Language: Español
Sociocracy combines consent decision-making, a decentralized system of authority and intentional processes to improve our decisions and processes over time into a governance system that supports effective and efficient process while increasing connection, listening and co-creation among members.
Sociocracy is used in businesses, communities, nonprofits, cooperatives, grassroots groups and in education. See the sociocracy resources on this page to get started.
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Books from Sociocracy for All
Many Voices One Song
The practical sociocracy handbook written by the co-founders of Sociocracy For All. 300 pages full of real-life support!
Let’s Decide Together
The definitive guidebook for practicing sociocracy with children. Children can decide with sociocracy too!
Sociocracy topics
More: Selection process | Writing proposals | Implementation
Making group decisions: consent
Consent is the default decision-making method in sociocracy. In consent, a decision is made when no circle member has an objection. Every person will consent if they can accept the proposal, and object if the proposal has negative implications with respect to the circle’s shared aim.
A group moves to consent in the consent process: presenting the proposal and clarifying questions, quick reactions and a round of consent/objections.
Different from blocking a proposal in consensus decision-making, objections are welcomed as valuable information and they can be integrated by modifying the proposal, its term or its measurements.
Circles and roles: who decides what?
Decisions are made in circles, a defined team of people working together towards their circle’s aim. Circle members make collective policy decisions in their domain and they define operational roles to empower individuals to take on responsibility and circle roles to self-manage their circle.
Circles are connected through parent circle/sub-circle relationships of nested domains, leading to a system where everything can be decided locally in the system, without centralizing power at the center. To make sure two circles are connected, we double-link them with two people as members in both circles.
Meetings with sociocracy
Sociocratic meetings are inclusive and efficient with a clear format:
- Opening: check-in and ADMIN
- Content of the meeting
- Consent to agenda
- Agenda items
- Review
- Check-out (meeting evaluation)
Facilitation is a focus of sociocracy. Rounds – the practice of speaking one by one – are commonly used in meetings to keep equivalence and focus. Rounds also make it easy to run virtual meetings in video calls.
Performance
All sociocratic processes are built on the basic idea of continuous improvement. Feedback is a way to improve what we do, both by creating feedback-rich organizations, a commitment to interpersonal feedback and formal, peer-oriented performance reviews. Other practices are: meeting evaluations in meetings, reviews for all policy decisions and for role selections.
Leadership in sociocracy is peer-oriented and based on accountability to own commitments and to the circle. Many people also combine sociocracy with restorative justice or Nonviolent Communication to align their practice with their values and to improve their effectiveness and communication.
Selection process
A sociocratic circle chooses together who will fill an operational or circle role. The most common process to choose that person is the selection process with nominations, change round and consent.
More concepts
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Cheatsheet
Writing proposals together
Policy proposals are always approved by a circle, but they can even be written together using the process of picture forming and proposal shaping.
See it done
Implementation
How hard or easy it is to implement sociocracy in your organization highly depends on your size, culture, current set-up and commitment.
One distinction you need to know. While training talks about sociocracy, an implementation changes the power structure of the organization.
- Training is about knowledge of how sociocracy works in general, potentially with practice on examples.
- Implementation is the application of sociocracy to a specific organization
Do you need a consultant to implement sociocracy? It depends!
- SoFA supports “self-implementations” without external help, for example through organizational membership with groups of peer support and discounts on training.
- But we also offer coaching and consulting for any desired level of hand-holding through the process. The help of a consultant is only useful when you already know that you want to implement and all decision-makers are on board.
- We also offer classes, and we are accredited by the International Certification Board.
More sociocracy resources: articles and videos
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Governance: the language of collaboration
Language: Español What can natural languages teach us about self-governance? The language of collaboration: When two humans talk, they use language to make sense of the world and to connect. […]
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Dividing Up Work and Decision-Making for Effective Teams
Language: Español The question of group size With the world’s issues and complexity rising, the number of people who need to collaborate to address an issue gets bigger and bigger. […]
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On Objections in Sociocracy
Language: Español What is an objection in sociocracy? Objections are a key part of consent decision-making in sociocracy. Objections are concerns that circle members raise in response to a specific […]
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Performance reviews
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Performance reviews (or “Role Improvement”) are a way to give feedback to one person or each other in a space of psychological safety.
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On interpersonal feedback
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Language: Español There is no right and wrong Many people are afraid of feedback. “Can I give you some feedback?” is typically followed by criticism, and we don’t do well […]
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Representation of those most impacted by decisions: Tools for when impact exceeds circle roles (Deborah Chang, Sofie Malm, Hanna Fischer)
Are we making decisions that are affecting more people than are in the room? How can we be more careful about representation? In this session, we will give examples of situations where decisions are affecting a broader group of people. We will offer tools to support us being more inclusive in the decision-making process.
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Keeping meetings short
Long meetings are a pain. Let’s make them shorter. Here are the tools that sociocracy has to offer.
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Platform co-op governance: deep democracy on scale
An article about governance of (large) platform coops and the tweaks we’d have to make to use sociocracy successfully.
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The 5 Minute First Aid Kit for a meeting
We offer a guide for facilitators or other meeting members to use when something unexpected happens in a meeting. It offers a structure, adding 5 minutes to the meeting to process the unexpected event.
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Sociocracy with Children and Other People
Language: Español Lessons Learned about Effective Meetings and Community Building I deeply believe that children deserve the same respect as adults, and to that end, I started a learning community […]
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Hart’s Mill: Ecovillage and Farm sociocracy case study
Language: Español[et_pb_section fb_built=”1″ admin_label=”section” _builder_version=”3.22.3″][et_pb_row admin_label=”row” _builder_version=”3.25″ background_size=”initial” background_position=”top_left” background_repeat=”repeat”][et_pb_column type=”4_4″ _builder_version=”3.25″ custom_padding=”|||” custom_padding__hover=”|||”][et_pb_text admin_label=”Text” _builder_version=”3.25.1″ background_size=”initial” background_position=”top_left” background_repeat=”repeat”] Hart’s Mill Ecovillage and Farm is becoming a reality, and the […]
