The Paradoxical Dance between Change and Stability

In quite a few answers to my recent article Yes, Holacracy is overhyped - and underestimated a common theme emerged.

The gist of it is, that frameworks such as Holacracy or Scrum are too rigid, that we need to look at organizations like living organisms and therefore that these frameworks need to be adapted constantly. There are quite a few elements in there that merit closer inspection. In this post, I would like to focus on the proposition, that these practices need to be adapted by each organization to their individual need.

I fully agree, that an organization needs to continuously adapt to its environment, if it wants to succeed and stay alive. In order to that, it also needs to have a stable core that maintains its adaptability however.

Let’s use an analogy: humans also need to adapt to their environment and you could say we have gotten pretty good at it over many thousands of generation. If you look at the changes from one generation to the other, there is actually not that much difference in terms of adaptability. If we zoom in even closer and inspect the foundation of where our adaptability is encoded, we arrive at our DNA. The system or technology of encoding information in DNA hasn’t changed dramatically over many tens of thousands of year. It is the stable core which enables evolutionary changes.

Evolution works its magic through many little mutations over long periods of time. Some of these changes prove to have an advantage it the current context, some don’t.

You can order a CRISPR Kit online now an hack your DNA. Would you do it? I guess for 99.9% of people it would be very wise not to start messing around with their DNA on a Sunday afternoon. There are maybe a few hundred experts on the planet, who actually have the knowledge and experience to know what they are doing, who can assess the implications and effects of interventions at the DNA level, know the risks involved and therefore usually work very meticulously.

Most people who are trying to adapt and “improve” Holacracy or Scrum (or any other practice that has matured over a long period of time simply for that matter) early in their practice simply don’t know what they’re doing. I have seen many cases over the years in which companies have tried to do this and in almost all cases it has backfired (not that many would admit that). In most cases the impetus behind such changes is that the practice feels limiting, awkward and uncomfortable in its early phase. And understandably, many people's reflex is to move back to the comfort zone. But in that situation what's needed is the appropriate scaffolding and support to help people build the practice, not change the rules of the game.

Most of the experienced Holacracy practitioners I know have been skeptical about certain elements of the practice. We have all had our moments of doubt and many of us share experiences in which something "didn't make sense". I personally have questioned many things about Holacracy. As of now, a closer inspection of of these issues and some honest reflection led me to realize that these things do make sense, I just might not like them very much in this very moment. There are cases, when we actually do find things that need improvement or where a company with a very mature practice has run an experiment with good outcomes. This is a good point to segue to another facet of this exploration.

The proposition that frameworks like Holacracy or Scrum always need to be adapted to the particular needs of an organization, also hints at a common misperception. Many complaints are suggesting that e.g. Holacracy is rigid and dogmatic. Very much to the point of some of the commenters to my last article, Holacracy is adapting constantly! Just in a different way than they expect.

The constitution, which we could compare to Holacracy's DNA in the above analogy, is constantly evolving. There is a developmental version that is constantly being worked on and improved. But it is done in a sandbox, in a safe environment and the changes are mostly very small, always very deliberate and carefully inspected and monitored by a community a seasoned practitioners. As they should be, because we are working on the DNA!

One commenter also suggests, that Laloux' book "Reinventing Organization" suggests that all the companies presented in the book have evolved "their own way of doing things". That's true and a closer inspection reveals a paradoxical pattern over and over again: there is a stable core that enables adaptability and responsiveness. It is this stable core which allows these organizations to flourish in highly dynamic environments. And yes, they do try many things and run many experiments AND there is always a core that is very stable (not static) and which changes only very slowly.