly, reality sets in.

Instead of freedom, people find themselves trapped in an endless loop of meetings. Roles that may have had decades of institutional knowledge and weight change overnight.

So, there are meetings about those roles. There are roles created to track all the meetings about the roles. There are meetings about the meetings about the roles created to track the meetings. There are so, so many meetings.

And, worst of all? The hierarchy doesn’t always disappear. It often just moves. Charismatic founders, funders, or loudest voices still hold power. The system sort of pretends otherwise, which makes it even harder to name and challenge. The promise of equality becomes a mask for informal dominance. (Zappos’ famous experiment with Holacracy ended with mass staff turnover and a quiet retreat to hybrid systems.)

And for organisations running on thin budgets, with high staff turnover, and work rooted in community accountability rather than VC runway? Well, there simply isn’t the time or capacity to maintain a new governance system more complicated than Apple's T&Cs.

A better way to think about it

The appeal of Holacracy is real: people are exhausted by bureaucracy and budget control, and long for more distributed, responsive forms of working. That instinct is sound. But the answer isn’t importing a corporate constitution wholesale.

Instead, think of it like this: power needs to be named, shared, and rebalanced.

Therefore, any adoption of Holacractic principles for purpose-led work could and should, imho, focus on:

• Making authority explicit (who decides what, and with whom),

• Rotating facilitation and convening roles,

• Using lightweight agreements instead of rigid constitutions,

• Designing governance that matches your organisation’s actual capacity, not an idealised machine.

For instance, FACT Liverpool have just undergone their own Holacracy-adjacent version of “role-mapping”. It seems sound. Here’s the CEO’s perspective, and the consultant’s perspective on their process.

Emergent strategy, sociocracy, community accountability; there are many influences that fulfil the promises of Holacracy, gently. The trick is to keep it human-sized and transparent.

Try it this week

If your team is craving less hierarchy but you are (understandably!) nervous about hiring expensive consultants or going for a full-blown re-org, try one of these:

1. In your next team meeting, have someone different facilitate. Watch carefully to see what changes.

2. Instead of producing job specs that are basically contracts in disguise, write down the actual jobs to be done. Keep it concrete and connected to real work.

3. Don’t mix “how we work” conversations with “getting work done” meetings. Carve out a distinct space to talk about process. It keeps both sharper, imho.

I once implemented some Holacratic ideas in a nonprofit I was running. Within three months, while we had definitely improved some things, new tensions and the same old problems surfaced. In organisations with long institutional histories, you have to be prepared for these shifts to rupture entrenched hierarchies.

Structures often evolve for real reasons: personalities, workflows, partners, geography. Institutional memory matters. For many, a hybrid is more useful than a wholesale reinvention. Sometimes the wiser move is not to abolish the hierarchy but make the hierarchy transparent, and keep it accountable.

🌊 WAVE GOODBYE 🌊

The world often praises specialists, but it’s the restless and the cross-pollinators who keep things alive. Holding more than one role, switching lenses, and connecting dots is part of the practice of resilience and resistance.

Holacracy gets this impulse partly right: it recognises that people aren’t static job titles. The organisations that actually thrive are the ones that treat multiplicity as a strength, the ones that are able to convene, partner, and deliver without losing their core purpose. Their people don’t necessarily need a new governance scripture; they just need space to stay flexible.

I call these organisations multipotential, and I wrote about that last week in my new monthly studio note about my own multipotential practice as a coach, advisor, writer, filmmaker, and musician.

My latest YouTube video, Why we glimmerscroll, also focuses on issues multipotential founders stumble into (namely: how to escape the "always-on" trap).

Finally, last week I launched Future Perfect, a simple method for rewriting mission and vision statements so they’re clear, human and fit for purpose. This free 15-page playbook helps you apply it to any project.

If you find any of that interesting, go dive in. If you find any of it valuable, you can tip me here. Every bit of support gives me more space to write, create playbooks, make guides, and to keep sharing it all freely.

Take care,

Adam

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p.s.s. I spelt "Holacracy" wrong about ten times in the first draft of this newsletter. I'm sure there's still a typo in here somewhere...