Ted Rau

Ted spends most of his time training and consulting in sociocracy and leading SoFA as an organization. Ted is co-author of the sociocracy handbook Many Voices, One Song. He enjoys writing articles, and teaching meeting facilitation. People and their universal need to connect and move things are at the center of his attention. He pays attention to the co-housing movement, transgender rights, and non-violent communication.

Outside of SoFA work, Ted is a parent of 5, former linguist, and singer-songwriter. His first career was in Academia where he worked in syntax/semantics and pragmatics — and the big question of what’s a fact from a linguistic perspective. Within the last few years, his life has changed in big ways. He worked full time, then spent 3 years as a stay-at-home homeschooling parent, now is back to working full time again. In the same time frame, he’s done his gender transition.

The training in linguistics taught Ted to find patterns that work well for the human mind, to work empirically, and break things down so they can be understood. Being a parent of 5 had taught him to be extremely pragmatic… maybe this earned him the label of being a “manifestor”; at the end of the day, dinner must be on the table no matter whether the new vision statement is done!

Publications:

Books

• Many Voices One Song. Shared power with sociocracy. Institute For Peaceable Communities. 2018. (with Jerry Koch-Gonzalez)
• Who decides who decides? How to start a group so everyone can have a voice. Institute For Peaceable Communities. 2021.

Articles (not including external and republished articles)

• Ted’s articles on SoFA page
• Ted’s articles on medium
• Highlighted articles:
  • The Language of Collaboration
  • What if people don’t cooperate? A systemic view of meetings
  • National, regional and local chapters – expanding sociocracy
  • Sociocracy meets Listening At Scale

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