Holacracy is a comprehensive practice for structuring, governing, and running an organization. It replaces today’s top-down predict-and-control paradigm with a new way of distributing power and achieving control. It is a new “operating system” which instills rapid evolution in the core processes of an organization.

Holacracy places the seat of organizational power in an explicit process, one which organizes around an explicit purpose. This allows emergent behavior of the whole system, without being controlled by either a single heroic leader or even the collective group.

Tension, n.: The felt-sense of a specific gap between current reality and a sensed potential.

Holacracy provides channels so anyone who senses a tension can process it into organizational evolution. People become the sensors of a conscious organization, driving its continual evolution.

With Holacracy at play, if an expectation isn’t explicitly defined via a governance process, no one has a right to expect it. This removes the need for organizational politics and centralized power to work around lack of clarity. The substitute is a clear process to identify what expectations are needed to express the organization’s purpose.

The Holacracy governance process is not governance “of the people, by the people, and for the people” – it is governance of the organization, through the people, for the purpose.  It liberates an organization to find and express its deepest creative capacity – and us to find a healthy relationship with it that honors our own.

HolacracyOne is a legally Holacracy-powered organization, with no employees (only partners), no managers (just distributed authority), and no owners controlling it (just investors along for the ride). All power vests in the Holacracy Constitution, and all partners take part in the organization's governance.