Is your workplace a psychologically safe environment and productive at the same time? How are decisions taken? Coming from the top? Consulted? Majority voting? Do all the workers have a shared objective and goal? If you answered yes to all of these questions, then it is likely that your workplace is very close to applying the principles and practices proposed by sociocracy, the governance structure created by French philosopher Auguste Comte, and Gerard Endenburg developer of the Sociocratic Circle Method, than you might think.
So what is sociocracy? It is a Governance system and practice, its purpose is to increase the productivity of bodies and organisations by ensuring psychologically safe environments, and it is applied is by working on consensus instead of directive or majority voting, and ensuring that a worker’s role includes participation in defining objectives, work processes and decision-making. In other words in sociocracy the whole has sovereign rights, and is responsible for the wellbeing and safeguard of the interest of the whole, be it a company, a body or society.
Sociocracy is a governance system, just like democracy is, and it resonates best with organisations and companies, where regulations are kept to the minimum power is equally distributed to groups and networks, and decision-making and choices are supported and empowered.
So we are talking about a corporate governance system which we can say resembles how a human body, or living organism lives, centred on a natural system where it’s work is decentralised and the subsystems are partly autonomous and yet dependent on one another, just like our internal organs. The rules are simplified to the core, such as the creation of circles and sub-circles within each circle and so on and so forth, just like tissue made by cells. Although the main principle is that of inclusion and egalitarian values applied at all levels, with as much participatory decision-making with a feedback loop system. The proposed sociocratic structure has guidelines and approaches to any aspect of management up to even how to structure work meetings, and making of the organisation a fertile soil for ongoing improvement.
