Zappos, an online shoe retailer, equates its success to its corporate culture. They adopted a system of corporate governance called “holocracy.” Since adopting Holacracy in 2014, they evolved in using self-organization to find ways to layer their culture, core values, and people’s focus into the system in a way that works for them[1]. Holacracy is a system of corporate governance whereby members of a team or business form distinct, autonomous, yet symbiotic, teams to accomplish tasks and company goals. The corporate hierarchy concept is discarded in favor of a fluid organizational structure where employees can make critical decisions within their area of authority.[2] Zappos has seen some of its easiest wins with newly formed circles. “New areas of work that didn’t exist in the traditional approach keep getting spun up and started. [These teams are] figuring out what work needs to be done, and starting to execute on that work.” In other words, they’re living and breathing Holacracy from the get-go.[3]
Halocracy is inspired by one of nature’s defining features: self-organization. One of the species that exhibit this is ants. Give a colony of garden ants a week and a pile of dirt, and they’ll transform it into an underground edifice about the height of a skyscraper in an ant-scaled city. Without a blueprint or a leader, thousands of insects moving specks of dirt create a complex, spongelike structure with parallel levels connected by a network of tunnels.[4] Janine Benyus, in her book Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature (2002), described three more of nature’s tricks of the trade:
- Nature manufactures under life-friendly conditions
- Nature has an ordered hierarchical structure, and
- Nature customizes materials through the use of templates.
Migo Aguado 