About Holacracy

Holacracy is a method of organizational governance based on decentralized management, in which authority and decision-making are distributed throughout circles. Holacracy relies on collective intelligence, and avoid having the organization under the influence of personal feelings or tempers of top managers.

How it works

In an holacratic organisation, a circle is a group of people gathered around a common field of activity, who will collectively be in charge of decision making and implementing tasks on topics related to this particular field.

At Energy Cities, we have set up five circles according to what we think our missions are:

• Learn (to increase municipalities’ capacities and knowledge)
• Engage (to engage and enlarge our community)
• Shape (to advocate fore cities to have the means necessary for their transformation)
• General Circle (overall coordination of staff and activities).

Different roles among circles are defined according to the needs to perform our missions, and then distributed between staff according to skills and interests.

As for any organization, our goal is not to aim at a frozen “perfect” state, but to go for the best possible state considering today’s specific needs and challenges. The difference lies in reactivity: each person is the final decision-maker for the accountabilities she or he is responsible for, giving responsibility and liberty to all.

Our circles all operate in an open environment, meaning that people can be in one or several circles at some point (depending on their skills, but also on what they want to share, learn, provide to the organisation and to the members of the network). Specific meetings within circles allow us not only to treat tactical issues but also to improve the governance and the decision-making process.

Throughout the years, thanks to holacracy we have set up lots of new professional behaviors, like teleworking, experience-sharing, peers mentoring, facilitation… that usually take a lot of time to be introduced and applied in more traditional structures. It also took us to places, projects, partnerships (amongst other things) that none of us – or anyone being in charge alone – would have thought of.

In holacracy, flexibility and direct initiatives fostering at all levels are balanced by collective intelligence regulation, and it works!