Holacracy (Brian Robertson, 2007; Constitution v5.0, 2021)
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Description
A full-scale governance operating system built around a published Constitution now at version 5.0 (2021). Brian Robertson developed it at Ternary Software in Philadelphia from 2001 and co-founded HolacracyOne in 2007 to implement and license it. All authority flows through explicitly defined roles nested in circles; two meeting cadences, governance and tactical, are kept strictly separate. Zappos adopted it in 2013 for 1,500 employees; roughly 260 employees took a buyout rather than comply, and the company had quietly modified the system by 2019.
Full text
# Holacracy (Brian Robertson, 2007; Constitution v5.0, 2021)
## 1. What it is
Holacracy is a constitutional governance system for organizations. The rule is one sentence. Replace the traditional management hierarchy with a written constitution that distributes authority into named roles inside nested circles, governs those roles through structured meetings, and amends itself through a defined process. The Constitution is the boss, not the founder.
The canonical short definition comes from HolacracyOne, the organization that develops and licenses the framework: Holacracy is "a complete system for self-organization with a constitution that sets out the rules of the game and re-distributes authority. It's a new operating system that instills rapid evolution in the core processes of an organization." The "operating system" framing is deliberate. Brian Robertson, the founder, came from a software background, and the design treats organizations the way good software treats systems: with explicit interfaces, separation of concerns, and well-defined update protocols.
The framework runs through four primary structural elements. A *Role* is a named function with a purpose, a set of accountabilities, and (optionally) a domain of exclusive control. A *Circle* is a group of roles that collectively pursue a broader purpose; circles can contain sub-circles, producing a nested holarchy from a single General Company Circle down through working circles to individual roles. *Governance Meetings* are the structured meetings where roles, accountabilities, and policies get changed through an integrative decision-making process. *Tactical Meetings* are the separate structured meetings where work gets executed (project triage, metrics review, action items); tactical meetings cannot change governance, and governance meetings cannot direct daily work. The two-meeting separation is one of Holacracy's most distinctive operational features.
Holacracy fits a particular kind of organization. One whose work is complex enough that traditional command-and-control hierarchy produces visible friction (lost information, slow decisions, frustrated middle managers, blocked initiative). One whose leadership is willing to give up positional authority in exchange for a constitutional protocol. One that has the resources to invest in initial training and ongoing facilitation (Holacracy implementation typically costs $40,000 to $150,000 in the first year for a mid-sized organization). One whose members can absorb a substantial procedural vocabulary in the first six months. The framework works less well in groups that need relational depth before procedural rigour, in small groups where the overhead exceeds the benefit, and in groups that adopt the language without adopting the discipline.
Among the participatory governance family, Holacracy is the explicit constitutional opposite of Doocracy (which formalizes nothing) and the whole-system opposite of Sociocracy 3.0 (which is a modular pattern library that lets organizations adopt one practice at a time). All three share a cybernetic ancestor in Gerard Endenburg's classical sociocracy, but they have diverged sharply on adoption philosophy. Holacracy demands a binary commitment: adopt the Constitution, or you are not running Holacracy.
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<title>How a Holacracy organization is structured</title>
<desc>Five modular Constitution articles, the nested holarchy of circles and roles, and the two strictly separated meeting cadences.</desc>
<text x="350" y="28" text-anchor="middle" font-size="11" font-family="Inter, system-ui, sans-serif" fill="#857e72" letter-spacing="3">BRIAN ROBERTSON, 2007 · CONSTITUTION v5.0</text>
<text x="350" y="56" text-anchor="middle" font-size="16" font-style="italic" fill="#5b554c">The Constitution is the boss, not the founder</text>
<text x="350" y="92" text-anchor="middle" font-size="11" font-weight="600" fill="#c97e4f" letter-spacing="1.5">CONSTITUTION v5.0 · FIVE MODULAR ARTICLES</text>
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<text x="92" y="128" text-anchor="middle" font-size="11" font-weight="700" fill="#5d4f3a">I</text>
<text x="92" y="146" text-anchor="middle" font-size="10" fill="#5b554c">Roles & Circles</text>
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<text x="226" y="128" text-anchor="middle" font-size="11" font-weight="700" fill="#5d4f3a">II</text>
<text x="226" y="146" text-anchor="middle" font-size="10" fill="#5b554c">Helper Roles</text>
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<text x="360" y="128" text-anchor="middle" font-size="11" font-weight="700" fill="#5d4f3a">III</text>
<text x="360" y="146" text-anchor="middle" font-size="10" fill="#5b554c">Governance Meetings</text>
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<text x="494" y="128" text-anchor="middle" font-size="11" font-weight="700" fill="#5d4f3a">IV</text>
<text x="494" y="146" text-anchor="middle" font-size="10" fill="#5b554c">Tactical Meetings</text>
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<text x="618" y="128" text-anchor="middle" font-size="11" font-weight="700" fill="#5d4f3a">V</text>
<text x="618" y="146" text-anchor="middle" font-size="10" fill="#5b554c">Adoption & Amendment</text>
<text x="180" y="190" text-anchor="middle" font-size="11" font-weight="600" fill="#c97e4f" letter-spacing="1.5">THE NESTED HOLARCHY</text>
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<text x="180" y="222" text-anchor="middle" font-size="10" font-weight="600" fill="#5d4f3a" letter-spacing="1.2">GENERAL COMPANY CIRCLE</text>
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<text x="135" y="328" text-anchor="middle" font-size="9" font-weight="600" fill="#c97e4f">SUB-CIRCLE</text>
<text x="135" y="344" text-anchor="middle" font-size="9" fill="#857e72">Marketing</text>
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<text x="180" y="390" text-anchor="middle" font-size="9" font-weight="600" fill="#c97e4f">SUB-CIRCLE</text>
<text x="180" y="402" text-anchor="middle" font-size="9" fill="#857e72">Ops</text>
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<text x="180" y="450" text-anchor="middle" font-size="11" font-style="italic" fill="#857e72">Circles contain roles. Circles contain sub-circles.</text>
<text x="180" y="466" text-anchor="middle" font-size="11" font-style="italic" fill="#857e72">A role is a named function, not a person.</text>
<text x="510" y="190" text-anchor="middle" font-size="11" font-weight="600" fill="#c97e4f" letter-spacing="1.5">TWO MEETINGS, STRICTLY SEPARATE</text>
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<text x="400" y="232" font-size="11" font-weight="700" fill="#c97e4f" letter-spacing="1.2">GOVERNANCE</text>
<text x="400" y="252" font-size="12" font-weight="700" fill="#5d4f3a">Monthly. Changes roles,</text>
<text x="400" y="268" font-size="12" font-weight="700" fill="#5d4f3a">accountabilities, policies.</text>
<text x="400" y="290" font-size="11" font-style="italic" fill="#857e72">Integrative decision-making.</text>
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<text x="400" y="364" font-size="12" font-weight="700" fill="#5d4f3a">Weekly. Triages projects,</text>
<text x="400" y="380" font-size="12" font-weight="700" fill="#5d4f3a">reviews metrics, action items.</text>
<text x="400" y="402" font-size="11" font-style="italic" fill="#857e72">Cannot change governance.</text>
<text x="520" y="446" text-anchor="middle" font-size="11" font-style="italic" fill="#857e72">Two cadences. Neither bleeds into the other.</text>
<text x="520" y="462" text-anchor="middle" font-size="11" font-style="italic" fill="#857e72">The separation is the point.</text>
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<figcaption style="text-align:center;font-style:italic;color:#857e72;font-size:13px;margin-top:10px;font-family:Georgia,serif;">Holacracy at a glance. The Constitution sets the rules. The holarchy is roles inside circles inside circles. Governance and tactical meetings each do their own work and never each other's.</figcaption>
</figure>
---
## 2. Where it came from
Holacracy has a clear founder, a clear founding period, and a clear institutional carrier.
**Brian Robertson and Ternary Software, 2001 to 2007.** Brian Robertson founded Ternary Software, a Philadelphia-area custom software development firm, in 2001. Inside Ternary, he and his colleagues experimented with self-management practices drawn from several sources at once: David Allen's *Getting Things Done* productivity methodology, Ken Wilber's integral theory, Gerard Endenburg's classical sociocracy, agile and lean software development practices, and Robertson's own design instinct as a programmer. By the mid-2000s, Ternary had distilled the experimentation into a coherent organizational system. The system became known as Holacracy in 2007.
**HolacracyOne, founded 2007.** Brian Robertson and Tom Thomison co-founded HolacracyOne in early 2007 as the organization that would carry the Holacracy work outside Ternary. Robertson transitioned out of Ternary in late 2007 to work on HolacracyOne full-time. HolacracyOne remains the canonical home of the framework as of 2026, headquartered in Spring City, Pennsylvania, with affiliated practitioners worldwide.
**The Constitution, first published 2009.** HolacracyOne published its first written Constitution in 2009. The document has been revised year over year since: v1.0 (2009), v2.0 (2010), v3.0 (2013), v4.0 (2015), v4.1 (2015), and v5.0 (June 2021). Each version is a published document at holacracy.org/constitution. The Constitution is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike; HolacracyOne owns the *Holacracy* trademark.
**Manifesto 16 and the 2015 book.** Robertson published "Manifesto 16 of Holacracy" in 2011 as the framework's public statement of design philosophy. He expanded the Manifesto into *Holacracy: The New Management System for a Rapidly Changing World*, published by Henry Holt in June 2015. The book remains the canonical practitioner reference. *Reinventing Organizations* by Frédéric Laloux (2014) had been published a year earlier and had positioned Holacracy as one of the leading examples of Teal-stage organizational practice, which gave the 2015 book launch immediate scale.
**The Zappos adoption, 2013 to 2016.** Zappos, the Amazon-owned online shoe retailer, began trialling Holacracy with its HR department in early 2013 under CEO Tony Hsieh. The company announced a full company-wide transition in 2014. In March 2015, Hsieh delivered a now-famous ultimatum: employees who could not fully commit to Holacracy should accept a buyout and leave. Approximately 18% of staff (roughly 260 employees) took the buyout by January 2016. The Zappos adoption made Holacracy famous in the business press, attracted both serious interest and significant skepticism, and put the framework on the radar of every Fortune 500 HR department.
**The Zappos retreat, 2016 onward.** Beginning around 2016, Zappos quietly began moving away from full Holacracy adoption. The company retained the circular structure and many of the governance practices but reintroduced traditional management roles and pulled back from some of the more rigid procedural elements. By 2019-2020, Zappos was no longer claiming to be a Holacracy organization, though it has not formally renounced the framework. Tony Hsieh, the CEO who championed the adoption, died on November 27, 2020 from injuries in a house fire. The Zappos arc is one of the most-studied case studies in contemporary management theory.
**The Constitution v5.0 redesign, June 2021.** The current version of the Constitution was released on June 1, 2021. The v5.0 design is the framework's most significant structural change since its founding. Where earlier versions required whole-system adoption, v5.0 broke the Constitution into five modular articles (Article I: Roles and Circles; Article II: Helper Roles; Article III: Governance Meetings; Article IV: Tactical Meetings; Article V: Adoption and Amendment) that organizations can adopt one at a time. The modular redesign was an explicit response to the Sociocracy 3.0 modular-pattern-library approach that had been winning organizations away from Holacracy in the preceding years.
**Contemporary state, 2026.** HolacracyOne continues to run trainings, certifications, software (GlassFrog is the canonical Holacracy software platform), and consulting. The framework has substantial adoption in tech firms, agile-influenced organizations, and the post-2010 wave of progressive workplace experiments. Other Holacracy-running notable organizations include parts of Mercedes-Benz.io, David Allen Company, Springest (a Netherlands-based learning platform), and a long tail of smaller firms across many sectors.
---
## 3. How it actually runs
Holacracy has a precise procedural form. The description below draws from Constitution v5.0, the 2015 Robertson book, and the HolacracyOne practitioner documentation.
**Roles, not people.** The first conceptual move. Holacracy distinguishes sharply between a person and the role that person fills. A role has a purpose ("the team's sales pipeline is healthy and full"), one or more accountabilities ("respond to inbound leads within 4 business hours"), and optionally a domain of exclusive authority ("the team's CRM database"). One person can fill many roles. One role can be filled by many people simultaneously. Roles are created, modified, and dissolved through governance meetings, not through HR conversations. Hiring is separate from role assignment.
**Circles and the holarchy.** A circle is a named group of roles that share a common purpose. Every Holacracy organization has a General Company Circle at the top of the structure. Inside the General Company Circle are sub-circles (Marketing, Product, Operations, etc.), and inside those sub-circles can be further sub-circles. The recursive structure is called a holarchy (a term Robertson borrowed from Arthur Koestler, indicating a hierarchy of nested wholes where each level is both a whole and a part). Every circle has its own governance, its own meetings, and its own roles, but each is constrained by its parent circle's purpose and policies.
**Lead Link, Rep Link, Facilitator, Secretary.** Every circle has four canonical helper roles. The *Lead Link* (appointed by the parent circle) represents the parent's interests inside the circle and assigns people to roles. The *Rep Link* (elected by the circle's members) represents the circle's interests outward to the parent. The *Facilitator* (elected) runs governance and tactical meetings strictly according to the Constitution. The *Secretary* (elected) maintains records, schedules meetings, and is the source of truth on what was decided. Helper roles are constitutional, not optional.
**Governance meetings.** Held monthly by each circle. The agenda is built in the room from the *tensions* circle members are sensing (a tension is "a felt sense that something could be different and better"; the word is used technically). Each tension is proposed as a governance change: add a role, modify an accountability, change a policy, dissolve a sub-circle. Each proposal goes through *integrative decision-making*: clarifying questions, reactions, amendments, objections, and integration. An objection is valid only if it would cause harm or move the circle backward; preference is not an objection. When all objections have been integrated, the proposal is adopted. Governance meetings are run by the Facilitator strictly according to the procedural rules; the rules exist precisely to prevent the meeting from drifting into culture-war or personality conflict.
**Tactical meetings.** Held weekly by each circle. The agenda is built in the room from the work in flight: checklist review (recurring actions), metrics review (key numbers), project triage (where each project is), and tension processing (anything blocking work). Tactical meetings cannot change governance; if a tension surfaces that requires structural change, the Facilitator parks it for the next governance meeting. The two-meeting separation is deliberate and is one of Holacracy's most-tested operational features.
**Integrative decision-making, the canonical procedure.** Used in governance meetings. Six steps: (1) the proposer presents the proposal, briefly; (2) clarifying questions, one per person, with no opinions; (3) reaction round, one per person, no debate; (4) the proposer can amend or withdraw; (5) objection round, where each member states either "no objection" or a specific objection that meets the validity test; (6) integration, where every valid objection is integrated into a revised proposal that addresses the objection without harming the original intent. The procedure looks bureaucratic on paper. It works because it is bureaucratic: the structure prevents the slow drift toward decisions that nobody can quite articulate why they oppose.
**The Constitution itself.** Constitution v5.0 is approximately 30 pages, divided into five articles plus a preamble. Article I defines roles, circles, domains, and policies. Article II defines the four helper roles and their authority. Article III defines governance meetings and the integrative decision-making procedure. Article IV defines tactical meetings and the rules for executing work. Article V defines how an organization adopts Holacracy, who can ratify changes to its own structure, and how the Constitution itself can be amended (the v5.0 modular adoption means organizations can ratify only Article I and live there indefinitely; in earlier versions, this was not possible).
**GlassFrog and the software layer.** HolacracyOne developed GlassFrog (glassfrog.com) as the canonical software platform for running Holacracy. The software records circles, roles, accountabilities, policies, meeting agendas, decisions, and the Constitution itself. Most Holacracy-running organizations use GlassFrog; some use Holaspirit (a competing European platform) or other tools. Running Holacracy without dedicated software is technically possible but operationally exhausting.
**The full operating loop.** A working Holacracy organization runs roughly this cadence: weekly tactical meetings inside each circle, monthly governance meetings inside each circle, and quarterly strategy reviews at the General Company Circle level. New roles get created continuously; old roles get dissolved continuously; policies are continuously refined. The framework's claim is that an organization running this loop becomes adaptive in a way that traditional hierarchies cannot match, because change does not require executive permission; it requires only that someone in the right circle senses a tension and brings it to the next governance meeting.
---
## 4. What it is and what it is not
Several common confusions worth naming directly.
**Holacracy is not Sociocracy.** Both descend from Gerard Endenburg's classical sociocracy. Both use consent-style decision-making, circles, and double-linking-equivalent roles. But Holacracy is a binary, whole-system constitutional adoption with a trademarked name, a proprietary platform (GlassFrog), and a paid certification program. Sociocracy 3.0 is a Creative Commons modular pattern library that organizations adopt pattern by pattern without commitment to a whole system. Robertson and the Sociocracy 3.0 co-developers (James Priest, Bernhard Bockelbrink, Liliana David) have had public disagreements about which approach better serves organizations. Both are operating in 2026; the field has not converged.
**Holacracy is not flat.** This is the most common public misunderstanding. Holacracy redistributes authority, but it produces a defined and explicit hierarchy of nested circles. The General Company Circle has authority over its sub-circles. The Lead Link of a sub-circle is appointed by the parent. Roles have power over their domains, and that power is asymmetric within the circle. The framework's claim is that the hierarchy of *circles* is more transparent and more accountable than the implicit hierarchy of *people* that exists in traditional management, not that hierarchy has been abolished.
**Holacracy is not Teal.** Frédéric Laloux's *Reinventing Organizations* (2014) frames Teal as a developmental stage in organizational evolution, characterized by self-management, wholeness, and evolutionary purpose. Laloux names Holacracy as one of several Teal-stage practices, but Teal is broader than Holacracy. A Teal organization could practise sociocracy, doocracy, or its own custom system. A Holacracy organization is making a specific structural choice that may or may not be accompanied by the cultural shifts Laloux describes.
**Holacracy is not a relational practice.** Sociocracy For Communities, the Tamera Forum entry, and the Circle entry on this Living Library cover the relational layer underneath governance. Holacracy is procedural by design and does not pretend otherwise. Organizations that adopt Holacracy without a parallel investment in the relational layer (NVC, Forum, Circle, therapeutic support) often report that the procedural rigour alone produces a thin, cold, transactional culture. This was one of the documented dynamics at Zappos during the 2014-2016 transition.
**Holacracy is not free.** A typical mid-sized organization spends $40,000 to $150,000 in the first year on Holacracy training, certified-coach consulting, GlassFrog software licenses, and the productivity cost of staff learning the system. Larger organizations spend more. The Constitution itself is Creative Commons, but the trademark, the certification program, the software, and the coaching are proprietary. This is a deliberate sustainability choice by HolacracyOne and is also a point of friction with the Sociocracy 3.0 community, which holds that the same operational benefits can be obtained from a Creative Commons toolkit without the paid scaffolding.
**Holacracy is not finished.** Constitution v5.0 (June 2021) is the current version. HolacracyOne has indicated that future versions are likely. The framework is in active development.
---
## 5. Organizations practising it
Five documented current and recent Holacracy-running organizations, plus the larger pattern of where the framework lives.
**HolacracyOne itself.** Headquartered in Spring City, Pennsylvania. Has run Holacracy as its operating system since its founding in 2007. The longest continuous Holacracy implementation in the world. ~30 to 40 employees as of 2026.
**Zappos, 2013 to ~2019.** The most-studied adoption in the world. Trialled Holacracy in HR in early 2013, full company-wide transition announced 2014, Tony Hsieh's "adopt or leave" memo in March 2015, approximately 18% of staff took the buyout (roughly 260 employees out of approximately 1,500 at the time). By 2016, Zappos was openly modifying the framework, retaining the circle structure while reintroducing traditional management practices. By 2019-2020, the company had effectively moved away from formal Holacracy while retaining elements. Tony Hsieh died in November 2020. The Zappos arc is the canonical case study in management literature on the limits of Holacracy adoption in a large, established, customer-facing organization.
**Medium (Ev Williams's company), 2013 to 2016.** Adopted Holacracy in 2013 alongside Zappos as one of the early high-profile experiments. In March 2016, Andy Doyle (Medium's head of operations) published "Management and Organization at Medium," documenting the company's decision to leave Holacracy. Doyle wrote that the framework was "getting in the way of the work" and that the company needed a less rigid form of self-management. Medium retained some Holacracy practices but the formal adoption ended in 2016.
**David Allen Company.** The organization founded by *Getting Things Done* author David Allen has run Holacracy since approximately 2010. Allen was an early adopter (his GTD methodology was one of Robertson's intellectual influences) and remains publicly supportive of the framework.
**Mercedes-Benz.io.** The digital and innovation arm of Mercedes-Benz, based primarily in Berlin and Lisbon, has run Holacracy for parts of its organization since approximately 2017. The arrangement is one of the larger contemporary Holacracy implementations in a corporate parent that does not itself run Holacracy.
**Springest.** A Netherlands-based learning platform, has run Holacracy since approximately 2014 and is one of the longer-running European Holacracy implementations. Springest's founder Ruben Timmerman has been a public advocate for the framework.
**The wider pattern.** HolacracyOne reports approximately 1,000 organizations have adopted Holacracy to some degree as of 2026, with the largest concentrations in the United States, the Netherlands, Germany, and France. The typical Holacracy organization is a 30-to-300-person tech or knowledge-work firm; smaller groups find the overhead disproportionate, and larger organizations find the whole-system commitment too risky.
**Intentional communities and Holacracy.** Notably absent from the documented adoption list: residential intentional communities and ecovillages. The Sociocracy For Communities curriculum (and Sociocracy 3.0 more broadly) has captured most of the residential-community market. Holacracy works at the organizational layer (companies, nonprofits, divisions of larger corporations) but has not penetrated the residential-community sector in the way sociocracy has. This is partly a cost issue, partly a culture-fit issue, and partly because Holacracy was designed for organizations with clear external customers, which most intentional communities lack.
> **From the field.** No archive interview names Holacracy directly. The framework lives in the corporate-leadership and tech-firm world rather than in the residential-community world the ToGather archive covers. The closest archive grounding runs through the conceptual contrast: every doocratic community (Feytopia) and sociocratic community (Vidàlia, post-2021 Tamera) is implicitly choosing not to adopt Holacracy when it adopts its alternative. The Feytopia decision to run doocracy "with an institutional scaffold underneath it" (per Poli's archive interview) is, structurally, a decision against the kind of constitutional formalization Holacracy represents. The Sociocracy 3.0 entry in this Library names Holacracy as the explicit sister framework with a different adoption philosophy. The Doocracy entry names Holacracy as the formalized opposite.
---
## 6. How to begin practicing this in your own community
Six steps. Verb-first.
**1. Confirm Holacracy is the right tool for your group.** Holacracy is built for organizations with external customers, complex coordination needs, and the resources to invest in formal implementation. It is the wrong tool for small residential communities (where the overhead exceeds the benefit), for activist movements (where the binary commitment is incompatible with the looser organizing form), and for groups whose primary need is relational rather than procedural. If your group is a residential community, read the Sociocracy For Communities and Sociocracy 3.0 entries instead. If your group is doing fast-moving project work that needs distributed authority and explicit accountability, continue.
**2. Read the Constitution and the Robertson book.** Constitution v5.0 (holacracy.org/constitution/5-0) is freely available, ~30 pages, dense. Read it twice. Robertson's *Holacracy: The New Management System for a Rapidly Changing World* (2015) is the canonical practitioner reference and is significantly more accessible than the Constitution. Read the book after a first read of the Constitution; the book teaches you to read the Constitution well.
**3. Plan the first-year cost honestly.** A small-to-mid-sized organization typically spends $40,000 to $150,000 in the first year on Holacracy implementation: training, certified-coach consulting, GlassFrog software licensing, and the productivity cost of staff learning the system. Smaller groups spend less but not zero. Decide whether your organization can afford this investment before committing. Underestimating the cost is the most common reason organizations abandon the framework within 18 months.
**4. Engage a HolacracyOne certified coach for the first six months.** Implementation without a coach is technically possible but most documented failures cite "we tried to roll it out ourselves" as the proximate cause. HolacracyOne maintains a directory of certified coaches at holacracy.org/practitioners. Plan for a coach to lead your first governance meetings, train your Facilitators and Secretaries, and accompany your organization through the year-one transition.
**5. Adopt one Constitution article at a time (v5.0 modular adoption).** The pre-v5.0 advice was to adopt the entire Constitution at once. The v5.0 modular structure changes this. Start with Article I (Roles and Circles). Live there for three to six months. Add Article II (Helper Roles) when your organization has clarity on who fills which roles. Add Articles III and IV (Governance and Tactical Meetings) when the role structure is settled. Add Article V (Adoption and Amendment) when your organization is ready to formally ratify the Constitution as its operating system. The modular adoption is the path of less risk, and it is now the recommended path.
**6. Pair Holacracy with a relational practice.** The procedural rigour of Holacracy does not, on its own, build trust or process conflict. Most Holacracy organizations that survive past year three have added a parallel investment in Nonviolent Communication training, regular relational meetings (Circle, Forum, or similar), and either internal or external therapeutic support for the inevitable interpersonal friction the procedural-only frame produces. Decide before adoption which relational practice your organization will use. The procedural and relational layers are both necessary.
**One caution.** Holacracy is a binary commitment by design. Halfway adoption produces the worst of both worlds: the procedural overhead without the structural benefit, the cultural disruption without the operational gain. Either commit to the Constitution as your organization's operating system (with the time, cost, and discipline that implies) or do not adopt Holacracy. If you want partial adoption, use Sociocracy 3.0 instead; it is explicitly designed for pattern-by-pattern uptake.
---
## 7. Living examples and entry points for community builders
Where Holacracy is alive in 2026, and how to engage with the broader community of practitioners beyond your own implementation.
### Living examples
**HolacracyOne** (holacracy.org). The original organization, run on Holacracy since 2007. The longest continuous implementation in the world. Located in Spring City, Pennsylvania.
**GlassFrog** (glassfrog.com). The canonical software platform. Most Holacracy-running organizations use it.
**The Holacracy Constitution v5.0** (holacracy.org/constitution/5-0). The free, Creative Commons, modular constitution. The five-article structure (Roles & Circles; Helper Roles; Governance Meetings; Tactical Meetings; Adoption & Amendment) is the contemporary canonical form.
**Springest** (Netherlands), **David Allen Company** (USA), **Mercedes-Benz.io** (Berlin/Lisbon), **Holaspirit** (holaspirit.com, competing European software platform).
### Adjacent applications and contexts
The Reinventing Organizations community (Laloux 2014); the Agile and Lean software movements (Scrum, Kanban, OKRs slot inside Holacracy's tactical meetings); the Sociocracy 3.0 community as closest sibling.
### Five entry points beyond your own first reading
1. Read the Constitution at holacracy.org/constitution/5-0.
2. Read Robertson's 2015 book.
3. Sign up for GlassFrog's free tier.
4. Attend a HolacracyOne training (Practitioner Training, 5-day, $2,000-$4,000).
5. Read the Zappos case literature (Quartz coverage, HBR, Edmondson HBS papers).
**One caution beyond your own implementation.** Holacracy has a strong evangelical practitioner community. The framework's claims about being a "complete operating system" should be read with skepticism appropriate for any management methodology that promises systemic transformation.
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## 8. Where it gets hard
The complexity tension (6-18 months to fluency); the Zappos retreat (most-cited critique, 2013-2020); the Medium case (Andy Doyle's March 2016 essay); the HBR/Wharton academic critique (Edmondson and Lee 2017); the "rigid" critique (procedural meetings feel mechanical); the cost-of-adoption tension ($40K-$150K year one); the constitutional-fundamentalism critique (Sociocracy 3.0 went the opposite way); the "is it scalable?" question (works at 30-300 people, untested above 500).
The honest reading is that Holacracy works in the right context and fails predictably in the wrong context; the practitioner skill is recognising which context you are in before committing.
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## 9. Companion frameworks and what to read next
- **Sociocracy 3.0** (`/library/sociocracy-3-0`) — closest sister, different adoption philosophy
- **Sociocracy For Communities** (`/library/sociocracy-for-communities`) — classical-sociocracy practitioner path
- **Doocracy** (`/library/doocracy`) — informal counterpart
- **Tyranny of Structurelessness** (`/library/tyranny-of-structurelessness`) — Freeman's 1970 critique that Holacracy can be read as a formal answer to
- **Reinventing Organizations** (`/library/reinventing-organizations-laloux`) — broader Teal frame
- **Liberating Structures** (`/library/liberating-structures`) — slot inside tactical meetings
- **Tamera Forum** (`/library/tamera-forum`), **Circle** (`/library/circle-way-of-council`), **Appreciative Inquiry** (`/library/appreciative-inquiry`) — relational pairing
- **Theory U** (`/library/theory-u-scharmer`) — strategic arc that governance meetings sit inside
### Sources
- Brian J. Robertson, *Holacracy: The New Management System for a Rapidly Changing World* (Henry Holt, June 2015)
- The Holacracy Constitution v5.0 (holacracy.org/constitution/5-0/, HolacracyOne, June 2021)
- Holacracy.org main site
- GlassFrog (glassfrog.com)
- Wikipedia: Holacracy (reference summary)
- Brian Robertson, "History of Holacracy" (HolacracyOne Blog)
- Aimee Groth, "Zappos has quietly backed away from holacracy" (Quartz, January 2020)
- Andy Doyle, "Management and Organization at Medium" (Medium, March 2016)
- Amy Edmondson and Michael Y. Lee, HBS working papers on Zappos and less-hierarchical organizations (2017 onward)
- Aaron Dignan, *Brave New Work* (Portfolio, 2019)
- Frédéric Laloux, *Reinventing Organizations* (Nelson Parker, 2014)
- Holacracy Constitution GitHub repository (github.com/holacracyone/Holacracy-Constitution)