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Integrative
COMPLEXITY
Complexity
- Ambiguity - Uncertainty
DYNAMIC
CO-GOVERNANCE
The
complexity and uncertainty of our world requires us (all of
us!) to learn new skills to be able to navigate uncertainty
and complexity. These new skills include perspective coordination,
collaboration capacity, decision-making & processing tools
and contextual thinking. These four are particularly difficult
for us in the West to master, however, because they are dynamic
and relational and can only be improved through community
learning, which is precisely the kind of learning that our
current education system discourages. Essentially to learn
these skills we have to 'unlearn' many skills we learned at
school!
Dynamic
Co-Governance, known as 'sociocracy' in Europe, is an organisational
system and structure designed to achieve participative alignment,
but without the often very inefficient processes normally
associated with democracy or consensus. It offers a way of
organsational decision-making and choice-creating process
where every voice can be heard equivalently and so ensures
that no stone is left unturned and no perspective left unviewed,
thus producing very rich considered collective decisions.
Sociocracy was first developed in Holland 50 years ago and
is now the standard approach of organisational governance
in many organisations in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy,
France, Holland, Portugal, Sweden, UK, Austraila, USA and
Canada. It is 'dynamic' as it enables organisations to steer
fluidly in ever changing organic world.
Organisations
face challenges that are so complex that solutions cannot
be found or implemented by a few elite leaders at the top.
What is required is full involvement, collaboration and engagement
of all involved in an organisaiton. This requires a different
type of decision-making, which is 'democratic' in the sense
that all are involved, but not 'democratic' in the sense that
it is not limited by the poor bi-polar antagonistic (adversarial)
voting found in most democratic systems. Voting is fundamentally
an exclusive and very impoverished form of collective thinking.
DCG is a collective way of thinking which is inclusive and
holistic and takes into account the diversity of perspectives,
a symbiosis releasing the soul of the collective. But it does
require the learning of certain skills like perspective coordination
and contextual thinking to succeed.
One
of the ways of learning VUCA skills is by learning the same
skills which are also present in sociocracy or its derivatives
(Sociocracy 3.0, Holacracy, Circle Forward, Integrative Decision-making,
Neighborocracy etc.). Like sociocracy, VUCA skills can only
be learned by practice in groups, hence relational communities
of practice. Hence it is worth learning sociocratic processing,
irrespective of whether you actually want to use sociocracy
as a governance system, because it actually lets you learn
the very skills required for VUCA. Consequently, we are now
more focussed on teaching VUCA skills per se rather than sociocratic
skills. Regardless, you will do get two for one!
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