📝 usncan Note: Beyond The Holacracy Experiment: What’s Worth Keeping
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When Tony Hsieh introduced holacracy at Zappos, he wasn’t trying to erase managers. He was testing whether authority could live closer to the work. Holacracy is a management system that replaces hierarchy with self-governing circles. Its question was simple: could people act without waiting for a title to bless the decision?
But even at Zappos, the experiment sagged under its own weight. In 2015, a handful of employees gathered in a team room to ask if holacracy was really working. Their complaints weren’t abstract. Meetings dragged on. Roles overlapped. Process piled on process until one employee admitted they were spending more time debating how to work than actually working.
That critique matters. Holacracy promised empowerment but often delivered exhaustion. Still, its principles—distributed authority, fluid accountabilities, real-time tension resolution—point toward what organizations need: adaptability with less bureaucracy. The value isn’t in adopting the full model. It’s in borrowing what helps work move closer to where it happens.
Spotify figured this out early. It borrowed ideas from holacracy but translated them into its own language: squads, tribes, guilds. The names mattered less than the behaviors. Teams had independence but stayed tied through rituals like regular demos, lightweight alignment check-ins and visible backlogs. The org chart stayed recognizable. The way people acted inside it changed.
The lesson is that most structures strain not from hierarchy itself, but from a lack of room to move. They don’t need demolition. They need space.
Where Holacratic Ideas Break Down
Holacracy’s struggles show up most clearly in practice. The system that was meant to clarify often blurred.
Too much mapping, too little meaning.
Roles get charted, domains mapped, but people walk away unsure. Gallup finds fewer than half of employees strongly agree they know what’s expected of them. In matrixed setups, that confusion multiplies: one person answering to several “bosses” but without real decision rights. Instead of empowerment, the result is burnout.
Flat on paper, hierarchy in practice.
Titles may disappear, but influence doesn’t. Teams quickly sense who holds the “real” power, and work slows while people navigate invisible politics. Psychological safety is often touted, but only 28% of employees strongly agree their opinions count at work. A flat chart doesn’t protect people if the culture beneath it remains brittle.
Decisions without anchors.
Spread accountability too thin and choices stall. McKinsey data shows managers spend about 30% of their time on decisions, with over a quarter spending most of their week on it. At the top, 14% of executives said decisions consume more than 70% of their time. In theory, holacracy spreads that burden. In practice, unless roles are crystal clear, decision time multiplies. Everyone has a voice, but no one has the final word.
In my conversation with Gary Hamel, the management thinker and prominent critic of bureaucracy, he cautioned: “New structures are often layered onto old power dynamics. What changes on the org chart doesn’t always change in practice.” Without anchors, authority doesn’t accelerate decisions, it fragments them. Overlaying holacracy on a bureaucracy-heavy structure—without shifting the real challenges—only recycles the same problems under a new label.
Fragility in Hybrid
Holacracy’s rituals assume visibility. In hybrid or distributed settings, that assumption breaks fast.
I watched a team split between San Francisco and Bangalore map their roles with care. On paper, accountabilities were clear. In practice, deadlines slipped. Lunch conversations in San Francisco turned into new agreements, but their peers overseas only heard the update days later. What looked like alignment in one circle became exclusion in another.
Hybrid exposes the cracks: visibility has to be designed and trust is always at risk. Gallup’s latest research shows just over half of managers of remote workers (54%) strongly agree they trust their teams to be productive. Only 57% of employees say they feel trusted by their manager. When trust falters, autonomy collapses. Practices meant to flatten hierarchy end up reinforcing it, creating two classes of workers: those trusted and those second-guessed.
If hybrid makes practices fragile, managers are the ones who either hold them together or watch them unravel.
The Role of Managers
If holacracy showed anything, it’s that eliminating managers doesn’t solve the problem. It creates new ones. The opportunity lies in redefining what managers are there to do.
The answer isn’t fewer managers—it’s managers doing different work. Coaching. Surfacing decisions. And sometimes just holding steadiness while experiments run.
One leader described her shift as moving from “traffic cop” to “compass.” She once spent hours rerouting requests and approving next steps. In a more self-organizing system, she spent that time helping the team define outcomes and guardrails. They didn’t need her to hold the wheel—they needed her to keep the map in sight.
When managers adapt this way, new practices can take root. Without them, holacracy’s tools remain abstract or collapse under pressure.
Multiracial group of business people having a meeting
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Practices That Travel Well
Few organizations will ever adopt holacracy whole. They don’t need to. Its most useful practices can be stripped down and applied inside existing structures.
1. Make roles fluid but visible.
Holacracy replaces static jobs with shifting roles. Companies can adapt the spirit without discarding job descriptions.
- Run role-mapping workshops to make accountabilities visible and negotiable
- Keep a living document of responsibilities that updates as priorities change
- Pilot temporary role swaps so people feel expectations from the other side
2. Resolve tensions in real time.
In holacracy, “tension” is how friction gets surfaced and resolved quickly.
- Run short retrospectives to capture obstacles before they harden into habits
- Use lightweight tools—polls, quick check-ins—to surface pain points
- Give teams authority to adjust workflows without waiting for senior sign-off
3. Build communities beyond the org chart.
Holacracy used circles and guilds to connect people across functions. The larger point: collaboration doesn’t have to wait for hierarchy.
As I wrote in an article on social network mapping, only 3–10% of your connections are truly valuable for building support and influence. Helping people see those relationships matters as much as formal structure.
- Encourage team members to map their real networks—the colleagues and allies they rely on
- Invite outside voices into project pods to bring new energy and unblock decisions
- In retrospectives or role-mapping sessions, ask “Who do you go to when…?” and capture those patterns
This complements holacratic circles by focusing not just on formal design but on who actually moves work forward.
What Survives the System
That story from Zappos—employees questioning holacracy in the middle of the experiment—still lingers. Holacracy promised too much, carried too much process and broke under its own weight. Yet its instincts—more flexibility, fewer layers—remain worth paying attention to.
Hamel has argued that if you cut 20% of the bureaucracy in most companies, no one would notice except the bureaucrats. But stripping away the chart doesn’t fix the culture beneath it.
The real test isn’t whether holacracy could ever work everywhere. The more useful question is whether leaders will keep waiting for the next system to rescue them—or start stripping away the weight themselves, piece by piece, until work actually belongs to the people doing it. And maybe that’s as close as we’ll get.
