 Slides, all right, great. So hi, I'm Brian. It's really, really cool to be at an Agile conference. My work grew out of Agile development. I was involved in Agile in the very early days and building an Agile software company. And I guess unlike most entrepreneurs, I was really not very passionate about any particular products or services of my company, which sounds like a bad recipe for an entrepreneur, right? But I was passionate about the process. I was passionate about how we work together. I didn't care as much what we did. So I started a consulting company, because what else do you do when you don't really care about doing anything in particular, but you're passionate about process. And I used my software company to experiment. I had this sense there's got to be a better way to build a company, to run a company, to work together. I had been doing Agile software development at that point for several years, and that gave me that visceral sense of a better way to work together, to build software. And my question was, how do I take these principles to everything I do in my business? And how do I go beyond just the way I build software and to the way I run a company and build a company and do every aspect of operations? And I didn't know the answer, but I had the question, and I used my company as an experiment ground, a laboratory. And over the next seven or eight years, I just iterated. I went out and found every idea, technique, process, practice, thought, anything I could find, and put it into practice as I built my company. And Holacracy was the result of many, many years of iteration and experimentation, and it's now spreading all over the world. So let me give you a glimpse of this, but I want to start with a story that became a founding, one of the key goals, I guess, or challenges, I'm a very meaningful part of my journey, and it was when I was flying an airplane. So I have a pilot's license, but at the time of this story, I didn't yet, I was a student pilot. I had about 20 hours of flight experience under my belt, and it was time for my first cross-country solo flight. That's where you get in the plane with no instructor and fly far away from your home airport, which they let you do with only 20 hours of experience flying, which I was a little surprised, seemed a little dangerous, but they assured me it was fine, so I got up in that flight. I started flying, and the low-voltage light came on on my instrument panel. Now, they don't teach you much about the hardware of the plane at this point, so I really didn't know what that meant, right? I mean, I can kind of guess it had something to do with electricity, but that's about it, right? So beyond that, I start looking at my other instruments. That's my instinct, check the other instruments. And one by one, I look at each one. I look at the altimeter, and it says, you're not losing altitude, everything's fine, right? I look at my airspeed, my airspeed's fine. I'm not losing speed. I have plenty of fuel. My navigation device says I'm perfectly on course. Every other instrument on the control panel says everything's fine, there's nothing to worry about. So I figured this must not be that big of a problem, right? Only one instrument is reporting anything anomalous. So I just decided to let the other instruments outvote it, all right? And I ignored it and I kept flying. Turns out that was a really bad decision. I nearly crashed the airplane that day. I, fortunately, obviously did make it down, but barely. I ended up completely lost with no electronics, no radio, no lights in a storm, in a cloud. Rain pouring down on the windshield, no idea where I was, almost out of gas, and then violating international airspace, right? So, you know, bad situation. And it all started when I let the other instruments outvote the voltage light. And when I did make it down, and I was reflecting on this, and I realized this is what happens in companies all the time. Except it's us humans that become the instruments. We are the sensors for this organization's flight towards its purpose. We sense its reality on its behalf, and often it's one lone person or small group that senses something that no one else sees. Naturally, we have different roles, different perspectives, different strengths. We see different things. Have you ever been the low voltage light in your company? Ever been the one that senses something and then find it really difficult to drive meaningful change? And that sent me on a quest. How do I build a company where anything sensed by anyone, anywhere in the business, has a place to go where it can get rapidly and reliably processed into meaningful change? And I started looking at what gets in the way of that. Everything that gets in the way of that. And there are so many things that get in the way of that. Every time you have to convince your boss and your boss doesn't see it, well, that gets in the way of it. The painful meetings that take so much time that even if you convince everyone else, it's no longer relevant, it's taken too long. That gets in the way. The politics, the egos, the resistance to change, there is so many things. So I started looking, what's the root issue underneath these? What can I trace this stuff back to? What I kept coming to the conclusion of is all of these things, the politics, the egos, the drama, the resistance to change, I think our organizations are perfectly designed to achieve those results. I don't think those are just something going wrong with one particular company. Those are near universal experiences. So I kept coming back to this, the management hierarchy. This is the way we organize companies today. We've been doing this for a long time. As much as my work is about moving to a different organization paradigm, I really wanna do that with appreciation. This has been incredibly powerful. If you were an executive running a company 100 years ago, this was a fine choice for how to run your company. Really, it was the only choice. This was like Windows 15 years ago. It's the only operating system on the planet just about at this point. There is no real choice. This is the only way we have of fundamentally structuring a business. And it worked just fine for the level of complexity our organizations faced for most of last century. But the world has changed. We face an environment with unprecedented levels of complexity. The pace of change is faster than it ever has been. The inbound demands on your attention. Think a century ago, how many messages did you get in a day as an executive? How many messages did you have to process? What do you think? Somebody shout out a number for me. 100 years ago, 1920, you're running a company. How many demands on your attention in a day? How many messages? 10, great. What about today? Hundreds, right? At best. Ever since my company, we used Slack and my message volume went up like 10X after that. But I love it. I wouldn't go back. I feel the responsiveness is amazing and yet the demand is huge. This organizational forum was not built to deal with the level of complexity and the demands that we have on our companies today. So I kept coming back. If I want to find a way to allow anything since by anyone, anywhere in the business to drive meaningful change, I think I need to question this fundamental structure. So I did. And ultimately, I realized there's a very different way of achieving order out there and we see it in our world already. We see order without bosses. We see it whenever we allow self-organization in emergent order to take root. We see it in our cities, right? I spent a good half an hour yesterday just watching from my hotel room the traffic in Bangalore, right? That was almost as riveting as an action movie as far as I can tell. It's chaos, but it's ordered, right? It's this beautiful ordered chaos. I was just enthralled with this pattern. I can pretty much trust. I can go to any modern city nowadays and I can find a ride to a place to eat. I can order a meal. I order a lot of salads. My salad is an act of global cooperation, right? The lettuce comes from one country, the peppers from another, the olives from Italy, maybe, whatever. And it's not through any act of top-down control, right? I mean, the number of people actually involved in my salad is huge. It's in the thousands, if not tens of thousands. The shipping companies, you know, trucking that stuff around. The iron miners to mine the ore for that truck, I mean, all of these. And there's not a supply chain management department organizing this whole damn thing, right? There's a framework in society. We have a framework that provides some basic boundaries, some basic rules, some regulations and laws about how we're gonna operate together, but they don't presume to tell us exactly what to do. They don't predict and control how we need to organize. They leave us a lot of freedom to adapt locally. So we do. We have merchants throughout that. We have individuals all adapting to their local context, transacting with others. And this is a pretty effective way we found as a human species of achieving order. And yet then when we step into a company, we leave behind the emergent order of society and we step into what is more akin to a feudal system. We have kings and barons and peasants and we have an attempt at a top-down planned economy. And actually that works fine when complexity is low. And it fails when complexity grows. Another metaphor that I find even more appropriate here is the human body. Trillions of cells working together in harmony and no CEO cell telling the others what to do. That's pretty cool when you think about it. And yet we have an aligned system. When I go for a jog, my whole system generally comes with me. And it kicks into high gear. My heart pumps faster. My lungs get more oxygen into the blood. My muscles move. My nerves send the signals. All of it working in harmony without a top-down control paradigm. Instead, every cell has autonomy. Every cell has its own internal self-organizing process and yet it's part of a larger entity. And this is how we get scale here. It's not just through a whole bunch of cells with no broader structure. We have organs that wrap together the cells. The heart takes the nerve cells and the blood cells and the muscle cells and it pulls them together without violating their autonomy. They still have autonomy and self-organization within every one of those cells, but it builds on that into a larger self-organizing whole, heart. Which is itself just a part of a larger self-organizing whole, a cardiovascular system and so on. That's why you can sit here thinking about holocracy and order in companies and not thinking about how do I get the energy to that cell to contract that muscle? You can ignore that complexity. It's abstracted out for you. Thanks to self-organization. We do this without a command hierarchy in the way we have in our company. So why can't we bring that into our organization? So that was my question. Experimentation led me to something we eventually named holocracy. It's a very different way of structuring a company and of the thousand, two thousand and some companies now doing this today, once you get there, it takes a while, this is a big change, but once you get there, there is no longer anything like a management hierarchy. There are no managers. There is management, but not managers. In other words, the functions of management are still needed. Somebody's got to worry about resource allocation. Somebody's got to worry about who does what, work breakdown, the functions we have that we typically look at managers of doing are still important functions, but that doesn't mean we need to organize them by centralizing power in a CEO and breaking it down a hierarchy. There are other ways to organize. So one way to think about holocracy is management without managers. It's a different way of achieving order. So I wanna hit a couple of misconceptions. When I say there are no managers and there's not and not only no managers, let's be clear, I'm not even talking about a flat structure. When you hear flat, that doesn't make any sense. I wouldn't describe this as flat at all. When I hear flat, I still think of, there's some CEO and they just don't use much hierarchy, but that's not the case here. There is no CEO. There's nothing that looks like a CEO. No more than there is a CEO cell in the human body anymore. So misconception number one I wanna hit is when we have no managers, we have no structure, which is actually a significant misconception of this. With holocracy, there is more structure, not less than a management hierarchy. You just get to the structure differently and the structure is much more fluid. It can change, it can adapt, but there's still clarity of structure. Who does what? Who makes which decisions? These things are more clear. They have to be than in a management hierarchy. Management hierarchy, you can at least fall back to the boss. When it's not clear who should be doing what or who should be making which decision, right? At least there's some boss to sort it out heroically. You don't have a boss in this, so you need more clarity. In fact, one of the things I found early on my journey is that if you want a deeply empowering environment, it takes the very things that we see getting in the way of empowerment today. Early on my journey, I thought most companies I've been in, it's all this structure and boundaries and policies and rules and constraints, these are getting in the way of self-organization, adaptation and empowerment. So let's throw them out. Problem is, I didn't end up with an empowering team doing that. I ended up with a confused mess. If you go to your team tomorrow, if you're a team lead of some sort, and you tell your team, guess what guys? You're empowered, good luck. You don't get an empowering team. What you get is a lot of confused people. Because they know there are some limits. They know there's something they really shouldn't do. You can pretend that doesn't exist, but it does. There's something they shouldn't do without talking to someone else. And if they don't know what those constraints are, they're gonna spend a lot of time and energy trying to figure out the constraints or being overly conservative because they don't know what they are instead of leading. So ironically, if you want a deeply empowering environment, one of my learnings was we need these things. We just need the right ones and we need them to be fluid and flexible. We need boundaries, we need constraints. Set another way, if you don't know your limits, you don't know your freedom. If you don't know what you can't do, you don't know what you can do without talking to anyone. If you wanna know your power, you need to know your boundaries. So, holocracy, one of the things that we evolved is a process for clarifying these things and for evolving them to find the right ones. They're gonna be different in any team so it's not something you can design top down, it needs to be iterated on, but you do need clarity, you need constraints. So myth one of holocracy, it's not about less structure, it's about more structure but agile structure. Another common myth is when you don't have managers, all decisions must be made by groups and consensus, which I think God is not the case. I find that to be incredibly excruciatingly slow and not very flexible and adaptable. With holocracy, there is more autocratic decision-making than in a management hierarchy. I find that fascinating, right? But it's decentralized autocracy. It's distributed autocracy. It's not rolling up in a management hierarchy. It's not broken down from a CEO on down. It's distributed, it's like in society. If I wanna decorate my kitchen, redecorate, repaint my kitchen, I don't call a big meeting of the neighborhood. I don't try to get consensus of all my neighbors. That's what I do if I was in a typical company, right? I'd call a big meeting and I'd try to get everyone bought in. I'd socialize it, all my stakeholders. No, it's my kitchen, I just decorated how I want. But I know not to do that to my neighbor's kitchen. That's my neighbor's to control. We have clear boundaries so we know who leads what. That's what we have in holocracy, so it's decentralized autocracy. We have clear boundaries so we know who leads what. I know what's my decision to make. I can get all the input I want, but at the end of the day, the burden of leadership is mine. But I also know what my colleagues' decisions are and I know not to get in their way. So let me get a little more concrete with you and give you a glimpse of what this looks like how it works. So holocracy is a role-based system. It breaks up work into lots of little roles. This is one of the roles I fill, I'm filling it right now, my holocracy spokesperson role. But this is just one role. I fill about 20-some roles throughout my company with about six different teams. So this isn't a job description, it's not the overall sum of what I do. It's one function, one little unit of work. This role has a purpose, all roles have a purpose. Holocracy is a purpose-driven system. It starts with a purpose of the company, it breaks it down into a purpose for each team and then a purpose for each role. It tells me why does my role exist, what am I trying to achieve? And then I have some expectations on me, these accountabilities. These define what I need to manage, what I need to lead and what others can expect of me. Now the golden rule of holocracy is this, to serve your role, when you fill a role and you have a purpose to get done or some accountabilities to enact, you have the full authority to make any decision or take any action whatsoever, even outside your normal area, anywhere in the company to get your job done. You don't need to socialize at first, you don't need to talk to anyone, you don't need consensus, you don't need buy-in. You have permission already, you have the full authority to make any decision or take any action to get the job done, unless there's an explicit rule against it, because there are some boundaries we're gonna need. But the default is open until restricted. This is the opposite of the way most companies work today. Most companies have a very strong implicit culture that things are denied until permitted. It's the opposite. So if you don't believe me, you can try and experiment. Go in your company, make a big, bold, autocratic decision outside of your normal area to serve your purpose without talking to anyone first, announce it to your team afterwards and see how many people you piss off. If people are upset and frustrated that you went and made a big, bold decision without talking to people first, you have an environment that says you need permission first before acting. And there are two ways in most companies today we get permission. One is by running it up the management hierarchy, getting the bosses involved. The actual more common one, even in management hierarchies, in most companies, is we get permission by socializing it. We get permission by calling the meeting, getting buy-in, talking to everyone and making sure we all agree on what to do. Which is nice in that we all get a voice in that, but it's incredibly slow. When you do that for most of your decisions, you slow down the entire system. You don't have authority to lead. This is the opposite of that. This says, look, if you have a role and a purpose to serve, the burden is not on you to get permission. The burden is on others if they want a constraint to put it in place. Because otherwise, you're gonna go fast. A colleague of mine that trains this in French says, in most companies, it's like we give people these really slow cars, and then we push them to try to go faster. But with Holocracy, we just give everyone a Ferrari to begin with. We say, go fast by default, and we'll put speed bumps down where we need them. But your default isn't go slow. Your default is go fast. Lead, be entrepreneurial. Go fast and create tension for others. Instead of the goal being to prevent tension in others, let's make the goal to be so fast and so good at adapting to tensions that we don't have to worry about creating some tension in the meantime. For the most part, there are some tensions you wanna worry in advance about. Fine, worry in advance about those. But for most of them, for most things in business, if we have a really fast way to learn and adapt, we don't need to worry about preventing tensions in the first place. We can simply use them to learn. So let me dig in a little further. And first, a warning. If you want to see this go horribly wrong, you can go try to define all this in advance. Don't do that. Let it emerge, let it evolve. You don't want to go define top-down. Here's all the roles, all the documentation, all the accountabilities. When we created this role, it had just a purpose and I think one accountability. And the rest we learned over time. And I'll tell you how that works in a minute. But first, let me show you another way we learn. We need to learn what the constraints are, what the boundaries are we need to honor. We have a lot of authority here, so we're gonna need some good limits. Here's where a limit comes in. So this is another role I work with. This is my colleague, Olivier, who filled our web architect role. It has its own purpose. Clear and stylish website for our company. But this role has a domain. Think of that as the property of this role. That's telling everyone in the organization here, the website is this role's property. Don't mess with it without checking with Olivier first. So in my spokesperson role, I have the authority to make any decision or take any action in the company, but if I want to impact the website, I need to check in with Olivier and I need to ask him one simple question. Will this thing I wanna do cause harm in the website? And if he says yes, I need to stop and I need to integrate his concern. So it doesn't matter if he's the newest hire and if I'm the founder of the company, right? There is no management hierarchy here. There are no managers. There is no status accordingly. All that matters is he fills our web architect role and he has property here. If I want to mess with the website, I need to check with them and make sure I'm not gonna cause harm in it. And so that's one way we break up control. That said, again, if you wanna see this collapse in a bureaucratic mess, you can go try to define all the domains that you need or you think you need in your company. If you did that, it would be like how we built software many decades ago where some architect would go and try to design, let me design the entire system, I'll build every component I think any developer will ever need, right? I will architect software that way. We used to do this and we found we had these massive overweight designs. Big design up front didn't work for software development well. Guess what? It also doesn't work for companies and yet we still do it today. It is the standard design approach for companies today. We do a big reorg every few years. Somebody does big design up front and they try to anticipate every possible need and they design an organizational structure. And it doesn't work any better than it did in software. So don't do that. Don't go create all the domains you think you need. You're gonna end up with an overly restrictive environment there and you're gonna miss domains you actually do need and you didn't know. So instead, start with the simplest, lightest weight structure you can. What you really need is a process to evolve the right structure, the right boundaries. You need some way to learn together rapidly and to iterate and to say, wait, we think we need a domain here. Let's create it just in time when we actually uncover the need for a limit for a restriction. In a holacracy that works through what we call a governance process. So every team, every circle here is doing a regular governance process where it's evolving the structure of that circle. So we do this, you can do it asynchronously and there's a governance meeting where we do that and work through issues and there's a structure to that meeting and whole process behind it. And it's in every team. So this isn't just one thing we do at the top or whatever. There is no top anymore, it's a distributed environment. But for example, this is our outreach team. This is our marketing team basically. That's where my spokesperson role lives, our web architect roles in there. And once every month or so, anyone filling a role in this team is invited into the governance process where they can propose changing any other role on that team. Or any policy of that team, which think of that as a constraint. The policies become your rules, your limits, your constraints. They can propose changing it, removing one, changing one, adding one, whatever they need to do. They can propose adding domains on roles or property, giving roles certain property or removing it. They can add expectations on roles or remove them. They can create new roles, merge roles, split roles, whatever they need to do. The whole team structure is flexible that way and every team is doing this. So we can start with a lightweight, simple structure, and then learn and evolve over time. Here's an example of what happened with that. This is my spokesperson role again. This is a true story. When we first created this role, I mentioned it only had one accountability. Let me tell you the story that I just love this story of where the third accountability came from here. It says defining criteria for acceptable speaking engagements. We got that accountability because way back in time, there was another role that proposed that and that role was our casting agent role. Role names often get a little creative. Casting agent is the role that receives all the speaking requests that we get and me the spokesperson for talks. We get a lot of invitations to speak at different events. So we had a while back, our casting agent was getting frustrated. She would get a lot of invitations, she'd find one, she'd build a relationship with a conference organizer. She'd build a relationship, she'd negotiate terms, and then at the end of her process, she'd present the opportunity to me and I'd shoot it down and say, no, I'm not gonna go to that, it's the wrong market or it's not big enough or whatever. And she felt totally disempowered. Imagine that, she built a relationship, she negotiated and then at the end of her process I say no. So she comes into a governance meeting, right? She comes into that meeting and she says, look, I wanna know the criteria you're using because if I know those criteria, then I can assess them myself at the beginning of my process instead of getting shot down at the end. So she says, I'd like to add an expectation under your role. I'd like to be able to count on you for defining that criteria so I can go look at it. That goes through our governance meeting process. In that process, by the way, we're not looking for consensus. We're not asking, does everyone agree? Do you think this is the right answer? It is accepted by default until unless somebody can say, here's a reason why adding that expectation will get in my way of doing my work. And even if somebody can say that, that doesn't shoot it down, it just gives us a puzzle to solve. How do we meet her need without getting in the way of your work? So this isn't a consensus process. It's a very different kind of process. In this case, nobody saw any reason why adding that expectation on that role would get in their way of doing their work. So it took two minutes and we had that new expectation and after the meeting, she was able to turn to me and say, so when do you think you'll have that to me by? Give me an estimate, a projection. When do you think that'll be done? Now, here's the interesting footnote of this story. She was our newest hire right out of college. I'm the founder of the company and a seasoned CEO before that. In what companies do you know where the newest hire right out of college in two minutes can add an expectation onto the founder and then turn to him and say, so when are you gonna have that done for me by? In what companies does that take two minutes or even happen at all? How would that have happened in a management hierarchy? There would have been politics and egos and status in the way and all this other crap. None of that mattered here. It's all about the purpose. It's about the work we need to do and it's about the roles. It's a totally different kind of process and environment. And what's beautiful to me about this, my background is in coding specifically in the agile world and software design and architecture this is an agile approach to design. What we're doing here is designing our organization structure one tension at a time. We're paying attention to the user needs here. The user need is where do you feel tension? Where is something in the way of you doing your work? My colleague here had something in the way of her doing her casting agent role, her expressing her purpose as best she could. There's a design need right there, something's in the way. So she channels that into the governance process which iterates on the design of our company until that tension is no longer in the way. When you do this, instead of big reorgs every few years with big design up front trying to solve your organization structure, you're doing a micro reorg every couple of weeks through your governance process. You're iterating and you're doing it in every team not top down from the top. Every team is rapidly iterating on their design. You're letting the design emerge for your team, for your structure. It's a really cool approach to design. It's design without a designer. It's an evolutionary design process. And it results in a very different organizational structure. So this is our org chart. We don't have a management hierarchy. There's no top down typical org chart. Every one of those little bubbles is a role and they're in circles. Every circle is holding governance regularly. The broader circle contains these sub circles and is navigating the boundary between them. There's no top down command hierarchy in here. There is a definitional hierarchy. The broader circle gets to define the boundaries between sub circles. But not command them what to do. Governance is never about deciding operationally what we do. It's about defining the boundaries between roles or between circles. In other words, my company does helocracy trainings all over the world. We just scheduled one in Bangalore starting on Friday. But we have a role that gets to decide do we do our training in Bangalore or do we do it in Mumbai or somewhere else. That role, that decision is never made in a meeting process. It's one person filling a role that has the autocratic power to make that decision. In the governance meeting, what we do is define we need a role for that. We need a boundary there. We need somebody that controls where we schedule our trainings. Somebody's job. And we need some expectations. We need to expect them and accountability for doing some market research and figuring out where a market wants them to be scheduled. If they do that, then it's up to them to use their judgment and choose where to schedule them. So governance is about defining the boundaries and the breakdown, but it's not about executing. That happens by empowered people filling their roles and leading. This is not a leader less environment. It's a leader full environment. It's like everyone is the CEO of their role. And I as the founder, I don't have the power to go tell somebody what to do anymore. But I do have the power to go use governance and define the boundaries and expectations just like everyone else. In that sense, this is not about stripping away power from the CEOs and the managers at the top. It's about raising power of everyone else throughout the system to give them the same tools. It's about distributing the burden of leadership. It's about raising power throughout the system, not removing it from the top. Now I feel like I have a whole team full of CEOs that helped me do that job instead of being the lone person. And this scales. This is Zappos' structure. It's about 1,500 employees, thousands of roles, hundreds of circles. It's an organic fractal structure. And it's living, it's breathing. This looks nothing like, this screenshot was taken a little while ago. If you look at their structure today, it looks nothing like this anymore. It's changed, it's evolved. Circles have merged and split and combined and grown new ones and the whole structure is organic. And the last piece of this puzzle I wanna add, I think of holocracy like a game or a sport. Every sport needs a good rule book. If you're not gonna have power resting in a CEO and broken down a hierarchy, you have to put power somewhere. With holocracy, it starts with a constitution. This is an open source document. It's a generic document. It's the same one used by the thousands of companies today doing holocracy. They're all using this constitution. And this spells out the rules of the game. Now it can't tell you how to run your specific business or it wouldn't be generic. So all it does is tell you how to do the governance process. And what a role means. Doesn't tell you what roles you should have. Just the definition of here's the elements of a role. And here's how you create them through governance. That's it. It defines your meta process, your meta framework, which allows everything else to change. It doesn't tell you how to budget. It doesn't tell you how to hire, how to fire, how to pay people. You're gonna have to figure that out for yourself but it gives you the meta process so you can evolve those. So if you have a tension about your pay, your hiring, your firing or whatever, you can evolve it. You can change it. Today in most management hierarchies, what do you do if you feel a tension about the way we do whatever? Performance management, compensation, firing. What do you do with those tensions? They're really hard to drive changes to those systems. It's hard enough to drive changes to the way we work together. Even Agile, which I love dearly, one of the things I noticed early on, you get something like Scrum. It gives you a great starting template. Here is starting roles, starting processes, but there's no meta process for how to evolve the processes. It doesn't fall back to an autocratic leader or consensus. What Holocracy does, and this makes it beautifully compatible with Agile methods, it works at a different level. It's not giving you a starting blueprint. It doesn't give you any method for building software but it gives you the meta method for evolving and customizing the method. So you can start with something like Scrum or whatever methodology you like and you can layer on Holocracy on top and now you have a meta structure for customizing and adapting the way we do Agile or anything and everything else in the business. Power is held in the Constitution. At the end of the day, when companies do this well, I frequently get people pushing back on me. When I go and give them input, they'll turn to me and say, well thanks for your input but I'm gonna go a different direction. I never heard that as a CEO. My input was taken as direction. Now, better, when people come to me and defer to me or try to when they're new usually, they say, what do you want me to do about something? Any leader here get that question sometimes? What do you want me to do about whatever? Now I just tell them, I don't have the authority to tell you what to do about that. Our authority starts from a Constitution and it gives me no authority to tell you that. That's in your role. The burden of leadership is yours, not mine. Good luck. If you want some input, feel free to ask but the burden of leadership is yours. Let me summarize and then we'll take a question or feel free of time. So in summary, we're moving from static job descriptions. These top-down things. When was the last time you went and looked up your job description? When was the last time you looked up a colleague's job description so you knew what you could expect of them? No one does that. They're not real documents. These are like the old design docs we used to have for software architecture decades ago. They'd be binders that no one ever referenced because they were meaningless. Instead, we have these dynamic roles that describe real clarity because they're the result of a learning process on the team and people do actually reference them because they're the distillation of the team's wisdom. Instead of authority being delegated down a management hierarchy, we have constitutional authority. It starts in a constitution which empowers a governance process which empowers your roles. And then every team customizes its roles, its processes using that meta process. And authority comes from that. Which means we don't need the large-scale reorgs anymore because we have tension-driven iteration. We're designing with an emergent design in every team and with the company overall. And that means we no longer need to play all the politics to get alignment because we have a transparent process that allows it. Often today I think politics are done to drive change. They're done often for good reasons. People want to get work done and that's the only way to work around a structure that doesn't work. Now you have a structure that works. You have a different way to do it. You can get alignment through a transparent process. Like my example with my casting agent colleague, she would have had to play politics in a management hierarchy to get that done. Now there was no politics involved. It was just about what was needed for the work and the purposes we're serving. So whoever's my timekeeper here, do we have time for a question or two? Five minutes, perfect. Let's take a question or two. Who's got a question for me? Yeah, please. What do you think there will be, so, okay. Should I repeat? I heard you, keep going. I'll repeat for everyone. So when we are defining role for every new requirement or anything we need. So don't you think there will be too many roles floating in the organization? Yeah. Yeah. And second thing, the link with this one. We have the role, we have the group and deciding the new role. But when we think one role is obsolete and when we can bring it down or we can define some new role associated with the existing one. So I have these two questions in my mind. Yeah, so let's say you did get more and more and more roles. Things got, started getting bigger and bigger. Do you think anyone would feel any tension about that? Would you, if there was starting to be this proliferation of massive numbers of roles and it started getting hard to figure it out, would you feel any tension? If so, could you go somewhere and propose a change? Maybe merge some roles. Maybe group them differently, maybe create a sub-circle to abstract out some complexity in it. Yeah, of course. That's the beauty of this. It's not trying to prevent that tension. It's saying, well, let's just give you a way to address it when you feel it. So this is my answer to so many questions I get asked when people say, well, what if this happens in holocracy? My answer is, sounds like a tension, right? Do you feel tension about that? If so, that's what the governance process is for. You can change anything and everything in your company through that process, right? That's the beauty of this. So if you feel tension about anything, go propose changing it. And that's exactly what we see happening in practice. We see roles get created and sometimes a team gets too many and it gets a little chaotic. So somebody goes and they merge them or they create a sub-circle or group something together or whatever. Sometimes we get too many accountabilities over time. We start light and then somebody comes and says, well, that's harder to manage and they start grouping them or they cut the ones that no longer seem that relevant anymore. It's living. It's breathing. Thank you. Your answer is my question. Thank you. Another question. Yeah, please. Up here. You get somebody running the mic. Great, mic's coming but for now just talk loud. Communication just so that not necessarily to give people information they don't need but just so that people are able to keep up to speed with everything that's happening that might be relevant to them. Yeah, how do you manage internal communications? I don't know. That's a great question. Sounds like a tension, right? Like there's no answer to this in holocracy. I mean, to me, this is the beauty of the system. It doesn't try to anticipate and answer all these. It says, well, I don't know but that sounds like a really interesting tension. If you feel a need for that, propose something. Okay, so if I was in one of your governance meetings and I said I feel a tension that I'm just not aware of stuff that could be relevant to me and I don't know about it. Yeah. Then what would happen? So sounds like there's something you want to expect there. Expectations in holocracy get encoded as accountabilities on roles, right? So then we get more concrete. Well, give us an example. What is it? Give us a concrete example and then we'd look to that role and we'd say maybe you want to expect this role that's relevant be communicating something or maybe you want a general role that deals with communication and sets up easy processes for communication. We had that tension in my company at one point and that's why we ended up with a role that moved us to Slack, right? We needed more virtual company. We needed more visibility into like little workflows and we created a role for that for internal communication stuff and that role said we need to be on a better platform for this and migrated us to Slack, right? So, but that was our solution. Yours might be very different. You know, the beauty of this is it starts with your consciousness. You're consciously feeling something, right? And this is one of the things I love about holocracy. It doesn't start from the head. It starts from the gut, from the body, from what do you feel and from the emotions. What are you sensing? Every frustration, every excitement, all of those are clues to your tensions and those are clues to what could be better in the organization's design. So it starts there and it builds on that and it allows the design to grow starting with that basic human consciousness. Awesome. We'll call it with that. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks so much. Thank you so much. One last thought. If you have more questions, I'll be around for a little bit over lunch. Feel free to find me. And also Ali, one of the sponsors of the conference, Calm Achiever. They're local in India and they do holocracy work and they can answer questions as well. Thank you. Thank you, Brian, once again.