From Quaker Meeting to Management System

The management concept which I like to call Consent Management, was developed by a long route of gradual evolution from Quaker meetings, so memories of the Remonstrance of Flushing come flooding back. Quaker meetings decide based on a deeply understood principle that all are equal before God.
Dutch educator Kees Boeke developed a secular version of Quaker Decision Making for his school in Holland in the Netherlands, "De Werkplaats," (The Work Place), in Bilthoven, and called it "sociocracy," which in his original manifestation was purely an internal management system for a community where students famously developed their own curriculum collaboratively with their teachers, and everyone was on a first name basis with one another. Now Boeke was also a bit of a socialist dreamer, who did not see the downsides of that system too clearly. One of his students however, Gerard Endenburg, who went on to become an electrical engineer, later developed the system, and first deployed his notions in a business his family acquired (they had an electrical contracting business in my native city of Rotterdam), and was so successful with it-turning the company around in short order-that it was subsequently merged into the family business, Endenburg Electrotechniek, when he took over the management from his parents, and it went on to grow. I learned a lot of these developments in the 70's when it started to be published, but also the company was the electrical contractor who did work in the house I grew up in, so we knew the company quite well.
As the practice proved itself, procuring the company even an exception from the Dutch rule of having a labor board, a consulting activity was gradually spun off to teach other companies how to use what in Dutch was called "sociocratie," or "sociocracy" in English. In 1989 I went to Holland to study the system in practice in the company for a month, having myself practiced the system to a limited degree in an company steering committee that I ran, and which allocated IT resources across the organization. The effort was quite successful, and became the effective backbone to achieve the development of major strategic systems within that company over a few years, but I also saw the shortcomings, in that if this type of empowerment is not practiced from the top on down, it is doomed to fail. I published an article on my experiences in Holland in Human Systems Management in 1991, of which Prof. Milan Zeleny of Fordham University was the editor at that time (HSM 10 (1991) pp. 149-154).
One major thing I decided on at the time that in my view the name Consent Management was more useful, and also I did not aspire to the think of political applications, like some people, Boeke included, had done. Apply it at the company, or community level, however and you are automatically creating a dynamic learning organization. And that is what the world is more and more interested in today, and moreover today's communication technology enables this form of management like never before. The essence of the consent model is that decisions are made only in the absence of reasoned objections. And it is the need to provide reasoning, which leads to invariably superior decisions, and better buy-in, because by overcoming the reasons, improved decisions result, and with total support of the group.

Rogier van Vlissingen (c) 2008