Brian J. Robertson
"Robertson was attracted to agile software development, a system that responds to feedback from customers, developers and other stakeholders, and hinges on the concept of self-organizing teams. He also experimented with sociocracy and its system for setting policy through structured consensus, which he later moved away from. But it was the work of philosopher Ken Wilber, who wrote about holarchies, the term used to describe overarching systems that are made up of other self-organizing systems or entities (“holons”) that he was eventually drawn to.
“Holarchies are a different way of structuring an entity,” says Robertson. “They’re the fundamental building block of reality. Holacracy is capturing a broader pattern. There’s nothing sacred about what we’re doing. I don’t feel like we’re inventing Holacracy. We’re capturing it concretely in a set of rules. Self-governance is how nature scales.”
Although he distances himself from Wilber’s spiritual devotees, he spent time with people who worked for the philosopher’s non-profit, the Integral Institute. In fact, Robertson met serial entrepreneur Tom Thomison at an integral theory gathering in 2006, and together they crystalized his experimental ideas for Holacracy into HolacracyOne." [1]
- Trustee, Social Evolution
