Sociocracy

Why Use Sociocracy?

"Nothing can withstand
an idea
whose time has come."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Sociocracy is a good idea!-me, Ted I can feel it in my bones. And that excitement is palpable in other people I know who used sociocracy and consent decision-making.

Many of our large-scale problems are systemic - that is, they are built into the systems we have set up to run our businesses and organizations. Our blueprints and templates for managing ourselves and each other have mostly been designed to try to make human organizations operate like machines, and have been evaluated for keeping down the bottom line.

Sociocracy was developed specifically to address human needs. It resembles and is specifically designed to mimic living organisms and is not based on a mechanical model. In a mechanical model a mechanic runs a machine. This is analogous to managers running their employees. Living organisms run themselves. Not only does sociocracy address human needs, but it allows for the most responsive organization and uses a minimum number of levels of hierarchy.

A huge source of our trouble in this world is that we unwittingly give up our power to consent in decisions that affect us.

I've always wondered if revolutions could maintain their revolutionary fervor 10 years after the change in government. How can the new government guard against entrenchment and power abuse? I've had vague thoughts of changing the people in power often enough that no one could gain that power to abuse. Now that I've studied sociocracy I see that there are, built into this system, checks and balances that make it possible to sustain that sort of guard against power mongers and abuse of the participants.

Read on....

"No problem can be solved
with the same consciousness
that created it."

Albert Einstein

Gerard Endenburg, one of the developers of sociocracy, considers it to be: "THE NEXT STEP"

"On the road which we have taken as organizing beings, sociocracy follows on from democracy."

"...an organization form guaranteeing optimum conditions for that search" for "prosperity and happiness."

"The consent principle employs chaos to come to clarity on policy directions that people will accept in their particular circumstances, but it makes it possible to resist sometimes sudden and arbitrary actions by power holders and systemic coercion by majority parties or other voting blocks."

Inspiration

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear
is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness,
that most frightens us.
We ask ourselves, who am I
to be brilliant, gorgeous,
talented and fabulous?
Actually, who are you not to be?
You are a child of God.

Your playing small doesn't serve the world.
There is nothing enlightened about shrinking
so that other people won't feel insecure around you.

We were born to make manifest
the glory of God that is within us.
It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone.
And as we let our own light shine,
we unconsciously give other people
permission to do the same.
As we are liberated from our own fear,
our presence automatically liberates others.

Written by Marianne Williamson
Excerpted from her book, "A Return to Love"

Empowerment

The impetus behind sociocracy is to spread power around evenly. Endenburg calls it "maintaining equivalence."

Sociocracy uses the Consent decision-making process that is the ultimate power an individual can have without having power over. It's sort of like saying that anyone involved in the decision-making process has veto power (and the responsibility that goes along with that - to present a reasonable objection). This power is not 'power over' because everyone in the decision-making group has the same power. It will also empower the group, or the organization to function optimally. I'm impressed at how well this method balances the needs of the individual with the needs of the group.

You can decide by consent to make decisions in another manner, but every other process allows people trying to make the decision to be ignored. I believe that if you decide to make a decision in another manner besides consent, you are giving up power. Sometimes that's not a problem and it can be best to identify limits so that a person or group can operate autonomously.

It's well known that many of our problems as a society stem from lack of equality. The balance of power is out of balance - WAY out of balance. How much of this is due to who gets to make the decisions? Shouldn't each and every person who has a stake in a decision be able to have a say in that decision? Most businesses and many other organizations today have autocratic power structures. The boss tells you what to do and how much money you are going to make. Can we truly call our country democratic if most of the decisions made in it are made by little dictators? I think not! Consensus seeks to give every person a say in decisions that affect them. It is the only method I know of in widespread use today that tries to address problems of power imbalances. Consent can now be added as a method of decision-making that addresses these same problems.

"Our nettlesome task
is to discover how to organize our strength
into compelling power."

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Consensus and Consent

Consensus is a good idea. So why am I trying to sell you Consent and Sociocracy instead of Consensus? Well, one reason is that one of the people who laid sociocracy on me has been a Quaker for many decades and is quite familiar with consensus and she believes that consent works more efficiently, at least, for her group, in their situation. She is also part of an ecovillage that struggled along with consensus for three years and had a lot of problems. Here is a quote from their website: "Initially the group used consensus to make their decisions. This proved inefficient and exhausting and led to serious rifts. Introducing sociocracy was a relief. The group became more efficient and subsequently has been able to make many difficult decisions in harmony with one another." This may not be the case for every group that uses consensus. The size of the group, their backgrounds, and their aims could make consensus a more appropriate choice.

Sociocracy is a fully developed model of governance. It's hard for me to picture mainstream corporations replacing their autocratic decision-making processes with consensus, whereas the sociocratic model is similar to a lot of theories that have been developed in the field of organization development in the last few decades, especially 'learning organizations.'

I don't know how most organizations that use consensus structure their governments, but the sociocratic model provides a well-defined set of patterns and agreements to use to obtain optimal equivalence.

"Man must evolve for all human conflict
a method which rejects
revenge, aggression and retaliation."

Martin Luther King, Jr.

"For both Gandhi and King, the "coherence of ends and means" is a first principle of nonviolent philosophy. This means that who we are is as important as what we do, that how we go about change determines what ultimately will be changed, and the process itself is as important as the goal. The end, therefore, does not justify the means because, in fact, the goal is inherent in the means. In the words of Dr. King, "The means must be as pure as the end, for in the long run of history, immoral destructive means cannot bring about moral and constructive ends."

This article , Healing the Soul of America – The Power of Nonviolence
is from the Global Renaissance Alliance website

Nonviolence

The following paragraphs are from a translation from a speech given by Gerard Endenburg called 'Knowledge, Power, and Power Over.'

"Uncontrollable "power over" (or "dominance") interests me because it is akin to the concept of negation. Negating or ignoring someone's existence is the ultimate form of violence. Power and superior force have directly to do with social safety and danger, not only in the sense of labor law and the working environment, but in the overall sense of our lives and our society.

"The question is then how to shape a safe societal situation such that the development of knowledge and skills is optimized. And how do we do it such that the positive qualities of power and knowledge can come right while the negative, the possibility of ignoring people, is eliminated or can be controlled.

"A negative quality of all these methods of decision-making" (chaos, religion, autocracy, democracy)..."is that there is a possibility of ignoring the individual opinion. If by chance another or others become the boss or the majority, there is the possibility to ignore the individual. The individual is in these events bereft of the formal possibility to correct. If ignoring becomes a threat in a sociocratic organization, the right and the strength of the method is to make a correction come to the fore. Nothing and no one accepts ignoring and experiences it ultimately as violence. Defensive behavior can arise or can summor aggression. In the traditional power relations between superiors and subordinates, defensive behavior is a good course to take."

What he means is that now, in our customary systems, since people's desires and needs are routinely ignored, we have adapted by becoming defensive and aggressive, knowing that someone else has control over the decisions that affect our lives. This shows that violence is systemic in our present systems of governance.

Many people associate Democracy with majority vote, which, as we can see, ignores the desires of the minority. There are other problems with it, of course, including the cause of voter apathy - none of the candidates represent the voter, which could mean that majority vote ignores the disires of the majority! An ex-Twin Oaker, Rob Loring, has a good page about Accurate Democracy

Organopomorphic

What I wanted this title to say is that sociocracy resembles organic systems – it uses the wisdom of nature.

In their pamphlet Sustainability Tom Heuerman, Ph.D. and Diane Olson, Ph.D. write:

"Fritjof Capra wrote that the wisdom of nature is sustainability. Ecologies and organizations are living systems and share the same principles of organization." "In most organizations these dynamics are driven underground by efforts to control." "Both [ecologies and organizations] are networks, their histories determine their structures, and they are intelligent and capable of learning. Ecological literacy means using the principles of organization of ecosystems (a community of organisms and their physical environment interacting as an ecological unit) to create sustainable human communities. We can learn much from nature about sustainability."

I've been looking around to try to create a list of qualities of organic systems. If you can help me refine this list, please contact me. Below I've taken a term from 'GAIA: The Human Journey From Chaos To Cosmos,' by Elisabet Sahtouris, PH.D. (One of my favorite books ever.) It is holon, "a whole made of it's own parts, yet itself part of a larger whole". For example, a student, a class, a school, and a district of schools, are all holons. The word autopoiesis also comes from her book. What I've come up with is:

1. Cooperative mutual dependence (networks)
2. Any holon is never completely independent (heirarchy)
3. Changes constantly
4. Expresses Diversity
5. Cannot be controlled and dominated
6. Self-maintaining and self-renewing (Autopoietic)

Capra discussed four principles of sustainability:

1. Interdependence
2. The cyclical nature of ecologies
3. Partnership - the tendency to associate, establish links, live inside one another, and cooperate
4. Flexibility and diversity

These are elaborated on more here.

Interdependence, Partnership, and Cooperative Mutual Dependence

Competition is a form of violence. It seeks to negate the efforts of others. Some people think that Darwin's 'Survival of the Fittist' means that competition is the way everything in the world operates. If we look at nature, though, we find that it is much more cooperative than that. Ecosystems evolve to dance/flow/proceed in balance. If one part of an ecosystem disappears it severely directly affects other parts and severely indirectly affects all parts.

Cooperation is the rule rather than the exception within most businesses today. Since a sociocratic organization's purpose is to serve community and participants in the company, competition outside the organization is also reduced, which, of course, isn't the rule today at all. Infact, sociocratic organizations link up with other sociocratic organizations and become reliant on each other rather.

People, like me, who don't like centralization still sometimes think in terms of a world government. There would be no boundries or seperations. This doesn't mean it's controlled by one power center. It could be acheived with cooperative networks.

Any holon is never completely independent

A sociocratic organization is always connected to other sociocratic organizations. Ideally there would be a lot of them. If there were, a community like mine, if it was, would be connected to a top circle of other similar communities. Then there would be a circle of community top circles. This would go on, hopefully indefinately.

Schools are already structured somewhat this way already. A student is not independent from their class, the class from the school, the school from the district, the district from the state, etc.

The cyclical nature of ecologies

Capra refers to feedback loops which in nature may be of elements and nutrients, etc. In sociocracy the circle process is a closed loop that functions cyclically. Measurement is an important aspect of evaluating the circle process and a fundamental part of the 9-block chart process, which I will finish a page about soon. Right now there is some good information about it here 3/4ths of the way down the page.

Diversity

I have come to the conclusion that with Consent, the more people that make a decision, the better the decision will be. I've seen how people with vastly different ideas can craft a decision that is win-win for everybody. I think a group makes better decisions when 10 people are present than when 5 people are present.

The more people involved in a decision, the more checks and balances there are that will bring the proposal closer to heeding what the little-angel-on-our-shoulder says. If there is only one person making the decision, there is too much temptation from the little-devil-on-our-shoulder, and as Gerard wrote, people certainly can be "uncaring, idle, and unreliable egotists. "

Cannot be controlled and dominated

I do believe that sociocracy is structured so that no one person or even block, clique, or posse can dominate the decisions. People I know say that any system can be abused and used so I guess it depends somewhat on the circumstances.

Self-maintaining and Self-renewing
and
Changes constantly

Elisabet Satouris calls this Autopoiesis (pronounced like 'ah doe poe ee sis'). I suppose this is another way to say that it is sustainable. One rule of sociocracy that was created to maintain equivalence is 'Any decision can be revisited at any time.' A special meeting may be called. This applies to elections as well. This is the self-correction that occures when ignoring becomes a threat.

This quality is probably not so uncommon for any organization, but sociocracy's structure allows for the quickest degree of adaptability, which will make a sociocratic organization better at maintaining and renewing itself.

Are Corporations Slaves?

John Buck, who found out about sociocracy in the Netherlands, studied it, and brought the idea here to North America, has an analogy for you to think about. A corporation is a legal person. If that corporation is owned, then that 'legal person' is owned and is a slave. If the owners make the decisions that affect everyone in the corporation, then we see here that there is a master/slave relationship.

In a sociocratic organization a person must be included in a decision that affects them. They also get total veto power - as do all members of the decision-making body (circles in sociocratic parlance).

In other words, if the owners make a decision that affects an employee, then the employee is due a say in the decision. The owners would also be included in any decision that affects them, but they wouldn't make the decision exclusively. In a non-sociocratic organization the owners could decide to move a manufacturing plant to Mexico. In a sociocratic organization, that couldn't happen unless every single employee who is affected by the potential move doesn't object to it happening. Is this the difference between a slave and a free person?

It brings up an interesting thought. If the organization cannot just be told what to do by owners or a separate management class, then it cannot really be "owned."

It exists to serve community and participants in the company.

A participant is everyone who wishes to share in the interest of the company. There can be stockholders, there can be investors, but if they sell their interest in the organization, the new owners cannot change anything without the consent of every employee who is affected by the changes. Hostile takeovers and buyouts become meaningless.

Why Sociocracy in Community?

Many intentional communities are in crisis around governance issues. The more resources a community shares, the more likely it is that conflict will arise. Many communities were founded with consensus as a decision-making model only to find that it did not offer enough structure, process, and efficiency to navigate the real white water involved when difficult decisions must be made.

When decision-making models begin to break down, the symptoms are clear:

§ Meetings become painful so participation wanes
§ People "drop out" of the governance process
§ Interpersonal conflict over community issues increases

Some reasons are that: It does a good job of reserving equivalent power for all participants. It integrates the managers with the doers so that there isn't a separate managerial class. It avoids the serious rifts that may develop in-groups that make decisions through majority vote. The election process is unique and fun. Sociocracy can make a positive contribution to the whole group even when used just by one small group. It does not require the immediate complete overthrow of the whole self-governance system we have.

For many communities, living intentionally in community depends on participative self-government. That is why the breakdown of a decision-making model or even persistent glitches can wreak such havoc.

UNIONS

The purpose of a union is to represent workers to managers so that they can demand that the managers make some decisions that are more in the interests of the workers.

This is fairly ineffective, though. After a strike or boycott or other union action, the management may change some policies to be better in favor of the workers, but their attitudes will not have changed and most future decisions will still not be in favor of the workers. In fact, union "demands" are another form of coercion. One reason sociocracy works is because it takes into account all sides of an issue.

What would happen if a union staged their non-violent direct actions in order to have actual and total representation in decision-making and become sociocratic. Then the workers become the managers. The demands the union had could be changed by directly being empowered to change policy. For instance, profits could be spread according to group decisions. Working conditions could be changed to suit the workers. There would no longer be any need for a union to exist.

NARCHY

An anarchist writer and speaker came to Twin Oaks recently and spoke about anarchy. She defined it as power being evenly distributed between all people. No one would have power over others. I've been looking for definitions on the web and what I find are references to anarchy being anti-authoritarian. One site quotes someone as saying that, "The anarchist is primarily a socialist whose aim is to abolish the exploitation of man by man."

I don't think anarchists are against order, just order imposed from the outside. The more I learn about anarchism, the more I believe that sociocracy is a system of governance that is consistent with it's values of power coming from within and not from without. If you consider yourself an anarchist, check out sociocracy and see if you think it is.

The Joy of Elections

Sociocratic elections are like nothing I've ever experienced before. During my first workshop weekend we did an election. It had to be something real so we chose some to give a review in the evening. Everyone votes on paper first putting their own name on it as well. The facilitator says, "Ted, you voted for Mabel. Why?" A reason is always given. "Because she already seems to understand this stuff and I think she'd present the material clearly." You end up saying nice stuff about each other! People feel good and get positive feedback. The facilitator puts the votes in piles for each person and asks if anyone wants to change their vote. Usually people do. If there's not a clear majority for someone, the facilitator can choose any of the ones most voted for (or even not if they think they can get a 'no objection') and go for a 'no objection' round. The candidate asked about is asked last. Elections are interesting and fun, but most importantly nobody feels like they lost!

In Conclusion

We can only make this world a better place by the personal choices we make and by being an example to others. Sociocracy is a good idea that needs to be spread.

If those in charge of our society - politicians, corporate executives, and
owners of press and television - can dominate our ideas,
they will be secure in their power.
They will not need soldiers patrolling the streets.
We will control ourselves.

Howard Zinn, radical historian

"paradigm shifts do not occur after everyone agrees with an idea. They happen when a critical mass of 10-15% of the people make the shift in understanding or belief. This could mean 10% of the world's population, but it could also mean 10% of your community, of your church/synagogue, or your block. Once a critical mass is reached, the idea begins to spread on its own momentum."

Quoted from the Nonviolence Works Website.