Limninous

Close to a decade ago I read the book “We the People: Consenting to a Deeper Democracy” by John Buck Jr, on Sociocracy as a democratic but non-majority-rule model for organizations, reflecting histories of Quaker consensus and Dutch worker-run businesses.

At that point in my development and interpretation, it introduced three principles central to organizational decision making that I've found useful:

• Consent, emphasizing a distinction between preferences and tolerances in blocking objections, and a method for valuing disagreements to maintain group cohesion. While Sociocracy mostly presents this as a decision-making version of consensus focused on evaluating objections, the book also frames it with respect to voluntary association, that a group persists by continuing consent by all members to the group's aims and proposals to achieve those aims.
• Understanding, reacting, and deciding as a deliberative process for achieving consent. This echoes facilitation methods for me, opening up space in the discussion for disagreements to be voiced non-confrontationally in a shared context, and amending a proposal along the way.
• Circles, and circles of circles, as a name for representational assemblies with particular scopes and aims. For me this emphasizes a bottom-up and two-way delegation for decision-making and decision-sharing, with an appropriately circular sense of responsibility.

Usually “consent” is the most relevant yet contentious proposal to adopt, it seems to me that disagreement comes from two related ends:

• Those for whom consensus represents an unworkable slog requiring too much trust and shared values when hard choices have to be made. For these, the framing of “consent rather than consensus” is a good opening to explore why participation is already grounded in consent and why we should try not to implement decision-making processes that override consent, even in the face of urgency or disagreement.
• Those for whom consensus has already worked well, who object to a perceived weakening of a process they've experienced as trust-building. For these, coming from my own view that these are commensurate processes, I encourage sharing how we've seen consensus work (especially blocks and reservations) and whether there are specific amendments to our group's understanding of consent which we could all adopt.

I've never participated in an organization that adopted Sociocracy in the large, and only provide my own interpretation from reading and subsequent interactions in groups with others influenced by their own understandings of Sociocracy, democracy, and consensus. But in the small, I've introduced these to groups and boards as a path away from concerns of factionalism and power concentration. Sometimes – moreso when less was available in English on the web – using the capital-S Sociocracy has been off-putting for a sense of consultancy-branding. I don't think these ideas are particularly unique to Sociocracy in the end.

Nonetheless, I've found “Sociocracy” to be useful shorthand for these principles that acknowledges the source of them in my life and references further material for informing and adopting this particular approach.