How to Change An Organization Using Sociocracy 3.0

Okay, just to start out, for people who are not familiar with Sociocracy 3.0, could you give a brief summary of what it is and why people should care about it?

Yes.

So you already mentioned it's a collection of patterns that help people to collaborate more effectively.

And when I say patterns, I mean either a process or a guideline or a practice that You can think of these patterns as templates or Lego pieces that you can use to, in your organization, kind of plug them into the places where it's needed to address a certain challenge that you're facing.

And these patterns came about through... initially through breaking down certain methodologies like sociocratic circle method, that's one of the main ones, but also Scrum and other Agile frameworks and Kanban.

Basically, my colleagues, Bernard and James, when they came together initially, they wanted to put together a set of resources that brings sociocracy to the agile and lean world.

Because I think still to this day, what sociocracy brings as a concept is a way of making decisions and a way of addressing the topic of governance that fits very well with, you know, the agile way of thinking and doing things.

So when they started to put together these resources, they realized, wait a Is there somebody who does all the things, like all the steps, all the different practices at once? And the answer is no.

Actually, what people do is they kind of try some things out.

They keep what works, they discard everything else, and they carry on doing things.

So what Sociocracy 3.0 is encouraging is doing precisely that, but in a more conscious and intentional way.

So rather than kind of, okay, we're just going to try things out and see what sticks.

The idea is more that you are identifying and responding to priorities in your organization and you're pulling in patterns to address them.

So obviously, right now, I think there's about like 70 something patterns.

So it's quite a big collection.

And over time, we've developed the body of free resources so you can learn about, like read about it online.

And One key element to understand about these patterns is that they are tied together by seven principles, which I would say they are the basis.

I kind of imagine a world, a future world where...

There will be no patterns needed anymore.

And what would happen is that people would kind of have an embodied experience of those principles and act accordingly.

So I'm just going to mention the principles which are probably familiar for the people in the agile world.

Continuous improvement and empiricism.

And then there is equivalence, which refers to involving people in decisions that affect them.

Consent, which is a way of making decisions by inviting and resolving objections.

Transparency.