Erin, how does sociocracy fit within a social enterprise model, when we often see that a lot of founders are holding the vision for everyone? It becomes this little bit of a juxtaposition there, when you’ve got someone that’s a social entrepreneur that’s holding the vision in their head and wants things to go as as he or she has imagined to then sharing that leadership. How would that look in a shared leadership sociocracy model where in social enterprise you almost sometimes need that division and the drive coming from a leader? [Continued…]

They’ll be in touch with the legalities that influence the activities of the organisation. They will be in touch with the financials, the broader perspective of what’s going on in the wider environment that that social enterprise fits into. That’s where the visionary likes to sit. That’s why they’ve started this social enterprise because they have been aware of the greater context and they see a role that this organisation has to fill. That’s a really important place to hold. That mission circle will usually be the core driver in creating the mission that gets consented to by a representative group inside of the social enterprise. Social enterprise, like any other enterprise will have its teams and divisions that have a very specific focus, and quite often people ask, “well what happens if you only have three people who are doing your work?”

Quite often social enterprises and startups start with a small number of people and then grow from there. I think it becomes that you can adapt sociocracy to work for that cause. There’s still media and communications that go on with three people. There’s still the production or manufacture that goes on there, administration still happens. Really, what then happens is clustering the conversations so that when there’s a discussion about the marketing, the three people know what their aims are, what they’re specifically trying to produce or provide in their marketing. The three people might be involved in all of those teams, but it’s about how to organise the conversation space to establish focused and effective activities and decisions inside of that, those areas.

So now for the difficult question; what happens when the ego comes into the game?

Well, a classic phrase we lean into is trust the process. For me, this is where the brilliance of working in a whole system’s way really comes in. Of course, the ego comes in because we’re human, but what we’re afforded with something like sociocracy are guard rails or the safe space where we know we’re being held in hard discussions or making hard decisions or even innovative decisions or whatever it might be. We still know what we can rely on is that we’ll have a space to ask the questions we need to ask. We’ll have a space to give our opinion and our reaction as we feel we need to, and we know we’ll hear from other people if they have questions, we’ll hear from other people what their reactions are. We know that there’s space for other people’s ideas and creativity to come in. There’s this level of transparency that’s woven into all of this along with an equivalence.

People aren’t telling other people what to do as well as overall. We focus on being effective and all of this activity that creates this psychologically safe space for people to do what they’ve got to do given the changing context and complexity of conditions that might come through for an organisation. For me, something like sociocracy is a living structure that holds us in all of our humanity and our over-inflated ego. If that comes through our creative breakthroughs or our vulnerable, fragile moments, it allows us to do all that. We all understand how it will operate when we’re in those spaces and times. Absolutely, there are exceptions to this, and sociocracy is no silver bullet! People have to do the work.

I heard someone here at Newkind say that organisation and individual transformation are hand-in-hand processes. They often drive each other. An individual’s transformation will feed into an organisation’s transformation and vice versa. There’s a lot of medicine, so to speak, or there’s natural evolution that comes through a living system, like sociocracy.

That was really inspirational, Erin. It’s a beautiful way that you describe relationships that can happen within an organisation because we don’t always choose the people that we need to work with, but we have to work with those people and then we also have to get along with the rest of humanity. It’s very important to have the ways and structures that we can manage that.

What advice would you give social enterprise founders that are looking into taking on a sociocracy model for their organisation?

The advice I would give to social enterprise founders wanting to take on something like sociocracy is be willing to trust the process, be willing to trust collective intelligence and trust the space for there to be boundaries as well. To trust that things emerge and evolve, and they can emerge and evolve in a constructive way. When people come together with the willingness to be together as a whole system, which is inherently inclusive and it allows that deeper wisdom of the group to really feed in and to also take it step-by-step and piece-by-piece, not expecting change to necessarily be overnight and to be rapid… to be able to be in the emergent experimental space and to see what’s real and what really works for that time and that place is a pretty key step for all of us in being alive in this time right now. That’s a pretty important approach for all of us humans. I think this is some of the commentary that’s coming out about our governments and on bigger governance systems that direct how things happen in society. There’s quite a fragility inside of their systems because there’s such a complexity of structures that don’t have a lot of flex and adaptiveness inside of them.

There’s some brick walls that are starting to really become obvious.

When we’re able to give space for the unknown to come into our world and for us to navigate through that step by step, then we can find ourselves. Finding new frontiers that are relevant and real and important to you and I. Social enterprise is a responsive, adaptive way of being in this world. It’s contributing something that’s needed to find more balance and it’s inherently inclusive. By being willing to be inclusive internally inside of the organisation as well as externally is a really powerful way to be.

Are there any trick books? Sociocracy 101 that people can download and get all the points?

There’s plenty of stuff online. Let’s bring it down to a really practical level:

Be willing to allow people to ask questions about decisions that are being made.

Be willing to allow people to give their responses and opinions. They don’t necessarily need to make the decisions, but be willing to hear, and this isn’t really new information.

Be willing to measure the decisions and the impact of the decisions. When you’re making a decision about something or how you’re going to do something inside of a team, find a way to put a measurable on that. That’s also not new, but it’s not standard business either. Measure everything and then review everything and put a time frame on it. Do this for six months and in six months time check in and make sure that you are on the course you want to be on and if not, you’ll course correct and you’ll adapt what you’re doing to be more relevant to where you actually want to go.

It’s a lot like sailing in that way, and sometimes in sailing you’ve got to go in another direction. You don’t just go straight to the target all the time; you’ve got too tack your way forward and that’s the experimentation process. Let’s go in that direction. Oh, okay. We got to go slightly over this way and slightly over this way. Being willing to sniff out the path through experimentation [is key].

And like with a lot of social innovation approaches, they’re not brand new. They have been practiced before. It’s just that we have either forgotten or have not incorporated those in our normal business approaches or in our normal day-to-day approaches. I think the realigning and that space for people to voice their questions and their solutions and also allow for those mistakes within parts that they’re not be taken for the long term. But when you put the date and an impact measurement on the decision that is taken collectively or not, then at least you can recourse that if it’s not going as planned.

A by-product of doing that and particularly using sociocracy processes is that there’s shared ownership and responsibility for decisions, and that naturally brings a sense of resilience to assist them, because it means there’s more minds and hearts paying attention to what’s going on and people are keenly watching like, “Oh, we made that decision together. It’s not quite working as we wanted it to. Here’s my suggestion and how we could change it, or an inquiry unit it allows for that.” That curiosity to be alive in everyone, and not just the leader creates a sense of responsibility inside of everyone which holds the whole load of the whole organisation and in a stronger way.

That’s awesome. Could you point our listeners towards some further reading or some websites where they can find some more information about sociocracy?

The Sociocracy Consulting Group is the group that I work with and we write blogs and share information and also do training and consultations through there, so that’s a key one. We The People Are Consenting A Deeper Democracy, by John Buck Jr and Sharon Villines is one of the key English language sociocracy books. It was first really coined in the Dutch language and so it’s been translated from them. There’s a lot of resources that are being put out by Sociocracy for All online. Lots of YouTube videos to be watched and they’ve also written a book called Many Voices. One Song on sociocracy practice. So there are a few of the resources available.

Thank you very much. On a different note, Erin is from the Sunshine Coast, which is the place where I’m also from. We’re going to have a very little chat about the regional opportunities for impact and purpose-led businesses around the Sunshine Coast and how we [want to] see that develop into a better impactful space. Erin, in your experience living on the Sunshine Coast, have you found it a place where your business and also your aligned approach to certain organisational structures can flourish and thrive?

To be honest, no, but I think it’s possible there and because of the nature of the group that I work with, we’re further afield more often than not. Something I think a lot of Sunny Coasters discover is, particularly if you’re living in the hills and away from the key business areas, is that being entrepreneurial is really important.

The employment opportunities there aren’t as vast as somewhere like Brisbane where I’m originally from. There’s a lot of people creating micro and small business on the Sunshine Coast and there’s a lot of natural connection and collaboration and networking that goes on because it’s a smallish community and people can connect with each other. I think there is a surprising and exciting amount of innovation that does go on in that sort of space somehow. It’s like being outside of the city, due to the nature element of being on the Sunshine Coast that holds the space for this mental spaciousness and creative spaciousness where people can see what’s going on and the needs that are there and then create responses through business and enterprise. What I do know is there is some great initiatives happening on the Sunshine Coast more and more. I’m really looking forward to getting out there more and being real on the ground and the place where I live. Part of my story is that I live in a forest and I work from home and I’m learning how to engage and interact in a space where it’s not all on offer like it was in Brisbane where I’m from. That’s new territory for me that I’m exploring.

My feeling with the Sunshine Coast is very similar to that. The nature is so beautiful and it allows that space that the city does not allow; space to think, there’s less noise, less emissions I guess, and less electricity so it makes for better thinking. What I am worried about is something that you also mentioned that we sometimes end up working in our little silos when working remotely, completely disconnected from our community and we’re trying to do what we are. We’re doing great things with communities that we’re working remotely with and sometimes we can’t belong to our geographical community because of a variety of things. Some beautiful clusters of people and it’s really lovely to share that creative vibe with lots of other people too. Lots of musicians there and lots of eco-businesses, which is nice.

And there’s a lot of people who’ve moved from cities to have their tree, or sea-change as well. There’s a lot of great intellectual and creative resources that comes in from people who’ve moved from Melbourne or Sydney or Brisbane and finding a way to connect in with that, that’s something that’s emerging. (Erin suggests collaborating in the future with Davinia).

It’s creating, cultivating the ecology of people in that region, and I think quite naturally it is important for us to have a sense of relevance inside of the connectivity.

It’s important for us humans to follow what brings us joy, and if we can’t, we have to have limits as well to who we interact with. We just simply can’t interact with everyone.

That would be something that I would want to incorporate into some way of networking is to bring that particular focus area of creative social enterprise. It’s got some sort of specific similarity and purpose that helps to really be beneficial to each other.

Definitely, we will definitely work on that together Erin.