Erin Young On The Role & Principles of Sociocracy To Foster Equitable Environments in Business

Erin Young helps purpose-led people and enterprise access tools to activate group intelligence to turn inspiration into positive impact. Collaborative decision-making and governance tools (Sociocracy) and holistic design for people systems (Social Permaculture) are her primary frameworks; all nature-inspired and informed.

Erin is a consultant, trainer, mediator, and facilitator. She holds a Bachelor of Environmental Engineering (Hons) from Brisbane's Griffith University (2004), and gained her first Permaculture Design Certificate in 2010 in Portugal. Based on the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, Australia, Erin lives with her husband in a forest cottage within a regional community of practical creatives.

Erin discusses the implementation of sociocracy principles, the benefits collaboration brings to business and social enterprise opportunities for the Sunshine Coast.

Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)

[Davinia Vella] - We are here at Newkind Conference with a very special guest today, Erin Young, who is a resident on the Sunshine Coast, Australia. Erin, could you please explain more about sociocracy and what that means in a business environment?

[Erin Young] - Sociocracy is a framework for helping people that are united in their mission and purpose to use collaborative decision-making and shared leadership in how they go about doing their mission in the world. It's based on circle decision-making using consent as the guiding principle. One of the key features is that it takes the load and responsibility off the hierarchy and the upper rungs to make decisions that impact people further away from them, and the organisation whose contexts they might not really understand. They don't necessarily understand what's happening on the ground to make the right decisions.

Sociocracy helps to spread the load of decision-making in a psychologically safe way for everyone involved. And also in a structurally safe way so that the organisational group know that things are happening in budget and respecting the energy and time available for everyone there. A key feature of it is that it embraces the collective intelligence of the people who are involved in an organisation. It uses the diversity of perspectives and embraces that which allows people to have ownership over decisions. It allows them that creative outlet, and so it really cultivates and fosters that environment which allows for a much more generative and emergent reality for an organisation.

It's taking in consideration everyone's share of the problem and everyone's experiences in the solution that’s being formed. That's beautiful. Erin, could you please share a little bit about your background, the work that you are doing and what has led you to be in this space?

I've got a background as an Environmental Engineer and when I was studying and working in that industry as a consultant, I knew it was the humans, and the way humans were thinking and designing that were creating the problems we were trying to engineer into more balance. It was more exciting for me to go upstream, so to speak, and start to interact on the human level and help people to organise themselves to make better decisions that would take into consideration the natural environment and how we all work together. In amongst my travels around the world in my twenties I came across permaculture and it was a really pivotal moment for me to take on a more integrated perspective about design and how to understand whole systems thinking.

From that point I started to merge into the world of social permaculture, which is applying permaculture design principles to how people organise themselves in a really effective way. And sociocracy came in at that point.

Sociocracy is a tool of social permaculture which uses whole systems thinking and approaches to be in a thriving regenerative state ultimately.

I've worked independently with these practices for about seven or eight years now. I was working for a Food Connect in Brisbane which was my introduction to social enterprise about nine or ten years ago. And I learned sociocracy through there because they wanted to become a workers cooperative at that time and brought in some sociocracy trainers and I totally caught the bug. I've been traveling with it since then and working with fellow colleagues and peers now who I work with to learn from projects.

Now I'm in a collab-collective called the Sociocracy Consulting Group. We're an international group, there's five of us and we provide online training consultancies. I also train people in social permaculture and support people to integrate that regenerative reality into how they're setting themselves up and supporting themselves to do the work they want to do in the world. What motivated me in this particularly was that it made me sad to see groups and organisations who came together with such important and strong ideas of what to do to help the world be a better place. To see those groups not actually be able to do that because of social dysfunction, they just weren't able to get their act together enough to continue on and have resilience in their system. It's really driven me to find frameworks and structures that help humans live healthily, to help us continue doing what we're doing, integrating the current context as it emerges and evolves and allow for that adaptive responsiveness in how we do things.

Yesterday at one of your many talks here at Newkind Conference, you gave a beautiful metaphor of what social permaculture looks like in the context of a forest. I was touched so deeply by that so could you please share that with our listeners?

I think that was the visualisation I did leading into the sociocracy session. And it feels very important to share, bringing people into a whole systems reality that they already know. A forest is a really good example of that, and the human body is another really good example because we are living in adaptive complex systems already. We're not necessarily educated about that. It's not part of our collective consciousness that that's how we operate. But that is what life is. And that's how we're doing things. And the more the human mindset can grasp that, the more aligned and harmonised we can be with each other.

The forest has all of these different elements that know exactly how to do what they're there to do. A tree knows how to be a tree. Nothing tells it how to do that. A bush is a bush, a stream is a stream, a fish is a fish, a bird is a bird. They're all autonomous elements that are working in symbiosis with each other to create a thriving ecology or respond to the conditions that are affecting their ecology. Life force is just pulsing through all of that, as it also naturally does through us, and the forest is in its fullness in that way. The tree has a certain territory that it takes up and all the other elements naturally know that and so on and so forth for all the other things. It's powerful to go into that space because when we apply that analogy into our organisational spaces, we can see the humans inside of that space as an ecology as well.

Something you see in a forest is that there are feedback loops that inherently function and move information around. When we can embrace that inside of our human organisations, share the feedback loops that come through us as individuals being sensory; being we hear, we feel, we taste, we sense. This is all information sensory, and sensing that we can then share and contribute to what's happening in our organisation.

Sociocracy provides the permission and space to give the feedback so that the subgroups in an organisational department or the teams have real time living information to work with. It really uses the humans in an organisation as sensory beings to their full potential.

Along with that sensing comes the creative invitation. I think that to me, creativity's one of the greatest natural resources that comes through in a human being. When we can allow the space for creativity to be accessed, it's almost like there's an endless source of possibility.

What we need to do is create the space for that to come through and focus that energy so that it can be constructive to what we're there to do together. Understanding how to set that up is really valuable.

One of my big thoughts about social enterprise is actually that an organisation not only needs to create revenue, an environmental cause and/or the social cause, but also take care of its employees and the development of the people that are involved in that organisation. I don't feel that a social enterprise or an organisation that's there to do good can actually do all that good without taking care of its employees wellbeing, and having the creative space for all of those people to extend their full potential and creativity. Can you give us an example, Erin, about a project that you are currently involved in that uses sociocracy as its organisational culture? Or as its operating model?

The one I have the most experience with is the collective I work with. It's an interesting case because we are geographically spread across different countries and different time zones. We work online, and we use sociocracy process to organise our training programs and now consulting, marketing and all the things we do together. It's quite fascinating to live in an asynchronous work space and in a world that has so much more of that remote team reality happening. Some of the projects and people who are coming to us about sociocracy are projects like eco-villages. They're quite a classic example of the group of people who are open to what sociocracy is and wanting naturally to share the leadership amongst all the people. I've been involved in some eco-village projects and training them and supporting them in their practice of sociocracy.

There's a new project coming online for my colleague Gina Price and I based here in Australia. It's a funeral business that is wanting to really pioneer and progress forward green funerals in Australia, and they're wanting to establish funeral homes around Australia that are working with green funeral principles, supporting that to be strong in this country. They are very naturally embracing sociocracy and wanting to use that technology of sociocracy to support that to happen. Schools are often also a really interesting place and have a lot of interest in embracing sociocracy in the last century. Modern sociocracy kind of stemmed out of practice of Betty Cadbury and Keith Booker, who worked in education spaces. I'm not sure if it was in Europe or the U.S., but they wanted the children that were in the school they were working with, to be involved in decision-making, the children to make decisions about how their school was being run.

These two adults didn't want the adults to be the only decision makers for the school, and they really experimented with these ideas and theories that have been coming through sociology, cybernetics and systems theory about how we set up human systems to be in integrity. Children take really well to practices like sociocracy. They get it, like they get so many things. They know how to turn up and ask questions when they're not clear on something and they know how to show up and say, “this is my response to a proposal that we're putting out on the table and here's what I have to say about what might not be working about this”. Children are a great malleable space to share sociocracy with. There's many examples of that. I don't know if it's exactly sociocracy, but very similar principles of the children's parliament in India are having what seems to be a broadening and huge impact on neighbourhood parliamentary sittings with children in big circles and they represent conversations around areas like the environment and health care, allowing children's voices to come into it.

There's a lot of adaptability of a structural sociocracy. I tend to say that it's like the skeleton in our body or an operating system, so to speak. When it goes into an organisation or to a group, that group then designs through the processes of sociocracy how it actually looks for them. Some groups might need to be meeting often and they might decide that they want to do some really interactive processes to help them make decisions. If they're more creative types, they might need to do particularly creative processes to support them in their decision-making. There might be some really straight laced corporate types who want to sit in a boardroom and just do it really solidly like that. There is a lot of flexibility and adaptability and essentially it's a co-design process that everyone in that space takes on. It looks different for a lot of people.

That's amazing. Have you seen the popular approach shift in the last five years to be more accommodating to shared leadership and different models of running organisations and businesses?

I think what comes up for me inside of that is the parallel world of organisational design. It incorporates lean and agile processing and project organisation and probably many other things. The lean and agile world works with shorter time frames too. It's very experimental and having lots of process around that. But it's very experimental, empirical and emergent, and it stems out of the software and space and it's now going into other industries where people are seeing the value in prototyping and rapid prototyping that comes through that way. In that sort of space there's also more openness to, ‘okay we're designing our products, our services differently’ and a natural understanding that the decision makings of the teams also wants to be run differently.

The classic top down hierarchy or even majority vote and democracy has a place and is useful in a lot of situations, and they have many limitations. Organisations that are living spaces tend to respond more openly when there's these deeply inclusive emergent processes to incorporate the people inside of the organisation into how things are designed and run.

It's a quickly changing world that we're living in and we're all adapting very quickly to the changes that are happening around us. Even after a few days here at Newkind it feels very evident that this change is not going to slow down at all, but it's going to become more and more intense and quickly tie around.

Erin, how does sociocracy fit within a social enterprise model, when we often see that a lot of founders are holding the vision for everyone? It becomes this little bit of a juxtaposition there, when you've got someone that's a social entrepreneur that's holding the vision in their head and wants things to go as as he or she has imagined to then sharing that leadership. How would that look in a shared leadership sociocracy model where in social enterprise you almost sometimes need that division and the drive coming from a leader?

Sociocracy uses the North star of the vision and the mission of the organisation to guide. Everything that happens, trickles down from that. Like any classic organisation, that is not new. Social enterprises, just like any other enterprise will usually have something like a vision and a mission guiding what it does. Inside of a sociocracy structure, it then says, “so that's what we're all working to together”. That's our collective bulls-eye.

What we'll now do is for the teams that have specific purposes to help that to happen. For example, the administration team, marketing communications might be another team, I.T. might be another team… whoever might be manufacturing or producing something in particular or on the floor or serving the customers might be another team. They will have specific aims that they are producing or providing to contribute to what the mission is. With those aims comes the secondary bulls-eye that guides what that team is specifically doing, and that team has the autonomy to make decisions about how they do the work. The admin team decide how the admin team does the work and there are feedback loops as I've mentioned, that feed information back up to the broader whole organisation. There will also usually be a circle called something like the mission circle, that holds the eagle eye perspective of what the whole organisations about.

They'll be in touch with the legalities that influence the activities of the organisation. They will be in touch with the financials, the broader perspective of what's going on in the wider environment that that social enterprise fits into. That's where the visionary likes to sit. That's why they've started this social enterprise because they have been aware of the greater context and they see a role that this organisation has to fill. That's a really important place to hold. That mission circle will usually be the core driver in creating the mission that gets consented to by a representative group inside of the social enterprise. Social enterprise, like any other enterprise will have its teams and divisions that have a very specific focus, and quite often people ask, “well what happens if you only have three people who are doing your work?”

Quite often social enterprises and startups start with a small number of people and then grow from there. I think it becomes that you can adapt sociocracy to work for that cause. There's still media and communications that go on with three people. There's still the production or manufacture that goes on there, administration still happens. Really, what then happens is clustering the conversations so that when there's a discussion about the marketing, the three people know what their aims are, what they're specifically trying to produce or provide in their marketing. The three people might be involved in all of those teams, but it's about how to organise the conversation space to establish focused and effective activities and decisions inside of that, those areas.

So now for the difficult question; what happens when the ego comes into the game?

Well, a classic phrase we lean into is trust the process. For me, this is where the brilliance of working in a whole system's way really comes in. Of course, the ego comes in because we're human, but what we're afforded with something like sociocracy are guard rails or the safe space where we know we're being held in hard discussions or making hard decisions or even innovative decisions or whatever it might be. We still know what we can rely on is that we'll have a space to ask the questions we need to ask. We'll have a space to give our opinion and our reaction as we feel we need to, and we know we'll hear from other people if they have questions, we'll hear from other people what their reactions are. We know that there's space for other people's ideas and creativity to come in. There's this level of transparency that's woven into all of this along with an equivalence.

People aren't telling other people what to do as well as overall. We focus on being effective and all of this activity that creates this psychologically safe space for people to do what they've got to do given the changing context and complexity of conditions that might come through for an organisation. For me, something like sociocracy is a living structure that holds us in all of our humanity and our over-inflated ego. If that comes through our creative breakthroughs or our vulnerable, fragile moments, it allows us to do all that. We all understand how it will operate when we're in those spaces and times. Absolutely, there are exceptions to this, and sociocracy is no silver bullet! People have to do the work.

I heard someone here at Newkind say that organisation and individual transformation are hand-in-hand processes. They often drive each other. An individual's transformation will feed into an organisation's transformation and vice versa. There's a lot of medicine, so to speak, or there's natural evolution that comes through a living system, like sociocracy.

That was really inspirational, Erin. It's a beautiful way that you describe relationships that can happen within an organisation because we don't always choose the people that we need to work with, but we have to work with those people and then we also have to get along with the rest of humanity. It's very important to have the ways and structures that we can manage that.

What advice would you give social enterprise founders that are looking into taking on a sociocracy model for their organisation?

The advice I would give to social enterprise founders wanting to take on something like sociocracy is be willing to trust the process, be willing to trust collective intelligence and trust the space for there to be boundaries as well. To trust that things emerge and evolve, and they can emerge and evolve in a constructive way. When people come together with the willingness to be together as a whole system, which is inherently inclusive and it allows that deeper wisdom of the group to really feed in and to also take it step-by-step and piece-by-piece, not expecting change to necessarily be overnight and to be rapid… to be able to be in the emergent experimental space and to see what's real and what really works for that time and that place is a pretty key step for all of us in being alive in this time right now. That's a pretty important approach for all of us humans. I think this is some of the commentary that's coming out about our governments and on bigger governance systems that direct how things happen in society. There's quite a fragility inside of their systems because there's such a complexity of structures that don't have a lot of flex and adaptiveness inside of them.

There's some brick walls that are starting to really become obvious.

When we're able to give space for the unknown to come into our world and for us to navigate through that step by step, then we can find ourselves. Finding new frontiers that are relevant and real and important to you and I. Social enterprise is a responsive, adaptive way of being in this world. It's contributing something that's needed to find more balance and it's inherently inclusive. By being willing to be inclusive internally inside of the organisation as well as externally is a really powerful way to be.

Are there any trick books? Sociocracy 101 that people can download and get all the points?

There's plenty of stuff online. Let's bring it down to a really practical level:

Be willing to allow people to ask questions about decisions that are being made.

Be willing to allow people to give their responses and opinions. They don't necessarily need to make the decisions, but be willing to hear, and this isn't really new information.

Be willing to measure the decisions and the impact of the decisions. When you're making a decision about something or how you're going to do something inside of a team, find a way to put a measurable on that. That's also not new, but it's not standard business either. Measure everything and then review everything and put a time frame on it. Do this for six months and in six months time check in and make sure that you are on the course you want to be on and if not, you’ll course correct and you’ll adapt what you’re doing to be more relevant to where you actually want to go.

It's a lot like sailing in that way, and sometimes in sailing you've got to go in another direction. You don't just go straight to the target all the time; you've got too tack your way forward and that's the experimentation process. Let's go in that direction. Oh, okay. We got to go slightly over this way and slightly over this way. Being willing to sniff out the path through experimentation [is key].

And like with a lot of social innovation approaches, they're not brand new. They have been practiced before. It's just that we have either forgotten or have not incorporated those in our normal business approaches or in our normal day-to-day approaches. I think the realigning and that space for people to voice their questions and their solutions and also allow for those mistakes within parts that they're not be taken for the long term. But when you put the date and an impact measurement on the decision that is taken collectively or not, then at least you can recourse that if it's not going as planned.

A by-product of doing that and particularly using sociocracy processes is that there's shared ownership and responsibility for decisions, and that naturally brings a sense of resilience to assist them, because it means there's more minds and hearts paying attention to what's going on and people are keenly watching like, “Oh, we made that decision together. It's not quite working as we wanted it to. Here's my suggestion and how we could change it, or an inquiry unit it allows for that.” That curiosity to be alive in everyone, and not just the leader creates a sense of responsibility inside of everyone which holds the whole load of the whole organisation and in a stronger way.

That's awesome. Could you point our listeners towards some further reading or some websites where they can find some more information about sociocracy?

The Sociocracy Consulting Group is the group that I work with and we write blogs and share information and also do training and consultations through there, so that's a key one. We The People Are Consenting A Deeper Democracy, by John Buck Jr and Sharon Villines is one of the key English language sociocracy books. It was first really coined in the Dutch language and so it's been translated from them. There's a lot of resources that are being put out by Sociocracy for All online. Lots of YouTube videos to be watched and they've also written a book called Many Voices. One Song on sociocracy practice. So there are a few of the resources available.

Thank you very much. On a different note, Erin is from the Sunshine Coast, which is the place where I'm also from. We're going to have a very little chat about the regional opportunities for impact and purpose-led businesses around the Sunshine Coast and how we [want to] see that develop into a better impactful space. Erin, in your experience living on the Sunshine Coast, have you found it a place where your business and also your aligned approach to certain organisational structures can flourish and thrive?

To be honest, no, but I think it's possible there and because of the nature of the group that I work with, we're further afield more often than not. Something I think a lot of Sunny Coasters discover is, particularly if you're living in the hills and away from the key business areas, is that being entrepreneurial is really important.

The employment opportunities there aren't as vast as somewhere like Brisbane where I'm originally from. There's a lot of people creating micro and small business on the Sunshine Coast and there's a lot of natural connection and collaboration and networking that goes on because it's a smallish community and people can connect with each other. I think there is a surprising and exciting amount of innovation that does go on in that sort of space somehow. It's like being outside of the city, due to the nature element of being on the Sunshine Coast that holds the space for this mental spaciousness and creative spaciousness where people can see what's going on and the needs that are there and then create responses through business and enterprise. What I do know is there is some great initiatives happening on the Sunshine Coast more and more. I'm really looking forward to getting out there more and being real on the ground and the place where I live. Part of my story is that I live in a forest and I work from home and I'm learning how to engage and interact in a space where it's not all on offer like it was in Brisbane where I'm from. That's new territory for me that I'm exploring.

My feeling with the Sunshine Coast is very similar to that. The nature is so beautiful and it allows that space that the city does not allow; space to think, there's less noise, less emissions I guess, and less electricity so it makes for better thinking. What I am worried about is something that you also mentioned that we sometimes end up working in our little silos when working remotely, completely disconnected from our community and we're trying to do what we are. We're doing great things with communities that we're working remotely with and sometimes we can't belong to our geographical community because of a variety of things. Some beautiful clusters of people and it's really lovely to share that creative vibe with lots of other people too. Lots of musicians there and lots of eco-businesses, which is nice.

And there's a lot of people who've moved from cities to have their tree, or sea-change as well. There's a lot of great intellectual and creative resources that comes in from people who've moved from Melbourne or Sydney or Brisbane and finding a way to connect in with that, that’s something that's emerging. (Erin suggests collaborating in the future with Davinia).

It's creating, cultivating the ecology of people in that region, and I think quite naturally it is important for us to have a sense of relevance inside of the connectivity.

It's important for us humans to follow what brings us joy, and if we can't, we have to have limits as well to who we interact with. We just simply can't interact with everyone.

That would be something that I would want to incorporate into some way of networking is to bring that particular focus area of creative social enterprise. It's got some sort of specific similarity and purpose that helps to really be beneficial to each other.

Definitely, we will definitely work on that together Erin.