Organizational Democracy

“I want the orange!”  ”I need the orange too!”  ”Fine. I could fight you, but I’ll split the orange with you so we each get half of what we want.”  ”Fine, I’ll give in and compromise.  I’ll take this half.”  ”Wait, why are you grinding up the peel?”  ”I’m using this orange peel to bake my Orangepeelicious Dessert!”  ”But you threw the orange in the trash!”  ”What, the juicy part?  I just need the peel.”  ”Oh!  I wanted to eat the juicy part!”  ”And you threw your half of the peel in the trash!  I could’ve made my Dessert twice as big!”  ”Sigh.  You know, we both could’ve had all of what we wanted.”

The following quote is from the classic Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In by Roger Fisher, William Ury and Bruce Patton:

“Dovetail differing interests.  Consider once again the two children quarreling over an orange.  Each child wanted the orange, so they split it, failing to realize that one wanted only the fruit to eat and the other only the peel for baking.  In this case as in many others, a satisfactory agreement is made possible because each side wants different things.  This is genuinely startling if you think about it.  People generally assume that differences between two parties create the problem.  Yet differences can also lead to a solution.

Agreement is often based on disagreement.”

Consider the fight at the local church over a pension plan for the man who’s maintained the building over the past 20 years and is ready to retire.  The church’s lawyer says the pension plan should be cut.  This causes a ruckus among the members of the church.  Some side with the lawyer, others with the man who’s waiting for his pension plan.  Meetings are called again and again, tensions rise, and members start to leave the church.

One day, the lawyer is overheard telling his wife how he resents that there’s no nursery room where they can leave their child during services.  The man waiting for his pension to be unblocked likes taking care of kids, and would actually very much like to make the church more family-friendly by converting the unused basement into a play area.  The lawyer has also wanted to make the church more family friendly, and his resentments about the church building not having a play area were displaced into his resentment for the man who maintained the building.  The building and the church rules are made more family-friendly, membership grows, and everyone is happy.

This is a first draft.  I’m curious for your comments.  In plain English, we might call these principles of organizational democracy:

1) Choosing the work you do and how to do it,

2) Choosing who represents you,

3) Experimentation, responsibility and delegation,

4) Balance of power, and

5) Community, reputation and benefits.

I will continue to write about these concepts in the future, since many of us have only experienced them rarely in our lives, whether in the United States or a city, state or country which we typically think of as a “democracy,” or perhaps in a religious group, or at school, or among friends, or among families, or observed in an ecosystem, or in business.  People I speak with mention “great experiences at work” as being experiences where at least some of these concepts were present — more so than at other times which were not so good in their lives.

Five Principles of Organizational Democracy:

1) Choosing the work you do and how to do it - self-directed teams - for fulfilling work relationships and successful results. 

Everyone who works together knows and agrees on their and their coworkers’:  wishes for what they want from the work, vision for how they want to change their part of the world from the work, what work they want to do themselves, and their shared timeline.

Everyone on the team does the work by: regularly working together in the same space and exchanging feedback and doing at least some hands-on work on the product or service.  Approvals for resources are based on the reputation of the participants.

2) Choosing who represents you - term limits for representatives or any position with a title – creates a dynamic, self-aware organization. 

Any representative or official leader with a title has a limited number of years in office, and can only be re-elected to that office a limited number of times.

3) Experimentation, responsibility and delegation - participative, representative, and federal.

Participative: Instead of lots of verbal discussion where agreement must be reached, the focus is on participating to try things out and getting things done, so instead of forcing everyone to work in the same direction, people can form risk-taking groups to try new things.

Representative: Instead of everyone deciding everything all the time, everyone has an equal vote or is included in consensus to choose at least their direct representative(s), if not each of their representatives at all levels.  Representatives are delegated with responsibilities.

Federal: Instead of one group where it becomes too big to know everyone, people in groups choose representatives to represent them in higher-level, more centralized, groups.  Actions too big for one person or group to do him/her/themselves can be given to higher-level groups representing many groups of people.

4) Balance of power - checks and balances – prevents one person, a small group, or a majority from systematically overpowering other people.

Examples of techniques:

Vetos: one group or branch can block decisions by another group or branch, although the veto may be overturned by a larger majority or other measure of resolve.

Vertical: a majority of lower circles can veto decisions by higher circles.

Horizontal: separate branches of decision-making, such as Executive, Legislative and Judicial, can veto decisions by other branches.

Action Teams:  an Action Team can work out details, which can be vetoed by a Representatives Circle or a Popular vote.

Historical: a Constitution or Charter can specify fundamental rights which will need to be amended by a larger majority than usual.

Popular: a majority of people can overturn a decision by any level of their representatives.

Separation of power: prevents any person or group from leading multiple groups simultaneously.

Divorce: individuals may leave groups, and groups may separate from other groups.

Other checks and balances include term limits and impeachment.

5) Community, reputation and benefits - local currency – provides stakeholders with profit without force over coworkers, as well as feedback on how a group is doing. 

Groups within the company can have and sell the equivalent of only Class B stock — where ownership of the stock has no voting rights or control of anything other than buying, selling or building on their shares, and those owners can sell their currency to anyone at a profit or loss.

Additionally, coworkers’ work can be rated by customers, coworkers and stakeholders.  As coworkers’ reputation increases or decreases in value, the exchange rate of that group’s currency increases or decreases.

So you know how I say my work has three parts? Planning what to do and why, getting the work done, and evaluating results and the relationships we have together? I’m reading a book called Love to the Loveless, by Derek Kidner. Not the warmest title, yet something made me curious, pick it up.

Kidner writes about Hosea, who was told, “at ground level and at painful length…to do the last thing a responsible prophet might expect. ‘Go and marry a prostitute.’” “And Hosea did not gather that he could simply go through a form of marriage, or… [marry] a prostitute with a heart of gold. He married a shallow, mercenary woman, the kind who might walk out on him the moment it suited her; and they started a family. She bore him a son. After that, she had two more children, who were apparently not his. Then she left him.”

Each child is named for the kind of relationship between Hosea and his wife at the time when the child is born. The first, a boy, is named “No space.” The second is named “Unloved.” The third is named, “Unknown.”

This is actually very similar to what happens when people work together and their relationships go wrong! Make space! In a company, one woman I interviewed talked about finger-pointing and blame between coworkers and no space to feel at peace or to have the meetings you need.

Love! I’ve thought a lot about love — what does it mean? The closest definition I came up with was, “To want to be near to all of someone or something.” A 50-year old coworker from Russia several years ago said, “We love people for what we can do for them.” And Sara Bareilles sings, “Only gonna get given what you give away.” Many people say love is an action as well as a noun. Love is not just, “I love you,” or “I fell in love,” but “I am loving you now,” or “I choose to love you.”

In reading this book about Hosea, I think love is “to stay with” someone. Sure, sometimes loving or staying means keeping your distance at times. But if you are still in that love relationship, you feel the distance, just as in that theater game where we wear giant elastic bands around our waists, like enormous rubber bands. When we’re close to each other, bodies nearly touching, the elastic band is slack, so we must hold it lest it fall to the ground. When we’re distant, the band is tense around our bodies, pulling us towards each other. And in this age of so many divorces, if love is not just to be swept off your feet by your partner, perpetually falling head over heels, then love can be literally, “to stay with.”

In companies gone wrong, people don’t give each other space to plan projects, they don’t stay with each other to do the work together, and — Know! — they don’t know what went wrong or what went right or why or who they’re really working with…because they’re off in their own fantasies, no longer with each other, no longer loving, no longer with a room to call their own.

So… Make space by planning - so you have room to work together. Stay together, so you get the work done. Get to know each other, so you can improve as you move forward. Similarly, although with sports instead of personal relationships, John Miller of Gemba Panta Rei’s compares continuous work relationships to a triathalon:

Make space: “1) Swim. Cross deep waters to new shores. In business this is starting something new, like technology or process trials, new product launches, product or process redesign, building expansion, relocation of processes, etc.”

Stay together: “2) Cycle. Once the new product or process is stable, the relay hand off is made to the jishuken teams or kaizen event teams. These teams sprint as fast as they can to cover the most distance in the shortest amount of time, as the cyclists do in a triathlon.”

Know each other: “3) Run. This would be the persistent, daily problem solving…as well as the suggestion systems by all employees, autonomous maintenance activities, etc. to keep improvements pumping along over the long term.”

And I’ll finish this note with some photos I took in a Flagstaff supermarket parking lot.

Make space to move forward. The car needs to move out of the way before the shopping cart can be pushed across the street.

Ironically, in business or personal relationships, you’ll have a group such as four people working together, and each thinks to themself, “We want different things. Jon wants to work hard and make money, Sammy wants to meet his girlfriend tonight, Jose wants to build his motorcycle, and Linda has that baby to take care of.” Yet you’re all in the same place right now, in this case at the supermarket, and you all want the same thing — to get home as soon as possible, together as a family. And the first step is to cross the street. Sure, you might have your head down when you start to cross the street, but don’t look down. Keep looking forward.

Stay together through that space. The guys walk together across the street. That’s the fastest way to all get to their car.

Ironically, often in business or personal relationships, we say, “Jon, you want to make money. And Sammy, you just want to meet your girlfriend. And Jose, you’re obsessed with your motorcycle. So we don’t have any reason to stay together any more.”

Know and raise your family. As you stay together, you start to develop rhythms for crossing the street together. You start to know that Linda has that baby to carry. And Sammy doesn’t mind pushing the shopping cart, and Jon is good at leading the way across the street, and Jose will pick up anything that might fall from the cart and put it back on. Okay, okay, you probably don’t think this all so explicitly, but you develop a life together that works well. You learn that when Linda crosses the street first, she’s watching her baby, and has a hard time seeing cars coming. You learn that Jon gets irritable when he pushes the shopping cart, and then he runs red lights when he drives the car.

So you move forward, and improve for the future. And conversations flare up, and you feel connected to each other, and as that baby grows up and your relationships develop, in unpredictable ways, you keep crossing new streets, and getting things done, and learning about yourself and the people you make space with, and stay with, and know.

A few weeks ago I bought a digital camera, and this was my first photo.  It’s called “Sky crossroads” and was taken on the drive from Phoenix to Flagstaff.  Click the photo for the full-size image.  

P.S. I always like it when stores and offices have personal mementos of the people who work there, or even photos, items or a bulletin board with announcements contributed by the customers.  So even though this is a site for organizational democracy, I’ll show some of who I am and my other interests, too, such as photos.

I help people work together in companies.  I do organizational democracy.  We like towns, cities and countries to be democratic, and companies can be, too.

Originally my background is in theater.  I did playwriting and producing, and loved helping people get on stage who were passionate and excellent at their work.

In 2005 I wanted to see the world, so I lived in Galveston, TX and Hays, KS, where I learned what it means to care about the people you pass on the street, and what it means to feel like a town is yours, even when you don’t literally own it.  I went to a lot of town hall meetings and a lot of companies and community groups.

Then I came back to New York, was marketing director at a company that sold TV’s, got frustrated with the assembly-line style of passing work along and no one being proud of it, got people together in teams, and we got work done which everyone had thought was impossible.  At the end of our first project, I got tears in my eyes as the subway rolled over the Brooklyn Bridge going back home.

Since 1998 I’ve been paid to work at or with over 100 companies in various roles, so I’m knowledgeable about many work styles.  And over the past four years I’ve gained passion and experience from my work in organizational democracy.