In my keynote speeches, I’m frequently telling the audience that you don’t have to take a radical approach to the changes I’m advocating. Yes, I think we need more transparency, but that doesn’t mean you need to share everything with everybody. We just need to move in the transparency direction to get better results.

Every now and then, however, I’m reminded that while it may not be required, the radical approach is certainly an option. I just read an article about Medium, an interesting new blogging platform (sort of). But the article isn’t about the platform, it’s about the organizational structure at Medium, where accountability and decision making are pushed down throughout the organization. Organizational structure is fluid, evolving based on the work that needs to get done. Medium uses a system called Holacracy.

This emphasis on organic growth has a side benefit of distributing authority. In Holacratic systems, individuals operate without managers because many of them have decision-making power in a particular area. And since everything is made as explicitly as possible, everyone in the organization knows who has authority over what. “It’s much better to have power distributed as widely as possible so more people can make more decisions to move forward,” Stirman explains. “This structure leads more toward moving fast, trying new things, and adjusting as needed. You don’t have to wait for everyone up a ladder to sign off. This can take weeks or months, when Holacracy says, ‘You know what, we’re going to hire the best people we know and trust them to make decisions for us.’ All day people make decisions, own parts of the company, and act on them. The momentum this creates far outweighs someone making a bad decision. You also have the momentum to change course quickly.”

Trust. Ownership. Decentralization. Speed. Agility. And I think Medium’s use of Holacracy is a great illustration of one of the central points in Humanize: clarity over control. You don’t just declare that there are no managers or that the structure is flat. You actually have to do the hard work of clarity that will guide that new, flat, manager-less system. By clarifying the roles and the “circles” and their relationships to each other. Holacracy is a system for providing that clarity, though I also like the fact that Medium is willing to add to the system when it sees something’s missing. At the end of the article, Stirman talks about how he needed to add praise and recognition to the whole system.

So if humanizing your organization seems impossible to you, just remember that even the radically different approaches are coming into fruition these days.

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