Reply to @DCcuddleface on "management reform"

gistfile1.md

@DCcuddleface mentions the latest vaunted effort at management reform, Zappo's adoption of "holocracy". It's just one buzzword in a long and growing list.

Tech industry bosses are understandably anxious to throw off the pall of "management", which sounds downright old-fashioned (anathema to those frantically seeking "disruption"). After all, "management" originally meant controlling a horse, particularly when training ("taking it through its paces"). Following Saint-Simon, it's crucial for the self-image of the tech capitalist that they not just make heroic technical leaps (read: pay people to make them), but "[pioneer] the economic and cultural conditions for social emancipation". "Management" of the old style, leading workers around by the nose until docile, becomes a bad look.

Despite presenting these practices as unprecedented, tech capitalists, qua bosses, are actually on pretty well-trod ground. Toyotist management theories, going on 50 years old now, promoted both illusory and carefully channelled worker participation as a strategy for boosting productivity.

I think it's safe to say the majority of the workers directly involved in realizing Zappos profits - those working in fulfillment centers for low wages - won't be included in these experiments.

Perhaps some of the employees at Zappos HQ, doing professionalized and/or high-skill work, will gain some autonomy. But what I suspect will happen, having worked for bosses that talked a lot of talk about "agile" and "flat" organization, is that these workers with high-skill jobs will be made party to their own domination in subtle and insiduous ways. Zizek, who I'm not generally a fan of, nails the psycho-drama of this:

Imagine this post-modern company... like some digital programming company or creative agency: the boss comes in jeans, embraces you, he’s fun guy, ‘did you have a good fuck last night?’, whatever. But to you he remains a boss! He nonetheless gives orders! But the social game is you have to pretend that ‘we are friends and so’ on... in this relation, the first step to liberation is to force him to really behave like a boss. To tell him, No! Fuck you! No camaraderie! Treat me like a boss! give me, explicitly, orders and so on...

And again, [elsewhere](of this.

Instead of bringing freedom, the fall of the oppressive authority thus gives rise to new and more severe prohibitions. How are we to account for this paradox? Think of the situation known to most of us from our youth: the unfortunate child who, on Sunday afternoon, has to visit his grandmother instead of being allowed to play with friends. The old-fashioned authoritarian father's message to the reluctant boy would have been: "I don't care how you feel. Just do your duty, go to grandmother and behave there properly!" In this case, the child's predicament is not bad at all: although forced to do something he clearly doesn't want to, he will retain his inner freedom and the ability to (later) rebel against the paternal authority. Much more tricky would have been the message of a "postmodern" non-authoritarian father: "You know how much your grandmother loves you! But, nonetheless, I do not want to force you to visit her - go there only if you really want to!" Every child who is not stupid (and as a rule they are definitely not stupid) will immediately recognize the trap of this permissive attitude: beneath the appearance of a free choice there is an even more oppressive demand than the one formulated by the traditional authoritarian father, namely an implicit injunction not only to visit the grandmother, but to do it voluntarily, out of the child's own free will. Such a false free choice is the obscene superego injunction: it deprives the child even of his inner freedom, ordering him not only what to do, but what to want to do.

I work with HolacracyOne, the company behind Holacracy. Although I share the general skepticism over new methods, the portrait of Holacracy in this article is pretty inaccurate. Holacracy is precisely not a cosmetic overhaul -- in fact, Holacracy cannot be used to dictate ways of being ("being cool, being friendly") to colleagues, because it is solely focused on defining roles for the organization - and roles can only be defined with 1) a purpose, 2) a domain (something they control), and 3) accountabilities. Then whoever is filling that role has full autonomy to express this purpose and these accountabilities. If an expectation is not captured into the governance records of the company (see HolacracyOne governance records for example: https://glassfrog.holacracy.org/organizations/5 ), then you have no right to expect it from others, and nobody can expect it from you. If you want to make it an explicit expectation, however, there is a process for that. But it's a process in which everyone has a voice - no "boss" has more voice than others. All the rules are in the Holacracy Constitution, if you want to see by yourself: http://holacracy.org/constitution

I've made an effort at reading the constitution, but their is quite an argot to be mastered before it's intelligible.

You've taken pains to insist Holacracy is not a democracy. The pyramidal hierarchy remains in place (nested circles are isomorphic to a tree).

Max Weber distinguished "wertrationalität", literally worth or value -rationality, with "zweckrationalität", which means something like "goal-driven" or "targeted" rationality. Democracy is cherished for including people wertrational activity, that is to say, including those who a decision will effect in the process of deciding what ought to be, not merely how best to accomplish goals imposed from above.

As near as I can tell, Holacracy the product of many years hard work in perfecting the process of getting zweckrational behavior out of skilled and professionalized workers. This is in the interest of bosses and shareholders, not workers.

The key feature of Holacracy is that the "purpose" for a particular "role" is still decided in a hierarchical fashion, albeit requiring more participation from those on lower levels of the hierarchy in defining the optimal way to achieve the boss' goals.

Yes, it's true the "purpose" is given to a role, however not by a boss, but instead by a collective process of the team – that happens in "governance meetings". More here: http://holacracy.org/blog/the-power-of-governance

Regarding the Holacracy constitution – kudos to you for trying, but it is not intended to be a learning material. Instead it's a reference for when you practice Holacracy. The constitution is the "rulebook" for Holacracy if you will. It's nearly impossible to learn a complex game by reading the rules, instead you're better off playing it and learning from practice. The rulebook is useful for reference when you have a specific question.

Is it fair to say that "processing tensions" is integral (no pun intended) to the whole process? It seems that many questions an outsider would be inclined to ask ("what if I disagree about the purpose that my circle has been given?") are directed to the tension processing aspect of the system.

Maybe it would help if you described tension processing for a specific tension. Let's say my work is boring, doesn't help me develop any skills, and I need to work so much that I don't have the energy or time to get educated, and as result don't understand much of anything that's going on in my place of employment. My subordination is self-perpetuating. A common scenario - for office temps, warehouse gophers, kitchen staff, etc.

The boss doesn't mind, because with my lack of skill I have little bargaining power (finding another, better, job is not a plausible threat). Nevertheless, someone has to do what I do for the company to realize profits (or they wouldn't have hired me in the first place).

How do we start to process that tension?

Or, to take an example closer to home for me: let's say I'm a relatively skilled software developer. My bargaining position is relatively good for the moment, and this is reflected in relatively high wages (thus the boss cries "labor shortage!"). My importance in the process of meeting client demands means the boss is often asking me to work more, to keep his problems on my mind.

The problems we tackle don't much interest me, as they cater to clients based on effective purchasing power (which in turn reflects the polarization of our society into the classes of those who are typically on one side or the other of the wage labor transaction) rather than human need.

More worryingly, parts of my high-skill job are being factored out (to borrow a term from my trade) from my role all the time. A hacker friend in his 50s knew the whole stack he developed on. He and his fellow programmers (an occupation factored out of prior occupations, like electrical engineering) knew about every step of the development process. They might specialize, but everyone knew how to do everything.

Slowly, we see the all-around "developer" dissolved into less complete tasks, which require less training, and which tasks can be carried out by lower-wage workers. I used to do testing, now we have dedicated QA people. They make about half what I do. The boss is thrilled, because my time, which is valuable, is freed up. But how long will it be until I'm the one whose time isn't considered as valuable?

Nevertheless, resigning myself to that macro-level phenomena for the moment, it's still in my interest to take home more of his profits as wages and direct more of my own time. How do we start to process that tension?

Yes you're right, "processing tensions" is central to how Holacracy works and a lot of questions are directed to that process, because the answers will be different depending on the specifics of each case – that's what make Holacracy so flexible.

I'd be too complex and time consuming to answer your question about your specific situation here, but I can offer one thought and one suggestions to explore further.

Holacracy is designed to process organizational tensions, not personal ones, and it prevents people from pushing their personal needs onto the organization. The goal is to express the organization's purpose, not make everybody happy, so to the extent that the people working in the organization are interested in contributing to the org purpose, they will love Holacracy as it enables them to do more of that and with less constraints. If they aren't interested in contributing to the org purpose, Holacracy will not help them hide it. It's not a fun situation to be in, for sure... Holacracy will likely make it clearer, so conscious decisions can be made about that situation.

Often times, tensions (especially tensions that have built for a while and have been "stuck") are a mix of personal and organizational tension. Holacracy tends to help disentangle the two, especially with the governance process.

If you'd like to hear more "how" that works, I'd suggest you attend a free webinar, you'll get an overview in 45 minutes and can ask questions at the end. The next one is on Jan 17: http://holacracy.org/events

Your candor here is admirable.

I think there is a discrepancy between the way the Holacracy organization gets billed in buzz pieces (as faciliating a radical break with the normal social relations in a workplace) and what you, at least, seem to acknowledge is its essentially neutral or quietist approach to said relations.

It seems to me Holacracy will be forced to choose, at some point, between drawing out tensions like those described above, endemic to working life under capitalism, and downplaying them. Given that Holacracy consulting is sought and paid for by business owners, rather than employees, it seems that its own viability as a business is contingent on taking the latter route.