Jennifer Rau of Sociocracy For All demystifies the philosophical complexities of sociocracy in the innocuously entitled 3 tools from sociocracy to use right away (plus magic phrases!). One pointer: Rounds, a practice intended for small groups, like less than 10 members.
Rounds
Rounds are the most contagious tools of sociocracy. The basic idea is ridiculously simple: everyone gets a turn to speak, one by one. Yes, that’s it. (I promised easy, right?)
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What is inherent in rounds is that everyone’s voice matters. Equally. What I say matters as much as what my co-worker says. And what my co-worker says matters as much as what I say. One might have more insight on a given topic than the other but good thoughts sometimes come from unexpected places.
Rounds change the rules of the game. It is not a game of convincing each other. It is a game of sharing your thoughts. I sometimes feel like we’re all giving our offering and put it in the middle of the circle where it can grow into something bigger and better than I could have come up with. When I am speaking I know I am protected from people wanting to prove me wrong. Rounds carve out a safe space to share.
Rau continues with other practical tactics to socialifying the workplace, like small group decisions, and consent.
I have personally from consent-based approaches, and Rau zooms in on the benefits by contrasting with other more well-known approaches:
Oftentimes, organizations do not have a defined agreed-upon decision-making method, especially start-ups or young organizations in general. Groups often switch back and forth between consensus (=we all agree), autocratic elements (=the most dominant decide and the others don’t speak up) and majority vote (=the needs of the minority can be disregarded) without any clarity or intentionality on how they make their decisions. Again, absence of intentionality often leads to reinforcing underlying power structures. The nay-sayer in the consensus-run group has too much power (tyrany of the minority!), and voting lets the power tip towards the 51% (tyrany of the majority!), and the more dominant people will get their way.
In those systems, everyone loses.
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Consent is defined as ‘no objection’. Not having an objection is slightly different from agreeing. We refer to that extra space as the range of tolerance. We don’t have to find the overlap of our preferences in order to make a decision. Instead, we seek the overlap of our ranges of tolerances which gives us much more to work with. (Side note: some use consensus like consent. In that case there is no issue as long as that is done by everyone consistently.)
I concur with Rau when she suggests
It might be a good idea to intentionally implement consent as your decision-making method. It might work best if you just formulate it in plain language: ‘From now on, a decision is made when no one in the group objects’.
I plan to return to consent and its ramifications – like the difference between solidarity, where all members of a group are supposed to find consensus on all important issues, and fluidarity, where consent supplants consensus.
More to follow on that.
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Below the fold: Schumpeter on organization as a network of teams; Gaining Traction in AI: Machine Learning and Data; Vincent Bevins skewers our obsession with productivity
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