Book of the Month: Humanocracy by Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini

I've been reading Humanocracy on a recent trip and it's one of those books that puts language to something most of us have felt for years but never quite named.

Here's the premise. Most organisations (including most agencies, even small ones) are built on bureaucratic principles. We don't think of it that way, because we associate bureaucracy with corporates and government departments. But the authors make the case that bureaucracy isn't about size. It's about a set of design choices: hierarchy, control, standardisation, approval layers, fixed roles, top-down decisions. It's the operating system most businesses inherited from the industrial age, and most of us copied it without questioning it.

The problem for agencies is that bureaucracy is built for compliance, not contribution. It optimises for predictability and treats people as interchangeable units in a process. But the entire point of an agency is the judgement, creativity and commitment of the people inside it. You're running a creative business on an industrial-age operating system and wondering why the team doesn't show up the way you want them to.

What they propose instead is humanocracy — organisations designed around the assumption that people are capable of more than they're usually allowed to give. Power is distributed rather than concentrated at the top. Decisions sit close to the work, not several layers above it. Information is open rather than rationed. Accountability is to peers and outcomes, not just to managers.

The book gives you a lens. And once you have the lens, you start to see the bureaucratic instincts everywhere in your own business,  in how decisions get made, in who is allowed to spend money, in how often you find yourself in the middle of something that should never have come to you in the first place. Most of it isn't malicious. It's just inherited.

Worth reading if you've ever caught yourself thinking the business has lost a bit of its soul, or if you can feel yourself becoming the bottleneck and you're not sure how that happened.