The Organization is Not the Tribe 

Here’s an aspect of Holacracy that many people have a hard time swallowing, but it’s fundamental: Holacracy is not about the people. Holacracy doesn’t try to improve people, or make them more compassionate, or more conscious. Yet precisely by not trying to change people, it provides the conditions for personal development to arise more naturally—or not, when it’s not meant to be.

I consider this one of the most beautiful paradoxes of Holacracy. And it is not an easy one to explain, especially nowadays: in the face of many progressive ideas pushing for improving the organizational culture and promoting “conscious leadership”, Holacracy’s stance goes strongly against the tide!

Fortunately, a few months ago during breakfast at a HolacracyOne partner retreat, Tom made a comment that shed a lot of light on this subject. He differentiated four “spaces” that always coexist but are inevitably fused within conventional organizations, and which the practice of Holacracy helps distinguish:

• Organization space
• Role space
• Tribe space
• Personal space

Tom articulates these distinctions better than I would, so I recommend you watch him presenting these spaces in this video from our Holacracy Community of Practice. For those of you in a hurry, I’ve roughly summarized each of the spaces below.

• Tribe space: the space of shared contexts, interests and meaning making. In a nutshell, community and culture. Organizations give rise to Tribes, though Tribes don’t necessarily give rise to organizations. In conventional organizations, we try to get work done through the Tribe, by influencing or shaping it in a certain way (see Tribal Leadership) by conveying work expectations and leveraging organizational authority in this space. Although it makes sense from a conventional perspective, Holacracy would say that it contaminates Tribe space to fuse it with organizational work. With Holacracy, Tribe space is just about people sharing interests together. No organizational work is done, and no organizational authority shows up. Tribe space is free of the organizational context and its implicit burdens. It’s safe to make this differentiation because Holacracy provides the clarity and processes needed to get organizational work done, and it’s no longer necessary to leverage Personal and Tribe spaces for that purpose.
• Role space: where most of the work is done in Holacracy (>95%). This space is unique to Holacracy, as Roles are clearly defined through Governance meetings. Roles are organizational entities with accountabilities and authorities, and are clearly differentiated from the people that fill them. Role-relationships are a new realm delineated by Holacracy. Because authority is distributed among Roles, role-fillers are empowered to act as leaders in their Roles on certain occasions, and as good followers at other times. It’s here that we channel feedback from reality to define and refine our Roles, and process tensions that help us continually evolve the organization.
• Organization space: the ritual, formalized and structured space of meeting practices (Tactical, Governance) (<5% of the total time). This is the sacred space of the organization. It is a context to focus on the organization’s evolutionary Purpose, and is not about us humans. In this sense, it is deeply impersonal.
• Personal space: thanks to the clear distinction between these spaces, personal sovereignty is deeply honored within Holacracy. With the organization having no control over you personally, you are fully free to choose whom you engage and how you show up. Personal relationships are never organizationally forced, since the work is done and clearly defined via Roles. Organizational power does not come into play within Personal space.

Holacracy is all about Role and Organizational spaces. Of course, Personal and Tribe spaces are also present in parallel, but Holacracy lets them be—not out of disdain, but out of respect: they are too sacred for the organization to govern.