Foundations of Sociocracy: Training Reference Manual

Presented by The Sociocracy Consulting Group

Version 1.0—July 2014

This work by The Sociocracy Consulting Group is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution—Share-Alike 4.0 International License.

For further information: contact@sociocracyconsulting.com or 800-870-2092

Overview

This manual is an introductory reference to principles, practices and underlying values of Sociocracy. It is designed to be a supplement to in-person training in Foundations of Sociocracy or equivalent curriculum. It is not itself a comprehensive treatment and should not be taken as adequate for full understanding and/or application of sociocracy.

What is governance?

Consider the diagram above as a guide to reflect upon how we organize ourselves to get things done

Governance engages all essential aspects of a healthy organization.

How do we organize ourselves and make decisions to get things done? What existing systems of governance can you name?

Where do we do this? In what contexts? How many can you think of?

Where is there no governance?

Overview of sociocracy

Vision—Mission—Aim

Attention to vision, mission and aim is essential to organizational success. These elements of organizational design are often missing, confused, or assumed. Where they are explicit, they may not have been consented to by all members of the organization.

Vision: the future as the organization desires it to be -“A world where...”
Mission: the organization’s general approach to creating that future.
Aim: specific steps within the general approach—actions that will accomplish the mission and realize the vision.
- A good way to start an aim statement is “To produce...” or “To provide...”.
A well-defined aim has the following properties:
- It is a named product or service
- It is differentiated from other aims
- It is described in terms your client/customer understands

Values of sociocracy

Equivalence – individuals function as peers in deciding how to accomplish their collective aims.
Effectiveness – focus on policies and actions that accomplish collective aims; continual self-improvement.
Transparency – direct access to all policy documents and records relating to one's work. No secrets! This supports equivalence, effectiveness and responsibilities of co-leadership.

Principles of sociocracy

Consent
- Policy decisions are made by consent. Consent exists when there are no remaining objections to a proposed policy decision.
  - Objections must be relevant to the collective aims.
  - Objections must be explained so that all affected understand them, even if some disagree with the objection.
  - An objection is not a veto or a block; it is a valid reason why a particular decision will prevent a member of the group from doing their job or supporting group aims.
  - Objections are solicited because they provide valuable information. The reasoning behind them allows the group to improve the proposal so all members of the group can work toward their aims more effectively.
Circles
- A circle is a semi-autonomous and self-organizing unit that has its own domain and aim. It makes policy decisions within its domain; delegates leading, doing and measuring functions to its own members; maintains its own memory system; and plans its own development (learning, adapting, improving).
  - Circles correspond to working groups, such as departments, divisions, teams, committees, associations, etc. Each circle has its own aim(s) and steers its own work by performing functions of leading, doing, and measuring for itself. Together the lead-do-measure functions establish a feedback loop, making the circle self-regulating and self-correcting.
  - The domains and aims of different circles within an organization range from broad and general to specific and focused.
Double-linking (feedback)
- A double link between one circle and another is formed by two people who are full members of both circles. For a given circle, one link is a circle member elected to be a link to the next more general circle. The other link is the operational leader of the circle, who is elected by the next more general circle. There can be more than two links.
  - Double-linking ensures that information moves in both directions between circles and increases integrity of information transfer. Through double links, feedback travels up, down and across the circles within an organization.

Applications of values and principles

Elections are a specific application of the above values and principles. Circles elect people to functions, tasks and roles by consent and with transparency.
Other applications of the values and principles include but are by no means limited to adding or removing members of a circle, performance reviews for circle members, and in general making policy decisions to accomplish circle aims.

Rounds

A round is when each person in the circle has an opportunity to express themselves without interruption by others. In a round, each circle member in turn asks or answers questions, makes statements, presents reasons or arguments, and so on, depending on the process being used at any given time.

Definitions

What sociocracy means

Sociocracy vests power in the “socius” (from Latin, socius, “companion”)—companions, colleagues, people who regularly interact with one another and have a common aim. Decisions are made in consultation with each other, in consideration of the needs of each person in the context of the aims of the group or organization.

What sociocracy is

Sociocracy is a whole systems approach to decision-making and organizational governance and action. It is also an organizational design system, and a project management system. Sociocracy enables an organization to manage itself as an organic whole, by giving every sub-part of the organizational system a sovereign voice in the management of the organization.

Operational mode

Working in the organisation. Getting stuff done!
Operational decision—flows/follows from or executes specific or implied policy decisions in day to day functioning of an organization. May determine daily job assignments, handling of correspondence, operation of machinery, delivery of specific services, etc. May use any decision-making method that aligns with existing policy.
Operational meetings—meetings to support operations. Can be daily stand-up, as-needed ad-hoc, or informal meetings. Transforming policies and operational concerns into actions.
Operational decisions—decisions which specify what to do—what actions to take next.
Operations output—projects or next actions.
Next actions—the next physical, visible activity that needs to be engaged in order to move the current reality toward achieving aims.
Project—any desired result that requires more than one action step.

Policy-making mode

* Working on organization—organizing work.

Policy decision—guides (constrains) a set of future operational decisions by setting aims, standards, limits, parameters. May allocate resources, clarify values, establish plans, specify general procedures for repetitive (production) processes. Policy decisions are made by consent.
Policy (circle) meetings—meetings to produce policy
Policy outputs—role definitions, policies, elections of people to roles
Role—a definition of purpose, accountability, and scope (domain) which defines expectations and grants authority to an individual.
Accountability—obligation to account for one’s activities, accept responsibility for them, and disclose results transparently.
Scope (domain)— the area or domain in which one may exert control
Policy—a grant or constraint of authority to impact scope

Elections

Elections are a simple yet powerful demonstration of the principles of sociocracy in action. For that reason we use elections as an introduction to sociocratic structure and process. Election parameters

These are determined by consent before holding an election. That is, generating these parameters is the first step in the election process

Responsibilities – of the position, role, task.
Qualifications – for the position, role, task.
Term – how long before end of or review of the position, role, task.

Election process—basic steps

Generate or review and consent to parameters for role: responsibilities, qualifications, term
Write and submit nominations to facilitator
Round – facilitator reads nominations one at a time and asks nominator to give reasons for their nomination
Round – facilitator invites changes to nominations, with reasons for changes
Facilitator proposes a candidate whose reasons for nomination satisfy parameters for role
Round – check for consent to proposed candidate (candidate goes last in round).

Nominations—and related election details

In virtual meetings, nominations are written down by each circle member and given verbally in the nomination round. Do not change your initial nomination after you write it down. You may change it in the change round.
You may nominate yourself, or nobody
The only roles that cannot both be held by one person are operations leader and elected link. Other than that, circle members may fill multiple roles.
There is no volunteering allowed
There is no objecting to being nominated allowed
A proposed candidate can object when it is their turn in the consent round
If in the consent round there are objections to the proposed candidate, the circle works to resolve them. This may involve but is not limited to proposing a different candidate and/or modifying role parameters and depends on specifics of objections.
An election can also be used to select from a fixed number of choices in other situations (which professional to hire; what delivery vehicle to purchase; what color to paint the barn; etc.)

Role of links

A link between two circles has the following responsibilities:

They are a full member of both circles, with power of consent in each circle.
They serve the flow of information between those two circles.
They serve each circle as an active member in all policy-making work done by those circles. That is, they represent themselves in both circles.

One of the links in a circle is the operational leader of that circle.

The other link in a circle is elected by that circle from among its members.

As indicated by the responsibilities above, the links are not only carriers of information, they are active members of the circle with power of consent in all policy decisions made by those circles.

Overview of Consent Decision

Making Principles of sociocracy—Consent

Policy decisions are made by consent. Consent exists when there are no remaining objections to a proposed policy decision.
- Objections must be relevant to the collective aims.
- Objections must be explained so that all affected understand them, even if some disagree with an objection.
- An objection is not a veto or a block; it is a valid reason why a particular decision

will prevent a member of the group from doing their job or supporting group aims.

Objections are solicited because they provide valuable information. The reasoning behind them allows the group to improve the proposal so all members of the group can work toward their aims more effectively.

Consent Decision Making process

The consent decision making process is fundamental to sociocracy and is how all policy decisions are made within an organization operating sociocratically. The steps of the process can be described as follows:

Present a proposal—state the proposal and any essential background or context information. See additional information below about preparing and presenting proposals.
Clarifying questions round(s)—to make sure everyone understands the proposal.

a. Questions only! This step is about understanding the proposal as initially presented.

Brief reactions round(s)—to find out what everyone thinks about the proposal.

a. In some cases, one or more reactions may indicate a need to modify the proposal before going to the next step.

Consent round—to determine if there are any objections to the proposal.

a. If there are no objections, the proposal is now a consented policy.

b. If there are objections, the circle uses information in the objections (feedback about the proposal) to modify the proposal until there are no longer any objections.

c. A modified proposal may be brought back into this process at any of the above steps, depending on the complexity of the proposal and/or the modifications.

d. There are a variety of ways to work on modifying a proposal, all of which take into account the information provided by the objections. These methods include but are not limited to:

1. the proposer and/or the facilitator modifying the proposal

2. facilitated conversation (additional rounds or other relevant processes) leading to modification

3. referring the proposal to a more general or more specific circle

4. a “how might you solve this”round

5. conducting an experiment to “test” the proposal and then modify

6. referringtheproposalbacktotheoriginator(s)formodification

7. referring the proposal to a “helping circle” for modification.

Preparing and Presenting proposals

Anyone may generate a proposal. Proposals address the following:

what is the issue or problem; what is missing or not working?
is there an existing policy to guide us in this area?
what is proposed to address the answers to these questions?

Preparing

Preparation includes drafting the actual proposal in writing, submitting the proposal to the secretary for inclusion in the meeting agenda and advance distribution to circle members, and providing any other information that may help circle members be well prepared to process the proposal in the meeting.

Presenting

The facilitator asks the person responsible for generating the proposal to present it. With good preparation—advance distribution and initial questions addressed before the meeting—only a summary presentation may be needed, reducing meeting time required for presenting.

Overview of workflow

Producing organization

“Producing organization” is about designing all the structures and processes that will form the organization and guide it in doing its work. Sociocracy produces robust, self-organizing systems that can thrive in unpredictable and changing environments.

Producing organization is one of the primary activities of a circle and is supported by all the principles and methods used in sociocratic organizations. The design of the work process—organizing work—is particularly relevant to this task.

Organizing work

Organizing work is about designing the steps used to produce the products and/or services that the organization aims to produce—that is, the steps that will realize the aim of the organization. This is the “doing” of the organization’s aim.

In systems terms, doing has three parts: input, transformation, and output. For example, an organization:

makes an agreement with its client (input)
creates the agreed-upon product and/or service (transformation)
obtains acceptance of the product and/or service by the client (output)

Although this example may seem to be only for business organizations, it is applicable to any organization. The nature of the “client” and the product and/or service may vary greatly depending on the nature and type of the organization.

Consider the various organizations you are involved with or familiar with.

Can you identify the “client” and the “product and/or service” for that organization?

In any case, the input-transformation-output model is fundamental for designing the steps the organization takes in doing its work, whether that work is making and selling widgets, advocating

for better working conditions, managing financial transactions, protecting rare and fragile habitat, teaching a spiritual discipline, managing a sports team, educating children or adults, or planning a family reunion.

Workflow in a policy meeting

A policy meeting is an example of workflow in sociocracy which applies the input—transformation—output model. Policy meetings have four fundamental parts , as follows:

Opening round

a. getting present, checking in—transition into meeting from whatever came before.

Administrative matters

a. announcements relevant to meeting (if any)

b. consent to minutes of previous meeting

c. set up next meeting: date, time, location, duration

d. finalize content portion of meeting (agenda): requests to add or change agenda items and consent to agenda

Content—processing agenda items, including but not limited to

a. accepting reports from linked circles

b. consent to proposals (consent decision making process)

c. addressing issues (generating proposals)

d. elections

Closing round

a. measure the meeting: what went well? What can we improve? Consider group effectiveness, facilitation, other aspects as relevant

Where in the above description can you identify an input—transformation—output process? How many such processes can you find?

An example of workflow

Preparing a meal

Consider the steps of producing a meal for your household. The three parts of the process, input, transformation, and output are:

make an agreement with household about meals. What are the agreements you have in place? What type of food—meat allowed, vegetarian, vegan? What time is meal to be served? What other agreements?
produce the meal: What preparations are required? How long will it take?
How will you receive acceptance of the meal?

As an exercise, write out some details for the input, transformation and output steps above for your household.

Pieces of the puzzle

Additional elements of the foundations of sociocracy

The sociocratic secretary and logbook keeper role

Some of the class exercises have given a hint of the responsibilities and qualifications for the role of secretary and logbook keeper. Here is a more detailed description.

Note that depending on the size of the circle and/or complexity of the tasks, a circle may separate this into two roles filled by two different people.

The secretary is responsible for receiving agenda items, working with the facilitator to prepare the agenda, sending out the agenda and any meeting reminders, confirming attendance of key members and/or guests, preparing the meeting room, taking notes during the meeting, and distributing meeting minutes and other documents.

Meeting minutes will normally include the date and time of the meeting, who was present, an accurate record of the text of all consented decisions, and closing round comments.

The logbook keeper is responsible for keeping the circle’s logbook up to date. The logbook will typically include (if/as applicable for a given organization): vision, mission and aim statements; bylaws; strategic plan; organizational diagram(s); rules and procedures; meeting records; names and roles of circle members; leading-doing-measuring activities of the circle; and the circle’s development plan.

The above are general guidelines. They may be added to, reduced, or amended by consent, as with any other policies of a sociocratic organization.

Note that it is not generally necessary, or recommended, to capture all or even most of a meeting verbatim or anywhere close to verbatim, for reasons including but not limited to:

the secretary is limited in their ability to fully participate in the meeting as a member of the circle
voluminous minutes can lead to loss of productivity when more attention is paid to the details of the minutes than to the decisions themselves (see below)
in most cases it is more important that circle members listen to one another than that they take and/or read written notes

In complex and/or difficult decisions, a member may request inclusion of a summary of reasoning and/or assumptions involved in reaching the decision for future reference. In information gathering rounds picture forming (see below)—the consented list of “pieces of the picture” may be recorded to support next steps in the proposal generation process.

Decisions are about moving forward, not looking back

In sociocratic organizations, decisions always include their own measurement and evaluation and are always open to revisiting if improvements are necessary or desired. If something “goes wrong” with a decision, what went wrong is taken as feedback to improve the decision.

Measurement and feedback

Designing measurement and feedback systems—the “steering” process—is essential for an organization to stay on course towards its aims. We have already looked at “organizing work”—designing production processes. The combination of production processes—the “doing”—and steering processes—“steering” the doing—is the core of producing organization.

Steering in sociocratic organizations is done through a cycle of activity that starts with leading—that is, making a decision that will guide some action. Next, the decision is implemented—this is the doing of the action. During and/or after implementation, measuring is performed to check if the results are as desired, or not. The information gained from measuring indicates whether the decision (and its implementation) need to be modified to get the desired results, or not—and so the cycle returns to the leading step. This lead—do—measure cycle is fundamental to steering a sociocratic organization.

For example, in a situation where a farm was facing the possibility of the County putting a railway line through the farm property, a decision was made to form a helping circle, as follows:

Delegate a helping circle (ie.task force, working group) to

contact county officials
get further details on why this route
see if there is a third alternative which modifies the route that would go through the farm

to be something else

to explore benefits and detriments more fully

This consented decision was the leading part of the lead—do—measure process. The general circle decided this would be a useful action to take.

The helping circle then started doing the work indicated in the above steps—this is the doing part of the lead-do-measure process.

The results of the helping circle’s work can be checked against what they were expected to do—did they do it, and were the results useful? This is the measuring part of the lead-do-measure process.

Note that the measurement is about the specific tasks of the helping circle and the value of its outputs—not about whether what the helping circle found out was “good” or “bad” news. The helping circle was tasked with getting certain information, and the measurement is checking to see if it succeeded in doing that.

Can you imagine scenarios where the decision made—the leading—turned out to not work well? What might be one such scenario?

How might the above measurements have different results—that is, how might they indicate that the decision needed modification?

Where proposals come from

Thus far we have talked about proposals that have been brought to a meeting already prepared in some initial form. A member or members, or a linked circle, has drafted a proposal and presented it to the circle for consideration, possible modification, and possible consent.

In some cases however, a circle may find itself with an issue, a problem, a “policy gap,” where there is no proposal yet developed. The circle can work as a whole to deal with these situations and generate a proposal. This happens in two stages picture forming and proposal shaping. Following is a brief outline of how these two stages are carried out.

Picture forming

The issue is presented to the circle (by appropriate person or persons, depending on the specifics of the issue)
Rounds are used to identify dimensions, elements, aspects of the issue, keeping in mind the following:

a. No solutions (no proposals!) are to be given in picture forming.

b. Picture forming is about understanding the issue as fully as possible at the moment.

Consent is given to completeness of the picture—that is, that all currently relevant and knowable dimensions, elements, aspects etc. are included in the picture.

Note that a “perfect” picture is not the goal here. Consent is to the picture being “good enough” for the circle to move forward with the next step (proposal shaping). It is inevitable that the picture will not be perfect.

Proposal Shaping

Rounds are used to generate proposal ideas based on the picture consented to in the picture forming process, keeping in mind the following:

a. Do not judge or evaluate proposal ideas in this step of the process.

b. This step is about free flow of creative proposal ideas.

Organize and/or combine proposal ideas to generate a draft proposal. Note that this can be done by the facilitator, or by the circle as a whole, when the situation is relatively simple. However—especially in complex and/or challenging situations—it is often more effective to delegate a few members, typically called “tuners,” to do this outside the circle meeting and bring back a draft proposal. In this case the steps are:

a. Select tuners from among circle members (selection method depending on specifics of the situation)

b. Tuners work with generated proposal ideas to shape them into a concise proposal or proposals (usually outside of/between circle meetings), keeping in mind that:

1. Tuners maintain a neutral attitude (open mind) towards collected proposal ideas while working on organizing and drafting proposal(s).

c. Draft proposal(s) are circulated to all circle members in advance of next meeting

The circle confirms (by consent) that the draft proposal(s) address(es) the identified issues adequately.

a. Note that this is not consent to the proposal! It is consent that the draft proposal covers the issues at hand.

If in step 3 it is determined that not all identified issues were addressed, then the process goes back to a previous step to address the issues missed. Which step (how far back) depends on what is missing.

If proposal ideas are lacking for some part of the issues, go back to step 1 and generate proposal ideas for those parts.
If it appears that some pieces of the picture were not included, go back to the picture forming process, identify additional pieces of the picture, consent to completeness of the improved picture, and then generate additional proposal ideas for issues missed due to the incomplete picture.

Note that a “perfect” proposal is not the goal here. Consent is to the proposal being “good enough” for the circle to move forward with the next step (consent decision making). It is inevitable that the proposal will not be perfect.

The output of proposal shaping is a proposal that can be presented to the circle for the consent decision making process previously outlined.

Dynamic Governance Summary Sheet

The above processes, as well as those for elections, consent decision making, and the basic steps in the flow of a policy meeting, are summarized in flowchart form on the Dynamic Governance Summary Sheet handout.

This document is designed to be used as a reference when working with sociocratic processes in meetings. It offers general guidance in the basic steps and some of the options. It is by no means a comprehensive reference and is not a substitute for instruction, practice, mentoring and guided experience in sociocracy. Think of it somewhat like the Sorcerer’s big book of spells in the story of “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” When the apprentice tried to use more powerful and complicated spells than he was ready to handle on his own, he got into some pretty deep water—literally and figuratively.

History of sociocracy

The name sociocracy was coined by August Comte, an early nineteenth century French philosopher and founder of the science of sociology. Sociocracy literally means rule by the “socios,” people who have a social relationship with each other. In contrast, democracy means rule by the “demos,” the general mass of people who have little in common. Comte proposed a system of thought and organization known as positivism that he hoped would provide the basis for a stable society and personal fulfillment in the context of the then emerging industrial revolution. However, Comte was not able to suggest a practical structure for his ideas about sociocracy.

Later in the 1800’s John Stuart Mill advocated worker cooperatives in which the workers controlled all equity and selected their own management, the beginning of the co-op movement that has had some limited success. In the 1920’s, pioneering management scientist Mary Parker Follett noted that in the most productive companies workers strongly identified with the organization as “their” company, allowing them to focus without conflicting feelings on the work of the company and how to make it run effectively. She discerned, however, that no structure existed which allowed such identification to be founded on anything other than a difficult to maintain illusion. It remained for work later in the 20th century by systems scientists, most notably Wiener, Nash, (featured in the movie A Beautiful Mind), and Prigogine (who won a Nobel prize for his work on self-organization), to lay the intellectual foundation for such a structure, the structure offered by sociocracy.

Prior to the development of sociocracy’s practical structure, cultivating an environment that consistently maximizes the potential of an investor-manager-worker partnership has, in general, remained in the hands of a few gifted managers. Sociocracy takes that sort of partnership out of the realm of such genius heroes and into the hands of ordinary people.

Gerard Endenburg developed this simple, logical structure, inspired by experiments by Kees Boeke, a Dutch educational reformer and management scientist. In practical operation for more than thirty-five years, the method has progressed past the experimental stage and is successfully serving a number of organizations in The Netherlands as diverse as an electrical contracting company, a municipal police department, a Buddhist monastery, a nursing home, a chain of hairdressing shops, a local public school system, and numerous others. It is also being used in a variety of organizations in other European countries, Latin America, Australia, and the United States and Canada. Organizations using sociocracy report increased innovation and productivity, reduction in the number of meetings, decreases in sick leave, and higher staff commitment to the organization.

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