The tension meeting makes it hard to avoid asking for support because it's so easy for people to bring up small problems as they're noticed and get quick resolution. Also, responsibilities are worded as objectively and measurably as possible (like good KPIs) to increase transparency into how people are doing in their roles. If a circle in an org like yours needs to avoid showing weaknesses to clients and to suss out problems before they're noticeable, they would be able to define those as responsibilities and assign them to the right people.
That said, I think one of the bets holocracy makes is that a group of people with a better understanding of their responsibilities and who receive quicker, clearer feedback will naturally be more proactive about problems. A circle is pretty unlikely to assign themselves the kinds of restrictive processing and reporting that are traditionally used to control interaction with clients in organizations that don't have perfectly reliable people. But in the short term, the control method would probably have more consistent results and that is not acceptable to every organization.
"I think one of the bets holocracy makes is that a group of people with a better understanding of their responsibilities and who receive quicker, clearer feedback will naturally be more proactive about problems."
Who provides the feedback? Based on what credentials? Explain why that person not a manager.
Tensions, which are problems or issues or defects, are provided by anyone who notices.
In addition to that, some roles may have responsibilities to provide particular support and feedback. For example, in a team of developers, a developer who has a code reviewer role may have the responsibility of providing feedback on others' code.
Other kinds of feedback-providing responsibilities could be proofreading, listening to sales calls, QA on manufactured items, feedback on negotiations, etc. Anyone could be assigned these roles/responsibilities.
Traditional managers usually see these responsibilities as their job and other employees don't easily get involved in the manager-employee feedback relationship.
"Tensions, which are problems or issues or defects, are provided by anyone who notices."
Interesting but 'deficit model' approach. No mentoring available for performance that does not cause what you define to be a 'tension' but that could be improved with little effort. I'm thinking of double-loop learning (Argyris) as opposed to single-loop learning which I interpret as covering proof reading/QA/Sales call monitoring.
Yes, I haven't seen anything requiring scrutinizing assumptions as a core role/responsibility, so it would have to be something the organization wants to do. I do think the model empowers employees to question assumptions very nicely once it is their responsibility, though.
That said, I think one of the bets holocracy makes is that a group of people with a better understanding of their responsibilities and who receive quicker, clearer feedback will naturally be more proactive about problems. A circle is pretty unlikely to assign themselves the kinds of restrictive processing and reporting that are traditionally used to control interaction with clients in organizations that don't have perfectly reliable people. But in the short term, the control method would probably have more consistent results and that is not acceptable to every organization.