Comment by nomade0 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nomade0 | Hacker News Reader

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Yes, yes, and yes. I work with Holacracy and I will confirm that the techniques described from Stirman's experience before joining Medium (chatting with employees, SCARF, etc.) are not to be put in the same bag as Holacracy.

It doesn't even make that much sense to compare them -- these techniques are bolt-ons - more or less useful practices to make do with the challenges inherent to a conventional structure. On the contrary, Holacracy is a new meta-structure for how power is distributed, how decision-making is distributed, with different channels available to effect changes - a new "social operating system", really.

In my experience, having my manager use techniques like SCARF to "better reward me" is nowhere near as powerful and empowering as having no manager to solve my problems, because there is a system that allows me to address them myself.

-Olivier Compagne

> a new "social operating system", really.

As a species, humanity is about 50,000 years old. Millions, if you include our most obvious ancestral species.

The claim that neologism-of-choice is a "new" system is extremely unlikely to be true. What is more likely is that the new system is a reinvention of a system that has been seen hundreds of times under hundreds of names. Social structures tend to be evolutionarily convergent, depending on prevailing constraints. If a given structure is rare, that is because it relies or can only exist in a peculiar environment (eg Valve + massive profitability).

Truly. There is nothing new under the sun. Including totally "new" social systems that "work" because of short-term enthusiasm.

Well, technically, I'll grant you that it's impossible to rule out. IMO it's highly unlikely that someone came up with these rules: http://holacracy.org/constitution, but I'm not going to argue that, the novelty is not my main point.

I'm interested in whether it's working. From what I've seen, it is. Perfect? Of course not. The be all and end all of running a business? No, you still need to do work. But it's a much better framework to do so that anything else I've seen. Many people seem to share this opinion, too, and it seems to help them to their work better (and enjoy it more). That's pretty cool in my book, I don't need to convince the world that it's right for everybody. If you find the same benefits with another system, or a similar one from thousands years ago, who cares, run with it.

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