DNA OF

HUMANOCRACY
ESSENTIAL PRINCIPLES FOR CREATING
RESILIENT, CREATIVE, & INSPIRING
ORGANIZATIONS
PRINCIPLES
 OWNERSHIP

 MERITOCRACY

 MARKETS

 COMMUNITY

 OPENNESS

 EXPERIMENTATION

 PARADOX
 OWNERSHIP
Suggestions for increase the sense of ownership in
your own organization
 Redistribute a chunk of your own authority.
 Step back from critical decisions and let your
team decide.
 Disaggregate big units into small ones. In
general, keep operating units to fewer than fifty
people.
 Give every unit a full-fledged P&L.
 Minimize corporate overhead allocations and
avoid building targets arounddetailed KPIs.
MERITOCRACY
Building a genuine meritocracy in organization
 Ask your peers to rate your expertise across a range of

categories, as well as your value added.

 Share your ratings with those in your network and ask them
for advice on how you can improve. Invite others to follow
your lead.
 Ensure that competence and performance ratings

are peer-based, with at least five assessors for every

individual. Make these ratings transparent to all.
 Create more opportunities for individuals to become

meritorious.
 Rotate team members across roles, challenge people with
stretching assignments, open up management training to
front line team members, and take time to mentor others
 MARKETS
Steps to embed marketplace principles in your organization?
 Test the merits of major strategic initiatives with an
 internal opinion market.
 See how the crowd ranks competing projects, or how it
rates the probability that a major new initiative hits its
milestones.
 Make sure internal innovators have access to multiple
funding sources, and engage the crowd in making funding
decisions.
 Over time, slowly expand the jurisdiction of the crowd.
 Let it define company values, rank the promotability of
senior leaders, suggest acquisition targets, identify low
value bureaucratic rituals, and more
 COMMUNITY
Tips to strengthen the bonds of community in your
organization
 Re-craft the mission statement for your unit or if possible,
the entire organization, in a way that makes
it emotionally resonant for every team member and
gives people a common cause.
 In interpersonal encounters, look for opportunities to

reveal something of yourself, and encourage others to

do the same.
 Have a tender heart for those who are struggling with
issues outside of work.
 Hire for compassion, follow the golden rule, and celebrate
acts of kindness.
OPENNESS
Advantages of Openness

 Tackle the climate of fear. In most organizations, there are penalties for
disagreeing with your boss. The result is an echo chamber. You need to make
it safe to dissent. That means takingevery opportunity to ask, “Where is my
thinking stuck?” “What other options do you see?” “What would you do
differently?”
 Crack open the strategy process in simple, low-cost ways.
 If the idea of that high-profile strategy hackathon seems daunting, start small.
 Make sure every future-focused meeting includes a disproportionate number of
young people, newcomers, and individuals who’ve worked in other industries.
 In one company we know, managers present their plans before hundreds of
young employees who live-tweet criticisms and suggestions. The point is, there
are lots of ways of getting new people into the strategy conversation.
 Link ideas to action. Most organizations have some sort of online suggestion
box, but submissions often disappear into ether. Employees want to know,
“Who is going to review my idea? When? Against what criteria? If it has merit,
how will it get resourced? Will I get time to work on it?” If the answers to
these questions aren’t clear, many contributors will opt out
EXPERIMENTATION
To-do-list for transformation of organization into exploratorium
 Equip everyone with the skills they need to design and

run their own experiments.

 There’s plenty of courseware out there on design thinking and rapid
prototyping that you can share with colleagues.
 Remove barriers that make it hard for team members

to fund and launch experiments.

 Starting with your own team, create a small budget for
experimentation.
 Encourage those who work for you to set aside a few

hours each a week for unstructured time.

 De-risk the personal consequences of experiments

gone wrong.
 Remind people that most experiments will fail.
 Make sure team members get credit for launching

experiments, whatever the outcome.

PARADOX
Suggestions for becoming an organization a master
of paradox
 Go out of your way to include individuals with

countervailing views in important conversations.

 Never accept an either/or. Think creatively
about how you could achieve your goals without
sacrificing other equally vital goals.
 Work systematically to equip people with the

information and skills they need to make smart

tradeoffs, and then push those trade- offs down.