There is a fair amount of buzz about how Zappos is joining other innovative companies in the move from hierarchy to holacracy. This is the move a culture that divides people into power and responsibility haves and have-nots to one of distributed governance. It's what the wildly successful Semco organization has been famous for, highlighted by their recent 10th Anniversary celebration of the last time their CEO made a decision. The Agile Canvas methodology works from the principles of holacracy. The process engages everyone in sharing decision making and responsibility for the whole. It also becomes a key cultivator of a holacratic culture. Its design tends to make group decisions actually faster and at least as smart as those previously made top-down. It works from the principles that, with transparency, engagement and distributed accountability, people are smarter together and that none of us are as smart as all of us.
Holacracy is the next logical organizational architecture as intelligence becomes more distributed and agility is a prime requirement in complex adaptive markets and industries.
