How to make decisions for your project - could 'sociocracy' be the answer?

25 May

February 9, 2023

***David and the Tiny House Community Bristol Design Circle at a Design Circle meeting***

Designing and building a project involves many, many decisions at every stage. Whether you're renovating your home, or developing a group cohousing project, having a structure for making decisions is essential. Most couples struggle to make decisions together, and expanding this to cohousing groups when many more people are involved requires a considered approach to discussion, fairness, and decision making. In this week's blog, project architect David Caldwell reflects on the benefits of 'sociocracy' and how we have adopted some of the principles in our own practice.

We have worked with a number of co-housing groups who use a sociocratic governance system. If you are interested in forming a co-housing group and you want to embed equality into the structure of the group, it could be well worth considering whether this could be right for you. When working with such groups we have been a part of many sociocratically facilitated meetings, and have really seen the power that this method has in allowing all members to feel heard.

Sociocracy is a system of self-governance, or peer governance, which was first developed by Gerard Endenburg in the Netherlands in the 1980s. It is a non-hierarchical, decentralised system which breaks down organisations into small groups which are known as circles. Each circle has their own area of decision making authority. For example, within a co-housing group in the process of developing proposals for a new housing project, you might have a ‘design circle’, a ‘management circle’ a ‘community outreach circle’ and potentially many other circles. These groups can make decisions within their own domain and feedback to the rest of the organisation.

One of the main aims of Sociocracy is to foster psychologically safe environments which allow all members to input ideas, thoughts and decisions equally, and within which all members feel accepted and respected. We have really seen the power of this to harness everyones ideas and energy and to avoid group discussions being dominated by a few of the loudest voices. It has often been very inspiring to see the richness and depth of ideas and thoughts which arise because of this.

Within Sociocracy decisions are made by consent, this means that a decision can only be made when all members agree, a useful concept used in Sociocracy is ‘range of tolerance’, so a solution must be found which is within all members range of tolerance. This is opposed to consensus, in which a majority of members must agree, while many others could strongly object and the decision could still hold.

We have been inspired to try to start implementing some of the principles of Sociocracy within Barefoot by forming circles in the practice. We now have a ‘community circle’, a ‘design circle’, a ‘systems circle’ and a ‘marketing circle’ and everyone is a part of one or two of these. We still have a long way to go and a lot of learning for these to function as well as they could, but we’ve started the journey!