 | 6.7. Organizations with few workers and many members | |
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| ↢ | Chapter 6. Implementing Sociocracy | ↣ |
Sociocratic circle structures scale very easily. It is easy to split up into more and more layers of specificity by adding sub-circles and sub-sub-circles that structure domains and aims in which workers make decisions together.
Things get tricky if there are many members of an organization who are not part of decision making on the policy level. For example, this can be true for food coops (many member-owners, only a few workers in the store), platform cooperatives (many contributors, only few platform stewards) and towns (many citizens, only few involved in governance). Sociocracy is designed to let workers make decisions about their own work. Especially in cases where many people contribute but are not formally organized in circles where they can have a say, sociocracy falls short.
This is the option that has served organizations like the neighborhood parliaments in India where hundreds of thousands of families are connected in linked circles. Each member, by being part of a forum that is small enough so everyone can be heard, has a voice and can request help and support. A lot of power rests on the grassroots level of such an organization. Organizing many people in this way requires a huge community organizing effort.
A different situation is what we have in platform cooperatives. Think, for example, a social media platform like Twitter being replaced by a sociocratically run (and cooperatively owned) alternative. There simply aren’t as many decisions to be made, and tasks to be performed as there are members. A platform cooperative has a group of contributors who greatly outnumber the decision-makers for policy. Here are some thoughts about this dilemma:
It does not have to be an issue if even a large number of contributors are not part of decision making, as long as they have the option of being heard by the decision-makers and there is clarity about the criteria for becoming a decision-maker. (For example, a certain threshold for work contribution could be required to become a circle member.)
Be intentional about the feedback lines in both directions: decision-makers in the organization have to proactively ask for, and members need to know how to give feedback.
Stewardship of an organization requires attention -- more attention than an ordinary member can give in passing. Sociocracy is about protecting working groups; defined membership for decision-making circles is an essential requirement of consent decision making.
Separate intentional, intensive use of well-defined feedback from decision making. We can hear many perspectives throughout the whole process of generating proposals, and we can hear many people leading up to a review process of a policy. In our view, this is the best way to include many voices and still benefit from small and solid groups of decision-makers. (See also section Section 4.4.3, “Input and information processing” on page Section 4.4.3, “Input and information processing” @@TODO@@: Figure out page references..)
A sociocratic IT business we are aware of created a transparent system of including all employees over time by replacing circle members with new members on a defined term so that every 2-3 years, every member has been part of a circle. This is a useful idea to give more people the experience of being in a circle, understanding how the decisions are made. This option can be combined with the two other options. It requires trust, transparency and a clear way of how to include the voices of the employees who are not currently circle members.