When people, AI agents, and humanoid robots are all equally involved in business processes and value chains within a company, a hierarchical organizational structure often makes it impossible to respond to market changes in an agile and immediate manner. In such cases, it can be very useful to consider other organizational structures. Holacracy is one possible alternative.
Holacracy is a self-organizing organizational model for companies that was formalized by Brian J. Robertson in 2007. Instead of a hierarchy consisting solely of people ( in the form of groups, departments, etc.), it features a structure of roles with clearly defined components:
- Purpose – Objectives, Skills, and the Role's Potential,
- Domain – the assets and processes over which the role has authoritative decision-making authority,
- Accountabilities – ongoing tasks for which the role is responsible within its own domain, or support tasks for other domains.
These activities are governed by policies that apply either specifically to the domain or centrally across the entire company.
Roles are grouped and organized into circles. Structural changes are not “imposed,” but rather decided collectively in governance meetings in response to a specific tension (a perceived discrepancy between the actual and the target state).
Es findet eine Trennung zwischen Rolle <> Person statt. Eine Rolle wird von einer Person „energisiert“. Was passiert aber, wenn der „Energizer“ kein Mensch mehr ist, sondern eine intelligente, selbstlernende (AI-basierte) Maschine?
An AI agent (e.g., an AI-based agent for maintenance diagnostics) has a purpose for a specific domain (e.g., “Diagnostic recommendations for the operation of the ‘HUMA-7’ machine”). It must independently carry out ongoing accountabilities (monitoring machine logs, reporting anomalies, generating reports, sending notifications, making predictions based on real data). Structurally, it is no different from a human role holder.
To illustrate this, a specific (fictional) but technically plausible application—the production of a humanoid robot (HUMA-7) —was developed in a prototype. The simulated company employs 13 people and utilizes 6 AI agents and 8 humanoid robots. The prototype can be controlled and monitored using various visualizations, simulations, and different optimization strategies. A key module of the prototype is the semantic model of the entire company, which also includes time-dependent data and milestones (semantically). This model is used in the W3C RDF 1.2 standard as a (temporal) context graph, thereby ensuring a complete, semantic view of all processes at any given time—including in retrospect—as well as interoperability with other internal or external processes.
Overview of the Company's Circles & Roles
Governance and DPP Compliance Dashboard of the Prototype