There is a particular kind of exhaustion that everyone who works in a university will know well. This isn’t the exhaustion of thinking hard; if anything, that kind is regenerative, even pleasurable. We expect to feel tired after wrestling with an intricate proof or brainstorming how to resolve some delicate technical issue. Even when our brains feel fried, we are still energized by it.

But there is another, “scarier” kind of exhaustion: the administrative one. It is the friction of a form that requires three signatures before you can make even the most trivial request. It is the demand to specify the future edition of your course that won’t run for over a year and is still under active redesign. It is the updated privacy regulations for your research project. It is the committee that exists primarily to schedule the next committee. The list could go on and on…

After writing the Workplace Cultures post, I was listening to the No Nonsense Agile Leadership podcast (episode #0116, linked here, if you are curious). The guest was Michele Zanini, co-author with Gary Hamel of Humanocracy.

When asked to explain the core difference between the bureaucratic status quo and the alternative they propose, Zanini offered a simple but striking explanation:

In a bureaucracy, the person is the instrument that the organization uses to create things and drive profit or efficiency. […] In a humanocracy, the relationship is actually reversed. It is the organization that is the instrument; the person is the agent, and the people use the organization to have impact.

I kept coming back to those sentences. University mission statements pay lip service to something similar, but the gap between that ideal and the lived reality of academic work has kept growing to the point of feeling almost comic.

# The Seven Principles

The concept of humanocracy starts from the assumption that no two organizations operate identically, so it doesn’t prescribe a single, universal set of practices. Instead, it offers a shared set of guiding principles that transcend particular implementations: ownership, meritocracy, markets, experimentation, community, openness, and paradox (balance). These stand in contrast to the guiding principles of bureaucracy: stratification, hierarchy, standardization, formalization, and narrow specialization.

The book dedicates a chapter to each principle, but the podcast episode presents them concisely. So, below, I’ll paraphrase (sometimes quoting directly) from the latter. I apologize in advance for not marking the distinction clearly.

The contrast with bureaucracy is fundamental. In a bureaucracy, people are treated as resources to be managed; in a humanocracy, they are recognized as agents with genuine contributions to make. Bureaucracy is designed to ensure conformance and control; humanocracy is designed to maximize human contribution. But let’s not get sidetracked.

Principle 1 — Ownership: Most people, given the choice, would prefer to be owners rather than employees. While not everyone can work in a startup, many of the organizations profiled in the book function as constellations of startups within a larger corporate structure. The goal is to give every team member both the autonomy and the financial upside that make entrepreneurial thinking feel natural.

Principle 2 — Meritocracy: People should have a genuine opportunity to develop their skills and be recognized for the value they create, with influence and compensation tied meaningfully to competence and contribution. This requires building systems where ideas compete on equal footing, regardless of where (or whom) they come from.

Principle 3 — Markets: Markets are far more effective than central planning at aligning needs with resources. Paradoxically, most large companies allocate capital more like a planned economy: top-down, annually, with little dynamism. Humanocratic organizations work to introduce market-like mechanisms that make resource allocation more responsive and decentralized.

Principle 4 — Experimentation: Most breakthroughs don’t emerge from spreadsheets or slide decks, they come from iteration. For example, the podcast highlights a large company that has built an entire system to encourage every employee to prototype their way toward new products and services, replacing lengthy approval chains with a culture of rapid, low-stakes experimentation.

Principle 5 — Community: People do their best work when they feel accepted, psychologically safe, and embedded in trust-based relationships. Organizations that prioritize community invest in making their structure more lateral than vertical, fostering the kind of belonging that unlocks discretionary effort.

Principle 6 — Openness: Innovative organizations blur the boundary between inside and outside. They actively seek out valuable contributions wherever they originate and build the channels to integrate them, treating the organization not as a closed system but as an interactive, outward-facing network.

Principle 7 — Paradox (Balance): The final principle is the capacity to hold apparently conflicting goals in productive tension–scale and agility, innovation and discipline, freedom and accountability. This requires reinventing the notion of control. Many humanocratic organizations are disciplined, but they achieve that discipline through trust, purpose, and peer accountability rather than top-down oversight.

Together, these seven principles give rise to a wide variety of specific practices. The key message, however, isn’t to copy what Haier or Buurtzorg (the Dutch home healthcare provider with over ten thousand nurses working in self-managing teams) are doing. The point is to understand the underlying principle at work, then ask: How can we bring this to life in a way that fits our own context and culture?

# Translation Needed

I’m sure that reading the points above, you might already be questioning my sanity. Parts of principles 2 and 3 directly contradict some of the things I advocated in my previous post. Moreover, the capitalist, market-driven assumptions underlying this framework clash with the service-oriented mission of the university, which values the promotion of fundamental knowledge without direct ties to profit or short-term gain.

It is a fun thought experiment to imagine discussing this in a university meeting. Picture reading the points aloud and watching your colleagues’ faces freeze or nervously grin (though maybe not if you work in economics or business).

They’d be right to be suspicious.

Over the last few decades, management reforms in academia have often meant using a similar vocabulary to justify cutting permanent positions, outsourcing core services, and centralizing power in the hands of administrators who are increasingly disconnected from the realities of teaching and research. I’m grateful that at least here in the Netherlands, there is a legal requirement for co-participation in administrative decision-making.

But let’s look past the corporate framing. Humanocracy is meant to be a set of driving values that align with the specificity of the organization. The principles, by design, are meant to be translated into something that resonates with academic needs and values before being applied.

Ownership, for example, doesn’t have to mean giving professors a larger cut of grant overhead or the control of a research unit. It would make more sense if it meant treating a research group or department like a community of adults: trusting them to know what they need, giving them control over their own resources, and holding them accountable for the intellectual and educational value they create. In this sense, not treating them as cost centers whose every move requires permission from someone who has never done the work.

Meritocracy, in line with DORA, should not be about ranking people by H-index or other citation counts: metrics that, like the algorithms we increasingly rely on, reduce complex human output to a single number. True meritocracy here would mean that influence should follow expertise and contribution, not rank. In a department where the loudest voice in a hiring decision belongs to the person who holds the chair, regardless of their relevance to the field, something has gone wrong. Zanini’s version of meritocracy could be an antidote to administrative aristocracy: the slow takeover of an institution by people whose primary skill is managing instead of creating.

Markets, stripped of their neoliberal baggage, are simply about letting resources flow to good ideas rather than locking them into rigid, historical budget lines. An internal seed fund, allocated by peer review and open to anyone with a compelling research question, is a market. It is how our external funding mechanisms (like the NWO or ERC) already work. So why are we so hesitant to apply the same logic internally? Given the many shortcomings of such system, I’d even push it further: make it a lottery, perhaps with a preliminary expert-led filter, while promoting equality by limiting re-application after an award and tying merit to a rolling average of past track records in successful supervisions.

Experimentation is, in theory, the foundation of the university. The irony is that universities have become incredibly conservative when it comes to experimenting with their own structures. The modern audit culture (accreditation cycles, performance agreements, constant assessment, …) has made failure feel dangerous. We demand rigour and innovation in our research, but we promote safe, short-term gains in grants. When it comes to our own organization, we settle for inertia and control over experimentation.

The last three principles (community, openness, and paradox) are easier to translate. At its best, a university is already a community of practice built on shared intellectual curiosity. Our task is to stop dismantling that community with structures that reward individual metrics and punish true collaboration.

# Shaping Leadership

One of the most clarifying moments in the podcast was Zanini’s take on the difference between leaders and managers. He pointed out that the term “leader” became fashionable precisely because “manager” had acquired a negative connotation. We started calling everyone a leader not because our structures became less rigid, but because it sounded better, refreshing the title and keeping the bureaucracy intact (or even growing it).

Zanini defines a leader not by their position on an org chart, but by their actions:

A leader is anybody who is mobilizing resources and other people to do something of value.

Under this definition, leadership stops being a title and becomes an activity. It is for the PhD student who starts a new reading group, the technician who reorganizes the lab workflow, the lecturer who rebuilds a course to make mathematical beauty accessible to a new cohort, or the researcher who connects colleagues because they have noticed a common thread in their work. The “leadership team” shouldn’t be a closed circle of ten people at the top, but the network of everyone driving the work forward.

This becomes a fun thought experiment. According to these principles, the roles of those who hold formal authority (Deans, Rectors, Board Members, …) change quite drastically. Zanini describes it as a shift from deciding to architecting: instead of making decisions for others, they become enablers, building the conditions within which others can thrive and make decisions that align with their needs.

At some point, the podcast draws an interesting connection to servant leadership, though Zanini partly distances himself from the term. He argues that it still implies hierarchy: the idea that you are at the top, graciously choosing to serve those below. Architecting is more radical as it means genuinely reducing your own decision rights in favor of trusting that the team closest to the work is best equipped to manage it.

This raises an important (and perhaps uncomfortable) question: How many of the decisions currently debated at various administrative levels would be resolved faster—and better—by the people actually doing the teaching and research?

# University as Collegium

The most immediate objection to applying humanocracy in academia is that it is a theory built for profit-driven organizations. What does “financial upside” mean to a mathematician exploring pseudodifferential calculus or infinite sequences in the primes? How do you measure the “market value” of a paper whose significance might not be clear for another twenty years?

My answer, which I hope I was able explain already, is that the corporate vocabulary is beside the point. Strip it away, apply a little translation, and what remains is a claim about the kind of environment that allows people to collaborate, think out loud, take intellectual risks, and produce meaningful work. In that light, humanocracy is a description of what the university was always supposed to be: a self-governing, dynamic community of scholars, trusted to pursue difficult questions and accountable to their peers and to the pursuit of truth.

In ancient Rome there was a word for this: the collegium. Fundamentally these were community of equals working together toward a shared interest. I wonder if universities are some remainder of ancient collegia, buried under layers of administrative procedure. (Disclaimer: I am not a historian and did not research this properly, I am pretty sure it is wrong what I am saying but I like that it fits nicely with the argument. Take it with lots of grain of salt!)

So in this (poorly substantiated) sense, adopting humanocracy in academia doesn’t sound like a revolution at all. I feel like I have been digging to find something new and ended up with an archaeological discovery. I wonder, though: could clearing away the administrative sediment make this older ruin breathe again, along with its community?

These seven principles aren’t new inventions. They are a modern formulation of dynamics that have animated university departments in the past, polished by a safer, more inclusive, and collegial atmosphere.

But are we willing to rebuild or strengthen the structures that make these values real? Or will we just keep inscribing them on strategy webpages while we sit in yet another meeting to schedule the next meeting?

# Appendix

Before I conclude: If you want to measure how far an institution has drifted from humanocracy’s ideals, Zanini suggests using the Bureaucracy Mass Index (BMI). For those of us in academia there is an immediate test: look back at the last month and count how many hours you spent serving the institution versus how many hours the institution spent serving your work. What do you find?