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.