Holacracy is a method of decentralized management and organizational governance, in which authority and decision-making are distributed throughout a holarchy of self-organizing teams rather than being vested in a management hierarchy.
founder Brian Robertson distilled the company’s best practices into an organizational system that became known as Holacracy in 2007. Robertson later developed the “Holacracy Constitution”, which lays out the core principles and practices of the system. In June 2015, he released the book Holacracy: The New Management System for a Rapidly Changing World, that details and explains his practices. The term holacracy is derived from the term holarchy, coined by Arthur Koestler in his 1967 book The Ghost in the Machine. A holarchy is composed of holons (Greek: ὅλον, holon neuter form of ὅλος, holos “whole”) or units that are autonomous and self-reliant, but also dependent on the greater whole of which they are part. Thus a holarchy is a hierarchy of self-regulating holons that function both as autonomous wholes and as dependent parts.