This is the start of a series that discusses the management book Humanocracy. The core of Humanocracy is made up of seven principles that are intended to provide orientation when you have to design organizations or act within them.
Published in the series:
The core idea
The Chairman of Bayer’s Board of Management, Bill Anderson, once described the 2020 book Humanocracy. Creating Organizations As Amazing As The People Inside Them by Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini as his bible. And the operating model recently introduced at Bayer, Dynamic Shared Ownership, adopts key ideas from Hamel & Zanini. If successful managers trust the ideas in a book so much and the answers given in the book seem to fit their problems and challenges so well that they want to shape their organization accordingly, it is worth understanding and discussing these ideas in more detail.
People in humanocracy
The basic idea of humanocracy is easily summarized: People are most productive when they can develop their full potential, but bureaucratic organizational structures stand in the way of this development. This identifies bureaucracy as the main problem because it inhibits innovation, is detrimental to efficiency, and prevents people from developing in line with their natural abilities. The authors therefore advocate a radical departure from bureaucracy and a focus on people, their abilities, and their needs. Consistently aligning organizational structures with people’s needs, the promise goes, will lead your own organization to new levels of excellence.
Humanocracy references people in several ways. First, humanocracy promises to be a form of organization that is more humane, i.e. better for the people in it. Second, humanocracy has the advantage of equipping organizations with human abilities and characteristics. Hamel & Zanini are primarily thinking of creativity, passion, resilience, and adaptability. Finally, a third reference to people arises from the structural significance that the members of an organization have as people in a humanocracy context: Everything depends on people, on their passion, and on their motivation.
The authors’ assumption is that bureaucratic structures undermine all three of these aspects. Bureaucracies are not creative, passionate, and adaptive, but rather obsessed with rules, repetitive, and geared towards stability. In such an environment, people waste away because their natural drive to achieve is permanently thwarted. And Hamel & Zanini see the reason for this mainly in the fact that bureaucratic structures are not primarily oriented to people, but to rules and hierarchies.
An organization in humanocracy
As important as people may be in humanocracy, it is essentially about organizational change. The bureaucratic structures of an organization are to be replaced in order to enhance organizational success. For this transformation, however, Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini do not directly address the level of concrete organizational structures. Instead, they argue much more abstractly by presenting principles that should point the way to humanocracy – convictions and beliefs that should provide orientation in the design of and acting within organizations. Specifically, the authors name seven principles as the core of humanocracy:
- The principle of ownership
2. The principle of the market
3. The principle of meritocracy
4. The principle of community
5. The principle of openness
6. The principle of experimentation
7. The principle of paradox
The issue for us
The principles initially sound good. Who would want to say anything against ownership, meritocracy, or community? At the same time, doubts do arise at the start of our discussion of humanocracy: Is bureaucracy really as bad as Hamel & Zanini make it out to be? Is humanocracy really as humane as the book claims? These doubts are what we want to investigate. Our aim is not to dismiss the concept of humanocracy in general terms but rather to understand the assumptions behind the concept and address them. The questions we want to ask are what we find convincing, what we should keep an additional eye on, and how this could be done.
We will discuss humanocracy in individual articles, each of which will be dedicated to one of the seven core principles. And we hope to receive feedback so we can discuss the principles of humanocracy in greater depth.
The series will then conclude with an overall assessment of humanocracy, with consideration given to the insights gained from the foregoing discussions of the individual principles.
We are looking forward to the discussion!
The next article in this series:
