The sociocracy brand
The day after putting my site up someone who isn’t on any of my lists (that is, someone I didn’t tell) saw it! It is at http://www.ranprieur.com/ and this is what was said about my site:
“September 2. Jim sends a link to a site about sociocracy, which appears to be a brand of non-authoritarian structure for communities and businesses, the same way permaculture is a brand of ecological design. Branding is useful because if you start talking to people about a challenging new concept, they won’t listen, but if you can hook them with a good word, they’ll say, “Oooo, what’s that?” and then you can explain it. But branding is also dangerous, because the same hook that pulls you in can hold you in, and make you think your answer is the only answer, or that it’s finished.
The page mentions that “most sociocratic experiments have been dropped,” and comes up with three good explanations, but misses the most important one: our own understanding and design are not yet adequate. If a big system without a single link of domination is an old growth forest, then right now we’re at the stage of weeds coming through cracks in a parking lot. Sociocracy is one species of weed, and there are many others, and if we stay diverse and keep evolving, maybe in a thousand years we’ll have a tree.”
Ted’s answer: This might be a somewhat accurate analogy, but sociocracy is a weed that adapts very quickly. From listening to people like CEO Marten Ditsburg of Reekx in the Netherlands, sociocracy is still, after 15 years, changing his organization under his feet. It’s one of the challenges of sociocracy that the form of the organization that uses it is never static very long. Intellectually this seems like a good thing, and it is, but it can be very difficult to deal with as well. I think this weed can be the same species of plant that grows into the old growth tree. I am definitely not saying that sociocracy is done evolving as it is now. I am saying that it allows for changing itself. Personally I think humans understand enough to create that old growth forest NOW – with sociocracy plus a lot of other wonderful ideas that many people have developed. The problem is that the systems we have don’t encourage these good ideas since they don’t end up consolidating power in a few people’s hands so they’re not encouraged and will take a long time to be adopted. As we encourage and experience these ideas we will evolve them more fully. I’m sure we won’t be totally where we want to be in a thousand years, but I think we could pull up a lot of the asphalt in that parking lot within a century or two.
One of the biggest challenges of telling others what sociocracy is about is that the assumptions about what it is come fast and furious and these assumptions are all based in the authoritarian structures we have now. Thinking about not dominating others is so far out of the box that people who are looking for that kind of thing can’t even wrap their brain around it.
