SOCIOCRACY: THE MOVEMENT

I’m part of several sociocratic organizations, and we sometimes get requests from what I call “sociocracy tourists”–people who want to attend a sociocratic meeting to see what it is like. I have a standard response that might surprise you: “Come. But you will very likely be disappointed. Sociocracy is almost invisible. Because good governance is quiet. What you can witness is flow but you will have a hard time seeing where it even came from. You’ll attend just to see how invisible it is.”

If you’ve ever been part of a sociocratic meeting, if it was well-run, you might have not noticed anything. And that’s the point. After all, we come together not to practice a certain kind of governance but to get things done and to connect. We want our attention to be free to take care of both the tasks that need attention and of each other. It feels effortless, like flying.

One thing you might notice as you enter a sociocratic meeting is that people speak in rounds. People speak not at will but keeping an order, one by one. What I have experienced in using rounds is that an amazing flow emerges in mature groups accustomed to them, and members begin to surrender to group wisdom. Very often, I leave a meeting and realize: this decision was actually built in tiny pieces and I cannot even tease apart who contributed what. It was all “us.” That group experience of flow is what I love most about sociocracy and I never ever want to go back to the old ways.

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