The Holacracy Constitution v4.1 is Out

Last night, in the night of June 8, 2015, the Holacracy constitution version 4.1 was released; you can find it here. All of us at HolacracyOne are really excited about this update because it’s a major milestone in the history of Holacracy’s development.

If you followed our announcement of the open-sourcing and simplification of the constitution, you already knew what was coming.

Here is what’s new:

• Natural language. Until now the Holacracy constitution was infamous for being particularly hard to digest due to its legal language. The main focus of this update was to rewrite it entirely in ‘natural language’ to make it much simpler and more accessible. Some stats: it went from about 15,000 to 10,000 words, and from an average of 22.5 to 15.7 words per sentence. It also means we don’t need a “plain English” version anymore.
• Bug fixes and minor enhancements. With any significant language change, there is inevitably a change in meaning. We’ve tried to keep true to the meaning of the rules in version 4.0, however we took the opportunity to fix some “bugs” and make some minor improvements. You can find a non-exhaustive list here. One of the improvements that doesn’t show in that list is that Article 3 was re-organized to allow the full governance process asynchronously outside of meetings.
• Contributions from the community. It could go unnoticed, but version 4.1 is the first version in the history of Holacracy that received direct contributions from the community, using GitHub as a collaboration platform. The list of changes show some of the people who’ve contributed, not counting all those who did outside of GitHub. This is a huge milestone on the path to decentralizing the development of Holacracy and tapping into more of the collective wisdom.

How to upgrade?

If your company is currently using Holacracy v4.0, you can still find it here. We generally recommend upgrading since v4.1 is an improvement, but there is no rush and you don’t have to upgrade if you don’t want to.

If you want to upgrade, how do you go about upgrading? Simply by the same process you used to ratify the Holacracy constitution in the first place. Look at who ratified the constitution in your adoption declaration (the “Ratifier”), and ask that ratifier to ratify the new constitution.

At HolacracyOne, we have incorporated Holacracy in our bylaws, so our Board circle needs to use Holacracy to ratify the new version in HolacracyOne’s operating agreement.

More often, companies adopt Holacracy by a simple CEO decision, so the CEO is the ratifier. You will then need to CEO to ratify the new constitution, whether he or she does it autocratically or delegates that decision to whatever process he or she wants.

Version 5.0 coming soon

Version 4.1 was a complete rewrite of the constitution while mostly keeping the same rules, in order to set up the stage for version 5.0. We have a list of more significant rule improvements for version 5.0 and you can follow its development — and contribute to it! — on GitHub.