A conference on power & responsibility in self-management
Dec 4 2025, online
What does it mean to be accountable in a system without control? How do we navigate performance, expectations, and responsibility when we genuinely want to do well together?
In this mini-conference hosted by Sociocracy For All, we’ll explore the dance between self-management, performance, and accountability in collaborative organizations. We’ll go beyond buzzwords to look at the real, gritty, sometimes awkward but always human practices that make decentralized systems work.
This is not about productivity hacks or performance metrics in disguise. It’s about the structures and habits that support us in showing up fully — to our roles, to each other, and to the purpose we care about. Through stories, practical tools, and honest conversations, we’ll explore how circles can support high integrity and trust without slipping into power-over control.
Join us on December 4 to learn, to reflect, and to practice building organizations where people thrive and get stuff done — with clarity, care, and courage.
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What’s waiting for you
| UTC | Eastern time (New York) | Central Europe (Paris) | Track 1 | Track 2 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 14:00 | 9:00 AM | 15:00 PM | Ted Rau Welcome, connection, and key questions: why is accountability hard in self-management? |
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| 14:30 | 9:30 AM | 15:30 PM | Elsa Breit Responsibility as a Key in the Power-Freedom Tension Field |
Sanket The sharing of power and the assumption of responsibilities |
| 15:30 | 10:30 AM | 16:30 PM | Kathe Todd-Brown Collaborations in science |
Vincent van der Lubbe Applying Sociocratic Consent to Multi-AI Collaboration |
| 16:30 | 11:30 AM | 17:30 PM | Leander Roth Community Accountability Tools |
Michael James From Cop to Partner-in-Crime: Embracing Intricacy |
| 17:30 | 12:30 AM | 18:30 PM | Teri Balser Mapping the Relational Accountability Space |
Stacy Jackson Meeting People Where They Are & Scaffolding UP |
| 18:30 | 13:30 PM | 19:30 PM | Reflections in small groups and closing | |
Speaker and topic info
Mapping the Relational Accountability Space
Accountability is critical for the establishment of functional, trusting, and productive relationships. However, our understanding of it is often as varied as the individuals in our circles. Without a common understanding, we can end up with a tangle of expectations, promises, and often unmet needs that confounds our best efforts at sociocratic process. In this presentation, Teri will walk us through the process of mapping the accountability space for our circles and organizations, and invite participants to consider operational and personal dimensions.
We will engage in a mapping exercise to outline factors influencing accountability, reflect on the different dimensions surfaced, and consider the role of power and control in each one. The presentation is aimed at practitioners, trainers and facilitators interested in a deeper understanding of the operational and social dynamics at play in sociocratic accountability.
Teri C. Balser
University of Calgary
Professor Teri Balser is a passionate scholar and experienced leader, and mentor. In addition to spending 15 years in senior academic leadership, she has received numerous awards and recognition for her work in soil and environmental science – including recognition as a Fulbright Distinguished Chair to India in 2015, and US Professor of the Year in 2010. Throughout her career, she has sought to connect and empower people across public, academic, and private sectors in working together toward a sustainable future. Sociocracy is a large part of her efforts in that space. As a Professor of Sustainability and Futures Thinking in the Faculty of Science, a Senior Scholar in the Graduate College, and Sociocracy for All Professional Partner she seeks to understand how higher education can contribute to regenerative and transdisciplinary responses to environmental change and planetary health.
Sharing power and accountability
Sanket’s talk explores the tensions of practicing self-management when people are not yet mature enough to assume responsibility. In theory, self-management promises power to the oppressed. In practice, however, many organizations struggle — people are accustomed to command-and-control cultures, tend to avoid accountability, or expect someone else to “hold” the responsibility.
She will highlight:
- Why immaturity in self-responsibility appears so frequently in self-managed systems;
- How this dynamic creates overload for a few individuals while weakening collective accountability;
- Which practices and rituals can nurture the development of maturity within teams and organizations.
Sanket
Sociocracy for all / independent consultant
Sanket is an organizational development consultant and facilitator of collaborative processes. She designs and leads participatory methodologies focused on dynamic governance and inclusion. Her approach integrates frameworks such as Sociocracy, Theory U, Nonviolent Communication, Integral Theory, and Afro-centric values. She has experience in projects on social impact, sustainability, and organizational transformation. She believes in dialogue and co-creation as powerful paths toward conscious and equitable development.
Collaborations in science
Scientists increasingly collaborate across institutions, connecting deep domain experts to tackle big, wicked questions. Traditionally, these collaborations rely on a lead will scope and make assignments. Sociocracy provides a better coordinate research between institutions.
But how is accountability dealt with across these nested power dynamics? We found that sociocracy can mitigate power abuses by professors of their students and expand student networks through project co-mentoring. Regular within-circle check-ins on individual progress provided soft peer-accountability and pooled expertise.
Accountability to parent circles provides a real time fail safe to catch project critical errors early. I’ll draw on examples from two implementations with different levels of success providing interesting contrast examples. At the conclusion, we will have a facilitator discussion on sociocracy as an integrator across organizations.
Kathe Todd Brown
University of Florida
Kathe Todd-Brown is a climate scientist and assistant professor at the University of Florida. She started using sociocracy to structure her meetings five years ago and completed both SoFA Academy 1 and 2. Three years ago she started implementing sociocracy into project level self-management. She currently lives in Gainesville, Florida but has lived in all four corners of the USA and in the middle.
Rethinking Responsibility, Freedom and Power
What happens when freedom is misunderstood as independence rather than interdependence? And how can responsibility become a shared source of power rather than a burden?
In this presentation, the speaker explores the dynamic tension between freedom, power, and responsibility, and how “power with” can transform collaboration and leadership.
Drawing on role-based work and sociocratic principles, the session demonstrates how clearly defined roles create clarity of responsibility and strengthen self-organization.
Participants will reflect on how freedom and responsibility can mutually reinforce one another, creating a space where power is exercised as co-creation rather than control.
This session is designed for leaders, facilitators, and organizational developers interested in shared leadership and self-organizing systems, who want to deepen their understanding of responsibility as the link between personal freedom and collective action.
Elsa Breit
Breit Consulting
Dr. Elsa Breit is an executive coach, management consultant for human resources and organizational development, and sociocracy trainer. Holding a doctorate in economics, her research has scientifically investigated organizational tensions and paradoxes in holacratic companies and has been engaged in sustainable business and collaboration, both theoretically and practically, for many years. She supports companies that want to introduce self-organization and/or rethink leadership. She works with management teams, people & culture leads, and HR teams that desire true transformation.
But why is accountability hard in self-management?
Self-management doesn’t happen in a vacuum. People bring their old stories, fear, and reactions to the table.
Accountability is a perfect example of how the practice of self-management is tainted by the shadow of hierarchies because of hierarchies have been using coercion to ensure accountability, people are hesitant to use accountability mechanisms – lowering accountability in self-managed organizations.
But throwing out the baby with the bathwater is not the only confusion. People also get confused who gets to hold whom accountable when we’re all peers.
Finally, the deeper ontology of self-management is fundamentally different from that of hierarchies. Self-management assumes a deeper interconnectedness where accountability and responsibility live in the system, while hierarchies assume separation that needs to be “held together” by hierarchy.
This talk will show how applying the deeper patterns of hierarchy to self-management fall flat – and how we can hold them instead.
Ted Rau
Sociocracy For All
Ted is an advocate, trainer and consultant for self-governance. His main focus is sociocracy. After his PhD in linguistics and work in Academia, he co-founded the membership organization Sociocracy For All in 2016. Ted spends his days consulting with mission-driven organizations, teaching and deeply immersed in the work as a member within Sociocracy For All. Ted has 5 children who are now teens and young adults. A German citizen, he lives between Massachusetts and Tübingen. He is (co)-author of four books on self-governance, Many Voices One Song (2018), Who Decides Who Decides (2021), and Collective Power (2023), From Here To There (2025). He is working on a book on the interface between governance, the deep code of modernity, and wisdom.
Meeting People Where They Are & Scaffolding UP
Rooted in empathy, equity, and growth, the program explores how to effectively “meet people where they are” — recognizing unique backgrounds, challenges, and strengths — and then “scaffold up” by providing intentional support, resources, and opportunities that promote development and success.
Participants will learn how to:
- Build trust and rapport through culturally responsive and trauma-informed practices.
- Assess individual needs and readiness without judgment.
- Design and implement scaffolding strategies that foster independence, confidence, and resilience.
- Create environments that are both supportive and challenging, encouraging continuous learning and growth.
Stacy Salters Jackson
ONEplace @ Kalamazoo Public Library
Stacy Salters-Jackson is a dedicated nonprofit professional with over two decades of experience in youth development, organizational leadership, and community service, currently serving as the ONEplace Programming Manager at Kalamazoo Public Library.
With learned and experienced education in Human Services and certifications in trauma-informed practices and cultural facilitation, she expertly supports organizations in implementing high-quality programming that incorporate social-emotional learning and wellness.
Stacy’s community engagement includes board service with several local organizations and ownership of Why Not? Consulting, through which she also extends her expertise.
Practicing Accountability at Work
What does it mean, structurally, that “we can’t hold others accountable, we can only hold our selves accountable” (Mariame Kaba)?
How does sociocracy contribute to the organizational conditions that make accountability irresistible?
How can we make our commitments explicit, responsive to access needs, and aligned with our capacity?
How can we name and adapt when commitments aren’t met- without blame and shame?
My coop has taught many classes on translating tools and practices from Transformative and Restorative Justice and Community Accountability to organizational and peer accountability.
We’ll share some of those tools, and debrief through case studies or rounds to talk about real life implementation scenarios.
Leander Roth
Spring Up
Leander Roth is the co-founder and mythematician of worker coop Spring Up, and co-host of the podcast Getting Free Together. He has a background in sociology, entrepreneurship, and restorative / transformative justice. Leander is a systems thinker and conflict strategist who enjoys supporting organizations in building shared power and decentralization. He is also one of the current support teachers for Academy 1, and a Professional Partner of SoFA.
The Empty Circle: Consent without people
(1) What happens to power, responsibility, and shared memory when a circle isn’t composed of people but of opaque, evolving models? This session reports on a year-long, 1,000+ conversation action-research project that coordinated between multiple AI assistants and two human collaborators.
(2) The presentation will explore what surprised the researcher-practitioners and what those surprises reveal about coordination.
(3) Topics include role emergence, Ashby’s requisite variety in practice, token-limits and patience as operational constraints, sociocratic assessment-integration cycles as an integration mechanism, the practical need to capture learning in shared artifacts, and implications for designing durable, responsibility-bearing systems.
(4) For practitioners and researchers who run into problems coordinating.
Vincent van der Lubbe
DoITogether Architecture
Vincent van der Lubbe is a reflective practitioner exploring how groups, technologies, and organizations coordinate. Together with his colleagues, he works with companies and teams to make collaboration more coherent—especially when no one fully understands the whole.
From Cop to Partner-in-Crime: Embracing Intricacy
In this presentation, Michael will explore how traditional ideas of accountability and responsibility oversimplify the intricacy of life and slip an enforcement mindset into our self-governing teams.
He will introduce a simple template for scoping action items, inspired by sociocracy’s proposal process, and share mantras from NVC, Brené Brown, and Quakerism to help him relate rather than judge.
Thanks to a few brave volunteers and some improv, participants will have the opportunity to feel the difference a few small changes can make in our meetings and relationships.
This session builds on sociocracy and Nonviolent Communication (NVC), so having some familiarity is helpful but not required.
Michael James
VillageCo
Michael James helps teams develop life-sustaining ways of working together. He is a neighbor, singer, writer, and Quaker in Pittsburgh, PA. He is the Mission Circle Leader and General Circle Facilitator at the community-growing non-profit VillageCo. He partners with organizations seeking to make the world whole by helping them sense what is true and build from trust. He tries to use sociocracy everywhere—at his job within a 100k-person organization, his improv team, Newcomers, and his Quaker committee. Michael is a Certified Sociocracy Facilitator and organizes the SoFA community Peer Support Across Practices. He is passionate about weaving practices from other disciplines with sociocracy and is always looking to connect with like-minded organizations and practitioners! https://michaeljames.design/
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