Sociocracy 3.0

04 Dec 2016

On the second day of XP Days 2016 Benelux, I attended the Sociocracy 3.0 session by Jef Cumps and Johan Decoster from iLean. This session was about getting to know the basics of Sociocracy 3.0, or S3 in short. We also got our hands dirty on an S3 technique called driver mapping.

S3

S3 is a pretty young framework, built around passion and innovation. It’s a principles-based pattern-language, for more conscious, passionate and effective collaboration. You can interpret pattern-language as a backpack full of techniques (driver mapping is one of them by the way). Principles-based means it is built around 7 principles, as shown in the picture below. S3 is open & free, kind of like open source software I guess.

Jef mentioned that, in the Netherlands, you can legally create a Sociocratic company. I guess this could mean that there are no bosses, no unions, etc…

Jef and Johan showed us the difference between S3 and Holacracy and gave us a small history lesson. From what I understood, Holacracy (founded in 2007) is like a copy-paste of the classic Sociocracy. 2 guys named James Priest and Bernhard Bockelbrink didn’t like where this was going and they founded S3 in 2014. Holacracy is more constrained and has more rules than S3. Also, Sociocracy is harder to write and pronounce :-)

Good enough for now, safe enough to try

Next, we dove into some decision making models. We compared consent to consensus and some other popular models, and we looked at how consent could work in practice. With consent, you go for something that is good enough for now and safe enough to try. There’s a lot of important stuff hidden in these few words…

• good enough … to try: there may be concerns, but that’s OK, let’s try it
• for now: decisions will be evaluated later
• safe enough: although concerns are OK, objections will block a proposal (but not it’s driver)

I like this approach because it feels like it’s quick and easy to go and try something. And it’s evaluated later on, so it’s basically inspect and adapt.

Driver Mapping

I won’t write anything about this, since my colleague Tim Schraepen has blogged about it recently.