Self Organization

Is self organization hard?  Complexity studies would seem to indicate that it is easy, with  just a few rules.  Perhaps it is because we can't state the objective well enough?   I am reminded of Holacracy, or social organization.  I was then struck by this:

" ... This week, Tony Hsieh issued a challenge to every Zappos employee: ... Self-organize or leave the company ...  

We’ve been operating partially under Holacracy and partially under the legacy management hierarchy in parallel for over a year now. Having one foot in one world while having the other foot in the other world has slowed down our transformation towards self-management and self-organization. While we’ve made decent progress on understanding the workings of the system of Holacracy and capturing work/accountabilities in Glass Frog, we haven’t made fast enough progress towards self-management, self-organization, and more efficient structures to run our business. (Holacracy is just one of many tools that can help move us towards self-management and self-organization, but simply abiding by the rules of Holacracy does not equal self-management or self-organization.) ... '  ... "