Recommended Reading: Yes, Holacracy Is Overhyped — and Underestimated

In early 2020, Quartz reported that Zappos had “quietly backed away” from Holacracy, the distributed governance system it adopted company-wide in 2014, and was building a new market-based approach instead. Had the experiment failed?

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In this thoughtful response, Patrick Scheuerer argues the story is more interesting than that:

• Hype cycles are normal. Many organizations struggle with Holacracy not because the system fails, but because practice and commitment fall short — as with any innovation.
• It’s like learning the piano. Holacracy is a neutral tool; real competence takes a lot of practice, and different organizations will play it in different styles.
• Transcend and include. Zappos may have evolved beyond “pure” Holacracy while keeping its core — just as the organizations in Reinventing Organizations each developed their own way of doing things around a stable (but not static) core.
• Tools don’t replace leadership. Becoming truly customer-centric still takes leadership, empathy and sustained discipline.

Read the full article in English:

👉 Yes, Holacracy is overhyped — and underestimated by Patrick Scheuerer (2020)

Future Organization Lab previously shared a Chinese translation of this article with our Chinese-speaking readers: 解開合弄制（Holacracy）的謎團