When it comes to collective leadership, simply a desire to work in this way is not always enough, and trying to make sure that everything is heard without systems and structures to support this goal can become messy and inactive.
More and more partners are investigating how the sociocratic administration system can help them to ensure that the people concerned are saying while things have done.
Sociocratic organizations consist of small, semi -autonomic teams called Circles, which unite members that ensure the flow of information between them. The roles of the circles are selected through an open, transparent selection process instead of a secret vote.
Decisions are made with consent, which is good enough and safe enough to try ” – so instead of adapting everyone to progress (consensus), simply does not have to have major objections.
This system and its fundamental values make sociocracy an attractive alternative to many organizations in the social and solidarity economy, from deliberate communities to children’s parliamentary and growing numbers.
Jerry Koch-Gonzalez, who had previously worked for the cooperative and is now the All (Sofa) Education Organization’s Sociocratic Path, says that when the sofa was established, the Co-Op movement seemed to be a clear suitability for sociocracy.
“We didn’t really have much” in “at the beginning, but a group of us was interested,” he adds.
The sofa, which joined the US cooperation development centers, by participating in their conferences and providing sociocratic sessions in their partners when sociocrates became known to the whole collaboration.
Over the years, the sofa has worked with partners around the world in different fields, from education to dining to technology. Although there is still a relatively small percentage of cooperation with SOFA and a clear overlap between sociocratic values and principles led Sofa to establish a component in its organization, to continue to investigate these links.
In 2019, SOFA published a healthy cooperation manifesto, which presents three central parts of sociocraticism, which can be formed by society: purposefulness, equivalence and transparency, and adapts them with the seven cooperative principles.
“We call this frame” healthy “because it integrates all these values and principles, tools and concepts, emotions and ideas, one practical entity,” Manifesto says.
“Without preaching it as a miracle, we hope that sociocracy will be on our way to our road towards the cooperative as we continue to take the road in walking. As we strive to create another world: a world where many worlds are possible.”
In addition to general ideology, there are a number of practical reasons that can be urged to study sociocracy, such as the need for clarity around teams and roles or better systems to deal with decentralized telecommuting workers.
“I think it is often about symptoms for people who really want to live collective control and collective leadership, but don’t really know how to do it,” says Abbie Kempson, a sociocracy trainer and founder of People Cor -OP.
“Quite often, I see partners (and other organizations) who have really strong principles for sharing power and working together. They base a lot of trust and to give people autonomy to act and so on, but there are not yet processes that support collective responsibility-or maybe they have little, but it is not fully developed.”
Kempson first discovered the sociocracy while working at Unicorn Grocery, a cooperation between an employee in Manchester, the UK. Unicorn grew rapidly at that time, and its members looked at the different ways in which the partners had customized their structure to deal with such growth.
According to him, he found sociocracy “very accidentally” in the cooperative’s online workshop and was quickly enthusiastic about its ability to help unicorn. “What really attracted me to sociocracy, and what I loved so much at the beginning was that it provided a plan of how to do things that brought the structure, which was a slightly loose system for group -based decision -making in Unicorn.”
At this point, Unicorn had a good system to make large, member -wide decisions at general meetings, but he needed system decision -making in its different groups of employees that had grown in size.
“When I first joined the Deli team, we were about 21, without much of the process of how we worked on the agenda and make decisions together,” Kempson says. “And also our VEG team was over 20.
This was facilitated by the fact that Unicorn was already working with a collective management structure, where small groups created different parts of the leading co-op work.
“We were pretty sociocratic before starting without using that terminology,” adds Kempson.
This has happened to other partners, as John McNamara, a cooperative organizer in the United States, points out.
“Sociocracy offers a different form of hierarchy,” he says. “The form is often considered” the hierarchy of work, not the hierarchy of power “. It turns out that workers’ cooperation creates this concept, even if they do not follow all the standard forms.
“Two major collaborations, Madison Trade Union and Rainbow Grocery Co-op both use systems for autonomous management groups related to the control committee or team.
Related: Why is a unicorn grocery store uses sociocracy
It is not always possible to monitor the cooperation of the “official form of sociocracy”, as some cooperative governing bodies, such as board and members’ meetings, play a key role in the law of the cooperative.
An example of the official rules of society that has successfully written sociocratic collaboration in the United Kingdom. The co-op of the community mentions the use of circles and draws up the process to make decision-making in the financial authority in the administrative documents, the “game exchanger” described by Kempson.
Although this shows what is possible to combine sociocratic and collaborative models, Kempson does not believe that a partner in the UK could ever be a “real sociocratic”-and not having to be.
“Our general meeting will always be a partner’s sovereign body,” he says, “so we always look for something that is a taste of sociocratic collaboration instead of trying to squeeze ourselves completely into a form that does not work here with the legal structure.”
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Kempson now needs sociocracy as a habit of understanding administrative practices and a set of tools that may be more or less useful in different circumstances.
“For me, it is basically a very much about cooperation and thinking about the management of a democratic member about how we do collective leadership and collective leadership. Which tools are working that can vary in different situations.”
In his role, the People support office of Kempson is often contacted by partners asking for advice on the implementation of sociocracy.
“When people find sociocracy for the first time, they are often enthusiastic (I did exactly the same thing) and think that this is going to be a magic solution for everything. It really is not! But it may be part of them as they continue to design and develop their administrative system collectively.
“It’s really, really important that when you make changes to remember who you are, what you do and what you want and use tools when they work for you.”