Turbo-charge entrepreneurial spirit in your organization – without the chaos.

A big part of the movement towards reinventing organizations in the 21st century have been approaches to replace the management hierarchy with more elegant structures. Those approaches were pioneered in the 1970s in the Netherlands by Sociocracy, and in the 2010s several new players have entered the scene leading to a radical expansion of what's possible in how you work together.

But this expansion comes at a cost: If you are not nerd about arcane decision making structures, how are you supposed to decide whether classical Sociocracy, Sociocracy 3.0, Holacracy, Do-ocracy, the Open Organization Framework or the Loop Approach is the most fitting approach for you? 

We’ve been part of the European self-organization movement from the beginning and we’re here to give you an overview over some core principles of role-based self-organization and how we actually go about implementing it these days. (Hint: We help you in choosing the most fitting approach for your company and customize it to your needs.)

What is Self-Organization?

Self-organization tries to solve the problem that many progressive organizations have encountered when trying to become less hierarchical: Suddenly everything grinds to a halt because decision-making by consensus somehow ends up as the norm. Team-members, instead of making courageous, purpose-driven decisions, delegate ever smaller and smaller decisions to the group consensus until you find yourself sitting in a circle for three hours, debating what brand of coffee to buy for your office kitchen.

That problem usually arises when you just try to get rid of hierarchy without replacing it with something better. For all its downsides, the management hierarchy has a few upsides too, otherwise it wouldn’t have been the dominant way of organizing over the last century. One of these upsides is that – at least theoretically – you always know how to get to a final decision. It’s simple: the boss decides. So whenever you have a disagreement, you know how to solve it: Let the boss decide. The downside is that now every major decision lands on the boss’s desk, leading to either decision-making bottlenecks which slow down the organization, or bad decisions made more quickly. In any case, even if you get really good at “giving back the monkey”, i.e. at handing back the implicit responsibility for solving a problem back to the person who approached you with it, it’s very hard not to get overwhelmed at the top. It’s not impossible, mind you, but it’s a constant uphill battle.

If you now remove hierarchy without having a clear system of how you get to final decisions – especially if there is disagreement – you very quickly land at the implicit agreement that you should now decide everything by consensus. It’s just safer that way. If anyone could question your decision and you have no way of telling them “no, I can make that decision”, it’s more efficient to just ask for everyone’s consensus upfront. But that dynamic quickly leads to everyone feeling they have to be involved in everything, which in turn leads to everyone becoming overwhelmed.

Where with hierarchy you only had one boss, now everyone else is your boss.

Where with hierarchy only a few people at the top worried about everything (and the rest were able to lean back), now everyone has to worry about everything all the time.

Individuals can fill different roles in different parts of the organization, with different expectations put on them and different decision making powers invested in them – not based on their social or legal status, but based on the roles they fill. If there is no clarity around how a decision is made, the corresponding role can just decide on their own. No need to ask a boss for permission, or the group for consensus.

There’s a clear consensus-ish meta-process of defining and updating those roles and decision making structures regularly, which is sometimes called the Governance Process or the "structural meeting", depending on which approach you use.

This process has the upside of consensus-based decision making in that everyone can make proposals and everyone is heard in their feedback. But it avoids the downside of vetoes overruling change ideas by a smart twist: A proposal is accepted not if everyone gives a thumbs up, but already if nobody has a clearly reasoned objection.  Even if there is an objection, the objector has the duty to join the search for an integrated solution, otherwise their objection is declared as invalid. So the process – at least if done correctly – excludes the possibility of endless discussions that go nowhere, or of ego-based decision-making gridlock.

And the Governance process is only used sparingly. It’s only used for decisions about the structure, so only for defining roles and decision making authorities. All other decisions, all the operational, strategic, day-to-day-decisions, are made inside those defined roles, and the standard mode of decision making there is localized autocracy: The relevant role decides.

This split of making structural decisions together and – based on that jointly agreed upon structure – making operational decisions in localized autocracy is the big difference to hierarchy, where the standard mode of decision is “the boss decides”. And the big difference to consensus democracy, where everyone has to agree to everything all the time. 

All those key elements are usually put into an explicit rule-set (sometimes even called a "constitution").

In it you usually find the definitions of what roles, accountabilities, domains and policies mean, how the Governance Process or Structural Meeting process works, as well as some ideas of how to steer resources and priorities in day-to-day work. It also provides some out-of-the-box decision making structures for who decides on budgets and on who fills which role, all of which can and should be adapted over time through the Governance process. In a full-on self-organization implementation the organization’s power holders officially ratify that rule-set, meaning that they give their decision making authority over into the self-organization system (read more about an implementation in our client story about ONTEC).