Traditional organisations, a “Boss” determines these boundaries from their perspective (lens). Of course, from other people within the organisation may be seen as incorrect/skewed/influenced or just plain wrong. However, the boss wins even though they may not see the whole picture. The “Boss” centric view allows the organisation to move forward, but the direction may not be correct as they don’t “see the whole picture.”
Many organisations adopt several frameworks or systems to help sort this out, including empowerment, lean, agile, and others. None of these is right or wrong; they are just ways to try to help the organisation and its people to make better decisions.
One framework chosen by organisations is Holacracy. The idea is to help create some structure around evolving the organisation and resolving the understanding of how work gets done. The reason is not that it is the perfect system far from it. It is only a framework to allow people to express their view of how to solve the endemic issues that arise in any organisation. As with any system, it only as good as the people who use it. Founders adopt Holacracy because they want to unlock the power of all of the people who work there to solve the organisational issues that arise.
One of the most insidious things that happen in any group of people that work together is the white knight and victim mentalities. These perspectives cause so much harm and devalue people and work.
The White Knight is a person who tries to solve everyone’s problems gallops into the fray sorts out everything (from their perspective) takes over and the gallops off to the next place they can feel good about themselves by being the hero. They usually leave a mess in their wake and a bunch of bewildered people who still are unsure of what just happened or worse yet they leave behind people who feel disempowered because they have a mentality that the knight is the only person who can make decisions.
The victim feels that everything wrong happens to them, with no ability to solve it. They are happiest whinging to anyone who will listen about what the problems are but take no steps to resolve them. Glad to be a victim of circumstance they take no responsibility for how things are. They love the white knight to come in and solve their problems and of course, then blame the knight afterwards because the situation still isn’t working.
I could continue to expand on the above, but I think you get the idea. We all have a bit of both in us. We all love being the hero and the victim. I know even now I play these cards in certain aspects of my life. The reality is that both are destructive to my own life, productivity and relationships.
Implementing Holacracy helps resolve this issue as well as provide everyone with a place to have a voice. Don’t expect your problems to be solved, don’t try to solve other people’s problems and if you don’t like something then fucking do something about it. Yes, we don’t have the meetings regularly enough then do something. The meetings require no quorum if there is a governance meeting booked and you want to change something then turn up if it’s just you then it makes it a quick process.
Holacracy is not meant to be a blocker it is just a programming language to help understand the way work and authority gets defined don’t blame the process it exists, and it is there not to hinder but to help if it wasn’t there then there would be some other “process” for you to blame, so use it just like arguing over android vs iPhone the argument is mute when all you want to do is make a phone call.