Understand Sociocracy in Five Minutes
This article is an English translation of 「5分鐘，了解全員參與制（Sociocracy）」, originally published in Chinese on Future Organization Lab 未來組織實驗室 on July 23, 2020.
From a talk by a co-developer of Sociocracy 3.0.
Today I want to talk about how to use Sociocracy 3.0 (S3 for short) to grow into a more agile, more accountable learning organization.
Sociocracy was first proposed in 1851 by the positivist philosopher Auguste Comte. I agree with some of his views and not with others, but he foresaw a more scientific society of the future.
He predicted that by moving away from feudal command-and-control and toward more scientific, rational ways of interacting and making decisions collectively, society would run more efficiently.
Since then, the idea of sociocracy has gone through several iterations.
1. The history of Sociocracy 3.0
In the 1970s, Gerard Endenburg brought several sociocratic concepts back to the core idea of a world governed together by its members, and experimented with them at his company in the Netherlands, Endenburg Elektrotechniek. This developed into the Sociocratic Circle Method — a methodology based on the idea of shared governance.
Later, around 2005 or 2006, Brian Robertson, the developer of Holacracy, experimented with the Sociocratic Circle Method at his technology company. He found value in it and wanted to combine sociocracy with some other ideas — and that became today’s Holacracy.
Finally, there’s Sociocracy 3.0, which I originally developed together with Bernhard Bockelbrink, an agile coach in Berlin and a former CTO, who brought an agile and lean perspective.
Lean and agile are about being able to change and shift quickly in response to a constantly changing environment — an iterative, incremental approach to development.
S3 came about because, as Bernhard and I studied classic sociocracy, we found it sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t.
Historically, when something doesn’t work, people either abandon it or change it. Many people have borrowed ideas from sociocracy and changed them, and later I found people borrowing ideas from Holacracy and changing them too.
2. The advantages of Sociocracy 3.0
S3 isn’t a method or a model of how to do things. It’s practical guidance that helps organizations develop greater agility and respond more effectively to any environment.
S3 is flexible because it’s made up of many patterns that can be combined freely, like Lego bricks.
S3 is principle-based, weaving its patterns together through specific principles of behavior.
And S3 is free: all the resources we’ve developed can be shared under a Creative Commons license. The point of the license is to help people remember where material came from, trace it back and understand how it has developed over time.
So everything I share here, please take it with you. You’ll find all of it on our website. Our only request is that when you share the material, you share the Creative Commons license too, because that’s the only way others can find more and trace the material back to its source.
3. Principles of Sociocracy 3.0
As we see it, principles are guidelines for behavior, while values are principles people cherish.
In S3 we decided not to talk about values, because different people cherish different things. When you say “you should value this,” people either support you, oppose you or are ambivalent.
But principles can be understood, because they’re simply an invitation to agree to act in a certain way. S3 has many principles; here are five we’ve chosen to share:
1. Equivalence
Equivalence is the essence of sociocracy: involving people in making and evolving the decisions that affect them.
Don’t do to others what you wouldn’t want done to you. If a decision affects people, involve them in it. Do what’s effective, and consider what you’re doing.
Is this the most fitting thing to do right now? Not just the most efficient, but — looking at the consequences of action — the most effective thing, from now into the long term.
2. Consent
Raise, seek out and resolve objections. If there’s a tension, say so; if you see something that’s off, say so.
3. Empiricism, experimentation and iteration
Test assumptions through experiments, and keep improving on that basis.
4. Accountability — do what you say
When I hear people say, “Oh, my organization has this problem and I don’t like it,” I find it sad. If you don’t like it, then leave. You decided to join; you decided to take part. So learn to choose your battles and take responsibility for your decisions.
Beware of slipping into feeling like a victim, getting temporary relief by creating an imaginary external enemy.
5. Transparency: make information accessible where needed, so people know what’s actually going on.
That’s a bit of background on S3: a principle-based menu of patterns that supports more effective collaboration and greater agility and responsiveness.
4. S3 won’t necessarily save you — you have to learn to save yourself
Now I’m going to bring you down to earth a bit. Before we enter a sunny fairytale land full of flowers: don’t expect S3 to save you. Only you can save yourself.
I want us to look realistically at the challenges we face. Here are four dimensions organizations need to consider:
1. Agility: responding quickly to a changing environment
When founders first build a company, they’re deeply committed. But when the company grows to 100,000 people, how do you keep that founder spirit? How do you make use of collective intelligence?
With 100,000 employees, you’ve gathered a lot of intelligence, and you could do amazing things. But how do you fully bring out and make good use of that collective intelligence? For the things that need to be done, how do you maximize value?
People are very good at doing things. The problem is: are you doing the right things? Do they create value? Or are you just repeating some habit?
Companies today often have many problems: unclear agreements, so people don’t know what’s going on; unclear domains of responsibility, so it’s not clear who’s responsible for what; unnecessary layers of decision-making.
What Toyota taught us with lean production is to push decision-making down as close to the front line as possible, because every time you need to do something, going up a level and back down again — unless it’s necessary — is just a waste of time.
2. Awareness of benefit and cost
If I’m a founder and I screw up, I’ll know it; if I’m a founder and I succeed, I’ll know that too. Not everyone benefits directly from gains and costs, but people should at least have some awareness of the value they create and the waste they cause.
3. Seeking perfection
What is perfection? Life is so complex that you can’t know what perfect is. Something that looks perfect today may be meaningless tomorrow.
Watch out for agreements that aren’t carried out or are forgotten; for a lack of feedback, evaluation and learning; and for disconnects between decision-makers and the people carrying out decisions.
4. Doing the work
Take time to look at what we’re doing and ask ourselves: what have we learned? Are we doing well enough?
Are there problems such as insufficient communication, duplicated work, lack of transparency, unclear ways of organizing work, insufficient prioritization, and assigning work to people instead of letting them pull work when they have the energy and capacity?
That’s a lot of information — we seem to have 33 kinds of impediments — and I think that’s only the beginning, because today’s organizations face a whole host of other challenges, and there’s no one method that can fix everything.
If that’s not enough, let’s take a quick look at the kinds of problems we face.
Has anyone read Dave Snowden’s work? He developed something called Cynefin, which is very useful for understanding different domains of decision-making.
Sometimes things are obvious — you just do them. For example, you have a cup and a jug of milk; you just pour the milk into the cup.
Sometimes things get complicated — there are known unknowns. For example, the cup slips out of your hand and breaks. Now it’s a bit of a hassle, because you have to clean up the mess — but breaking a cup isn’t new to you; you know how to deal with it. And sometimes things start to get complex.
Complex means there are unknown unknowns: you don’t know what will happen, and when it does happen, you may not even know what’s going on. So you first have to figure out what might be happening, then sense where the problem might be, and only then respond. At this stage, all you can do is experiment.
Finally there’s chaos. It doesn’t last long, but it does happen.
Snowden also talks about disorder — when you don’t even know which domain you’re dealing with. The problem is that in a particular situation, you face a mixture where each domain is tangled up with the others.
You might face a complex situation with various obvious annoyances mixed in; or a complicated situation that, once you dig in, turns out to contain some complexity and a few obvious things — or even a complex situation with a touch of chaos, and so on.
So it really is quite complicated. And we humans are amazing: we’ve managed to make it through all the hardships of life and stay sane.
Although each of us exists every moment — we all actually live in our own little box — there’s no denying that existence is an absolute miracle. Sometimes we shift back and forth between the two, so we start to understand a little of what we’re facing.
5. Why S3?
Every situation is unique; there’s no magic solution for complexity. Unless someone brings some value to a particular situation, you’re better off figuring out how to solve problems yourself.
But looking across history, we can see both consistency and difference in the solutions people have come up with.
So how can we draw on the wisdom of those who came before us, without simply bowing to our parents’ expectations and rules, and find our own way in a new environment?
People need to interact and figure things out together to find effective ways to respond.
Not long ago, I heard someone say that focusing on changing individuals is almost always futile, because until there’s good enough reason to change, people will stay as they are.
When I see a good enough reason to change, and no stronger reason to stay the same, I’ll invest resources in changing. But if you change how people interact with each other, you have to wait until an interaction becomes ineffective before you can introduce a more effective one.
This matters because we all have habitual patterns and habitual strategies.
We all have our favorite ways of doing things, and there’s a good reason behind each one. Your way may not seem to make sense today, but at some point in your life it made perfect sense.
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We’re most likely to fall back on habitual patterns and strategies when we feel vulnerable — and sometimes we feel vulnerable precisely because something is happening that has never happened before.
Your past knowledge can’t handle it well — so this is exactly when we most need new approaches, and also when we’re most likely to fall back on old ones. As a result, we create the very things we’ve been trying so hard to avoid.
6. The patterns of Sociocracy 3.0
Patterns are templates that help people deal with particular situations. S3 is a collection of patterns that people can combine in different ways, depending on the situation, to deal with the complexity their organizations face.
Patterns include definitions. For example, there’s a pattern called “role.” From an S3 perspective, a role is not a required pattern, beyond being a member of the organization.
I can’t cover all the patterns today, but I’d like to briefly share the categories.
We have patterns that support co-creation and evolution, patterns that help people learn and grow in the roles and teams they serve, and patterns that help people have enjoyable, focused interactions.
So S3 patterns — a collection of observable patterns — are applied by people in all kinds of situations to deal with complexity. They’re like helpful constraints that invite us to stay awake, pay attention to what’s happening and what we need, and consciously decide how to respond instead of reacting out of habit.
I especially love this idea: at the boundary between old habits and new patterns lies the potential for greater awareness.
When you form an intention — when you have a reason to try doing things differently — pressure appears, pulling you back toward your habitual ways.
At some point you experience the contrast between your habitual way and the new way, and you can make a conscious choice: do I want to do this? Do I want to do it today? We grow as individuals at that boundary. When we do it together, sharing our perspectives and what we’ve learned, we grow even faster.
That’s the overall introduction.
Next, let me introduce a few patterns we find very helpful for people in organizations.
1. Navigating via tension
Tension is something that catches our attention — a physical or emotional experience, or a kind of awareness. Tension is like our alarm system: for example, your life is going smoothly, and suddenly you run into something — say, a lion.
When what we expect or hope to see doesn’t match what we perceive, we notice easily, because it’s instinctive. The gap between these two states is tension.
Note that what we perceive isn’t necessarily true, so we need to test our assumptions. And what we hope for isn’t necessarily the future life wants to show us — but of course we’ll keep hoping for a different present.
Navigating via tension means observing the situation and developing some understanding, pulling ourselves back and forth between stimulus and response so we consciously consider how to respond.
So pay attention to tensions, understand why we have them, and check whether they’re meaningful. If they are, ask who’s responsible; if it makes sense, pass it on.
It’s like the nerve endings of a living system. You’re a person in the organization and you notice something that seems important. Can you act on it?
No — because it’s not your area of expertise or not within your responsibilities. So you pass it on to the relevant people, just as information passes through nerves in a body.
That way you understand what’s happening and respond experimentally and iteratively, evaluating and evolving as things unfold. That’s a brief introduction to navigating via tension.
2. Drivers — the “why”
In S3 we have a concept called a “driver”: the motive — the “why” — for responding to a situation.
For example: we spend a lot of time on administrative work every week, so we don’t have time for more revenue-generating work. We need to free up time.
You can describe it briefly, exploring what’s happening and what we need.
Look at this statement: it actually breaks down into four parts.
First, the current situation: we spend a lot of time on administrative work every week. That’s like an observation. The effect of the situation — why it matters to the organization — is that it reduces our ability to generate revenue.
What we need is more time; we don’t have enough. And the effect of responding is that we can do more revenue-generating work.
It’s nothing profound — just stating the obvious.
What’s interesting is that even with obvious things, if you introduce this concept to a team, ask them to identify drivers they think are meaningful and then describe them, people will see things completely differently.
So when you bring people together to talk about drivers, you can compare different perspectives and build a fuller picture of the situation, leading to a more accurate, shared understanding of what’s happening and what you need.
It’s a very useful analytical tool that prevents wasting time by rushing to respond to a driver, since it may later turn out that people had very different understandings of what they were responding to.
This matters locally, at the team level, and at the organizational level too.
I know people in organizations — large ones — who have completely different views of why their organization exists. Every day, each of them responds to their own “why.” No wonder things sometimes get confusing.
So ask: is this driver relevant?
You only need to ask: if I respond to this situation, will it help us? If I don’t respond, will it harm us? It’s not about whether it’s important, or whether it should be pushed down the priority list — it’s about whether it’s meaningful to act on. If it isn’t, drop it. If it is, make sure everyone knows as early as possible.
3. Domains — whose is it?
The next question is: “Who’s responsible for this?” Is this within my domain? Is it within my sphere of influence?
Let me clarify: asking this doesn’t mean “it’s not my problem.” We’re responsible for our roles in the organization; if you can do it, go ahead. But if it’s not within your domain, pass it to the relevant role or someone on the relevant team.
In S3, one way to define a domain is to clarify the “why” and then break it down into parts: what must be done and who is accountable, the constraints involved, and the resources you need to provide.
So what resources should we provide, and what qualities, skills and experience are preferred, to support people in this domain?
Most importantly, have evaluation criteria and regularly evaluate the domain to make sure everything is still going well.
People respond to drivers in two ways: one is doing the work, or organizing how you do it; the other is governance — making governance decisions and continually iterating and evolving them.
There’s a simple way to distinguish operations from governance. Just ask:
Is the response to this driver based on a previous agreement?
If so, just act on it. If not, ask whether — given the organization’s context — the decision made in response to this driver will have ongoing consequences for future decisions and actions. If not, it’s probably an operational decision. But if it may have lasting effects, we call it governance.
When a driver enters the realm of governance, sociocracy does some interesting things. For example, it moves decision-making from a manager to the whole team. The manager sets down their authority, and the team selects someone to facilitate the meeting process so everyone can co-create and reach agreement.
We should also ask ourselves why, and when, co-creation is appropriate.
Because if one person making the decision works fine, you don’t want to co-create. But if you need collective, distributed intelligence — if you’re trying to deal with a complex problem, if you don’t even know what you need to know, if you want to make full use of diversity and hear different and innovative views, if you want to increase people’s ownership of decisions — then you should try a more participatory way of making decisions.
I believe good governance reduces governance. In today’s organizations, we should let people take part in decisions as freely and autonomously as possible.
When you think about what decisions we should make, don’t put obstacles in people’s way; create opportunities for them to respond better themselves.
When it comes to decisions, our aim should be “good enough for now, safe enough to try.” We don’t really know what’s best or perfect, so this iterative, incremental approach — through safe-to-fail experiments, perhaps many of them — lets us learn quickly and then iterate and evolve based on what we learn.
Here I need to talk about objections — a very powerful thing. Many people don’t have the courage to stand up and say, “No, I don’t agree,” or to share their reasons for objecting.
But we celebrate objections. Objections reveal the possibility of harm, or room to improve on what we’re currently doing. So we invite people to share their objections, or to say that they have none.
We need to integrate objections to evolve our decisions, reach agreement and make decisions that are good enough.
Then, once everything is clear, we regularly take time to review and see whether, given what we’ve learned, we need to change or improve what we’re doing.
Having introduced a few patterns, here’s what else I want to share:
One is about how to organize work. If you know Agile, you’re probably already familiar with many of the patterns: planning and review meetings, daily stand-ups to start the day, retrospectives, and regularly evaluating and improving your workflow.
Visualizing work so people can see progress at a glance; prioritizing work; pulling work when you have the energy and capacity; and perhaps limiting work in progress, because it helps improve overall effectiveness.
These are S3’s patterns for organizing work. Put them all together and look at an organization from its beginnings: as it grows, different people take care of different domains, making decisions that are good enough for now and continually iterating and evolving. What we see is an emergent organization, not a pre-planned one.
7. Building the organization
Finally, I’d like to talk about building the organization.
We talked about roles earlier. In S3 we recognize that people often organize themselves in groups, so we have a pattern called “circle,” along with two or three other group patterns.
You can read our materials for more detail on how people operate in groups and the different characteristics of these collaborative groups.
We also link domains to ensure the flow of information and influence, creating two-way value links. People can attend each other’s governance meetings to bring in different perspectives, and we select people to represent us and carry our wisdom into other domains.
Combining all of this produces a variety of organizational structure patterns, now used around the world. When you add S3’s principles and patterns to an organization, you’ll see people allowing information and influence to flow freely through the whole system in all sorts of ways, changing and adapting to whatever happens.
Buurtzorg — we heard this example earlier — has nurses self-selecting based on why they chose to join. Morning Star has a six-month trial period, so people are chosen for the organization and roles based on that reason.
In S3 we have a similar pattern called the “peer review” — a self-initiated review, not a performance review imposed by a manager.
As individuals or teams, we invite people to give feedback on our work, share their understanding and suggest improvements, helping people keep learning and growing in their roles and teams.
That’s a high-level overview of S3; I wanted to give you a sense of it from different angles.
To close, I want to ask: what does this mean for you?
Setting all these patterns aside, I believe the most important thing in organizational change is “us.” Self-reflection can sometimes be very helpful, because much of what we do is actually unconscious.
There’s one pattern in S3 that I think is among the easiest to understand and the most continually challenging: “contribute” — actively taking on work.
Because it invites us to ask ourselves: is my current behavior making the greatest possible contribution to the effectiveness of this collaboration?
Is my behavior right now — every moment from now until the end of my life — making the greatest contribution to this collaboration?
We can extend this to our role as human beings: is my behavior at this moment making the greatest contribution to human well-being? If not, what should I do?
Sometimes helpful participation isn’t all laughter and cheer. Sometimes it means interrupting someone, raising your hand to challenge the status quo, breaking an agreement — and sometimes it means learning restraint, holding back from rushing in.
Finally, thank you all for listening. If there’s one thing I’d like you to take home, I’d invite you to ask yourself: is the way you’re living now good enough? After this conference, is there anything you’d be happy to do differently?
This isn’t a thinking process but an intuition, because at a deep level we already know what’s good enough. If you’re ever unsure, you can always ask the people around you for feedback.
I’d like you to consider this: we’re living with the consequences of what those before us did and didn’t do, and our children will live with the consequences of what we do and don’t do. What kind of future do you want to leave for your children? How do you want to act — or not act?
