Ted Rau: A deep dive into Sociocracy
Sociocracy is one of those organisational models that have gained lots of attention and momentum over the past few year. Ted Rau is the operational leader of Sociocracy4all and shares some of his experience and key questions around the framework.
How should one start?
Ted points to that it is important to bring in more people than yourself to start with. If there are a few of you it becomes less threatening and you get to practice what you preach from early on and most of this system is about practice.
What does decision making look like, is it really slow?
Sociocracy is based on the consent model. It means that you are biased towards allowing people to try unless it will cause harm to the organisation. It also means that the circles decide themselves what part is most important for them to achieve the task or area or goal that they are pursuing. The big threshold is the responsibility. If you are in a circle and consent you are co-responsible. You are not encourage to object if you do not think it’s safe it is your responsibility to. Fundamentally Sociocracy is a way for organisations to negotiate between different perspectives explicitly and balance opposing forces like profit and purpose or de-centralisation vs speed. All of this is built into the method.
What is the key barrier?
It is to take the jump and decentralise power. But it also has to do with the capacity of people. This method requires a lot of capacity in people to see and view their internal preferences. It is moving away from preference and moving towards experimentation. And in doing so we empower and enable our coworkers to take full ownership and responsibility over the different tasks and put it in the hands of their colleagues to regulate when we veer from what is best for the organisation. Ted says that this system is one of the few that he’s found that is fit for the job of navigating in the complex times we live in.
[This is a write up by Amit and does not contain direct quotes from the interview. To hear the entire conversation take a listen!]
Links
Deep level diversity; Reasons for inviting more diversity in our organisation through awareness and structure.
The Work - Byron Katie. An inquiry method that invites self-responsibility.