Embodied Practice
This week, Network Weaver is excited to share a 3-part series by Root. Rise. Pollinate! on fostering connection in virtual space. The series was originally published earlier this year at The Reverb.
How to bring movement practice into virtual space to foster connection with our bodies’ wisdom
In our first post we shared the importance of breath practice and ritual for deep connection in virtual space and offered rituals grounded in the elements of air, water, and fire. As we share the next practice on embodiment, we’d like to invite you to consider how all elements, air, water, fire, and earth live within each of us.
How do we embody each element at different times including times of upheaval and possibility for interdependence, deep connection, and love in a rapidly changing world like now?
Embodying The Change We Seek
Movement requires movement. The simple truth of this statement is particularly important during these times of physical separation, especially when we sequester ourselves in our homes and lie or sit in one position for long periods of time. Perhaps we are in front of screens for work or to indulge in whatever’s on offer from the multitude of streaming services that keep popping up.
While this time of COVID-19 is a particular point in our lives, around the world, over time, many of our people have become disembodied as a result of the privilege given to intellectual knowledge and grind culture over more holistic ways of knowing and being. This has led to individual and collective burnout, and even trauma. Even changemakers now ground much of our work in logic models, pages upon pages of strategy, theory, and deep analysis. We lead with our heads, not our hearts and bodies, even though we often already know in our bodies what is most important. In leading with our heads, we lose touch with our bodies sometimes to the point of breakdown and exhaustion.
When we are disembodied, it can be hard for us to tap into what the change we seek would feel like.
If we are disconnected from our bodies, how do we know how and where feelings of joy and inspiration show up in our bodies?
How do we tap into the inner wisdom that tells us when we need to pivot into something more life-giving and sustainable? How well do we connect to the hearts, minds and bodies of ourselves and fellow beings?
Therein lies the importance of body-based work so that as we reconnect with and listen to our bodies, we can draw on and be one with the delicate balance of earth, water, air, and fire that lives within us and is required for the liberated, sustainable, and thriving world that so many of us work tirelessly for.
So how might you bring movement practice into virtual space to foster connection?
You can draw on and invite your community members to share practices that they already know and engage in like somatics, tai ji, and yoga. As you practice, be sure to move with your breath, being conscious about the physical actions you take with each inhale and exhale.
Ultimately, starting virtual gatherings with practices — like (breathing through) movement — can help bring everyone’s bodies, minds, and spirits into alignment, enabling deeper conversations. Starting with and in our bodies allows us to be more present with each other and experience a sense of intimacy, even across distance, time, and experience.
An Invitation
Consider this: how might physical movement coupled with breath support you and your connection to those you care about? Who might you invite to practice with you? Next time we’ll touch on the practice and importance of fostering intergenerational space.
Thank you for continuing to journey with us.
Read post 1 HERE and post 3 HERE.
Originally published March 11, 2021 at The Reverb.
Root, Rise, Pollinate! is an experiment that aims to catalyze and nurture a transnational community of feminist human rights advancers, organizers and movement builders using embodied practice for social transformation.
PLEASE DONATE to help Network Weaver continue in it’s mission to offer free support and resources to networks worldwide.
Taking a Virtual Breath
This week, Network Weaver is excited to share a 3-part series by Root. Rise. Pollinate! on fostering connection in virtual space. The series was originally published earlier this year at The Reverb.
How shared practices can create depth and connection despite physical separation
As we settle into our second year of physical separation wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic, our sense and practice of community and connection is stretched. We continue to maintain physical separation as an act of safety and care for each other for the foreseeable future.
The experience of physical separation is not only an experience between each other, but also within ourselves, as individuals.
If you stop and pay attention for a moment, and look away from your screen, can you locate where your breath currently sits? Is it in your throat, your chest, your belly, somewhere else?
When was the last time you intentionally noticed how your body moves: perhaps danced, stretched luxuriantly, or massaged yourself? When was the last time you listened for birdsong or paid attention to the ground holding you up? Or perhaps the physicality of all this is too much to bear?
In this time, many of us have the opportunity to deepen our practices of care, connection and community, bridging distance across time and space. We still get to support, celebrate, and be with each other albeit in virtual space. We get to be even more aware of why and how we do this.
Practices of connection with self and community are essential for us to harness and nurture the kind of energy needed not only to get us through hardship but also to imagine and bring forth futures of thriving, interdependence, and wholeness.
Over the past year Root. Rise. Pollinate! experimented with how to cultivate care, connection and community with feminist change makers around the world. We are going to share the virtual connection practices we developed in a series of three posts over the next few weeks. These practices were especially meaningful because they helped create a real sense of intimacy, care and depth even though we were separated physically by time, space and the pandemic. This was possible because the practices hinged on building authentic relationships, exchange, and building on each other’s wisdom.
The first post in our series focuses on how to open and set the space through breath practice and ritual. Subsequent posts will focus on embodied practice and intergenerational practice. We hope these offerings support you in this time of continued physical separation.
Setting the Scene: Preparing to be in Virtual Space
Even though we are limited to virtual rooms, it is still possible for us to “set the space” and create conditions for your group to experience authentic connection.
The most important thing is our attention and awareness. Before each session, invite community members to be in — and to the extent possible — protect a comfortable space with few distractions or disruptions for the duration of your time together. As participants arrive, play music whose energy captures how you want the community to feel during and after each session. Also invite community members to be and stay on camera if possible and to let go of any (assumed) judgement of their physical space or appearance. This preparation is particularly important as it creates the opportunity to arrive and stay in space with more ease.
Virtual gatherings make it so we miss out on some of the cues that we’d typically rely on in-person. How do we set and read energy in the ‘room’? What new cues do we need to tune into where body language subtleties are lost? How might we arrive together sans hugs, handshakes, and kisses? We propose setting and entering space with and through breath practice and ritual.
The Power of Breathing Together
Some research findings suggest that choir members, through synchronizing their breath and voices when singing, also synchronize their heartbeats.
This kind of connection, heart to heart, is important when setting energy that fosters connection for community building in virtual space.
Guided breath practice, which lasts for 10–15 minutes allows community members to:
- get out of their heads and release — at least for a little while — from whatever they have been doing or thinking prior to the session, and
- be with their individual breath as part of a collective, breathing organism
This practice may take the form of the group participating in five rounds of a five-breath sequence together, with accompanying physical movement. This works best when one person leads and provides cues for the group.
Breath (and physical movement) Practice
Coupling the breathing with physical movement ensures that community members arrive within themselves, their own bodies, as they arrive with the community as well.
Palms facing up, interlace your fingers just below your belly button.
Inhaling
- As you inhale slowly, move your arms up
- As you get to chest level, rotate your palms (face down then quickly face up again) to allow you to bring your interlaced palms above your head with ease. Pay attention to the sensations in your shoulders. If you have any tightness, lower your arms to the level at which the tightness releases.
Exhaling:
- Turn your upturned interlaced palms to face down
- Slowly exhale as you bring your arms back to just below your belly button. Aim for your exhale to be longer than your inhale
This completes a round of breath.
- Round one: inhale in silence, exhale in silence (five times)
- Round two: inhale in silence, exhale with a hum (five times)
- Round three: inhale in silence, exhaling with one vowel — a (ah), e (eh), i (ee), o (oh), u (oo) — on each breath
- Round four: inhaling in silence, exhaling with a hum (five times)
- Round five: inhaling in silence, exhaling in silence (five times)
Arrival breath-work is about opening and holding space for community members’ hearts to connect and beat as one in preparation for whatever conversations or work that lies ahead.
Once the community is breathing as one, then you can move into shared ritual in order to continue to deepen connection.
Ritual: Setting Space and Coming to Center Together
Rituals have long been part of human existence across different cultures bringing community together in times of joy and celebration, in times of grief and mourning, to commune with the spirit realm, to assuage anxiety or prepare us for big undertakings — to get us through life. In an ever-busy world, where many peoples have lost touch with ritual, particularly communal rituals, the slowing down, the great pause brought on by COVID-19 created an opportunity to practice and reëngage with, or perhaps create new rituals.
We rooted in rituals and conscious practices to bring the group together in a focused, energized way. In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, rituals for self-care and healing are essential as are rituals and practices that deepen our sense of spirit-rootedness and collective thriving. Rituals may be rooted in a tradition or culture, or be co-created in groups. Below we share two rituals around water and fire.
Creating a Community Water Font
Tewa elder, Kathy Sanchez from San Ildefonso Pueblo in New Mexico modified an in-person water ritual for virtual space, inviting the community to acknowledge, honor, and commune with water as a life-giving and life sustaining source.
Invite community members to bring water into space in a ceramic, earthenware, or similar vessel forged from living material.
Participants name the source of their water — river, stream, watershed, etc. and share reflections on water in their lives including how it heals and lives in and through each community member. Community members then imagine pouring, and therefore mixing their water, into a vessel where many waters flow as one.
Building a Communal Fire
Invite community members to bring a candle and matches or lighter into space. At a designated time, those leading the space invite community members to each light their candles and share their internal wisdom about how this element — and indeed all elements — show up in our external and internal lives as life-giving and sometimes destructive forces as we build towards thriving communities and futures.
Rituals such as these enable community members to thoughtfully bring their individual experience into the community as part of building a collective ritual, which they can carry beyond virtual space.
An Invitation
As we close out this post, we invite you to practice some of what we’ve shared — perhaps first with yourself, and then with a friend or colleague. You can begin by just taking one breath, consciously inhaling and then exhaling. Consider, what difference might it make to our collective futures if we regularly synchronized our heartbeats? Stay tuned for the next offering on embodied practice.
Read post 2 HERE and post 3 HERE.
Originally published March 4, 2021 at The Reverb.
Root, Rise, Pollinate! is an experiment that aims to catalyze and nurture a transnational community of feminist human rights advancers, organizers and movement builders using embodied practice for social transformation.
PLEASE DONATE to help Network Weaver continue in it’s mission to offer free support and resources to networks worldwide.
Virtual Meeting Role Cards
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Virtual meetings and events are common place by now. Technology like Zoom and the persisting globalization make effective virtual meetings a must. Since January 2019 I am co-hosting the monthly network weaver cafes, in which we learn about different topics such as learning or governance of transformative networks (http://bit.ly/weavercafe).
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These virtual meeting role cards emerged through our process of organizing the weaver cafes. We found that these roles allow for seamless and interactive meetings. The roles, if done well, guarantee excellent technical hosting and support, harvesting the key outcomes and facilitating co-creation. You can fill the roles as an organizing team or distribute them to participants at the beginning of the call by sharing these role cards in the chat.
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I hope you find these valuable in your own work and feed them forward to anybody in your network that might be interested!
Scaffolding for System Shifting Networks
Networks come in all shapes and sizes. However, if you want to be a system shifting network you will need to put in place scaffolding so that transformation can emerge easily and quickly. In nature, billions of soil organisms and mycorrhizal fungal mats work together to form this type of scaffolding to distribute resources and support the growth of plants and trees as they create a forest.
There are 6 basic structures that work together to create an environment for rapid change. Some, such as innovation funds, have been prototyped by many different networks. Others, such as communications systems and governance systems, are still in their infancy. I encourage us to work together to experiment with these structures.
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1) A communications system that provides places, spaces, processes and protocols for individuals and projects in the network to communicate, interact, self-organize, learn and expand.
It includes a platform that has the capacity to provide for network-specific spaces, cross network spaces for networks to interact, and whole network of networks common spaces. Such a platform supports self-organizing: people with an interest to find each other, have discussions, move to action and be fully supported in that action, and then have easy pathways to share what is learned. This aspect of scaffolding is the least well-developed of all the elements and this lack is holding back the potential of networks to bring transformation of systems.
The next step is to develop a fully functioning platform. Four networks are planning to work collaboratively to develop such a platform. If your network is interested in joining a platform cooperative to work on this development, let us know.
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2) An innovation or activation fund that catalyzes and resources self-organizing, collaborative projects.
This aspect of network scaffolding is fairly well developed, with examples from the work of Leadership Learning Community (LLC), Go Philanthropy’s Networks in India, the Resonance Network and the WEB Network.
The idea is to jumpstart self-organizing and collaboration through small grants to collaborative projects. Only a few rounds of such funding are usually needed to tip the network into a self-organizing regime, where experimental, collaborative projects become the norm.
The next step in innovation funds is to have a second round of larger grants that grows out of what has been learned in the first round. In addition, more attention needs to be paid to harvesting learning from the set of projects funded.
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3) Communities of practice (CoPs) and learning popups where people, especially from Innovation Fund projects, can explore new topics, learn from each other, support each other with challenges, and share what they have learned with the larger network.
Communities of practice (CoPs) are also a fairly well-developed element. Most are monthly virtual sessions lasting 5-9 months with 25-75 participants. A typical session includes relationship building time often in breakout rooms, a short content/practice piece, a chance to practice a new process, with discussion on how to apply done in small group breakout sessions, commitments, peer assists for people with challenges, and sharing of what participants learned when they tried to apply a new process or technique.
Usually during a session new topics are identified and a learning pop-up (a one time session) is set up with a subset of the participants attending.
The next step is to more effectively capture the learning that emerges in these sessions and share it with the larger network and networks of networks.
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4) Catalysts: Catalysts help people in the network more quickly shift to network behaviors and processes (such as dismantling racism, self-organizing and learning). We have found that an investment in their training and making them easily accessible to projects and circles in the network can greatly amplify the speed of transformation. Both the Resonance Network and the WEB Network have facilitation pools that are working well.
A facilitation pool or network weaver pool is a group of already trained facilitators who learn how to become network facilitators, especially focusing on helping to facilitate and coordinate collaborative projects. However, they are acting as seeds of the new network culture, modeling behaviors, making sure that projects work on dismantling racism and hierarchy and showing participants new collaborative project skills and processes.
Learning weavers are people with writing, social media and graphics skills who capture stories and learnings and develop protocols for sharing learning. So far as I know, no networks have set up this role yet.
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5) A tracking and learning system for helping people change while also tracking transformative shifts and outcomes, along with a system for sharing learning within and across networks which can identify promising areas for spread and/or possible aggregated action with other networks. This area is just starting to be developed.
Some networks are using quick, web-based surveys (examples are those on network values, network leadership, collaborative skills, meeting assessment, and overall network assessment - most of these are in the resource section). These are reviewed immediately after taking and enable groups to identify strengths and challenge areas, then quickly design strategies to work on the challenge areas.
However, very few networks are consistently putting aside time for learning and/or sharing what they are learning in spite of the fact that without this element, networks are unlikely to be transformative. We need to make work in this area a much higher priority!
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6) A governance system: protocols for co-design, advice and consent to support participative creation of the network and especially of the elements described above.
Scaffolding can be network-specific but we are working hard to design scaffolding where elements can also be deployed cross-network. We believe we can design scaffolding that has some “bounded” elements that preserve the sense of belongingness but other scaffolding that allows people to maximize their reach and influence and pool of potential partners for culture of health work.
If you have added any of these elements to your network, please let us know!
Network Evaluation
In complex settings, causality is also complex. We cannot identify a single action that will produce the outcomes we want. We often have to experiment, trying out a number of actions or strategies and then notice what about those exploratory forays worked.
In the process of examining or reflecting on what we did, we often make breakthroughs in our thinking about the situation or problem and this helps us move to more effective actions.
For example, in combating infections in a hospital, we notice that when housekeeping staff work closely with – and are respected by – nursing staff and doctors, the resulting preventative actions are more innovative and effective. This insight leads us to become more inclusive in other aspects of our work, making sure that staff from many different roles work together on solutions. As a result, our hospital becomes a better place for both patients and staff. Complexity theorists use the term emergence to describe such new ways of operating that arise from this combination of self-organized experiments and reflection.
Of course, complex causality makes it difficult to determine whether a particular organization’s strategy is working or making a difference. And, in response to the complexity of problems, organizations in many communities have begun to work in networks so that they can utilize their differences to be more innovative and experimental and so they can access the power of scale, aggregation and diffusion.
A critical question then becomes: How do we determine the value of these networks? How are they contributing (or not) to the solution of problems? How can we tell if these networks are worth our investme nt?
We are just beginning to explore this terrain, but already we have developed a 3 faceted evaluative process that can be engaged in collaboratively by foundations, organizations and the individuals they are hoping to assist in some way. This evaluative process is meant to be inclusive and engaging, as well as developmental. Participants gain new understandings as a result of this process, and often need to restructure activities and even outcomes as they proceed.
Click here to download Network Evaluation.
Microtrends To Amplify for Transformation
How does change happen? I saw a book in the airport about microtrends and how they give a glimpse of the possible future. Microtrends are new behaviors, actions or directions that are just starting to emerge but have the energy and excitement to expand into something significant.
I’ve long thought that dramatic and rapid change happens when we see the opportunities in new microtrends and work collaboratively to support and spread those new directions.
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Some of the microtrends I see are:
- Antiracism work, dismantling white supremacy culture, understanding structural racism: dismantling Racism - Resource Generationhttps://resourcegeneration.org/wp-content/uploads/.../2016-dRworks-workbook.pdf We can’t collaborate effectively if we don’t know how to be peers.
- Youth leadership: https://climateemergencydeclaration.org/climate-emergency-declarations-cover-15-million-citizens “An estimated number of more than a million people in ca. 130 countries demonstrated at about 2200 events worldwide on March 24.[1][36] “
- New approaches to clothing: “no new clothes” pledges, upcycling clothing, groups making thousands of shopping bags from cloth scraps and used clothing https://boomerangbags.org; https://sew-seamless.com/the-pledge/
- Healing and arts driving change: Resonance Network is convening healers and artists to identify collaborations and ways to build community.
- Governance networks and participation: food policy councils writing policy for city sustainability plans.
- New community places and spaces: maker spaces, community and school gardens, co-working spaces, libraries adding functions like showers and PO Boxes for homeless people.
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What microtrends do you see? Let us know in the comments below.
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How can we help these new directions go viral?
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Communities of Practice
One of the most powerful ways to amplify an emerging trend is to virtually convene groups or networks around the country (or world) who are working in this area as a community of practice where they can share what they have been learning in their local project(s), get support for challenges and learn more about building expanding networks of networks. This information could then be distilled and shared broadly to other communities so that they can quickly implement and adapt the new strategies.
I feel that supporting these types of communities of practice is one of the most important ways foundations can increase their impact.
Another way to expand your approach is to find other communities who want to experiment and try out your strategy and then set up virtual sessions over a six month period where you can share what you have done. These sessions should also help people plan and strategize how they can adapt your ideas to their community. Having the sessions last over a six month period will give the communities time to try out specific steps, them come back to the group and talk about their successes and challenges. This is like the community of practice idea described above but with newbies. You can do this if you add $15-30,000 to grants you apply for to cover the staff time to facilitate these sessions and coach individual communities between sessions.
Another version of this is to turn what you have learned into products that you can share and/or sell to others. The Food Corridor did this when they developed a Shared Kitchen Management Tool.
Another final way to accelerate the expansion of emerging practices is to provide support for network support structures. In addition to resources for communities of practice, networks around emerging areas need to develop communications ecosystems for expansion. This is a huge gap in that platforms that fully support self-organizing and the sharing of curated information do not currently exist. But patching together the use of zoom, google docs, discussion groups such a Facebook groups or Buddypress, slack and email/enewsletters is a start. Another support that networks need for expansion is training/information in skills such as:
- using self-organizing strategies to expand your network [ap_spacing spacing_height="10px"]
- Facilitating deep reflection so that your strategy is continually improving and making breakthroughs[ap_spacing spacing_height="10px"]
- developing information toolkits from your practice and experience so that others in other communities can adapt your strategy [ap_spacing spacing_height="10px"]
- Identifying existing networks that may be interested in helping their projects or communities try out your strategies and having conversations with them.
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How to Set Up an Innovation Fund
Innovation funds (also called seed funds or activation funds) are small regranting funds used to jump start innovation, collaboration and self-organizing in networks. They have proven to be one of the most effective strategies for high impact networks, giving people on the ground a chance to initiate action that they believe will make a difference and often leveraging many new resources as a result of their successes.
Most funded projects will bring new people into the network. When funding is combined with peer learning opportunities and opportunities to share with the larger network, the lessons learned from this strategy can have substantial positive impact on the network as a whole.
We now have quite a few examples of successful Innovation Funds, whose stories we will share in detail in the next few blog posts.
This post, however, will summarize the basic characteristics of an Innovation Fund and the processes involved in setting one up.
Innovation Funds typically have $15,000 to $50,000 to regrant in a particular round. Grants vary in size from $1500 to $8,000 and usually must be spent within 6 months.
Applicants must be collaborative projects, typically involving 3 or more organizations (or in some cases community residents). For communities where organizations are not used to working together, this requirement can start to create a culture of collaboration. Funds also restrict grants to new projects, with the idea of incentivizing innovation. In addition, funds may have a specific focus - for example the Resonance Network funded only healing and arts projects in one round.
The design and implementation of Innovation Funds are network building processes. For example, Leadership Learning Community (LLC), which has implemented 4 Innovation Fund initiatives, first recruits as many as a dozen network participants (none of whom can apply for funds) and holds two zoom sessions in which the group gives feedback on a draft design provided buy LLC.
Here are a set of guidelines given to a small rural Innovation Fund design group.
Here is a powerpoint used to recruit a fund design group for an LLC Fund.
The proposal is usually very short so it does not become a barrier for community groups. Here is an example application form from Go Philanthropic, a donor fund that works to end trafficking in south and southeastern Asia.
Sometimes a small group of network guardians are convened to make decisions about which projects will be funded. In another case, 200 people volunteered and each read and rated 2 or 3 proposals. This was a fabulous way to get many more people involved in, excited about and owning the project.
Funds are often used for a coordinator/facilitator and/or for a grant writer. Seeing the collaboration as an opportunity to create a plan and/or pilot, when combined with access to a grant writer, means that the project has the potential to leverage substantial additional funds for expansion of the innovation.
We are discovering that bringing the grantees together as a mini-community of practice enhances the learning while also creating a peer support network among the project participants. At the CoP virtual sessions, the project participants learn basic collaboration and communications skills and tools, share and help each other with challenges, and steal ideas from each other. We find that this encourages much more interaction among different projects between sessions as well.
Almost all the funds have a final session where the projects share what they have accomplished and what they have learned. We are now encouraging funds to record these sessions and share them with the entire network.
Here is a wonderful video where Miram Persley, formerly of the Leadership Learning Community, shares the details of one of their funds.
In conclusion, Innovation Funds are a powerful strategy for increasing network impact.
- They ignite a culture of collaboration and innovation in communities and enable networks to expand. This is accomplished by only funding collaborations and innovations and by engaging many people in the design and implementation process. [ap_spacing spacing_height="15px"]
- When combined with a community of practice or sharing sessions, Innovation Funds offer an opportunity to deepen collaboration and communication skills and practices, and create a support network among the project participants.[ap_spacing spacing_height="15px"]
- Innovation funds often enable collaboratives to pilot or try out an innovation. This way they have the opportunity to show funders that the new approach can work, thus paving the way for additional funding and spread of the innovation.[ap_spacing spacing_height="15px"]
- Innovation Funds offer a new approach to complex problems: they are created through the initiative of people on the ground, who have a deep understanding of their problems and strong intuitions about how they might be remedied. Especially if project participants are brought together for deep reflection, the process can unearth insights, help identify breakthroughs in understanding about the problem, and unearth patterns for success in dealing with the problem.
In future blog posts we will share the stories, processes and documents from Go Philanthropic, Leadership Learning Community and the Resonance Network - three of the most successful Innovation Funds.
[ap_spacing spacing_height="15px"]We encourage you to comment on this post so we can hear about your thoughts and experience.
A Network Connector Story
Sometimes a story can convey meaning better than a lecture. This week's free resource is a story from the early days of the Appalachian Center for Economic Network's (ACEnet) Kitchen Incubator describing how staff were network weaving small food producers in our region.
This focus on connecting people is important no matter what type of organization or network you are part of! We'd love to hear your network weaving stories.
Sociocracy: Why, What and Who?
An excerpt from Chapter 1 of Many Voices One Song: Shared Power with Sociocracy by Ted J Rau and Jerry Koch-Gonzalez
Sociocracy is a set of tools and principles that ensure shared power. How does one share power?
The assumption of sociocracy is that sharing power requires a plan. Power is everywhere all the time, and it does not appear or disappear - someone will be holding it. We have to be intentional about how we want to distribute it. Power is like water: it will go somewhere and it tends to accumulate in clusters: the more power a group has, the more resources they will have to aggregate more power. The only way to counterbalance the concentration of power is intentionality and thoughtful implementation.
Power, like water, is neither good nor bad. In huge clusters and used against the people, power will be highly destructive. Used to serve the people and the earth, distributed to places where it can work toward meeting the needs of the people and the earth, power is constructive, creative and nourishing like an irrigation system.
One can think of sociocratic organization as a complicated irrigation system, empowering each team to have the agency and resources they need to flourish and contribute toward the organization's mission. We avoid large clusters of power, and we make sure there is flow. Water that is allowed to flow will stay fresh and will reach all the places in the garden, nourishing each plant to flourish. Sociocratic organizations nourish and empower each team to have the agency to flourish and contribute toward the organizations' mission.
Power does not have only one source. In that respect, power is different from an irrigation system. All members of the organization feed their own agency and resources into the organization, in each team. Everyone contributes their power and relies on each other's power. From there, power, and with it, resources, gets distributed into the whole and gets channeled to where the group wants to put their energy. Sociocratic organizations keep everyone's own agency and power intact and support people to make changes bigger than they could have made alone.
In order to achieve this, our sociocratic organizations differ from organizations with aggregated centralized hierarchical power in two ways:
- We distribute power more evenly. Those who come with less agency get support to step into more agency. Those who come with more sense of agency contribute toward the whole without diminishing anyone else's power. Teams doing work together are empowered to contribute. [ap_spacing spacing_height="10px"]
- We let power flow. Flow means the distribution of power needs to be adjusted and potentially changed over time. The sociocratic organization is adaptable and resilient.
Building a system that distributes power by empowering everyone requires thought and intentionality. That is what sociacracy is: the design principles of distributing power in a way that flows with life.
1.1 The values under sociocracy
What kind of world do we want to live in? The way we answer this question is: We want to live in a world where people support each other, consider each other and help each other meet needs. A collaborative world.
1.1.1 Organizations are living systems
Organizations are designed in a way that fosters our connection with each other and with ourselves, both within and outside of the organization. To effectively create connections, organizations need to be life-serving and all-embracing. Life-serving means that we want to foster organizations that work for everyone in the organization and hold care for everyone affected by the organization. No one and nothing can be ignored if we want to honor connection.
We want to support living organizations. Living systems can be on any kind of scale: a cell is a living system as it creates a membrane, forms an identity and interacts as a whole with its outside. Organizations are living systems: they interact with their outside (clients, students, consumers, investors), and their members on the inside interact as information, goods, and energy are being exchanged. A system that does not let the organization breathe like a living system will constrain and muffle its unique expression of life. Living systems have characteristics that we want to be aware of:
- Living systems form a whole and can act as a whole. For example, a human body is a complex system of smaller complex systems, but it is perceived and acts as a whole.[ap_spacing spacing_height="10px"]
- Living systems are interdependent with their context. There are no isolated systems. However, many people in Western cultures have been conditioned to think individualistically, as if we were separate from our context and could ignore our impact on the world around us.[ap_spacing spacing_height="10px"]
- Living systems are interactive and open (within limits). An organism that does not interact with its outside will not be able to survive. Organisms provide a (permeable) "membrane" between their inside and their outside. This is the basis of identity and capacity to act.[ap_spacing spacing_height="10px"]
- Within a system, parts are interdependent, which means they rely on each other to meet their needs. This both true for parts of a cell and it is true for a society.[ap_spacing spacing_height="10px"]
- Living systems are dynamic, they are not static. They change over time as they adapt and change constantly. Living systems can learn and heal. They are resilient.[ap_spacing spacing_height="10px"]
- Living systems are inherently ordered, in their own way. A forest, for example, has an order. So does an organization - living systems are defined by the fact that they create more order than is present in entropy of their surroundings. Organizations do exactly that: organize to exchange information and resources to meet needs.
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We encourage you to comment on this post so we can hear about your thoughts and experience.
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featured image by: Mel Poole
Trust: Foundation of Effective Networks
This article is a chapter from the Network Weaver Handbook with several worksheets you can use with your networks, projects and organizations.
They go together nicely with the blog posts Trust in Networks is Fundamental to Social Change by Christine Capra and Trust in Networks by June Holley.
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