Chris Cowan: Holacracy is a sandbox with tools for finding the best way to organize ourselves

Here is another special episode of my podcast devoted to self-management, and specifically to Holacracy. This time I sat down with Chris Cowan, an accomplished Holacracy expert who serves as a partner and master coach at the HolacracyOne. He got fascinated with Holacracy after seeing the limits of many traditional leadership development approaches and trying to find suitable alternative ways of managing and organizing. For him, Holacracy provides the framework for people to create the best possible way of organizing themselves for the organization to fulfill its purpose. It was a great chat about whether and how it is possible to better satisfy the human psychological needs through practicing Holacracy. Hope you will love it as well!

“It is quite a one-dimensional view to simply contrast Holacracy with the conventional hierarchical management. Holacracy is not mainly about the stuff that people were not able to do under the so-called conventional management hierarchy, i.e. have a freedom to direct their own work and so on. This polarity can give people a sense that Holacracy is the competitor of the conventional hierarchical management, whereas I think that it is much more accurate to say that Holacracy is a natural evolution of the management hierarchy. And we have to acknowledge that all those benefits that management hierarchy has had to offer us have largely been fantastic! We are only able to be here now because the management hierarchy has been so wildly successful. Now, Holacracy goes beyond and basically invites us to ask where things work well under the so-called top-down management perspective and where things could be even better. So it does not automatically say that one way of approaching organizing and managing is always the best way; instead, it helps us to look at all different ways how we might approach this. What if we did not have to subscribe to just one way of approaching organizing and management? What if we had means to articulate different ways of organizing at different places at the different times as relevant to the needs of that group and its purpose? That is what Holacracy is all about – providing the framework for people to create the best possible way of organizing themselves for the organization to fulfill its purpose.”– Chris Cowan

Listen and enjoy!