Holacracy: The Next Step in the Evolution of Management

Estefanía Campos  | 03 de septiembre de 2019  | Vistas: 43

In this lecture Albert Loan shares a historical context of ideas regarding the source of social order, to frame and introduce what holacracy is, an idea that’s been around for years and which insights and efforts can be beneficial in the scientific community, education and even business; in his opinion holacracy can be the next step in the evolution of management.

Loan begins discussing the problematic that holacracy is trying to solve and contrasts it with Friedrich Hayek’s ideas on the use of knowledge in society in regards to planning a national economy. Hayek proposed that the decision makers should be the people with the local knowledge; that is one of the proposes of holacracy as a management system.

Does your current form of organization which is very likely sort of vertical hierarchy contribute to the knowledge problem or solve the knowledge problem?”. - Albert Loan

Later he talks about Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations’ idea of social order and explains how language, for example, is the result of human action and evolution, since nobody designed it. Other scholars mentioned are Fréderic Bastiat, to explain the complexity of the social world that we conform and Michael Polanyi, on his distinction between articulate and inarticulate knowledge and the importance of making scientific knowledge public.

This is very significant because it relates to not only how we deal with people in our companies but more fundamentally how we arrange and approach teaching in our institutions of formal learning”. - Albert Loan

He shares that after reading The Habit of Thought by Michael Strong, he understood dialogue as a spontaneous order and it transformed what he thought learning should be in the classroom. With this book he learned that the two enemies of group dialogue are anonymity and invisibility.

Once learners understand the learning process as a matter of constructing their own meaning, acquiring knowledge becomes a fundamentally different process”. - Michael Strong

Loan talks about the secrets to successful group dialogues and later analyses the educational system created by Maria Montesorri, which innovates in the organization and activities of students; this makes him believe in the possibility of anarchy, in applied in politics.

Finally he reflects on holacracy as a way of organization that empowers people to bring out the ideas that they think could improve their organization. Loan says, holacracy makes roles and accountabilities in organizations, so people can be autonomous and can pursue their purposes without having to ask permission, making use of their local knowledge.