This year, we celebrated our second sociocracy workshop delivered to purpose-driven organizations in Chile. From our own experience, we know how joyous collaboration can be, when we use the appropriate tools and processes (and when we cultivate our inner peace). We know sociocracy is a toolbox well fit for that purpose and we are sharing it with the world.
In August 2018, we partnered up with fellow organizations Colunga, Glocalminds and América Solidaria and recruited forty nonprofits to come work with us on a two-day retreat on sociocracy. The experience was great and we immediately started planning a second version.
Our second workshop was held on the 8th and 9th December. This workshop was again a success, and attendants are already linking up to the community that emerged from the first workshop. We believe that sociocracy can make nonprofits (and any organization) work more efficiently and with more joy (and less stress) on the teams and team members.
For the second version of the workshop we were very lucky to have a great guest: Edwin Maria John from India. Edwin leads what is known as the biggest sociocratic organization in the world, the network of Children Parliament in his country. We were deeply inspired by his vision and the movement he has created for hearing all voices in society, a principle known in sociocracy as equivalence.
Together with equivalence, transparency and efficiency are usually described as three main principles by the different flavours or distributions of sociocracy. Other two main components are the decision making by consent (instead of majority or consensus) and the intense use of rounds during meetings.
Sociocracy (sometimes also referred to as dynamic governance) is a system of governance that seeks to advance collaboration while creating and strengthening harmonious social environments.
If you think those two last paragraphs are too ‘wordy’ or ‘dense’, we agree. That’s why we designed both workshops to be experiential and practical. From harmonic relaxation, to bagpipes and drums, we put everything into the circle to allow everyone to learn in the most holistic way.
“We are delighted to make these tools more widely available and happy to know their adoption rate grows. We hope using these tools will help us building a more just society where we are all included.” – said Josefina Maturana, one of the facilitators from Glocalminds.
“We are very inspired by the message and invitation we hear from Edwin Maria John. He is asking us to dream with him and to put our effort into distributing power and decision making.” – commented Diego Cuadra, from our team of The Kairos Project.
