so um we're going to start out with uh Ted Rau and Jerry catch Gonzalez and they're going to share a little bit about the sociopathy model take it away

thank you Renee um yes and what I I love what you said earlier when I think of sociocracy uh gathered group Discerning love at its core um that's kind of how I understand sociocracy I'm going to do a we're going to go through a slide deck um and then after that we'll have the congregations talking about their experience and then we'll have question and answer a period of time so I'll go right to the slide deck that I've got here sociocracy let's see all right um accuracy governance socials so governance by those who associate together or those who work together uh those who worship together and their sociocracy has three kind of core elements one is decision making by consent another is organizational structure through the linked circles and the third is continuous Evolution through feedback and there's ways in which these all there's practices that bind all of these together the underlying principles being we want to be effective and we want to be egalitarian we want to be able to hold both of those

um then all of this as you can imagine this is like a steering wheel uh because governance is about steering your organization towards achieving its aims and these are their core elements that help us steer towards achieving our aim in mixed in with all these different core elements are the various practices like selection for roles by consent the meetings the performance reviews that we do for people in roles interpersonal feedback writing proposals together workflows these are all uh kind of bits and pieces of what holds the whole of steering towards the AIM we'll explain some of these things a little bit in the session today but some of those you'll just find out more over time so a little bit about the history and I liked what Renee said you know we don't really know the whole history of indigenous ways often were in circle you know everyone's speaking sense of equality we don't know exactly how that influenced the early history of sociocracy but we're pretty sure that it did the earliest mentions of sociocracy comes from a French philosopher named August Kant and he didn't actually coin the word but he put it into use and in those in that era the many philosophers were influenced by indigenous thinking particularly from the Northwest um indigenous populations in the United States what is now the United States uh then the sociocracy idea continued with uh um sociologist named Lester Ward but it didn't really become start becoming what it is until kesperka and Betty Cadbury implemented consent decision making in their verplatz the Children's School in the Netherlands and in that school in the Netherlands a man named Gerard endenberg he went there grew up became an electrical engineer and instituted what we now know as sociocracy in in his in the an Electronics uh company and from there branched out into spreading the ideas of of sociocracy um through training and education and that's kind of where we start coming in John buck and Sharonville lions in 2007 wrote we the people that was kind of the first book um bringing sociocracy to English-speaking world and that's about the time when sociocracy for all begins so and sociocracy has spread in not only in congregations but in communities co-ops nonprofits businesses neighborhoods Etc so Ted unto you yes hello everybody my name is Ted and I'm going to speak a little bit of about the history and Jerry you can just Advance it all off that slide so because I'm not going to go deeply into it I just want you to get a sense of what we care about in sociography for all um you can see we started in 2016 you actually have here the two Founders which is rare these these days that we're doing events together um and we started doing training especially immersion training and then people wanted to join they said this is cool how can we how can we do this can we join so we then became a membership organization in sociography for all started to doing it doing Advanced Training um writing books um translating books and so on and we'll talk about that at the end and now we're about 200 people worldwide in several languages and in about 50 circles or so but that changes all the time which I hope we get to talk about why these things change and you can advance thank you and um one of the principles in that steering wheel that Jerry showed was decision making by consent and I want to just highlight the few pieces about consent that I find important and then Jerry will talk a little bit about the structure and also show how the structure can be adapted or can be used um in the context that we're here for today so consent decision making is where the um everybody in a circle comes in so here we see what would be five people in this particular example and whenever they would have a proposal and they want to approve this proposal by consent together with them and Jerry you can advance then they would pass this proposal whenever everybody consents to it so each person in the circle needs to give consent so that it is consent if one of them says no then that means this no this objection needs to be looked at further so we can figure out together as a group what could be improved and the next line what's interesting about it is that um the question that we ask is slightly different from what many of us know as consensus because sometimes it's not it's not consistently consistently so but often the question for consensus is do you think this is a good idea or do you think this is what we should do or do you agree or do you like the proposal and then socioccasin consent decision making the question is slightly different it is do you think this will work do you think this will further or will it will it further the aim or will it keep us from doing what we thought we would do which is the aim so will it inhibit or will it further the aim and there you see here the way the heart is that would be the that would be the group of people in any given group that would say I love this proposal it's great it's perfect it's exactly what I want and those are the people that in consensus decision making would say yes foreign you can see that with that icon of the um of the like in the lighter green lighter green no actually the other one light the green thank you and those are the people that might maybe not say this proposal is my number one or my favorite what I would have chosen but they might say yeah fine this this is also going to work it's also going to further our aim or at least not harm it it's like yeah we can do this and that is the key the key uh group of people that we um include in the yes and consent decision making because decision making by consent means there can't be any objection right so if there's an objection we have no consent we need to work a little harder to listen more and figure out what to do but it's enough if there's simply no objection not everybody needs to come to a place that they are now saying this is the best place best proposal ever written so you see here on the right that's why we have this um difference here between this works oh this doesn't work whether it's your preference is actually not as important because that helps groups adopt a proposal and bring something into action more easily so that then when the same boat and learn what this proposal brought us and whether it it enhanced what we're trying to do or not and then we can adjust it together because none of us can predict the future so it helps us try something out and you see with that broken gear icon there an objection really means no hold on if we are if we um if we approve this proposal then the thing that we're trying to do together can't be done anymore for example we're going to be too busy or somebody's going to get hurt or this is not safe this is too expensive all those reasons are very good reasons to object and we would want to hear them because they help us prevent us from making mistakes now you can advance and one thing that I really appreciate about consent as well is that it helps us it's a step-by-step process to it which helps helps us in a group to think together at the same pace so whenever we make a decision we always make sure that we have a have a time to answer questions ask and answer questions that's why you would need to click to me so we want to make sure that people understand the proposal and then the next step we do one round of making sure that everybody can give a reaction to the proposal and there we have it and then in the last step we make sure that everybody either consents or objects and then if there's an objection again we work some harder some are harder and what do you see in the front and the top right here is what we would call around that's that soccer practice right talking one by one by one and actually listening when somebody speaks instead of being at the edge of your seat waiting till the person takes a breath so you can you know get in and prove them wrong that's not what happens in sociocracy because of rounds that keep a certain order of what we do in what order and who speaks when so that everybody can relax and knows what's happening and it's really working together and over to you Jerry hey the the central idea for Gerard endenberg was no one ignored every voice matters so when you have a round you know that every voice matters if you do consensus without Clarity of rounds then the people who speak the most often seem to have their voices seem to matter more when you do uh majority rule the people who've got the majority their voices matter in a minority doesn't so I'm going to turn to organizational structure so here's the kind of the basic structure and this is ordinary this is kind of like any organization you might have a board you have a management team or a coordinating Circle and then you have several departments and sub-departments and sub-sub-departments you know that's kind of standard structure what's different with sociocracy is that we we link those circles with two people uh the leader and the delegate who are chosen by consent by either the parent group or the or the child out group here so the selection process is by consent of your of your leadership rather than appointed a majority rule Etc and so the information flows all the way through all the circles because of this double linking So within each circle decision making by consent and within the organization a whole everyone is linked together and the information can flow

there is um it gets interesting when we think about the the top Circle or the board of directors or we often call Mission Circle how are those going to be organized in the context of um you know unitarians there may be typical that the membership is electing the board uh in the context of non-profits more often it's members of the board self-perpetuating selecting you know the next round or the next members of the board so there's ways to do either one of those we won't go into detail now but I want to bring this next piece is the what's interesting is that when you have a minister and you have lay leadership in a sense you have two sources of power if they work well together fabulous if they don't work well together ah it's awful um and if the lay leadership is an argument with itself that's hard um so what we look at with sociocracy is kind of unify the power structure you know everybody has power in a linked way and so the minister is not set apart but is one of the members of the Minnesota circle of the board is one of the members of the coordinating group and may have some other roles in the organization like perhaps leading the ministry or however you know you would call that um here is just one visualization of structure you know again Mission Circle coordinating Circle and maybe you have program with religious education social action environmental action Ministry worship and administrative kinds of things but this is not a static process and your own particular congregation probably has a different you know would come up with a different look than what you see here and you can keep adding you know there maybe a subset of social action as Refugee work and a subset of ministry might be pastoral care and it might be a choir Etc so you you keep developing your circles as fits your particular organization and Ted you want to continue here sure that box many of us this one song is um is the first book is basically the handbook and I know many people use it as kind of a reference handbook for sociography the second one is um who decides who decides is about how do you start when there's nobody to consent to something because the organization hasn't formed yet then how do you do it who decides that you're going to be making decisions by consent like how do you even get the first set of people started and this is a step-by-step step guide for that and then let's decide Together written by a colleague of ours hope um who has a lot of experience with um using this with children so this is her guide on how to do that I think that's the last stop show there you know one of the interesting things just being here is that we Ted and I both live in a co-housing community and we're aware that there's a way disproportionate number of unitarians in co-housing communities um you know around the United States and Canada and probably some of you here belong to some of those some of some co-housing communities have been started by Unitarian groups you know offshoots of of a particular congregation so glad to be here and then we're ready to talk with congregations great thank you both that was an awesome