Differentiating Organization & Tribe | Holacracy

Differentiating Organization & Tribe | Holacracy

Holacracy doesn’t try to improve people, or make them more compassionate, or more conscious. And it doesn’t ask them to create any specific culture or relate to each other in any particular way.
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Holacracy is fundamentally focused on the organization and its purpose—not the people and their desires and needs, however positive these may be. Holacracy's systems and processes continually help the organization find its own unique identity and structure to do its work in the world, while protecting it from human agendas, egos, politics, etc. Instead of those driving the organization, Holacracy allows it to be more driven by its own unique purpose
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But Holacracy wasn’t removing all of their hard-won connectedness and trust, just moving it into a different space and liberating it from the organizational matters at play.At some point it really clicked for David (Allen), who put it into his own words:

“What you’re saying is that it is an inappropriate use of love and care, to use love and care to get something done.”
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We’re not dismissing or limiting a culture of love and care by installing Holacracy—in fact, we are making the domain of human connection more sacred, because we are installing a system where we no longer need to lean on our connections and relationships just to be able to process organizational tensions.
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In an operating system that’s dysfunctional, you need to focus on things like values in order to make that somewhat tolerable, but if we’re all willing to pay attention to the higher purpose, and do what we do and do it well, the culture just emerges. You don’t have to force it.” What he and his team were discovering is that far from suppressing the personal and interpersonal dimensions, Holacracy actually releases them to be more fully themselves and more fully together, without muddying those spaces with business agendas and organizational politics.
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A healthy relationship requires clear boundaries
In this way, Holacracy creates a healthy separation of different domains that are often fused in traditional organizations and sometimes even more so in progressive organizations. My business partner Tom describes this as differentiating the “personal space” and the “tribe space” from the “role space” and the “organizational space.” I love this distinction, and what it points to. These very different spheres of human experience often get blurred – and understandably so, as they all coexist together within any organization. The personal and tribe spaces are where all the wonderful richness of being human come into play; the former is about you and your values, passions, talents, ambitions, and identity, while the latter is about how we interact together and our shared values, culture, meaning-making, and language. The role space on the other hand is where we operate role-to-role to get things done for the sake of the organization’s purpose, and the organizational space is the realm of governance, where we actually shape the structure of the organization to allow the purpose to flow through it effectively. Holacracy doesn’t devalue the personal and interpersonal domains, as some people fear at first—in fact, I believe it instills a deeper honoring of them, much more than many organizations that focus entirely on that. It does so by clearly differentiating these four spaces and holding appropriate boundaries between them, which allows them to co-exist together without any dominating the others – it moves them from an unconscious fusion and the blurred boundaries that result, to a healthy marriage, distinct yet integrated.