Holacracy: Empowerment Baked In 

I’ve always appreciated the Karpman Drama Triangle model of Persecutor, Rescuer, Victim. We see it play out in organizations all the time, where people end up in this Drama Triangle pattern. It’s interesting to look at that pattern from a Holacracy frame, and how it shifts it. I ran into David Emerald’s model recently — TED, The Empowerment Dynamic — which just looks at an alternative to that Drama Triangle: a healthy response is for Persecutor to shift to Challenger, Victim to shift to Creator, and Rescuer to shift to Coach.

I think it’s a great frame to look at the effect of Holacracy. It’s really difficult to maintain a victim stance in Holacracy. It’s possible, but it’s difficult, because the world keeps holding up a mirror to you, saying, “You can process your tensions. If you’re choosing to be a victim, that is your choice, and perhaps a choice because you don’t know how to do something else, but it’s not because somebody else is persecuting you. It is your choice to stay in that pattern if you so choose.” Which is a nice catalyst to shift someone over to a Creator side of “Oh, alright, let me bring a proposal, let me process a tension, let me do something to change the environment I’m in.”

Before Holacracy, it was easy for me to end up in a Persecutor role as I tried to lead an organization and get its needs met. It was so easy for me to end up being cast as, and playing into, the Persecutor role of trying to get people to meet the organization’s needs.

Holacracy offers me a powerful alternative. First, get clear on what are the organization’s needs. We have a governance process, so it’s not me forcing my vision or demands or will on anyone else. There’s a governance process that gives everyone a chance to integrate into that. So whatever the output is is explicit, it’s clear. That’s what the organization needs, and now I can be a Challenger. Now I can say, if that’s not being met, “Okay, well, what are you going to do? It’s in your power. What’s your next step?” I can ask questions, and I can challenge.

There’s a great story out there on YouTube from Bernard Marie Chiquet, one of our licensees and Holacracy coach, who talks about his own background with the Savior pattern. How easy it was for him in business to fall into that Savior/Rescuer pattern of trying to rescue others, and how Holacracy helps him shift to be a Coach, and say “I’m done with rescuing”, because in this environment, there are no victims that need to be rescued anyway. You’re not even allowed to process other people’s tensions for them in the way that I think you can get away with in a conventional company. Holacracy keeps holding up a mirror to that and lets them process their own tensions.