Sociocracy Resources by Ted Rau

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From Ted Rau and his organization Sociocracy for All.

SOFA's most popular sociocracy resources in 2021 in one big list

Another year sharing, teaching, writing, coaching, problem-solving is ending. 

This email is our end-of-the-year gift to you - it's packed with inspiring reads and learning.

May our resources help you make your organizations smoother, connected and more wonderful! 

If you want to share all these resources with someone, please do! Share this list on social media Facebook | Twitter | LinkedIn or by email. Or tell them to look on this page: https://www.sociocracyforall.org/our-most-used-resources-in-2021.

Ted, Executive Director of Sociocracy For All

P.S. If you haven't donated yet, it's about time! See the SoFA giving page.

Books

In 2021, we added two books to our list!

• Many Voices One Song. Shared power with sociocracy. (2018) Ted Rau and Jerry Koch-Gonzalez - the manual!
• Who Decides Who Decides. How to start a group so everyone can have a voice. Ted Rau (2021) - for forming groups!
• Let's Decide Together. (2021) Hope Wilder - for grown-ups and children!

Articles

Older articles with many reads:

• 3 tools from sociocracy to use right away, plus magic phrases. What are the tools you can introduce anywhere, without mentioning the word sociocracy? 
• Decision-making methods: a comparison. What are common decision-making methods, and what are their implications? 
• Strategies for integrating objections. What are our options when someone objects?
• “What if people don’t cooperate?” A systemic view of meetings. Sometimes people ask this question, and the answer is: there is no easy answer. Everything is connected. 
• The 3 most typical struggles in sociocratic organizations and how to fix them. Recognize any of these?
• On feedback. A short introduction to giving feedback that can be heard.

Newer foundational articles:

• Sociocracy in small groups
• Sociocracy in large groups?
• A facilitator's guide to keeping meetings on track
• Clarity and empowerment: What is a domain?
• Sociocracy and Nonviolent Communication

Advanced resources for governance geeks

• How SoFA uses sociocracy (recording)
• National, regional and local chapters – expanding sociocracy (article)
• Sociocracy meets Listening At Scale (article)
• What is a Help Desk? (article)
• Policy and Operations (article - NEW)

Thought-provoking

• Otherness by Eric Tolson
• The tragedy of a meeting by Ted Rau
• 5 Ways you’re already using restorative practices by Hope Wilder
• Practicing co-regulation during Meetings by Sofie Malm
• 5 Strategies for Combining Equity with Sociocracy by Deborah Chang

Videos

• Sociocracy - the operating system of the New Economy. (4 min)
• What is sociocracy?  (19 min)
• How to generate a proposal in sociocracy (5 min)
• Consent process: decision-making in sociocracy (5 min)

Case studies

All case studies can be accessed on the case study page. 

Printables

Find our printables on the Facilitation Page. 

Like what we do? Thank you!

Here are ways to help: 

• Support SoFA: Sociocracy For All donation page
• Share this list on social media Facebook  |  Twitter  |  LinkedIn
• Want to plug in and help? Learn about SoFA membership

Learning with Sociocracy For All

SoFA generally has 4 sociocracy levels. Unclear what your level is? Take the quiz!

• Beginner level (6-8h)
• Facilitation classes (6h). 
• Immersion and practice classes (10-20h). Learning through role play
• Academy (100h+) Leading to certification

Beginner level, facilitation level and Nonviolent Communication classes can be done in 3 different ways: 

• Open workshops. You simply sign up for a class.
• Video-led classes. Your group learns with videos and exercises.
• Team workshops for your organization. Your own group + a SoFA trainer. 

All details on the training page.

The best deal are definitely the video-led classes. You can learn with your group, low price, on your own schedule. All you need to do is register, access the videos and invite 3-5 friends and start learning. They can be done via video platform or in person. 

• Video-led beginner class for groups ($120/group)
• Video-led facilitation class for groups ($220/group)
• Video-led Nonviolent Communication class ($120/group)
• Bonus: a video-course to walk you through drawing an organizational structure (free!) 

Upcoming events

• Jan 13: Free introduction: What is sociocracy?
• Jan 15: Conference: sociocracy and schools
• Jan 19 (for 10 weeks, weekly) Sociocracy Leadership Training (SoLT 19), our immersion program!
• Jan 24, Jan 31, Feb 7: Nonviolent communication introduction
• Jan 27 + Feb 3: Accountability and feedback – how to get things done without coercion
• Feb 8 + 15: Sociocracy beginner class
• Feb 17, Feb 24, March 3: Facilitation training for sociocracy
• March 15 (weekly for 5 weeks): Facilitation – deep practice (advanced!)

And here is the complete schedule:

https://www.sociocracyforall.org/events/

Conssent Management Blog © 2021 by Rogier Fentener van Vlissingen is licensed under CC BY 4.0

Inspiration from Richard Wolff, in an interview with Marianne Willamson

Marianne Williamson interviews Prof. Richard Wolff, and it was brilliant.

I am liking the thinking of Prof. Richard Wolff a lot, and the cooperative concept has potential, however, what does not work for me is the democratic one person one vote, which includes a veto right.

The crucial improvement of Consent Management (Sociocracy), is that it focuses on making decisions only based on the absence of reasoned objections, thereby preventing stalemates and creating a true learning organization.

Once you understand that, the only challenge is to structure your company correctly to ensure that the right people are always included in decision processes at every level.

Like Wolff, I hate the labels, for they prevent intelligent conversation. This is one reason I did not like Endenburg's term sociocracy. The principle is very clear however, and it is clearly the better answer to what Wolff proposes, for the cooperative concept has always been stymied by decision stalemates, just as much as the consensus style decision making is. It was Endenburg's brilliant contribution to define consent as "the absence of reasoned objections."

Consent Management Blog © 2021 by Rogier Fentener van Vlissingen is licensed under CC BY 4.0

State of Grace Document

The State of Grace Document is truly an inspired idea.

I have recently gotten to know Maureen McCarthy, who developed this idea originally with her partner Zelle Nelson. Their joint website www.maureenandzelle.com is also a pleasure to study, as there they bring together lots of themes from their work in management consulting and personal development, including their practice of Byron Katie's "The Work," which is a powerful tool to help people to learn that the only thing they can change about a situation is themselves, so that progress is possible only if we are willing to entrust ourselves to the possibility of change.

The consent practice based on Gerard Endenburg's Sociocracy, which I've always preferred to call Consent Management, provides an organizational platform for enabling dynamic change, which has been proven over the years to release a very powerful force in creating true self-learning and self-organizing organizations. The system seems to be slowly catching on in the US, but it has proven its value in many organizations in Holland, as well as internationally in many countries.

Soon, on October 9th & 10th, they will be hosting a seminar on this methodology by John Buck, who wrote the book about it - Beyond Democracy - Of course John Buck calls it something else again, Dynamic Governance, or Dynamic Self-Governance. So, if you're in the Asheville, NC area around that time, it may be worth your while signing up for that workshop.

Back to the State of Grace document, I can only say that I took to the idea immediately and I'm now looking to bring it into all my major business relationships. I am simply tired of the whole notion of all the normal misunderstandings which wreck perfectly good relationships over time, when there is a way to invest more in the quality of the relationship up front, and provide a mechanism to overcome all the bumps in the road, which you will encounter. And, what's more I'm beginning to think that if you encounter resistance on this point, it might be better not to entertain the relationship at all. Life is too short for lousy relationships!



Copyright (c) 2009, Rogier F. van Vlissingen

Up towards the Knowledge Economy

Interesting presentation, suggesting out standard business school fare really got it's genetic makeup from the 19th century industrial revolution, and is fast becoming obsolete. Evidently something is stirring, and people are waking up when even a Harvard Business School professor, is pointing out how disastrously traditional business school fare is rooted still in the 19th century industrial model and irrelevant to the task, and even more so when Business Week takes notice, being the business magazine that unfailingly notices trends after they're over, and it's too late to do anything about them.



The ideas in this video also suggest the context in which Consent Management would thrive, as in fact it reflects much stronger focus on serving all stakeholders, and structuring itself around the business mission and vision and the very process itself as the central given of the organization. Process thinking, systems thinking are where it's at, and the whole traditional corporate model, and stock market capitalism is an impediment to the knowledge economy of the future, because its merits lie in the large scale industrialization of the 19th century, and are irrelevant to the coming knowledge economy.

The whole creative destruction and VC model of business, is an approach that boils down to throwing so much mud against the wall and seeing what sticks, combined with a casino mentality of risk diversification that makes the best of your bets against the house, and ignores that you can't win. The very purposive model created by consent management creates companies which are self-learning and adaptive, organized around their purpose. They are not organized around the things they make, but around the purpose they serve. They will evolve from the abstract to the concrete, and focus on the solution set which derives directly from their business purpose. It's the embodiment of Deming's thinking, and of sustainability. Creative destruction has its place, as does manure, but we could do with a whole lot less than what the traditional business model produces.

Copyright (c) 2009, Rogier F. van Vlissingen

Copy Left, Consent Style

Long traditions of consensual decision making implemented within the framework of the traditional command and control corporate structure have gotten a bad rap for gumming up the works. The Consent Management model is quite something different. It dismantles the command and control structure as we know it, while recognizing the practical value of hierarchy in the organization. However, it lets the business process itself dictate the overall structure, by creating a constant learning organization, which self-organizes around the most efficient way of performing the company's business process.

Once it is understood, it is a natural for the knowledge enterprise of the future. The elimination of majority voting solves logjams particularly at the top, where powerplays with blocks of stock, i.e. money, can foul up the business process completely with false motivations, and goals that are external to the company and potentially disruptive. It is well known by now that most mergers and acquisitions are disasters, probably because very often they are driven by the opportunity to make money on the transaction, rather than improving the business in any meaningful way, thus they are often one more way to generate fees for bankers, and profits for speculators in the short run, and sacrifice productivity in the long run.

Within the Consent model such M&A activity would not work, for if the motivations are false, and destructive to the purpose of the business, they would be seen through immediately, and never threaten the business. If they were entertained for sound reasons, they would work quicker and easier, and with preservation of the consent management practice.

Given that you can control a consent company by holding an undiluted 51% of shares in a not for profit, foundation, or trust, with a commitment to a) guarantee the integrity of consent management, and b) a restrictive covenant that does not allow the shares to ever be sold except by consent on the board. This is an effective defense against all takeover defenses that are based on merely money motives, but it is a facilitator of takeovers that are constructive to the business objectives.

The catch is that it will work like Copy Left does in open source software development, if you want to adopt software under an open source license in your development, and modify it, you must make the product available under the same licensing provisions. A consent company would therefore, if it becomes acquired, stipulate consent management principles to be adopted company wide as a basis for agreeing to the merger. Et voilà so the practice grows, and a practical guarantee is instituted for the continuity of the business in all its practices, yet with new chances for learning and refocusing. If it was the target company that was run by consent, it stands to reason that the management model had something to do with its greater efficiency and productivity, as has been demonstrated over and over again. On that basis the acquiring company could only benefit from implementing the same lean and mean management model.


Copyright (c) 2009, Rogier F. van Vlissingen

We the People, Consenting to a Deeper Democracy, by John Buck and Sharon Villines

John Buck and Sharon Villines wrote the book We the People, Consenting to a Deeper Democracy, as a way of documenting Gerard Endenburg's development of the Sociocratic management model, which I personally prefer to simply label as Consent Management.

By and large, what the book seems to be is a rewrite of Endenburg's book on his model, titled Sociocracy, which goes back to 1981, in Dutch. That book was a difficult read, even in Dutch, in spite of the crystalline clarity of Endenburg's management model, which is brilliant for its simplicity, but completely muddled up by lack of clarity about the financial, economic, and legal implications of it, which need considerable adjustment for the American market. Per se, this book is a vast improvement over the English translation of Endenburg's original material, which had at one point been translated into English by John Buck, which was not very readable. I discussed that book in a 1991 article in Human Systems Management. The present book is in effect the "Now tell us in your own words?" version of the story.

However, to all intents and purposes, the book is for now the best available in the US to document this wonderfully powerful management model. There are so many ways to discern the power of the system - people usually get it right away. Not too long ago I presented it to a very large organization, and although circumstances did not permit them to entertain making such changes now, nevertheless, the workshop I provided for them was a total success, and may at least have helped them to start thinking about making such changes in the future.

Besides all the war stories, of which I have at least a few of my own, about situations where breakthroughs happened, that would not be possible other than with the consent model, one of the most powerful comments in the present book is doubtlessly about the experience of Endenburg Electrotechniek passing ISO9000 certification without a hiccup, which for traditionally run businesses is usually a painful process, simply because traditional management structures directly interfere with the efficiency of the internal business process, since they still reflect Tayloresque command and control thinking, and they confuse legal structures with business structures. The consent model turns the table on that by putting the business process first, and making the management, legal, and financial structures completely subservient to the business process.

What makes the consent model so powerful is the confluence of the secularization of the Quaker decision model by Dutch educator Kees Boeke, with cybernetics, systems thinking, and control theory, to design an optimal, self-organizing and self-learning business process. And it is to realize that it is this process which is your business, and now all you have to do is make the structure of the business completely supportive of that structure. This is much more profound, and goes much deeper than Jan Carlzon's famous changes at SAS airlines in the 80's when he turned the organization upside down (See Carlzon, Moments of Truth, 1987), for Endenburg's work distilled a model which is completely organic, repeatable, and replicatable, as history has proven, in many organizations throughout the world, both for profit and not for profit.

The work that yet remains to be done after this book is for someone to develop the concomitant management accounting, which would then lead to a total revamping of the incentive structure, which in its present form leads to predictable absurdities, and suboptimal incentives, since it in fact confuses job costing with management accounting. Revamping this incentive system is entirely integral to the basic tenets of the consent model, namely that the company is a vehicle to accomplish the business process, and that everything needs to be done to create useful feedback to that process, including appropriate financial incentives. Money thus becomes, in the spirit of Jack Stack's The Great Game of Business, a measure of the efficiency of the business process per se, and important management information at all levels. With modern information systems this is definitely feasible. Of equal importance would be that the proper legal structures (plural!) within the US legal system be developed.

The requirements for the legal structure of consent management are not difficult to define, but may run afoul of some systemic limitations. The one most fundamental thing to understand, is that consent management is a complete methodology for how to create a corporation in which the business process is king, and everything else is subservient to that. Again, because it does this so well, it also makes it easy to pass quality management certifications like ISO9000. To set a company up this way requires a top-down implementation first, which needs to be completely anchored in the corporate structure. The first conflict we encounter, is that the fundamental notion of voting of shares immediately runs afoul of the fundamental notion that consent should govern all decision making. The voting of shares makes some animals more equal than others, and has nothing to do with the fundamental business process per se.

Therefore the only way to harmonize consent with a corporate structure, is to determine at the outset that Consent governs all decisions, and is the operating mode of the company, and the way to enforce this in perpetuity, is to vest an undiluted 51% of shares in a trust, or a not for profit, covered by an operating agreement in which they a cannot sell the shares, except back to the company, and are responsible for overseeing the integrity of the consent decision making process in the company, including performing or rather having someone perform an annual audit.

Pursuant to this, disruptive manipulation of the company through shares, which can only interfere with the business process becomes impossible. For an audience that is used to the concept of the stock corporation, and creative destruction, this is difficult to fathom. For the student of management, who begins to appreciate the power of the self-organizing model which is consent management, this is the easiest thing in the world. The whole notion of external controls, that feed on the system like a bunch of parasites, are unnecessary, and counter productive, once you've seen to the creation of a truly self-organizing system. This is why raising money for a consent management company is a bit tougher at the outset, but with some operating history, it becomes positively easy to attract capital, and you'll have to beat 'em off with a stick, so the role of the CFO will most of the time be focused on not retaining too much money from the investors, and returning it before it becomes a drag on company performance.

Copyright © 2009 Rogier F. van Vlissingen. All rights reserved.

Operationalizing Consent Management

Besides the basic operating rules, the Consent Management system ultimately needs to be operationalized through formal inclusion in a company's bylaws, so that the guarantees are meaningful, and there should be an annual audit that Consent procedure is being followed.

The most important thing is that ALL (strategy and policy) decisions, as well as job assignments, should be made ONLY in meetings, and that all meetings should be properly organized and run, with calendars posted to the members no later than a week before. To keep it efficient, consent allows the members to delegate their vote for a given meeting, and conversely as a protection anyone can withdraw their consent from a decision, if they see a new problem crop up, thus forcing it onto the agenda for the next meeting.

The rest is simple, at the board level, you set strategy, while at lower levels you make more policy decisions and at all levels people are chosen for jobs by consent. Jobs and tasks are assigned through the meetings as well, including clearly defined limits of authority, so that in the field people are free to carry out their duties, and the only rationale for recourse to a meeting is really if a person is confronted with something that exceeds their authority, in which case they need either approval, or an expansion of such authority.

Following these guidelines and making them part of the company's operating rules makes backroom dealing, hidden motives, and cloak and dagger operations impossible, and thus provides essential rights to all participants which ensure the integrity of the process.

From a practical point of view implementation begina with an simple agreement to begin using the consent rules, but maturity means that the rules are embedded in the bylaws, and become a right. This will ensure a trust in the integrity of the organization which is not otherwise possible, the process itself guarantees that objections are flushed out at the outset, and don't remain hidden for long, thus resulting in a better quality of decisions.

(c) 2008, Rogier Fentener van Vlissingen