Over the past year, the company I work with, Adscale Laboratories Ltd, has adopted Holacracy as our governance practice. We have successfully used it to apply agile principles to structuring, governing, and running Adscale Laboratories, and I have recently presented it at the Canterbury Software Summitin New Zealand to share our experience. I thought it would be worth sharing with the Holacracy community too.
I used the term “dynamic governance” here to refer to Holacracy, not to be confused with “Dynamic Governance”, which is a different system.1
As a New Zealand based software development house for a German online advertising company, we had achieved significant success by using agile software development methodologies to rapidly build our product and capture our market. By structuring the organization as a series of autonomous, multi-disciplinary and cross-functional teams, we were able to build an extremely complex product with remarkable efficiency.
However just over a year ago it was apparent that as we grew, the initial efficiency gains of our flat management structure were being challenged by the increasing number of communication channels within our organization. Our teams were functioning effectively but we were struggling to make wider ranging decisions in an inclusive and efficient manner. The lack of consistent inter-team coordination was evident in both small issues, such as technology upgrades falling behind, to larger concerns such as our integration test runtime becoming unmanageable.
A traditional solution would have been to create a management layer with the explicit responsibility to take care of inter-team coordination and decision making. We were concerned that this approach would undermine the freedom and autonomy within our teams that had enabled our success from the outset.
So we began looking for an alternative to the conventional hierarchy and eventually came across Holacracy, which shares the same core principles that agile methodologies are based on. It enabled us to extend the Agile culture already prevalent within our teams onto the entire organization in a lightweight manner.
Decisions are now being made rapidly and inclusively throughout the organization. In the same way that Agile methodologies yield dramatic improvements in software delivery, we have found that Holacracy equally enables us to rapidly evolve our organization’s structure and policies to better fulfill our purpose. Shared problems that previously got swept under the carpet are now being addressed by a coordinated cross-team approach. Our test suite run time has been cut in half and technologies are now upgraded frequently.
But most of all I think the key benefit here is the journey itself — the journey of evolving our organization has become so much more enjoyable and engaging for all those within it. This has even been recognized recently with Adscale Laboratories becoming a finalist in the Kenexa Best Workplace Awards.
1. I have used the term “dynamic governance” in the video purely because I find the explicit meaning it conveys helpful in explaining these concepts to those new to them. Although “dynamic governance” is a term often used to refer to Sociocracy, a different system, at Adscale Laboratories we have adopted the Holacracy Constitution and all governance decisions are made within this framework.
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