Business Intelligence Success Factors: Tools for Aligning Your Business in the Global Economy

CHAPTER 9

Holacracy

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

 

—BUCKMINSTER FULLER, INVENTOR, DESIGNER, POET, FUTURIST

 

Mastering every competency goes a long way to creating an environment through which an adaptable, resilient organization can emerge. However, considering the ingrained habits from many years of working in an old model, real effort is often required to change day-today activities that allow a different relationship with work.

EVOLVING THE ORGANIZATION

Six years ago, Brian Robertson, entrepreneur and creator of Holacracy™¹, asked the question, “How can we live and work together in a fuller, more embracing, more powerful way?”² He was not looking for another incremental improvement or new techniques within existing models and structures; he wanted “an entirely new tier of organization and shared meaning, one which rewrote the most basic rules of human engagement.”

With the question in mind, he had his goal. The rest of the journey consisted of staying focused on the question, testing different practices, and seeing what emerged. He decided to create a company within his current expertise, software development, to serve as a test bed for answering his question. Hence, Ternary Software was born.

As he and his team ventured into uncharted territory, they held the question as an ever-present imperative while they built the company. Along the way, they ran into all the usual ...