Nineteen Years Inside a Sociocratic SMB
Monday morning, on the A13 somewhere between Versailles and a client. My phone vibrates: the minutes of a circle meeting that wrapped while I was driving. They have decided to drop a service contract I had been defending for eighteen months. Owner named, deadline set, decision logged.
I read the message twice.
I don’t agree with the decision. They didn’t wait for me. And nothing about that bothers me anymore.
Two years earlier, this would have been impossible. Two years earlier, this same decision would have landed on my desk, where it would have aged for three weeks before dying of indecision. I would have called it due diligence. The team would have called it le boulet.
I was le boulet.
The pyramid I was standing on
I founded OM Conseil in 2003, an IT services firm in Île-de-France that grew, over the years, to thirty-five people. We did fractional CIO work for SMEs and a few mid-market clients. Suzuki France, public hospitals, mutual insurers, a media group. On paper, a healthy operation.
Off paper, I trusted no one.
I was certain everyone in the company should work the way I worked. I read every contract. I reviewed every architecture. I rewrote half the technical proposals before they went out. I called the clients personally when something mattered. I told myself this was leadership.
It was a chokepoint with my face on it.
The team adapted. Decisions waited. Initiatives deferred to let’s see what Olivier thinks. The good engineers learned that the cheapest path was to ship things past me at 7pm on a Friday. That isn’t delegation. That’s evasion under pressure: a sign that the structure was the problem, not the people.
I didn’t see any of this clearly until something broke.
The day I stopped blaming the crisis
In 2009 we lost our largest client. They alone represented more than half of our annual revenue. The subprime crisis was the proximate cause. But every other vendor of theirs survived the same crisis. We did not. It took us two years to recover.
Two years is a long time to think.
For most of them, I told myself the comfortable story: bad timing, bad luck, a client who didn’t understand what we’d built for them. Halfway through year two, I stopped telling myself that story. I had not lost a client. I had lost a relationship that I, alone, had been trying to manage. My team had insights into that account I never asked for. The client had concerns I never let surface. I was the single point of failure I had quietly built around myself for five years.
If I had known the real richness of my own team (and the real richness of that client), none of this would have happened. The opposite, in fact. The relationship would have grown.
That is the moment I went looking.
What dialogue actually looks like
I won’t define sociocracy here, or holacracy, or the bits of Nonviolent Communication we eventually wove in. The names matter less than what they unlocked. What follows is what the practice actually changed, week after week.
The first thing was re-engagement. Mine, then theirs. We took the time, slowly, to co-construct a shared project: a vision and a set of values we actually believed in, rather than the laminated mission statement nobody could quote. I had never done that with the team. It turned out they had been waiting.
The second was dialogue. Real dialogue, with structure: time-boxed rounds, the obligation to listen before responding, the refusal to let any one voice (mine, usually) take the floor. The ideas that surfaced in the first six months had been sitting inside the company for years. I had simply never built a vessel that could hold them.
The third was tensions.
Before the change, when something didn’t fit (a process that didn’t scale, a recurring client friction, a tooling annoyance), each of us compensated quietly, in our corner. We absorbed the friction. We worked around. After the change, we surfaced those gaps openly, weekly, in meetings designed for nothing else. The gap between the ideal we wanted and the reality we lived became material to work on, not pain to swallow.
That weekly habit (surface a tension, work it together, ship a small change, repeat) is the most underrated tool I have ever deployed in a company. It made continuous improvement something embodied, not a slogan on a slide.
Roles, not people
Sociocracy gave us a way to decide together. Holacracy gave us a way to operate without titles.
In a pyramid, “Olivier” is a job description. “Olivier” approves the budget. “Olivier” signs the proposals. “Olivier” calls the client on a Sunday when the firewall breaks. The person and the function are fused: you cannot reach the function without going through the man.
We unbundled them. The function “approve the technical proposals” became a role someone else held three days a week. The function “host the client check-ins” became three different roles for three different account types. The function “carry the on-call beeper” became a circle with a rotation. My name no longer guarded any of these doors.
That is the move that frees a CIO from being the company’s chokepoint. Not abdication. Distribution.
Who stayed, who left
I’d like to say everyone thrived. They didn’t.
You cannot force people to change. Some of the engineers I had counted on most (the ones I was sure were exactly like me, ready to take ownership the moment I let go) left. They went to classical pyramids: bigger company, clearer hierarchy, more management above them. They did not want autonomy. They wanted a manager. Fair enough.
Others (quieter people I had not paid much attention to, who had never raised their voice in my old all-hands) turned out to be the pillars of the new structure. They were the ones who held the circles together, who carried the weekly tension reviews, who took the decisions I wasn’t there to take.
You learn who is in your company only after you stop deciding for everyone in it.
I sold OM Conseil to a group in 2022, nineteen years after founding it. That sale is, in retrospect, the only true failure of the adventure. I would have preferred another adjacent possible. But we were coming out of the COVID years, the exhaustion was general, and I no longer had the energy, from inside, to invent the next chapter.
The second decade had been unrecognisable from the first. The B Corp certificate, the sociocratic circles, the holacratic role chart: none of those are the point. The point is that I stopped being the chokepoint of my own company, and the company started growing in directions I had not designed.
When I work today as a fractional CIO for an SME, the IT problems I am asked to fix are rarely IT problems in any pure sense. The migration that won’t ship. The team that can’t keep an engineer. The director who insists on signing every change request. Most of what crosses my desk is a governance problem wearing a technical costume.
I learned to recognise it on the A13, somewhere between Versailles and a client, reading a decision I disagreed with, taken without me.