How to measure the success of Holacracy in your organisation

Measuring processes of change is difficult and many companies don’t do it, exactly because of the complexity of it. But with increasing data drivenness and decreasing tolerance for gut feelings, organisations do feel the need to validate the effort they are putting into organisational changes. At every event where I speak, there is at least one person who asks the following: did adopting Holacracy make your company a better company? The honest answer is: I don’t know. But reflecting on this question has given me insights that are valuable when you want to measure Change Management.

In the end, it comes down to having clarity on multiple levels:

• The Organisational level — what do we want to solve?
• The Individual level — are employees happier, more productive, healthier
• The Implementation level — did we reach a critical mass within our defined time frame?

Organisational: measuring the right thing

Implementing Holacracy is often expected to be the fix for an underlying problem that organisations, teams or individuals are trying to solve. Examples range from slowness of execution, to avoiding bottlenecks on key positions, to spending less time on meetings. Often the opposite of what is expected happens though…