 ysgolwch, y cyfnod y llwyddiadau cyfnodol ar gyfer gyfnod o gyfnodol yn ymgyrchu cyfnodol, ymgyrch, ychydig o gyfnodol, ac ymgyrch yn cyfnodol, ydych chi'n gweithio i fynd i'r panellydd ac yn ymgyrch yn cyfnodol. Irenau yma i gydag y cwestiynau, yn ymgyrch, felly, ydych chi'n gweithio i'r cwestiynau, rydyn ni'n gwybod. Ychydig i'n gweithio i'n cyfnodol, ychydig i'r cyfnodol, If you type your questions into them we'll be able to answer them as we go. OK, so a subtly lower expectations of as we start. Sure I am not an expert in sociocracy and definitely not an expert in the history of sociocracy, but I borrowed this nice image from sociocracy for all in the US and it's an few of the people who helped to form sociocracy along the way As you can see, it's not a new idea. We can trace it right back to 1851. So the bit I thought I'd focus on is more recent history of sociocracy. So you can see here, I'm not too sure about the pronunciation here. I think it's casebooker 1926 implementing consent decision making in a school setting. So we have a really interesting history of a practical application of a theory of sociocracy. And what happened was Dutch civil engineer pacifist Quaker decided to see how this would work in real life and applied it in an education setting to try and bring children, teachers, parents all together to create a self-covening community drawing very heavily on Quaker principles. And that experiment was something experienced by Gerard Endenberg. He was at that school as a child. He then took all of that learning, that knowledge and later in life applied it in an organisational setting. So he was working in a company established by his parents called Endenberg Electronics and he developed what we know today as the circle method, the sort of sociocratic circle method, the way of organising. So there's a lot of information out there actually about this, which is really fascinating and well worth reading. But you can definitely find a lot of that online just by googling. You can also find it in the book We the People by John Buck and Sharon Vilnes, which came out in 2004. And I think the really interesting thing here is that Socioxy was pretty much unheard of outside of the Netherlands, I think Germany, places in Europe. And then it really spread after this book came out. It was sort of John Buck as known as the person who brought it to the US and then it sort of spread more recently. There's also some people in this nice screen who are part of Socioxy for all now in the US. And that's an organisation we've been working with from Unicorn and they have done a lot to bring Socioxy into the limelight in recent years. So, as I said, whistle stop history with no real detail there, but there's a lot of information out there. So moving on. So Gerard Endenberg, he created a living laboratory for Sociocratic Governance in this company and the double linked circle structure, which we'll talk about more in a moment, really came to life then and is still very much the underpinning theory of Socioxy. So when I first heard of Socioxy, the sort of key concepts that came across that got me very excited about it. The first thing is that it's about no one being ignored. It's a way to hear all voices within an organisation. And that's such a key part of co-operation and being part of a co-op that it struck a really strong chord with us. And then we also heard that Socioxy was going to bring effectiveness. So you understand that the work that you do together matters and you start to think about how you can make that as efficient and effective as possible so that you can see really tangible results for all the effort that you're putting in collectively to make your co-op or whatever the form of organisational business work. So collective time is always really precious whether you're in a co-op or elsewhere and making the best use of that is something that I think we've all been striving to do for a lot of years. So systems and ideas to help improve that's always really, really welcome. Transparency is a huge part of what I've always known being part of Unicorn and other organisations of very similar ethos but I know it's not that common across the business world in general but having like an open access to information really, really crucial for this. And feedback, which I think is something we all try and do all the time when you work in a more horizontal organisation that really values hearing from each other but learning how to give feedback usefully, learning how to build that into the way that you develop in terms of connections between people but also in terms of organisational developments really, really interesting. And then Socioxy, this idea of continuous learning trying something out, learning from it, trying it again, not looking for perfect before you can move on and make a decision that's another really crucial piece. I haven't actually typed it and I'm wondering why I haven't but the key phrase from Socioxy is good enough for now and safe enough to try and I think that's a really, really useful mantra for the sort of getting the mindset of all of this. A little definition is that for Socioxy those who associate together decide together. So as with democracy, autocracy, the first part, the socios, the people associating together you could say so much more about that but I realise time would run away. So this is another slide that I've borrowed from Socioxy for All in the US, they don't mind, it's public access and this is the way that they describe sociocracy, these three key elements. So organisational structure, double-linked circles and we touched on that really briefly with Gerard Endenberg's work so that's where that comes from. This idea of continuous evolution by feedback that you're always looking to learn, you're trying to take in new information at all times with whatever you're doing and then from that developing new ideas, being brave enough to try them out, see what happens and keep doing that and that's quite revolutionary I think for some of us in the co-op world where we're much more used to thinking and talking about things for a while before we'll decide it's a risk we're willing to take and then decision-making by consent. That's another key part of this, consent decision-making and I think Pete's definitely going to talk more about that later in some more detail but I'm going to take each of these three. So in Socioxy we're talking about these circles and circle working so what you need to know about that is that in an organisation that's running sociocratically everybody's a member of at least one circle and circles are small working groups there's about four to seven people is the ideal number and then within these circles every circle has four roles they might have lots more roles lots of operational roles within the circle but four key process roles and that's a co-ordinator role a facilitator role secretary and delegate so your co-ordinator or sometimes referred to as the leader role is the person who takes the overview of the work of the circle and what's happening facilitators facilitating your meetings secretary has responsibility for taking minutes note sharing keeping information and then delegate this is kind of a fairly new idea is having somebody who's solely responsible for sort of representing what's happening in your circle and that's important because as you sorry I think slides have shifted around as you double link through an organisation you have two people attending the next circle you have your co-ordinator your leader and you also have your delegate and they have two quite distinct roles to play to do that properly so I think also something that you have to know about sociocracy early on is that in circle working you have this emphasis on equal participation which is so crucial to how it all works and that's usually speaking in rounds so if you speak in rounds everybody gets an equal chance to speak so that means it's easier to listen easier to pay attention to what you're talking about what you're trying to decide between you because you're not sort of waiting for your turn thinking ah me me next please you know it's going to come back to you and you can sort of relax into the meeting and that's something that we've really enjoyed doing those of us have been doing this for a little while at Unicorn so there's lots of different types of rounds and we always start with an opening round which is something we would have loved to do today but it's great there's so many people here which made that a little bit impractical but an opening round just helps set the frame how you're showing up in a meeting and that means you can share like things for us perhaps we've just been on the shop floor doing some really difficult work maybe helping a customer maybe just come from splitting a delivery and trying to find all the relevant bits of paper or whatever it is you can just share what's going on for you kind of take a breath take a pause and then get ready to to join the meeting um we might talk a little bit more about this later so then in your meetings you are trying to make sure that you have this real emphasis of equality for participation so using rounds is a core part of that but also wanting to have process that supports that possibility for everybody to engage on the equal footing so socioxyforall term this understand explore decide and this is a framework we found really really useful so first of all you just want to understand make sure that everybody understands what you're talking about so in that that would be your clarifying questions round make sure that everybody knows what you're discussing a chance to explore and this is I think you know crucial piece for how to run meetings efficiently and also be able to hear from everybody so for us that's doing a quick reaction round so a quick reaction round would be what comes up for you about this topic what's your initial reaction to this anything you'd like to share and then when you've done that you can move into making a consent decision on something and at that point you're asking everybody whether they will go along with what's being proposed I realise I'm rushing through something that's definitely a webinar topic all on its own it's a quite a big process and there's lots of different ways of looking at this and using this depending on what you're doing at any given time but the key point here is that you take this stage by stage and you make sure everybody's ready to move on to the next step before you do and then when you become familiar with this everybody kind of always knows where they are in the process and it creates this nice working space where things aren't up in the air or difficult this is a key piece for consent decision making and I really would like Pete to talk about this maybe a second if he could jump in how to understand consent is that we're framing it with what's your personal preference so we will have personal preferences on whatever topic it is under discussion but also what you can work with what's within your range of tolerance and if we are looking at everybody's range of tolerance a much bigger space in which you make a decision and if we're just looking at everybody's personal preference so this relates very much as well to being really clear about what you're trying to do and what the aim of what you're trying to do is Pete could I call on you to maybe have a few minutes to talk about this would that be okay? Yeah just to give you a little break perhaps have a you're doing great job it's going really well yeah I mean specifically on that thing about range of tolerance and and so forth and consent I'm kind of assuming that most people have got some sense of what we're talking about now I think you've been explaining it well but it is a lot of information well just to summarise I suppose what we're talking about is when somebody has made a proposal of some kind and then I'm in a round and I'm being asked whether or not I consent to that proposal the question is how do I make that decision how do I decide whether to say I consent or I have no objections or how do I say actually I do have objections and this the picture that Abby just put up is a way of thinking about that which is to say that there is a range of tolerance so there are things as an individual you can put up with and there are things that you can't put up with that's kind of how I think about it so it would really obviously it really depends on the situation and the other thing about it is that the best way and again I think Abby's made this point is that you have you know you learn you really learn sociocracy by doing it I mean when you do rounds and you go through consent the consent process many times you start to get a sense of when it's right to object and when it's not that's probably the ultimate way to do it but I suppose for me what it really is it's a kind of a bit of an inward looking question where I kind of ask myself do I you know is it really going to hurt me or particularly is it going to hurt the co-op and what we're trying to do as a goal is it really going to stop things happening or am I just trying to stop it for some other reason my sense would be that most people you know I don't know how you are but when somebody presents something towards me I almost have an automatic habit of kind of saying no first that's my first response so for me I have to kind of get over that a little bit and then think you know is there really something kind of serious here is I like to use the term critical is it really critical that we that we stop this and then I think the other thing Abby is kind of alluding to is that when that thing comes out if it is important then we find a way to kind of deal with that objection and integrate it into the work rather than use it to kind of block the progress and block things moving forward we find a way to integrate it is that enough Abby to be going on with that's perfect thank you very much Pete I'll go back to the screen share if I can so one way this was explained to me reasonably as well is just if you frame that question of whether you consent to something is what's the risk we can't afford to take and anything within the risks that you can afford to take you have a way to try and move things forward so and that point you made about good enough for now safe enough to try as the exact is right in that space isn't it definitely yep that's the that's always the mantra is this good enough for now can we make something work from this is it safe enough and giving people the space to to work out whether whether or not it is I think it's yeah absolutely key to that and can I can I just add while we're talking about it I mean the the other kind of philosophical thing that surrounds all of this is the idea that actually it's better to be moving forward and trying things than it is to be spending time in arguments and blocking things so so there's a kind of trust thing that we assume that actually we try something nobody can know actually how it's going to turn out and and that's better it's a kind of general assumption behind all of that yep definitely completely agree with that Pete thank you so I've going to move on with a little bit of explaining the structure side of it I talked about double linking earlier and this this slide you can hopefully all see kind of shows what this looks like so if you imagine you've got two people in circle two who are also attending circle one then you have this this crossover of people and they're both full members of both circles the idea is this sort of a circular information flow so you have your person one taking information out of a circle and person two sort of bringing the information from that circle back into the first circle the way we understand this at Unicorn is the coordinator of a circle would have the responsibility of bringing the broader focus back into the circle that's connected to let me see if I can show you this to make this make a bit more sense so each circle would have a different range of focus so you have the more specific focus on your sub circles or sub sub circles and then as you move up through an organisation the focus gets broader so if you have your coordinator very much taking this role of from the broader circle saying right okay so coming back into the more specific circle this is what we need to keep in mind this is what we need to be framing our decisions by understanding what's going on in the business then you have your delegate representing the views of the circle and taking that into the broader focus and in that way you should have a really good flow of information so this is a double linked circle structure just to give you an idea of how the information would flow round between all the different circles these can be quite simple for some organisations and they can be really complex for much much bigger organisations I've been learning recently actually just how many different companies and schools and co-housing groups and cooperatives and all sorts of people are using sociocracy around the world and some of it's really simple maybe you've got sort of three or four linked circles and some just sort of keeps dividing exponentially in there you have many many people connected this way so this is what we were just talking about in terms of consent decision making as Pete referred to this progress this moving forwards is taking things forward so so for referring to it is circular steering at the moment so lead do measure so you lead on something you plan what you'd like to do you agree that in your circle you do it you put it into action and then you gather feedback you measure what happened and then you keep on doing that and hopefully you're heading somewhere useful over time so this was just another way of phrasing this experiment and evolve lead do measure put something forward address any objections try and run with it on a trial basis all good sociocratic decisions come with a time frame so you say you'd be doing something for if it's not that safe to try and you're really not sure about it it might be just for four or five six weeks or it could be something that you're going to review again in three years time but you always want to put a time scale in there so you know when you're going to come back and measure how well it's worked evaluate to change it if you need to and repeat and keep going until you feel like you're making some progress so do we have any questions so far you have Abby so we've got somebody asking is there a minimum size in terms of members in which sociocracy works effectively ie not having every member in every circle there's definitely some much smaller organisations out there that are working sociocratically so one circle single circle organisations can still be sociocratic so as long as there's more than I guess even just two or three of you you could you could run sociocratically okay and I've got a question it I don't know if I can frame it properly but it sounds to me that sociocracy seems very more about doing it and kind of getting on with it moving forward all of that seems to be quite characteristic of it whereas perhaps my corporate background was that you have to involve everybody first in the part where before you're doing it and that can be the blocks so as soon as you say we're doing this sociocratically how do you whatever the word is if you're doing it that way does that open up already everybody's thinking and that allows for you to start coming up with ideas that immediately aren't blocked as they would be traditionally I think so yeah it's quite a big question I guess but there's an idea in sociocracy that you can always start small you can you can take some key concepts you can assume that you're looking for consent for example when you suggest something new and you can work from that frame where you're assuming consent and you're assuming that you want to take people with you if you're trying to bring in something new there's a really good article actually about that which we can maybe share the link with afterwards sort of concepts you can use and you know take on board and use straight away without having everybody's big agreement to use sociocracy I don't know Pete if there's anything you want to add or Kirsty Not really I think that's a good answer and lots of questions coming in I see Yeah so another one how many members would each circle usually have I guess number seems to be important and there's one other as well or carry on if you want to So the classic answer to that is four to seven members the idea that seven is about the limit to have good really good discussions in a small group but also the answer to that is it's totally flexible and whatever works for you works so if you have a circle that maybe has 20 members and you're not coming together to make a lot of decisions but you're coming together for info sharing and checking in with each other that's absolutely fine and circles can work like that if you have a circle that needs to be making a lot of decisions together keeping the numbers smaller is going to work to your advantage at Unicorn we're looking for circles of around nine people because we're calculating in sort of the impacts of annual leave absence maybe cover on the shop floor which would probably mean that most of the time there'd be six or seven people attending a meeting Okay we have got more questions coming in but I think we'll try and theme them at the end a little bit more or as we go and also any of those questions that aren't answered we can do that later and send you your answers directly Okay thank you So Unicorn we at the moment have 68 members we all hold director status so we are a very flat structured co-op we're very proud of that we've been going for nearly 23 years now and we started as a small collective of half a dozen people now we're up to nearly 70 Everybody multi tasks so we all have a mixture of shop floor work and we do administrative back office tasks as well so any member of the co-op can ask to mix up their tasks if they don't feel like they've got something administrative to do and it's just too shop floor heavy they can look to find another role and vice versa if you find that you're doing more administrative stuff and you really want to do more shop floor there's always opportunities to do that and I think the crucial piece for us is that we've always wanted everybody to be a worker and that's so fundamental to who we are so we wouldn't want to ever have a system in which we had people doing management and then other people doing the work everybody is both we have a flat wage structure so everybody earns the same and we value all work contributions equally so whether you're predominantly serving customers and stacking the shelves downstairs or whether you spend quite a bit of time for example in finance wrestling with all the figures you are going to be doing your work at unicorn because you believe in this let's value everybody equally framework flat management structure so there isn't a management committee or a board of directors we are all the board and for years well I think from day one we've used consensus decision making in our members meetings and that goes really well actually I would say for the most part we've got a really nice system in our members meetings everybody is on board with how we do consensus it's quite a pragmatic form of consensus it's a consensus minus two so we have a blocking system where we'd need three members of the co-op to block something and then if something is blocked it's not a complete dead end we then take it to a workshop we bring people together we work collaboratively and we bring something back to members so for us consensus and consent are fairly similar fairly similar things I've got a little video we've worked out that unfortunately the sound doesn't work so you might not be able to hear anything but we do have subtitles on it we just made this I say we I can't really take any credit my colleague Debbie just made this two weeks ago so we're about to link with a co-op in Rejava in Syria and we said we'd send a little introduction video to them and we've mostly got the women in the co-op in this video because we're linking hopefully with a women's co-op in Rejava so I'm going to show you this and sorry for the lack of sound so we did want Abby to talk over this but she's actually hearing the sound and we're not and Abby can't talk outside of what she's hearing because that will mess everything up but you can see some of the pictures and subtitles I hope I can try and talk over can't quite hear myself but anyway, yeah this is some of our members that's Nina stocking the juices and you can see the deli counter behind and the tails and this was filmed as I said just a couple of weeks ago so this is very much how the shop floor looks at the moment and a few of my colleagues waving goodbye so this is our timeline I mean still can you see this properly still yes yeah great so 1996 the co-op was established and we ran everything in I've put easy and inverted commas but easy decision making with up to 15 members so everything was done in sort of the one circle if you like 2004 we reached a size where we felt we couldn't bring in more members until we looked at the structure again, I'm saying we I wasn't there back then but I've done a lot of reading about it and talking to other co-op members about it so I almost feel like I was but I wasn't so we had set up with this framework that said that 15 was the maximum number for this human-sized family-sized group interaction and that comes for those of you who are familiar with this Roger Sawtel's blueprint for 50 co-ops which was a hugely important document for us when we got started so in 2004 we wanted to be able to bring more members into the co-op the business was growing a group of my colleagues many of whom are still here decided on a system that would devolve decision making so we introduced teams and sort of an umbrella team system as well with sub teams underneath it it's actually quite similar in some ways to sociocratic design which is interesting so we feel like we're sort of revisiting our roots and within this system there's a central forum where representatives from the different teams would come together once a fortnight check in with each other share information and it could make small decisions in forum usually small spends just above the team spend threshold but below what we'd need to bring everyone together for for the members meeting and this worked really well and still does work today but you know worked really well until 2012-2013 and we went into a period of rapid growth then and we brought on a lot more co-op members and this is actually when I joined as well so we were noticing people were really noticing that we were struggling with decision making at forum we had more people there we had more teams decision making in the members meetings because there was just so many of us sort of packed into the room and the old way of doing things wasn't quite working and some of our teams were just reaching this point of being bigger than the 15 magic number when we devolved back in 2004 so there was a real sort of sense of needing to do something and in 2015 there was a decision taken to do like a big wholesale review of the structure so three of us did that and we reached out to other co-ops and we did lots of sort of surveys in the membership and talking to people and thinking what do we need to do you know what options do we have to make this work better for the biddy and at that point what we decided was we weren't going to make any major changes we were going to revamp our consensus process which we did we were going to look at some of the ways that teams were working together and we were basically going to take the phrase of someone who was working with us at the time work smarter to keep things running as we had been doing and retain that sort of collective ethos so we didn't want to do anything that brought in any hierarchy and we didn't want to lose what made sort of unicorn feel so special but we knew we wanted to do something so after 2015 we put together a sort of semi-permanent longer term structure team group of people to start thinking how can we do this work smarter piece what can we do to make things stop creaking so much at the scenes with the number of members that we had so we made lots of smaller changes and some worked, some didn't some are still going now and then with late in 2017 we sort of stumbled across this thing called sociocracy and it felt like it was a real opportunity for us so this is kind of what I've been saying this is a slide I took for a presentation we put together for members a couple of years ago it's just this sort of idea that if you're making a decision in a large group it's definitely more complicated than in a small group and if you've got everybody in the room at the same time it doesn't guarantee that you've got equality of participation and in fact for a lot of people being in a room with sort of 70 other people is a way that they're going to really struggle to articulate their ideas and their thoughts so formal hierarchies are definitely not inevitable but alternatives take a lot of perseverance and work and imagination and I think that's something that we all sort of subscribe to at Unicorn so what we've been doing for the last couple of years in fact now it's 2019 I have to start saying for three years which feels like quite a long time is looking to redesign the collective management structure so that the membership that has been growing has been static at the moment we've made a decision not to recruit whilst we're just working all of this out to make sure that we continue working well and we're still somewhere that people really want to be and that means thinking about decision making what do we all need to decide together and how can we make sure that we are sharing power without having everybody overwhelmed with all the decisions that need to be taken in a vibrant busy business like Unicorn so that's a lot of that for us is about the team meeting structures I think we've cracked it for the members meetings but our teams some of them are pretty large over 20 people making changes for that and for them and then we've realised that there's quite a lot of hidden functions there's a lot of work that people do that's not sort of part of a particular team necessarily so we wanted to sort of make all those things visible and understand all of the work that was happening so this is a slightly naff diagram I put together of our current structure so we've always described it as a wheel so the members meetings are the outside and that's sort of boundaries our structure for decision making and that's all of this I've got 23 teams at the moment most of them come to forum but not all of them some of them are little teams and they're sort of sub teams of other teams and we have quite a few projects at any one time that various different members will be involved in so it kind of pretty much functions like this you've got your members meetings taking lots and lots of the decisions forum making the smaller decisions teams having quite a lot of autonomy to get on with things but lots of stuff sort of filtering to forum back to teams forum again then up to members meetings so it can take a little while to get things decided so I thought I'd pause as well at this point and just see if any questions about Unicorn have come in there's quite a few questions how do you avoid hierarchy I think we're talking about that in your presentation already also somebody asking what is the pay structure what it actually is the pay and can you give an example of circles at Unicorn specifically are they organised by functions or something else okay so hierarchy well we know that hierarchies will always exist in terms of experience lengths of service the amount of time that you've been there often brings more weight to your voice and to your ideas I think that's just human nature and that's how things tend to go but what we've always been really keen to do is to try and see where there might be any hidden hierarchies and to try and sort of understand why they exist and how they exist and how we can always make things as open and traversable as possible for members in our structure so I think hierarchy is an interesting I often say we're kind of allergic to hierarchy at Unicorn because if anyone mentions hierarchy we tend to say no we don't do that don't do that but we also do understand that sometimes there are hierarchies of knowledge and experience so obviously people on our finance team they're very very much trusted to be able to work out financial projections and sort of guide spending decisions and of course we all trust that because that's a key part of what they're doing and that's part of collective management so I think it's just sort of how it's framed and there's probably another probably two hour webinar on its own looking at hierarchy pay we've just had a little pay rise we're up to £12 an hour so everybody earns that and that's a pretty good wage for the sector that we're in in grocery and we're you know we're quite proud of that so it's a reasonably well paid job in the sense of if you look at sort of other people working in retail what they'd be earning if you look at what finance managers might be earning in a company with a sort of turnover that we have I'm sure it's far below but you do this kind of job because you believe very much in the ethics of it and the social change aspect of who we are as a co-op which I think I've never left out of a presentation before but haven't really talked about that today with Unicorn circles we are going to come to in a minute and the different function areas so shall I move on and yeah okay so what we've been doing then with Sociocracy is initially last year beginning of last year we brought a proposal to forum just for a small budget to for a few of us to learn the basics so I'd sort of accidentally attended an advanced Sociocracy webinar something that just came into my inbox and was one of those annoying people that said oh yeah but what is it in the question and answers and realised it was something really interesting and I wanted to find out more so we connected with Sociocracy for all and they had at the time I think they've changed up a little bit now what they call the empowered learning circle programme ELC or as one of my colleagues dubbed it and it's forever remained the early learning centre programme so we six of us got together to do that and we asked for the hours and the co-op said fine we could do that so we had these 90 minute video led sessions exploring the basic concepts and getting to practice talking around and using decision making and so on so we did that for the six sessions and we had some meetings online with Ted from Sociocracy for all who was coaching us and answering our questions and at that point all of us decided this this seems great this has a lot of really positive things that we think we can bring into the co-op so then we went back to the membership to the full members meeting this time and asked for quite a bit of a bigger budget to continue with this work and we asked for the six of us to carry on with fortnightly meetings to explore sort of what implementation might look like and to roll out the training that we'd been receiving to the membership more broadly start a consultation process and start looking at what a new structure could look like with the aim of producing a proposal for this May so we're working on that at the moment two of us participated in the sociocracy leadership training with Sociocracy for all last year we've continued a relationship with SOFA so we've had sort of check-in meetings with Jerry from Sociocracy for all fairly regularly and we've been working with our largest trading team there's 25 of them when we started this in a trial circle structure so I'm going to go through some of these sort of design principles of sociocratic structures just to explain how we've sort of come to where we are at Unicorn so you have a general circle which is a little bit like how a sort of central forum which is tasked with sort of information flow making sure that the department circles are all well connected and understand what each of them are doing so this question of sort of aims and domains and sort of functional areas is the question asked about the functions it's really important that people understand what's happening in which bit of the structure and I think that's something that we've been working on generally for Unicorn and tend to do a lot more of because I mentioned hidden functions there's often stuff that happens that's really important that it's happening but it's not sort of designated to a particular area and this it makes sure that everything is is very open and everybody knows exactly where the limits of authority lie for any given circle then move to department circles I borrowed some slides from one of my colleagues who put together a presentation on this for our members recently hadn't realised I had to click for each little bit of text to come up so this is four or five usually department circles or forums taking a specific business function and then again acting as an information point for the circles that are connected in in the same department and having decision making authority for the issues that sort of span the various teams or circles within the department so like we have with forum now we tend to bring anything that sort of crosses teams comes to forum so that we can make sure that everyone affected is happy with what's going on so similar idea then so the actual sort of working circles or the team circles so every department would have a varying number of these it could just be a couple or it could be sort of five or six and they need to have their very clear domain setting out the limits to their authority and it shouldn't overlap with the neck of crucial part of sociocracy here and some circles will be sort of permanent or I think nothing's ever permanent everything should be dynamic in a sociocratic structure but some circles will be more permanent and others will be much more temporary so a temporary circle that comes together particular times of year for a specific function or a temporary circle that comes together as a helping circle to research something specific or come back to the recommendation for example then we have the sub circles so this again can really vary there might be none at all or there might be several and it's specific aspects of the domain so if you have a large domain so the example we've got on here is personnel, the HR function we have a membership committee now which is a group of members elected each year to make the decisions on new members joining the co-op and they take feedback from across the the whole of the membership to be able to make that decision so that's like a very specific piece of the domain for the personnel team that's looked after by another connected group so very similar in sociocratic structures again temporary helping circles or more permanent and then there can be lots of layers so I mentioned at the beginning there are some much bigger organisations that sort of do this and have circles sort of going for for several levels and then this is something that happens for more hierarchical versions of sociocracy which you can certainly have a mission circle or a top circle I think actually sometimes it's referred to as a council of elders which we quite liked at Unicorn and that's the board of directors and that in your sort of classic classic structure you'd have your board and then maybe a sort of senior management team and departments and so on so sociocracy does seem to work really well whether you're a very flat structured organisation like Unicorn or you're a much more hierarchical traditional organisation there's a way to bring it in that works for both so oops at Unicorn this is the members meeting so we definitely are not looking to introduce any kind of board of directors other than the one we have now which is all of us so this I was trying to summarise you know where we're at at the moment and what do we think that sociocracy offers Unicorn so a framework for further devolution and distributed authority is the key part of it so looking at this clarity over who's doing what why they're doing it what the aims of what they're doing are being really specific about the functions the different functional areas and that's how we've been looking to set circles up time if you've got smaller circles so if you had a meeting which we do have now of 20 plus people coming together for an hour of fortnight that's sort of 20 plus working hours used in that meeting and if there's a lot of actions that come out of it that people don't really have the time to take on and then two weeks later 20 of them are coming back together again you're using quite a lot of our collective management time to not necessarily make that much progress if you have six or seven people coming together for an hour you then free up a lot of other hours for getting on with the work that needs to be done to support the functioning of the decision making so I think that's been a key idea for us if we're able to create a structure where we're all very actively involved in decision making and perhaps slightly smaller pieces of this sort of team system then we have a lot more time to make these decisions together and make them work well using the consent process in team meetings which is sort of the area we've identified as needing the support to boost decision making and then some meeting tools that really reflect cooperative values so again it would be a webinar on its own but all the different sort of ideas that Socioxy brings in for how we can explore ideas and how we can work together to make decisions so this is our working draft of a new circle structure for Unicorn our underlying draft because it keeps changing we're doing lots of consultation with members at the moment and we are working really hard to make sure that we're covering all the different functions in the business and that we're making logical distinctions for the circles I'm sure a lot of this won't mean anything to many of you because it's our weird acronyms of things for explaining what's what but if I give you an example so we're looking at this operations circle so having a forum style department circle of people looking operational decisions would mean that a lot of decisions that now come to the general forum where people are a bit like I don't really know would be taken by people who are working within the operations sphere so we were looking at linking together some of our current teams into this thing called facilities management that seems to make a lot of sense bringing together IT, maintenance, security, health and safety to avoid some of the duplication that happens now with sometimes with people doing bits of work in two different teams and then realising afterwards that that's what's happened and also the people element the HR element the training and of course finance so people making smaller spending decisions can we afford it you know what's the implications for the maintenance of the building and so on can happen in that area and it's I've got so used to it now because I've been working on it for a while it looks less complicated to me but I know each time we're on there let people go ooh so it's probably quite hard to explain quickly but what I can show you is this one so the veg team last year they had reached about 25 people they were really really keen to try and do things a bit differently and they asked for the support of the Sociocesi circle to have a go at redesigning the veg team functional area so we worked with them to put together this idea of various sub circles and like a central coordinating circle for the veg team and it started off with four and now it's three so we've got veg people looking at training and staffing needs and working with any probationers we've got the operations group which is all about the shop floor display communicating with customers deliveries dealing with the waste streams and so on and then we have veg buyers and veg buying such really huge part of unicorn people who put so much time and energy and effort into making sure our fresh organic fruit and vegetables which bring so many customers to us are fantastic quality and well priced and everything so this is a huge piece of work that's happened ever since we started having people doing the dedicated veg buying role on rotation so having space for them to meet to work on a lot of the stuff that surrounds the veg buying role and having other people taking specific areas of responsibility and connecting it together through a central circle sort of the was plan we wanted to also give everyone sorry it's a lot of background information I suppose to make this make sense but at the moment if you work in a particular area of unicorn you're usually on the team nine times out of ten you're on the team so if you do ours working a veg putting the veg out for customers splitting deliveries then you're on the veg team and you'd come to the meeting what we wanted to do was say to people all right so you might be doing that function but possibly your headspace is somewhere completely different and you're really involved with the deli team as well or you're really involved with education and marketing team or whatever it happens to be so a few people decided to stay within the wider team but not beyond a circle and that's been an interesting sort of learning experience for us and thinking about how the feedback works within the team and then the circles so we've had various successes and challenges I thought I'd start with the challenges so it was designed to accommodate all the existing team members who wanted to be in a circle rather than thinking about what's like the functional need which meant we started off with too many sub-circles and there was a bit of an overlap of who was responsible for what and a little bit of a lack of clarity so we then reformed it and we've had the three sub-circles which have been working much better some members have said that they do miss the connection of the full team meeting so even if the decision making wasn't working brilliantly there was that lovely sense of we're all in the room together once for a night and connection is a huge part of sociocracy so we're thinking about how we can work that back in somehow but a little bit, not many but a couple of reported instances of sort of information flow being a little bits lost across the wider team it's taken a while for people to sort of get familiar with some of these processes probably longer than we initially thought it might but now I think most people feel like they do know what they're doing and they're comfortable with it and we knew from day one that there would be difficulties kind of linking one sociocratic bit of the business in with non-sociocratic bits of the business so that's definitely that's definitely been an issue and our rotor super complicated definitely to our webinar I don't think it's one that many people would want to come to but the rotor makes it really tricky to just sort of arrange meetings spontaneously so we have to work within the kind of current meeting slots which makes it trickier to accommodate the sub-circle system but we've also had a lot of successes the working circles being small a means we've got sort of tangible results in making progress on goals that the team have we've done two lots of evaluation that we haven't finished evaluating where we're at now but sort of the midway point through the trial there was really sort of high levels of satisfaction and engagement reported and most people feeling that sort of generally their participation and participation of their colleagues has sort of stepped up a level through the system which was great and it's been just a really useful learning experience for those of us outside of it and those of us within it thinking about how we can devolve decision making to smaller groups and thinking about whether you do need to be part of all the decisions or whether you can see very clearly these people can take this piece and they can make good decisions on it and my feedback is still very valuable into how that works so I'm just going to slip skip back a couple of slides and just finish with some reflections on challenges of implementation more generally we have a real lack of meeting space at Unicorn we have one large room which we saw in the little video and we fit everybody in there but that's also the space for lunch times we have an office space where we can have a meeting of about 15 people around the table and we have some little offices that can fit smaller meetings in but everybody's working in those spaces so unless we can build up what's on the roof we are going to struggle with having the room to do meetings the road to super complicated and being able to just staff the business and having real multitask is a huge part of who we are but it means that people are sort of here there and everywhere through their working day I think if you were in a tech co-op for example you'd find this much easier to be able to just have meetings as you needed them and sometimes we have overlapping domains because of the people involved in particular teams at the moment so we're looking at how that would play out developing understanding of processes definitely takes time we need to have that headspace to step back and think right I'm learning something new and I want to give this a chance and whether it works for everybody is still a question mark because we all have different learning and communication styles and Pete and Kirsty and I were just at a conference two weeks ago talking about socioxy at work and it's the first one in the UK and this was something we talked about quite a lot how to make sure that if you're introducing these new kind of processes everybody has a chance to come along with you and they're not left behind and then just having the confident facilitators to support all the different circles we've been doing a lot of training but there's probably still more training needed and culture change is not a quick thing it takes time so we know that there's lots of work to do but overall we're getting a lot of positives from the membership I've realised I've gone over time by about 10 minutes so I really want to bring I think maybe Kirsty shall we ask you to come in next and tell us a little bit about what you're doing at Green City and then we'll come to Pete thank you thanks Abby okay so we're can you hear me yes we can you're a bit blurry we're in the very early stages with socioxy and we're a worker quote we have about 50 members at the moment and last May four of us went to the worker quote weekends and experienced socioxy there and so we've kind of brought it back we're chatting to people casually about it and then we formed a small circle to kind of explore it further and the last thing we did was introduce it to all members at one of our meetings so we've not really formalised yet how we're going to take it further or giving everyone enough information yet I think for us to make a decision on if we're going to formalise it but I'm just here to talk about what's attracted us to sociocracy and I think it's quite important to highlight that it's the experiences that socioxy addresses the kind of problems it addresses are kind of things we experience just within hierarchical organisations as well it's not a purely quote thing addresses quite human needs that we've not really been taught to address in proper ways so yeah first of all I'll talk about rounds because that's definitely the first thing that drew us into it so at the worker quote weekends we had the opportunity to sit in a circle meeting with about seven or eight of us and we had a sort of toy proposal where we were going to donate x amount of money to charity so we did the whole kind of round structure and it was really empowering to know that you will get the opportunity to speak and you know when it's going to come because it just takes away so many distractions and you really get the freedom to actually listen properly to what's being said and to understand so you can really listen and learn from each other and the second aspect that was talked about quite a lot at the weekend was check-ins and check-outs or what Abbey differs to I think is like opening and closing rounds first we find it quite difficult to imagine using those here it would be quite a bit of a kind of culture change but we've been doing it in our little small study group and we do find it really helpful especially if you've had quite a quite a lot on your plate you're quite distracted you voice at the beginning of the meeting and just kind of addressing it makes you kind of recognise yourself why you're distracted and you usually find by the time you come to do the checkout round you feel much better about things you did manage to refocus yourself by kind of getting it all out of the way to begin with the other aspect of the meeting structure that we like is consenting to the agenda which if I'm honest we've not really been doing properly yet we haven't really been writing out proper agendas but what appeals to me is the fact that any topic on the agenda you want to be pointing down whether you're understanding this topic or you're exploring this topic or you're making a decision and Abbey displayed in one of the visuals earlier if it's a decision you're going through all those steps when you're understanding, you're exploring, you're deciding so that provides an additional kind of structure and keeps you on the right track to kind of knowing where you're going with the meeting and you can come away from the meeting knowing what's happened I think we can quite often have experiences of conversations going back and forth you make a decision and then you start exploring it further and you come away not quite knowing what happened and by the fact that everyone has consented to this agenda is everyone taking responsibility to keep the meeting on track and not kind of go up in a tangent so that's the kind of first thing that we're introduced to social anxiety with and it really appealed the second thing that we came away with from the quote weekend was it provides quite a change of mindset and a different outlook which is quite a culture change so the first one is the fact that everyone is taking ownership of a proposal so everyone should want a proposal to pass and objections are welcomed objections are seen as a gift and so I think that was quite a different kind of mindset for us maybe just really keeping it in your head that you should want every proposal to go through and that objections are a good thing and we really like the fact that it's everyone's responsibility to integrate the objection into the proposal and so it really forces us to recognise our responsibility towards each other and we don't want to dishearten anyone who comes to the table with a proposal we definitely don't want to do that and if anyone's got an objection we don't want to dishearten them either so we're just going to always out in a really valuable voice and that the second big culture change for me which I think is really important is that it encourages a much more confident and positive attitude to change what you were talking about before that good enough for now is safe enough to try mantra we keep saying it again and again and it really does help to retrain your mindset because I think at the moment we can be quite overpowered by fear we want everything to work first time quite frankly our expectations are just too high we need to be more realistic so we need to accept that when we try something new there will be aspects that won't go to plan and things will also surprise us so sitting in a time frame reviewing it, adapting it that we do measure I think keeping that in your head all the time is a big culture change good enough for now, safe enough to try which leads into the range of tolerance that you were talking about before the fact that we all have preferences and we have to just accept that we won't all agree on our first preferences and just keeping a range of tolerance in your head all the time really and recognise where your objections are coming from and the other thing is just remembering that consent doesn't have to mean that we lock up and close up it just means that we can offer that it's good enough for now safe enough to try it's all a totally different mindset I think for us the more you say it in your head the more you really start to love it so yeah teaching us to be much more self-aware of where our objections come from I think is really important and as Pete was talking about before a critical objection is quite different to just not liking something so we need to think if our objection is a critical if not it could actually have quite a negative impact on the group because you're preventing that group from reaching their aim but then of course there's also the issue where sometimes you don't quite understand where our objection comes from we're not quite sure about something we can't quite define why so as Abba you said before you're putting a time on it you try it, you review it and develop it so you're not constantly getting held back because I think what we can experience sometime is just a bit of a paralysis and we just kind of abandon ideas once we've knocked on it perfect and then they get forgotten about for a while until we readdress and then go to the same process and I think this is so important because the only way for us to keep up with outside world is to have these systems in place that allow us to predict and to respond when opportunities arise and again with all this good enough for now safe enough to try it's really encouraging us to actively support people who want to try something new and so that I kind of talked a bit about objections there but I want to kind of talk about it in a bit more detail now because what social ox is really highlighted through me is that it's not actually objections that slow us down it's how we deal with those objections we've all got the experience of meetings running forever and people repeat themselves you can make themselves heard and quite often people are just repeating all the positives of something as if the positives should outweigh the negatives and so this is quite a mindset of pros and cons and social oxy totally changes that mindset so we're actually addressing the negatives until we don't have any because the pros and cons usually we find leaves us with quite binary choices instead of something that's a bit more flexible and with the old pros and cons system you end up with objections that are left unaddressed and then meetings have to be rerun so having this mindset that objections to make proposals better and that they contain truths because as we've seen so many times decisions fall apart later because an objection turns out to be true or because people aren't on board with it it just kind of gets forgotten about or we'll try something but because it's not about enthusiasm for everyone it's just never going to be as good as it can be so yeah properly addressing objections I think is another big change in mindset and as I said before we don't want to dishearten anyone and we don't want anyone to feel like they're not going to voice their opinions in the future we want to avoid anything that's going to create any negative feelings because those can be really contagious and quite damaging and but I want to kind of talk a bit about like our current situation how we would do things without social oxy it's not necessarily the fault of individuals that objections do get ignored it's just because without the kind of detailed structure of sociocracy just the different emotions and personalities bouncing around you easily forget that an objection has been raised it's not deliberately ignored so the next thing that's attracted me to sociocracy it's kind of came a bit lighter because it takes a bit more understanding and that is the organisational structure so I know sometimes when you first look at an organisational chart a socioclasic one it can maybe still look like a hierarchy to some people but you've got to really remember that sociocracy pushes power outwards the general circles there to make sure all the folks are spinning and the communication flows so the circles attached have the really defined aims they know where the authority lies and they don't need to gain consent from large groups which we know is really difficult and time consuming and then these circles are always encouraged to make sub circles to really keep the power localised so that the people who are informed in that area are the ones making the decisions and the people who it's going to affect are the ones who are making the decisions so it really makes us force us to think about who is really affected by our proposals but then the other thing is if what we would maybe currently find is if you're making a decision in a small group there is a bit of a fear of people who aren't involved in the decision disagreeing with you but that can lead into why sociocracy there is quite rare processes and for people to be happy with decisions of others even if it's not their preference you really do need a time process so they can understand and you've reached that decision so if a specific circle has been made this decision it's because they're the most important to do so and they know within that circle they've got elected roles based on abilities they know that the proposal has gone through the full decision process and all the objections have been harvested and consent given so that should make people feel comfortable that even if it's not their preference the decision has been made for the right reasons because I do think that not knowing how people have made their decisions is usually the root cause of disagreements usually people know how they've came to it they can accept it and if we're all going through the same process then it takes a lot less explanation and so a lot of time consuming but the other aspect is all people don't want to take on responsibility because you don't know what's expected of them and they're scared of doing the wrong thing and so Sotrock's say really pushes us to define a policy so these people should feel a lot safer with trying something different but in the opposite we have of this is to have some people who take on lots of responsibility but share amongst a small number of them and there's a good kind of phrase in the many voices one song where it says many people can wear many so many people can wear many hats but each hat can only be worn by one person otherwise you're just stretching out responsibility and it's getting pushed and pulled and you're waiting for each other to catch up and if it's something small it's so much more efficient and stressful you've got one structure really that allows us to break down operations and decisions making us more organised and we can tune into the finer details and monitor it more closely because it's all mapped out in front of you so yeah so in summary we want to get away from annuals hosting in large groups because it'll be all culturally inefficient and it takes away autonomy as well and the really important thing for me with Sotrock to say is of course it's got to be a bit more proactive in the maintenance of the governance because you're constantly doing it which is a whole part of your everyday processes it's always under review and adapting and if you pick up the many voices of one song book there's a really good bit on it about power and about how distribution of power needs to be intentional I think we may have all had experiences of structurelessness kind of waiting to natural hierarchies and I think people are still a bit wary that Sotrock say you can still end up with some natural hierarchies but in the book there's a water analogy so to be intentional about queer we want power to flow so we have to be intentional about queer we want power to flow like you would do with water and we need to make sure it is flowing you're not collecting somewhere because as soon as it collects it can gather more power so being really intentional and we might even not get it perfect with Sotrock to say it's a little bit better than letting it go wherever but as Sotrock is a system that allows us to respond quickly in the hardest part can you see it effectively and we just hope it can help us to listen to each other better and understand each other better share things distribute power more evenly and remove distractions so we can just respond much faster I think that's everything for me but I just jumped in while I can and thanks Kirsty it's been really interesting and I just thought and I love the idea of sociocracy just taken away the fear of things not working first time so in that vein we have got a show of hands facility which I'm hoping that we'll be able to use if we can just ask the question to people now is there something that's really chiming with you listening to both Kirsty and Abby today and can you see to how some of the elements of sociocracy could benefit your workplace so if you can see the show of hands button where you're on your laptop could you click it now and we'll just see I think Abby will be able to see what happens with that and if it doesn't work I don't feel any pressure now thank you Kirsty for that we've got 14 raised 15 raised hands 16 oh it's going up 17 an advance on 17 17 raised hands thank you so thank you so much Kirsty that was really really interesting to listen to and what I love about these things is that even for concepts that we all feel quite familiar with and you hear somebody else describe it always for me I get oh yeah you know that really helps me reframe it in a way that I understand it even more so thank you Pete shall we come to you and then take questions afterwards yeah that's fine thanks Abby and yeah thank you Kirsty that was brilliant it was a kind of in many ways it was a really good kind of segue I think from from probably what Abby had been saying to kind of what I want to talk about I've been working with a co-op some of some of you may have heard of called Outlandish and helped them kind of introduce sociocracy and with one or two other places my real interest is kind of participation and democracy and organisations I guess but my like Abby I wouldn't claim to be an absolute expert in sociocracy my profession is organisational development it's not even organisational design it's not about structure it's more about how things kind of work underneath the surface so another way of saying that is that I'm really interested in culture which Kirsty mentioned and so I wanted to just make a few remarks about culture really but just before I do that I also wanted to say that for me kind of the structural stuff you know there are different aspects to sociocracy one is the one is clearly the structure another you know the circles and all of that kind of stuff another big one is obviously the process of decision making and we haven't really gone into all the aspects of that so you know there's a whole maybe you just have to kind of trust for now that there are processes to deal with most of the things that you would expect there to be operationally in an organisation so things like Kirsty mentioned it again agenda setting electing people into roles defining goals all of all of those kind of operational things that you do even and the strategic things as well there are ways of doing all of those in in sociocracy we just haven't gone and setting policies and so forth but so so they are all there trust us even though we haven't kind of talked about them the thing I wanted to talk about specifically though was really culture and some of what I say will probably be an overlap on what Kirsty and Abbey have said so forgive me for that I just wanted to reinforce a few things and the first thing probably is to treat this all as an experiment so it's been said a few times that you know you have to kind of try things and probably many of you have heard of Holocacy and some other versions of these kind of things one of the things I really like about sociocracy is it's actually it kind of builds in this idea that you don't have to follow the rules so you're all you know you're pretty much at liberty to kind of design and customise sociocracy in your own way and the way you do that is you try something and you get it into place and then you you kind of just see how it works out you can adopt the things you like and not adopt the things you don't want to adopt the second thing I really wanted to say was of course sociocracy is not a panacea it's just not going to solve all your problems in some ways what it does is it deals with some areas and it throws up some new areas so in some ways my experience of being involved in these kind of things for a while now is that it doesn't always make life easier I'm sorry to say that it would be lovely if you could just kind of adopt sociocracy off the shelf and it would work brilliantly and solve every problem but actually I think maybe more what it does is it brings some other problems to light I mentioned outlandish and Kaylee I think from outlandish was going to be here and she's mentioned she's come up with this term kind of militant sociocracy which is a way of kind of people trying to kind of use power to kind of force through decisions and until we started using sociocracy in that way maybe it was always there but we'd never quite seen it had never been quite so conscious so that's what I mean it throws up these things and it isn't easy because addressing those kind of problems is a difficult thing in itself so if you're not up for doing a bit of hard work and dealing with some of these things I'd recommend you don't really you just stick with hierarchy and a traditional kind of ways of doing things what else to say I mean in the same kind of vein and this is very much the area I'm interested in and I'm interested in what happened you know if you imagine an iceberg and the water line and I'm very interested in what happens below the iceberg below the water line so the unconscious beliefs kind of power the way people in organisations get scapegoated all of those things which exist in every real organisation so as I say it doesn't get rid of them because they're always going to be there again Abby mentioned this earlier maybe what it does do it gives you a little bit more time a little bit of structure on the other things you can look at but to do that you have to have a kind of reflective aspect to it so again Abby talked about this idea of you know trying something seeing how it goes kind of reflecting on it that part of the reflecting part is so important to me that you keep looking at what's going on and you're able to really step back in times and say well what has been thrown up by this process again as I'm saying I'm interested in things below the water line and two very obvious things in organisations that are the kind of emotions of anxiety and frustration and to some again Kirsty mentioned this you know that sometimes objections get left behind and I think fundamentally that's very frustrating for people and it leads to people even in extreme circumstances kind of even sabotaging attempts to get things done so one of the good things about all of this is that if you follow the sociocratic decision-making processes and you do include everybody's voice you know what you're going to get to you're not going to get to the perfect decision but at least people feel really included and I think that can kind of reduce frustration and again I think both Abby and Kirsty mentioned it the fact of using rounds is a great way to kind of reduce anxiety in an organisation again it feels kind of slightly clunky at first and it feels weird but over time as people get more used to those kind of ways of working it's fantastic to sit in a round and know that you're going to get your turn and then when people people's anxiety is reduced and it has to use the kind of fear that as anxiety goes down it becomes more and more possible to adopt a kind of mindset where we're actually welcoming in change and we're welcoming in new things which of course makes it easier for an organisation to adapt to what's going on in the marketplace outside how the world is changing all of that kind of stuff so it's definitely not perfect but it's better than voting in my mind and I just wanted to say a couple more things about you know the method itself I suppose and how it's approached and how it kind of relates to kind of emotion I mean one of the things I've noticed a little bit being around sociocritic for a while is sometimes it can become a quite technocratic kind of thing and a bit of an expert thing so my suggestion is that to counter that you make sure you introduce some you know you really encourage kind of emotional literacy into your organisation as well and do some separate activities that are going to really bring that in one of you know to me we have kind of brains and we have a head and a heart and guts as well and sometimes when sociocracy has talked about you know in the decision making process we tend to talk about making rational decisions and it becoming something we can do rationally for me I think it's perfectly valid in a circle decision if somebody's got a gut feeling that something's wrong or it doesn't feel right in their heart they ought to be able to say that even if they're not able to at that moment express what it is rationally I mean my experience of these things is that when people do that if the group can then work together the circle can work together and say okay we really respect you have got a really heartfelt objection here then somebody usually will find a way of articulating what that objection is in a rational sense it's quite rare that you can't do that and even if you can't sometimes there's you know there can be something useful there that is worth exploring so I personally I think this kind of emotional literacy is is kind of vital as well what else we've talked about this a little bit I think one of the other mistakes that people sometimes make in implementation is that you know when you get into it and you start doing it you think well we have to do everything you know all decisions have to go to a circle and really it's not saying that at all it's saying that in my mind very few decisions actually have to go to a circle I mean the vast majority of things we do in life and in work we don't really need to get consent for if we if we kind of ask ourselves is what I'm about is what I'm about to do going to cause a problem is that going to cause an objection somewhere else we can normally decide for ourselves or I might turn to Abbey or on Kirsty and say is that you know have you got any concerns would be doing that that's a very kind of practical way we don't have to have a formal kind of circle meeting and I might rather work in an organisation where most of the the decisions are made outside of circles and it's only really when you've got real things that you're really concerned about that you can bring it to circles and I suppose again yes that's just to reinforce really what both Abbey and Kirsty were saying about I mean the underlying kind of ethos of this it's about devolving responsibility it's really about trust so it's about being able to you know sometimes in a circle if you're going through a decision-making process it's perfectly valid for the facilitator to kind of say to people look you know to a small to one person or two people or a small subgroup to say look we trust you to go away and do that yourselves it's absolutely fine to do that you don't have to you know go through the formal process and kind of block it up at the higher level because we're always trying to push decision-making down so just a couple more points to kind of finish off really and they're really mainly about implementation and the first one is that sometimes people and I think you kind of alluded to this Kirsty a little bit that sometimes people ask things like well what do you do when you know there's kind of resistance in the organisation to even doing kind of check-ins and what do you do if you have people in the organisation who haven't got the emotional or the intellectual capacity or resources to do this kind of stuff I mean I have a real problem with that I just think it's completely wrong I think everybody has got the ability to do this and to do it at pace the difficulty we have is that so many people have worked in traditional organisations where they're not allowed to kind of think like this and all of us or most of us have been the school and we've all worked in very hierarchical organisations so we have to do quite a lot of unlearning of those kind of things to get into mode to make this work and again we're not culturally we're not taught to include our emotions as well as just our intellect so all of that needs to be unlearned and the other thing just to finish off really is that the question and it will probably come up a bit later on people often ask well how does it work in bigger organisations or how do you know always for me you have to kind of start in one very little step if you want to get to the top of Everest you have to take one step at a time and nobody really knows quite how it's going to flow out into bigger organisations and into the world and even into bigger and bigger structures I mean there are as Abby said there are some very big structures around but you know why not just start with a small step and start exploring and go from there that would be my suggestion Is that okay Abby? That's perfect thank you Pete yeah it's um there's well we need to take questions but there's so many things that you've both said that make me want to say things back but yeah this I probably didn't highlight enough for early days of unicorn it was built on people having a really strong sense of individual autonomy to act and when there were sort of up to 15 people coming together for the meetings is that circle the members meeting it was within that frame of people really feeling like they knew what they were doing and they had the authority to get on with it and I think a phrase you taught me Pete a while ago of um you know don't ask for permission just ask for say sorry if you get it wrong kind of thing ask for forgiveness if you get it wrong and I think in small co-ops that works really well so for us sociocracy it's kind of we discovering that as well having circles where the members of that circle feel like they have a lot more empowerment and autonomy to get on with things without constantly needing permission first from the group and also um I've I learnt at the event recently that um talking arounds and using these processes is analogous to learning to ride a bicycle learning to swim learning to drive you feel a bit dangerously out of control and then it clicks and you're okay so you've just got to give it that space to let it click and um I think as a really nice guy called Francois who I met a couple of weeks ago who's worked in sociocracy I think for a long time as well said if it doesn't work for you then it doesn't work for you but just give yourself permission to let it try and work for maybe six meetings or eight meetings and then evaluate there's nobody saying you must do this but also just having that freedom to understand that you can try and do this and see how it works for you first before a blanket no comes along Lewis Okay so shall we go to some of the questions that we've got coming in some people have had to leave but they've left so all of them wanted to stay they're kind of glued to what you're saying which is really good so some of the questions are especially in unicorn can you see sociocracy working across other sites does it help that unicorns based in one physical place for example and how could you see this working in multi sites probably a lot of things about our co-op help that we're a single site co-op because it makes it so much easier for connecting with people and checking in with people and decision making but I think sociocracy probably does not have to be limited to that there's certainly some big companies that work in multiple sites that use these frames again it's about pushing power out with as Kirsty said as Pete said as I probably completely forgot to say at the beginning distributed power that's sort of the aim of sociocracy so if you've distributed that power and that autonomy to make decisions and you've got the connections where you need them to bring the right people together as needed to check in for information flow and to have that overarching picture that you need for the broader focus at the top that shouldn't be the decision making at the top really it's just the broader focus to make sure the decision making is happening in the correct frame and understanding and there's no reason why multi site wouldn't work very well Could I just add Abby I mentioned I've worked with Outlandish and one of the things Outlandish do very well is work with remote workers and so quite a lot of the although they don't have multiple sites quite a lot of the circle meetings will have members who are remote and just on a computer screen and stuff like that and again you know just thinking about it very simply the round mechanism is a very good way of making sure you actually include everybody if you don't forget the people that are remote Interesting Other questions so we can see that this is an intricate decision making tool however what happens when you've got urgent decisions to make and particularly they're thinking about health and safety decisions for example Shall I take that first I don't know I think it could work consent decision making can work really quickly and really well for urgent decisions much more so than a more traditional consensus I actually I don't like saying that consensus bad consent good I see that they're both very much coming from exactly the same space but yeah consent decision making quickly following the process all right we need to act now we've got to do this thing anyone need to ask anything to understand what the thing is or what we're proposing quick reaction everyone pretty much on board with this okay done have we got consent and you could you could do it within five minutes if people are switched on to doing this quickly whereas if you take it to a meeting where there isn't that structure and you have because you mentioned the structuralist effect which I've certainly seen quite a bit in certain co-ops definitely mine occasionally where you don't really know what the frame of the discussion is or how you're going to get to the decision and it plays out and plays out and plays out so sociocratic systems could make that really quick I think and just to add to what Abby said there it might look like you've got a lot of steps to go through to make a decision and do not understand explore decide and see that on agenda it might make you think that this process is going to take a lot longer but understand explore decide you're always doing these things when you're making a decision but this is breaking these points down and doing them in the right order instead of jumping back and forth and exploring something then realizing you're not quite understood something so you go back and do that and then it's impossible to keep track when you're doing it in that order and things always get missed in the end so that actually that could be a lot as Abby said a lot faster than having a more relaxed meeting structure Definitely and hopefully as you said earlier Kirsty as well then you know what the decision is that you've made and you know why you've made it whereas sometimes you were you sort of make a decision and you're not quite sure and lo and behold it's popped up on the next agenda for the next meeting Some questions about the forum and the structure could you just go over it again over the yeah I think they just want to hear that again actually in unicorn Yeah sure so we have a central forum at the moment which is made up of representatives from our different teams and that is a space that's supposed to catch information that affects more than an individual team affects you know more people or something that affects the whole membership so forum is a two-way information flow you bring something to forum if you want to get feedback from people if you want to send it out to all the teams in the business to make sure everyone's okay with whatever the potential decision is or the information that needs to be shared and also it's used for spending decisions so proposals for could we have I don't know however many hundred pounds for this particular thing that isn't within our team budget because it's our team and another team or it's a general thing I hope that's an okay explanation and forum is a little bit fluid it shifts a little bit with its remit and that's something that we're hoping that a sociocratic restructure will fix a little more and give people more authority to just make those decisions in there in their existing teams okay is there a map of organisations that are using sociocracy in the UK or examples of organisations using it effectively there's not a map that I know of Pete I've never heard of one it's a great idea I think somebody should create one definitely there's so I know that in the US but sociocracy for all have got quite a few case studies I think there's a couple of people in the UK a really interesting thing I think is that a lot of people are using sociocracy around the world and not necessarily calling it sociocracy in the US that's because there's a fear that sociocracy sounds too much like socialism and there's a dangerous lefty tendencies going on that you know people couldn't possibly countenance so you could have a completely sociocratic organisation but it's calling itself a circle structure or distributed authority circle structure organisation or something so there's that as well interesting one here if you're trying a consent-based system for the first time for example a proposal for a 3.5 pay rise in your organisation can you play out a scenario that might unfold using sociocracy Phil this is a question for Pete oh wow I was hoping you were going to do that one well again I suppose my take on it first of all would be to kind of experiment a little bit and go quite slowly so because one of the things is different proposals have different kind of emotional weights so if it was a pay thing wouldn't it when it was really quite close to people's hearts maybe you'd want to go at it as a certain kind of pace so what that means is as Kirsty said that the consent process is broken into these stages so if you like you're allowed to kind of do a few stages and then kind of stop and see where you get to and then kind of work from there so you know you'd basically just you'd start by trying to get kind of real clarity over what was being said but then you might even at that point you might decide to kind of stop and take it away and do something different with it and then essentially we just keep using the consent process but at a pace that is appropriate for the scale of the problem I mean the next stage I think I've recovered this having discovered got clarity, real clarity about what the proposal is so that's not still at this point not trying to raise any objections you do move to a point where you're trying to get you're trying to bring up those objections and as Kirsty said explain this really well we're trying to gather these objections so that we can improve the proposal so because we're trying to find our way forward we're not trying to use it to block so again you know very important skills of kind of listening and clarity and doing all of that kind of stuff and the other thing I usually say when I talk about this and when we do it for real in real life is you know at this point it's quite a creative process and at the best of this when you've got a small group of people working very creatively to solve something quite often you can come up with a proposal which is really quite radically different from what was said in the first instance and that's a really positive thing we're still moving forward but we're moving forward with something that everybody can kind of get behind in just doing all of that I've just really kind of shortcutted the consent process but does that I don't know what do you think Abby you have to speak on behalf of the question of that answer Yeah I think so and Kirsty anything you wanted to What do you think in that situation to understand you'd first be wanting to understand and also be specified how much the pay rise they want is you want to understand the reasons why they feel they deserve your eyes and then I guess the exploration part would be gathering the information and paying across the boards what everyone else is on how pay rises occur or whatever and then in the decision stage I guess you're going to get objections people may be thinking well I've never had to pay rise I've been here all this time or how do I know you're doing all this x amount of extra work and we don't know so it kind of brings up other problems where you kind of want better things to be able to measure how you do your work and then in that situation you may well say well and we're going to integrate this and say in about six months time we'll review this again or it may be the case where people would agree on a pay rise across a board at a smaller level or something and to integrate people's objections that way and we haven't mentioned your thesis Kirsty that you know you might in the first stages you might actually just get the clarity that you need to do some more research so somebody might form a subgroup to go off and do that research and bring that information back I mean as I said sociocracy has mechanisms to deal with or ways of thinking about doing all of these things that you would do in a normal situation Okay, how do you measure how sociocracy is working in your organisation? Lots of evaluation and reflection I think Pete's definitely going to have stuff to say that's more useful this and we maybe I haven't made clear enough as well that at Unicorn we are still learning and experimenting and we haven't yet agreed as a membership whether we want to sort of fully implement sociocracy or which pieces we're going to take from it so this is all an evaluation process that we're in now we're trying out little bits and pieces and we're finding out from people what they think of them and how they see them developing and then I think something that was said by Kirsty and by Pete earlier as well that you know sociocracy should be dynamic and it should be a moveable feast and it needs to be sort of your flavour of sociocracy if you like and I know that the sort of form of sociocracy that we're working on bringing to Unicorn is a very flat-structured co-op form of sociocracy and we wouldn't see that sociocratic identity in any way superseded the cooperative identity so us as a worker co-op is fundamentally number one and we do quite a lot of evaluation anyway in following members meetings for example standard practice evaluate what worked what didn't was the timing right all that kind of stuff we probably have a slight oversurveying culture now where we regularly sending out little surveys to people to say how do you feel about this that the other but finding mechanisms that really do invite genuine feedback and people to say what they really think about things is crucial and I feel like sociocratic tools really lend themselves to that being able to speak in rounds being able to reflect and react something we've done a little bit in our little implementation group is experiment with sociocratic process of feedback and review which is probably another big subject that takes too long to explain here but there are tools built in to enable people to reflect on how well they're working with people in the same circle as them and to hear be very open to hearing other people's feedback on that I think that's quite a powerful thing I will say a little bit about it I just I wish there was somebody from Outlandish here who could talk specifically about Outlandish I mean I'll take the risk and talk a little bit on their behalf for when I consult to Outlandish I'm not a member but Outlandish for example as a co-op has gone through a process over the years of kind of establishing its kind of mission and the mission is two parts essentially one of them is about its social purpose so what it gives back to society and the other thing is about the well-being of the members and all the other people that are involved so it has if you like it has a kind of top level of kind of business goals and then below that each of the circles have kind of designed work together to produce OKRs objectives and key results which are connected to those to that higher mission so each of the circles is trying to do stuff that is in theory kind of aligned with the higher mission and the process that we use in meetings is to you know we use the sociocratic methods but we also use the note taking and bring the OKRs to the forefront and talk about all of those kind of things so that's just a way of then saying the way that success is measured ultimately is by again looking at those top level those measures of success and at the level of success at each level down in the organisation so the OKRs are assessed to see are we making progress as a circle and is the organisation making progress on its goals and those are measured in the ways you'd imagine where they can they're measured numerically and otherwise they're measured qualitatively you just do what you can Yeah Can you see sociocracy embedded in charities social enterprises especially those that want to disperse power it says across service users and service providers I guess incorporating volunteers as well Yes, there's a short answer Yeah and I suspect there are examples of people doing that in most of those settings already I can't think of any to hand but I'm sure we could dig some out I think there's lots in the networks sort of around the sociocracy for all network in the US there's definitely a lot of organisations and it's very big in different places in Europe definitely in the Netherlands where it comes from originally we know there's quite a few people in Germany different organisations and groups using it and Scandinavia so I think it's it seems to be something that works across a load of different sectors and it certainly works in volunteer based organisations because that's another key part particularly people doing stuff around permaculture and transition and things where social change is a key part of who they are and what they're doing because sort of essence of sociocracy which I think definitely failed to get across earlier was it came out of this desire for social change that democracy doesn't work democracy fails us majority voting fails us and there's something much more profound you can do to be part of a well functioning group and the original theoretical stuff talked about sort of societal change based on these sociocratic principles okay so we have had a number of questions some that are kind of more theoretical house common aim created define hierarchy and all of that and I think we'll probably take those offline but we will be able to answer those and send those to to the questioners later I just wondered if there's anything that the panellist wants to finish off with anything that they want to add and if possible we'll then take it to a poll we haven't done that before but we're going to be seeing how that works but anything else that the panellist wants to say before we depart one quick thing somebody popped up a question saying what's an OKR an OKR is an objective and key results if you google it you'll find a whole lot of stuff about that but basically it's a bit like a it's just a way of setting an objective and having some measures of your success Bestie Anything? Don't think I've got much more to add other than it is a culture change if you're if you're yeah we're a bit concerned if you're implementing it we want to make sure we're training everyone as we go so that no one kind of gets left behind because what could happen is if we were to introduce this and there were some people who weren't quite as up to speed I wouldn't want someone sitting in a circle where you've got four or five people who are really well changing sociocracy and one person who's not as confident because that is going to leave that person useless feel quite alienated so just to remind you that it's quite a slow process so you are changing a lot of habits and it does yeah it's a different mindset I think a lot of the time I guess what would be the first steps if organisations are interested in looking at this further and bringing this into their organisation having meetings about it is it something that we can look at what would their first steps be um interact so I can say a bit funny way at the beginning what you said there um it's just what would an organisation's first steps be if they're thinking we might want to include this in how we run things in our organisation where would where would they go is it online is it just google it or are there facilitators that actually support this and and can implement this or at least introduce it in their workplace yeah there are consultants out there and I'd say social safety for all are the best kind of resource I'd be able to say a bit more about it but they do the online training courses where you can have a empowered learning circle so your group and your organisation you can get together with a consultant and you'll have I don't know a fortnight way or something I don't know meetings with them or you could do a leadership training course and then they've got so many resources if you go to their website so that would meet people's different kind of learning desires so they've got lots of slides so you can use there's some good videos so you can see footage of their webinars you can actually see footage of their empowered learning circles that they've done and the book is really good as well it's really broken it down into a bite size trunks some of the other books are a bit more kind of wordy but this is really kind of broken down so you can really oh there we go can you turn it out where you want it's not like a front probably but you can just phone right in and I've got my quality hearing it's got all kinds of post it notes sticking it right a bit as you can see what's a good visual so I think maybe we all do cover it everyone's feeling different wearing the styles so that's definitely the best place to go I would say yeah I'd completely echo that look at Socioxyfoil's website there's lots of information on there there's more and more people getting interested in this in the UK in the work at co-op movement definitely I can't be there this year I feel very sad about that but the work can't weekend I think there will probably be a lot of discussion about Socioxy there again this year as well and it's yeah it is fairly easy to find some good quality not expensive resources and ways to start and then there were a lot of people out there like Pete who really know their stuff in the UK as well who can help organisations I guess the only other thing that I thought I might like to add is that we talked a lot about power recently and the power of knowing the rules being a really powerful part of that so making sure that what you're doing works for people as Kirsty said not leaving people behind is a massive thing but also understanding that sort of talking arounds can be as basic as we're just going to take turns and talk in around now and we'll definitely come back to you and the way that I've been learning Socioxy is to always sort of start if you're facilitating saying what it is you're about to do why you're doing it and how it works and that constant repetition just means that it doesn't feel alien it doesn't have to feel alien and that we all have to if we care about this stuff and lots of us do being able to connect with people make good working relationships with people really valuing of what we're doing because we spend so much of our lives at work then we want to do that as well as we possibly can and these are some fairly simple tools to help us to do that yes right thanks to everyone I think it's been really interested and I know that people have been well they didn't want to tear themselves away some had to because of the time but it has been really valuable before we leave then so thank you Kirsty Abbey Pete and Abbey do you want to have a go at pulling up that poll and seeing if we can get the attendees to participate as well as their checkout and we'll see how this has gone down and whether it is useful so how useful is today's webinar in your opinion one not at all or five very useful and click now if you can and we'll just see if this works and also while you're clicking it we are experimenting whether webinars are a really good way of sharing some of the learnings that we have here in Cooperatives UK we do want to do more of these throughout the year so if you're interested in participating in more give us your feedback let us know send us your questions send us your chats we'll get through them all at some point but we're really keen to know if this was valuable to ours for many of you so thank you thank you again panellists and has anything come up now Abbey because we can't see much oh yes it's here in front of me there are still a few people to answer I don't know if everyone can see it that's the tricky thing with how we're set up today we can't see any of you to see if you're struggling no never mind we tried it doesn't work all doesn't work this time we've got 61% of people who have taken part and we have 64% saying 5 for very useful 27% saying 4 for pretty useful and 9% for in the middle so thank you very much thank you very much thank you everyone and we'll see you again soon I hope thanks again bye bye everyone bye do I need to press anything are we still alive or I think we are still alive and we still have a few people here who can hear us and we are recording I am technologically out of my depth I'm used to Zoom but not this package of Zoom if we end the meeting then you guys disappear as well so so there's Aaron we stop live stream I'll turn that one off stop recording yep