Holacracy, Teal or Hybrid Model? New Organizational Structures and Changing Business Realities

An organisational structure is a decision about who may decide what, and how a disagreement is settled. Holacracy, teal organisations and hybrid models are three ways of answering that question once the traditional management chain stops answering it quickly enough. This article describes what each changes and what each costs.

Quick Overview

• Why the Hierarchy Stopped Answering the Question
• Three Answers to the Same Structural Tension
• Holacracy: A Constitution in Place of a Management Chain
• Roles, Circles and the Links Between Them
• What Holacracy Gives an Organisation
• Where Holacracy Costs More Than It Returns
• Teal Organisations in Laloux’s Account
• Self-Management and the Advice Process
• Wholeness, and What It Is Usually Reduced To
• Evolutionary Purpose and What It Does to Strategy
• The Practices Teal Organisations Actually Run
• The Hybrid Model as a Deliberate Design
• Joining a Hierarchical Zone to a Self-Managing One
• What Flexibility Buys, and What It Costs
• How the Three Models Decide
• How Much Autonomy Each Model Grants
• Which Organisations These Models Suit
• Starting the Transformation Without Breaking the Company
• What Happens to the Manager
• Measuring Whether the Structure Works
• Where Structural Experiments Are Heading
• The Competencies the Structure Assumes

Why the Hierarchy Stopped Answering the Question

The traditional hierarchy — defined management levels, departmental division, information moving downwards — was the dominant organisational form for decades because it solved real problems. It produced order, made control possible, and left nobody guessing about who reported to whom. None of that has become worthless. What has changed is the environment those virtues were bought for.

The shorthand for that environment is VUCA, an acronym that names its four properties:

• volatility — the rate at which conditions change
• uncertainty — the limits of what can be forecast
• complexity — the number of interacting variables
• ambiguity — the absence of a single correct reading of the situation

Against that background the hierarchy shows the same weaknesses repeatedly. Decisions travel through several levels, so the response arrives after the situation that prompted it has moved. Departmental silos slow the flow of information between the parts of the company that would have to cooperate for anything interdisciplinary to work. People below the level where decisions are made learn that initiative is not their job, and behave accordingly.

The underlying failure is narrower than “hierarchy is outdated”. Centralising authority and information creates a bottleneck whose width is fixed by the number of hours available to the people at the top. When the volume of decisions grows faster than that number, the structure does not fail loudly — it simply becomes the slowest component in the company.

Three Answers to the Same Structural Tension

Holacracy, teal and the hybrid model are usually presented as competing philosophies. They are better understood as three answers to one question: where should authority sit if it can no longer sit entirely at the top? Each redistributes decision rights; they differ in how much of the redistribution is written down.

Holacracy is the most formal of the three. It replaces the management hierarchy with a system of roles and circles governed by an explicit constitution, with defined meeting formats and a defined way of processing proposals. It is adopted, not invented.

Teal organisations, as described by Frederic Laloux, are the opposite kind of thing: a set of principles rather than a system. Self-management, wholeness and evolutionary purpose describe what the organisation is trying to be; the practices that get it there are designed locally, and no two teal companies look alike.

Hybrid models keep part of the hierarchy deliberately and introduce self-management where it earns its cost — autonomous project teams in product development, conventional reporting lines in finance and compliance. The hybrid is not a failure to commit; it is a decision that different parts of one company have different tolerances for ambiguity.

What the three share is the direction of travel: authority moves towards the point where the work is done, and the coordination that the manager used to perform has to be replaced by something explicit.

Holacracy: A Constitution in Place of a Management Chain

Holacracy is a complete governance system developed by Brian Robertson, and its defining feature is that the rules are written. The organisation adopts a constitution, and from that moment the constitution — not the goodwill of the executives — is the thing that says who may decide what. The founding move is to organise work around the work itself rather than around the people occupying posts.

The unit of structure is the role, not the position. A role names a purpose, the domains over which it has exclusive control, and the accountabilities expected of whoever fills it. One person may hold several roles, and roles are created, altered and dissolved as the work changes rather than as careers advance. A post survives its usefulness because someone holds it; a role is not supposed to.

Roles are grouped into circles, which correspond loosely to teams or departments. Circles nest: larger ones contain smaller ones, producing a hierarchy of purposes and accountabilities rather than a hierarchy of people. The distinction matters more than it sounds. A circle can be subordinate to another circle without any person in it being subordinate to any person in the other.

Decision-making runs through defined meeting formats — governance meetings, which change the structure of roles and circles, and tactical meetings, which handle current work. The point of the formality is that a tension anybody raises has a route through the system that does not depend on their standing, as the entry on Holacracy sets out.

Roles, Circles and the Links Between Them

In practice a role is assembled from three named components: a purpose that says what it exists for, domains it controls exclusively, and accountabilities it owes the rest of the organisation. Instead of a post called “Marketing Manager”, a company may carry roles such as blog content author, online campaign analyst and webinar organiser — each with its own scope, each fillable by a different person or by the same one.

People “energise” roles rather than occupy positions, and they can take on new roles or step out of existing ones through defined processes as needs and preferences shift. This is the mechanism that lets structure follow work at a speed a reorganisation cannot match: adding a role is an ordinary governance decision, not a restructuring.

Circles are joined to one another by a pair of connecting roles:

• Lead Link — appointed by the broader circle, responsible for assigning roles within the circle and allocating its resources
• Rep Link — elected by the circle itself, carrying its tensions upward and representing its interests in the broader circle

The pairing is the interesting part. One link transmits the wider organisation’s priorities inwards; the other transmits the circle’s experience outwards, and the person doing it is chosen by the people whose experience it is. Structural decisions themselves are made in governance meetings through a process designed so that every raised tension is processed unless a valid objection stops it.

What Holacracy Gives an Organisation

The first return is clarity about who is accountable for what. Because purposes, domains and accountabilities are written per role, the ambiguity that produces territorial conflict in conventional structures has fewer places to hide. The question “whose call is this?” has an answer that can be looked up rather than negotiated.

The second is decision speed. Authority is attached to roles rather than to seniority, and operational decisions are made by whoever holds the relevant role without escalation. A problem that would have travelled up the chain and back down is resolved by the person who noticed it, within the domain their role already controls.

The third is engagement, and it is more conditional than the first two. Someone holding a role has genuine discretion over how the accountabilities are met, and can take on roles that match what they are good at. Where that discretion is real, motivation follows. Where the constitution is adopted but decisions still get quietly settled by the former management, holding a role means only that a person now attends more meetings.

The fourth is adaptability. A structure of roles and circles can be altered in a governance meeting, which is a far cheaper operation than a reorganisation. Companies that redistribute routine work through automation reach the same conclusion from a different direction — the structure has to be able to absorb the change in what people actually spend their days on, a shift described in the guide to work automation across RPA, AI agents and low-code platforms.

Where Holacracy Costs More Than It Returns

The system is complex, and the complexity is not a teething problem. The constitution describes detailed processes whose consistent application takes training, practice and time. For people accustomed to conventional structures the first months are genuinely disorienting, and organisations that treat the rollout as a communications exercise discover this late.

The cultural change is heavier than the procedural one. Holacracy asks employees to take responsibility without being told to, and asks leaders to give up authority they are used to holding informally as well as formally. Both halves have to happen. If executives keep deciding outside the process, the process becomes theatre; if employees wait to be instructed, the roles stay empty in everything but name.

The system also attracts a specific criticism: procedural rigidity. Governance and tactical meetings, run badly, are experienced as bureaucracy — and a company that replaced management overhead with meeting overhead has not improved. The related risk is that attention shifts to the structure itself, and the organisation becomes absorbed in its own governance while customers wait.

None of this makes holacracy a bad system. It makes it an expensive one, appropriate where the cost of unclear authority was already higher.

Teal Organisations in Laloux’s Account

The teal concept was popularised by Frederic Laloux in Reinventing Organizations, which places teal at the top of a developmental sequence of organisational forms. The defining move is away from hierarchical control towards structures that are decentralised, organic and founded on trust. The governing metaphor changes with it: the organisation is treated as a living system rather than as a machine to be operated.

Laloux identifies a set of breakthroughs that characterise the form:

1. Self-management — the management hierarchy is replaced by a network of autonomous teams that decide about their own work without needing approval from above; coordination happens through mutual agreements and advisory processes rather than instruction.
2. Wholeness — people are encouraged to bring more of themselves to work than a professional persona: personality, emotion, values and the things they are unsure about.
3. Evolutionary purpose — the organisation is treated as having a direction of its own, which members try to hear and follow, rather than a strategy imposed from the top and defended for a planning cycle.

Unlike holacracy, teal supplies no structural template. Organisations that describe themselves this way experiment with practices that support the three breakthroughs in their own context, and the resulting arrangements differ enough that comparing two of them tells you little about the model.

That is both the strength and the difficulty. There is no constitution to adopt, so there is nothing to adopt badly — and equally nothing to check yourself against.

Self-Management and the Advice Process

Self-management is the most radical of the breakthroughs and the one most often described incorrectly. It does not mean that nobody decides. It means that decision rights sit with the team or the individual doing the work, over that work, without a supervisory layer whose function is approval.

In the teal account there are no managers in the conventional sense — no role whose job is to tell others what to do and verify that they did it. Teams organise their own work, set priorities, distribute tasks, track progress and make operational decisions. Coordination between teams runs on mutual commitments and advisory mechanisms rather than instruction from above. What disappears is the supervisory layer, not the coordination.

The mechanism that makes this workable is the advice process. Anyone may make any decision, on condition that they first consult everybody the decision affects and everybody with relevant expertise. The purpose is not to obtain consent, and not to reach consensus — it is to collect the perspectives that would otherwise surface after the decision, when they are expensive.

This is a demanding arrangement. It assumes a level of trust, individual responsibility and maturity that cannot be introduced by announcement, and it assumes supporting processes that make the consultation visible. An advice process that nobody can audit degenerates into a licence to act unilaterally with a courtesy conversation attached.

Wholeness, and What It Is Usually Reduced To

Wholeness means building a workplace where people can be present as themselves rather than as a professional role played for eight hours: with their emotions, their values, their enthusiasms and their weaknesses. The target is the split between the work persona and the person, and the cost that maintaining the split imposes on both.

The practical work is cultural. Organisations pursuing wholeness build trust and acceptance deliberately, and often introduce practices that make authenticity ordinary — regular team meetings devoted not only to work but to sharing experiences, reflections and difficulties, in an atmosphere where doing so is not a career risk. The condition that makes any of it function is psychological safety: the shared belief that speaking up will not be punished, as the entry on Psychological safety describes.

Making room for emotion is part of the same argument. Teal culture treats emotion as an ordinary component of work rather than an interruption to it, and people are encouraged to say plainly what they need. Practices such as mindfulness and nonviolent communication are used to build the self-awareness and communication skill this requires.

Many companies also attend to the physical workspace — shared kitchens, comfortable common areas, places where relationships form without a meeting invitation. This is the part most often mistaken for the whole, which is why the model is so easy to fake. Furniture is cheap; the willingness to hear something uncomfortable in a team meeting is not.

Evolutionary Purpose and What It Does to Strategy

Evolutionary purpose is the breakthrough that most directly changes how strategy is done. The organisation is treated as a living system with its own reason for existing and its own direction of development — something discovered and sensed by its members rather than composed by its leaders and printed on a wall.

Instead of trying to predict and control the future through detailed strategic planning, organisations working this way try to listen for where the organisation wants to go and what it wants to contribute. Strategy emerges through a sequence of experiments and adaptations, in response to opportunities that appear, judged against the purpose rather than against a plan agreed a year earlier.

The decision test changes accordingly. Rather than asking whether an initiative fits the approved roadmap, people ask whether it is consistent with the purpose — and they are expected to start things on that basis, usually through the advice process. Profit is not treated as the objective but as a consequence of following the purpose and delivering something the world wanted.

The obvious objection is that this is unfalsifiable, and in weak implementations it is. The distinguishing feature of a serious one is that the purpose is specific enough to rule things out. A purpose that forbids nothing is a slogan, and an organisation steering by a slogan has replaced strategic planning with nothing at all.

The Practices Teal Organisations Actually Run

Because teal supplies principles rather than a system, the useful description is a catalogue of what companies working this way actually do. No item on it is required, and no combination is canonical:

• Team-based structures — work organised around small autonomous teams, often owning a whole process or a specific customer end to end
• The advice process — anyone may decide after consulting those affected and those with expertise
• Information transparency — broad access to financial and strategic information, on the argument that people cannot decide well on data they are not shown
• Budgeting without fixed budgets — resource allocation handled through flexible mechanisms and the advice process rather than an annual settlement
• Team-set compensation — in some companies, teams decide pay for their own members against agreed principles and peer assessment
• Roles instead of posts — work organised around dynamic roles, as in holacracy, rather than fixed job descriptions
• Reflective meetings — regular sessions devoted to relationships and to the wholeness the model asks for, not to status reporting
• Explicit conflict resolution — defined processes for interpersonal conflict, frequently based on mediation and nonviolent communication
• Distinctive hiring — selection focused on fit with the organisation’s values, with the future team heavily involved in the decision

The list is illustrative rather than prescriptive; each organisation builds its own ecosystem of practices around its values and purpose. What is worth noticing is how many of these items are mechanisms for making something explicit that a hierarchy left implicit — how pay is set, how conflict ends, who sees the numbers.

The Hybrid Model as a Deliberate Design

Not every organisation is ready for, or needs, a wholesale move to holacracy or a full teal model. Increasingly companies build hybrid structures that deliberately combine elements of the traditional hierarchy with practices drawn from the newer models — self-management, agility, role-based work.

A hybrid is not indecision, and it is not the absence of a model. It is a designed structure that takes what works from different traditions and applies each where it fits. A company may keep a conventional hierarchy where stability and control are the requirement — finance, legal compliance — while running self-managing project teams where innovation and speed decide the outcome, typically in product development and marketing.

Other hybrids are narrower still. A company may adopt agile practices such as Scrum or Kanban inside individual teams while leaving the organisation-wide structure conventional, or introduce selected elements of holacracy — defined roles, governance meeting formats — in particular departments without adopting the constitution.

The thing that decides whether a hybrid works is the deliberate design of the interfaces between parts of the organisation that run on different rules. This is the same design problem that appears whenever authority is moved closer to the work: when application development is opened to people outside the IT department, the question of where their discretion ends is precisely what determines whether the arrangement holds, as the article on the democratization of application development sets out.

Joining a Hierarchical Zone to a Self-Managing One

Combining a hierarchy with self-management is difficult for a specific reason: the two rest on incompatible assumptions about authority, control and how decisions get made. The joint has to be engineered rather than hoped for.

The first requirement is a precise definition of the autonomous units’ scope. It has to be unambiguous which decisions a self-managing team makes alone, which require consultation, and which require approval from the hierarchical structure. Those contact points and the rules governing them must be stated and communicated — not inferred from precedent, which is how they are usually established and why they are usually disputed.

The second is deliberate coordination machinery between the zones: regular meetings, designated liaison people such as management-side project sponsors working with autonomous teams, shared platforms where information is exchanged. The flow has to run in both directions. A liaison structure that only carries instructions downwards has reproduced the hierarchy with extra steps.

The third is a change in how leaders in the hierarchical part behave towards the self-managing part — from issuing instructions to supporting, removing obstacles and setting strategic direction. Trust between the zones is built or it is not; there is no procedural substitute. Maintaining the arrangement requires continuous monitoring and adjustment as experience accumulates.

What Flexibility Buys, and What It Costs

The advantage of hybrids is that an organisation is not forced to choose between extremes. Rather than accepting either full hierarchy or full self-management, it can take what suits particular contexts — and the contexts inside one company genuinely differ.

Flexibility also allows gradual implementation. An organisation can introduce self-management or agility in selected areas such as IT or R&D and extend them as experience and cultural readiness grow. That sequencing limits the risk that a single failed transformation costs the company its ability to operate, which is the risk a simultaneous whole-company change carries.

The same flexibility lets structure follow the nature of the work. Where predictability and control matter — series production, finance — traditional arrangements can remain. Where innovation and adaptability decide, decentralised and agile approaches can run. Differentiating structure by need rather than by doctrine is the hybrid’s central claim.

The costs are as specific as the benefits. Running several operating systems inside one company creates complexity that must be actively managed, and interfaces that must be maintained rather than declared. A hybrid also risks producing two speeds: people in self-managing parts feel autonomy and engagement, while colleagues in conventional structures experience the contrast as a verdict on their worth. That perception needs managing directly, because it is accurate about the difference and wrong about the reason.

How the Three Models Decide

Decision-making is where the three structures differ most concretely, and comparing them on this dimension is more informative than comparing their vocabularies.

In a traditional hierarchy, decision authority is concentrated at the upper management levels. Strategic decisions are made at the top and cascaded downwards; people at lower levels have limited influence over anything beyond their immediate remit. The process is often lengthy and requires multiple approvals, and its cost is measured in the delay between recognising a problem and being permitted to act on it.

In holacracy, decisions are distributed and attached to roles and defined processes. Operational decisions are made autonomously by whoever holds the relevant role, within their accountabilities. Structural decisions — creating or altering roles and circles — happen in governance meetings through integrative decision making, a process that ensures every raised tension is processed unless there is a valid objection to the proposal.

In teal organisations, the primary mechanism is the advice process. Any employee may take any decision, provided they consult the people affected and those with relevant expertise. The aim is the best available decision for the organisation, not consensus and not permission, and the whole arrangement rests on trust and individual accountability rather than on rules that can be enforced.

The practical difference is what happens when someone disagrees. The hierarchy escalates, holacracy processes an objection, and teal expects the disagreement to have been collected before the decision was made.

How Much Autonomy Each Model Grants

Autonomy — the range of decisions a person may make about their own work — varies sharply across the models, and the variation is not simply “more” as you move away from hierarchy.

In a traditional hierarchy autonomy is limited and bounded by the job description and by managers’ decisions. People execute tasks according to guidance and have little influence over how work is organised or over decisions beyond their direct responsibility.

Holacracy grants substantial autonomy inside defined roles. Whoever energises a role has full discretion over how its accountabilities are met, provided this does not intrude on another role’s domains. That autonomy is nonetheless constrained by the formal rules and processes of the constitution: decisions about changing structure or accountabilities are made collectively in governance meetings, not unilaterally.

Teal organisations aim at the widest autonomy through self-management. Teams and individuals organise their own work, take operational and strategic decisions within the advice process, and shape their own roles and responsibilities. The constraint here is not procedural but relational — the autonomy rests on trust and individual accountability, which is a softer boundary and a harder one to appeal to.

Hybrid models grant differentiated autonomy depending on the part of the organisation. That is their point, and also the source of the two-speed problem described above.

Which Organisations These Models Suit

Holacracy and teal are inspiring concepts, and neither is a universal solution. Whether either works depends on contextual factors that are knowable in advance if anybody asks.

Holacracy, being a formal and fairly complex system, tends to suit organisations that want clear structure and precise decision processes while decentralising authority. It is harder in very large global corporations and in heavily regulated industries, where strict control and demonstrable compliance are requirements rather than preferences. It also demands considerable maturity and a real willingness to learn and apply its rules.

The teal model, being a philosophy rather than a system, is potentially more adaptable — but its implementation requires a high level of trust, maturity and self-awareness from leaders and employees alike. It is harder to introduce in organisations with a long history of hierarchical management, or in cultures where individualism and internal competition are the norm. It appears most often in knowledge-based firms, professional services and non-profits, where relationships, creativity and a sense of mission already carry weight.

The decision should follow an honest analysis of the organisation’s culture, industry, strategic goals and appetite for a fundamental change in how it thinks and acts. In practice the most realistic answer is frequently a hybrid that combines elements deliberately — which is a conclusion about fit, not a compromise reached by exhaustion.

Starting the Transformation Without Breaking the Company

A move towards a more decentralised structure is a change programme, and the sequence matters more than the destination. Beginning with the structure is the most common way to fail.

The first step is genuine understanding and commitment at senior level. Leaders have to do more than approve: they have to believe the change is needed, accept that their own role will be redefined, and be prepared to support the effort over a period measured in years rather than quarters. Educating them about the models and the implications comes before anything is announced.

The second is stating the “why” plainly. What business problem is the structural change meant to solve — decision latency, weak innovation, disengagement? That answer is the compass for everything that follows, and its absence is why so many transformations end with new meeting formats and unchanged behaviour.

The third is starting with a pilot in a selected area. A limited experiment tests the rules at a scale where failure is survivable, produces experience, exposes problems and builds internal advocates before a wider rollout is committed to. Running that pilot as a managed change rather than an announcement is a discipline in itself, which is what the change management models workshop is built around, and it runs in parallel with preparing the culture the new structure assumes.

Culture preparation is the slowest strand. Self-management rests on the assumption that people are responsible, competent and want to do the work well, and the organisation has to earn the right to that assumption through transparency, kept commitments and the visible surrender of unnecessary control. Alongside it sit a culture of individual and collective accountability, open communication, constructive feedback, and an environment where experimenting and being wrong is survivable.

What Happens to the Manager

Decentralisation fundamentally redefines the manager’s role. In these systems there is no need for managers in the classical sense — people who plan, organise, control and direct subordinates’ work. Those functions are dispersed among roles, processes and team members themselves.

Leadership does not become unnecessary. It becomes necessary in a different form, concentrated on work that distributing authority does not eliminate:

• Creating and communicating purpose — setting strategic direction and making it worth following
• Building culture — shaping an environment of trust, cooperation and continuous learning
• Coaching and mentoring — developing the competence and autonomy that self-management assumes
• Removing obstacles — identifying and clearing organisational barriers that stop teams working effectively
• Representing the organisation externally — relationships with the wider environment
• Holding specific structural roles — such as Lead Link in holacracy, with the accountabilities the system defines

This is a demanding transition for people whose competence was demonstrated through control. It requires giving up authority, developing largely interpersonal skills, and adopting the posture of a servant leader whose primary aim is the success of others, in the sense the entry on Servant leadership describes. Managers who make the change usually report that the hardest part was not the loss of authority but the loss of the visible evidence that they were needed.

Measuring Whether the Structure Works

Evaluating a structural change requires abandoning metrics designed to measure control. What is worth measuring falls into three groups, and the useful reading comes from watching them together.

Speed and adaptability:

• Decision latency — are decisions reached faster than under the previous model?
• Time to market — does the organisation respond to demand more quickly?
• Structural adaptability — how fast can the organisation change its own structure or processes when conditions change?

Engagement and wellbeing:

• Employee satisfaction and engagement, measured through regular surveys
• Perceived autonomy and influence — how people rate their ability to decide about their own work
• Retention — whether the new structure keeps the people it was meant to attract
• Stress and burnout levels, which self-management can reduce or quietly increase

Operational and business results:

• Team productivity, measured appropriately to context — throughput, value delivered
• Product or service quality
• Customer satisfaction
• Financial results, with the honest caveat that attributing them to a structural change is rarely defensible

Quantitative metrics need qualitative work alongside them — interviews, observation — to produce a complete picture. Measurement here is a continuous learning instrument, not a verdict delivered at the end of a programme.

Where Structural Experiments Are Heading

The era in which one universal hierarchical structure was the default appears to be ending. Growing complexity and a faster environment push organisations towards more flexible, adaptive and frankly more human ways of organising work, and experiments with holacracy, teal models and hybrid forms are likely to continue.

Hierarchy will not disappear. The more probable future is organisations that are increasingly hybrid — capable of combining structural models deliberately, according to the needs of particular parts of the business, the kind of work and the stage of development. Flat structures, networks of teams, project organisations and role-based arrangements will coexist with conventional elements where those are justified.

The persistent trend is the decentralisation of authority and the growing weight of team and individual autonomy. Digital tools support this by making communication, collaboration and access to information cheaper across dispersed structures — though tooling has never yet caused a decentralisation that the organisation did not already want. The lasting difficulty will be the balance between flexibility and coordination, and the cultures and competencies that make new models function. Structures that stay useful are the ones their organisations know how to redesign.

The Competencies the Structure Assumes

Every model described here assumes capabilities in the people who have to operate it, and a structure introduced without them fails in ways that look like proof the model was wrong. This is where a structural change becomes a development problem — and it is a different problem from individual resilience or wellbeing, which concern how a person copes with the environment rather than how the environment allocates authority.

Employees need self-organisation, accountability and initiative. In self-managing systems nobody waits to be told: people identify what their roles require, act, and own the outcome, which presumes the ability to plan, prioritise and manage their own time. Communication and interpersonal competence become load-bearing rather than desirable — stating needs clearly, listening, giving and receiving feedback constructively, collaborating in teams whose composition changes, and resolving conflict without an authority to appeal to. Decision-making ability matters, whether inside the advice process or holacracy’s formal processes, alongside a tolerance for ambiguity and complexity, openness to learning, and — where wholeness is taken seriously — emotional intelligence and the capacity for authentic relationships.

Leaders need a different set: coaching, mentoring, facilitation, obstacle removal, and the delegation of authority they previously exercised. Both groups need the ability to adapt and to keep learning as roles and structures change around them.

Investment in development programmes covering these competencies — the interpersonal ones and the model-specific processes alike — is what makes the difference between a structure that is announced and one that operates. Technical training follows the same logic when responsibility for a tool moves into a business team rather than staying with specialists, which is the case with end-user automation courses such as Automation Anywhere for end users and automation with Python and SikuliX: the structural decision to devolve the work is only as good as the competence that arrives with it.

Frequently Asked Questions

How does holacracy differ from a teal organisation?

Holacracy is a written system: a constitution, defined roles, circles and meeting formats that an organisation adopts more or less as given. Teal is a description of principles — self-management, wholeness and evolutionary purpose — that each organisation implements through practices of its own invention. One supplies the rules; the other supplies the argument for having different ones.

Can holacracy work in a large company?

Scale is not the first obstacle; regulation and the number of decisions that must be traceable to a named accountable person are. Large organisations more often adopt parts of the system — role definitions, governance meetings — inside individual units rather than replacing the whole management chain at once.

What are the biggest risks when removing hierarchy?

The common failure is removing the management layer without replacing what it did. Coordination, priority setting and conflict resolution do not disappear with the manager; if no explicit process picks them up, they reappear as informal power that nobody elected and nobody can appeal against.

Where should a move towards a flatter structure start?

With a stated business problem and a pilot area small enough to fail in. A transformation that begins with the structure rather than with the problem it is meant to solve produces new meeting formats and the same decision latency as before.