Dynamic Governance: Decision Making, Power Sharing, organizing and Co-Creating
Our system of Dynamic Governance is based on the principles of Sociocracy and Holocracy.
Dynamic governance is a system of egalitarianism which empowers people to take action according to their truest passions, highest purpose, relevant skills, expertise, aptitudes, desires, and experience all in a deeply supportive team structured to inspire and maintain the best interest of each member while accomplishing a task in the most fun, efficient, and creative ways possible.
This is modern tribal village living at its best. Everything that needs to be done to make life happen births a team of people to share in the co-creative process. The teams are iterative, emergent, agile and ever evolving as you choose what team you want to be involved with (or not involved with), what role you desire to play on the team, and what level of engagement you want to have in accordance with what feels true, relevant, and authentic for you.
This style of governance is designed to create a safe space to continuously empower, promote, reveal, and explore your gifts, passions, purpose, and contributions. Within each meeting we utilize processes and tools that support your authenticity and empower your desires. As resistance or conflicts arise, tension revelation tools are utilized to explore and extract the hidden wisdom, opportunities, and creative solutions that are revealed through navigating resistance. Therefore, tension within the group is celebrated as a vital and necessary point of power, creativity, growth, healing, and evolution. Each team meeting begins with a brief meditation and emotional/somatic check in process with all of its members giving space to explore feelings and processes and holding space for witnessing. Our communication is founded upon practices and tools of NVC (Nonviolent Communication) which allows for effective and authentic relating and witnessing. It is the goal that you are seen, heard, understood, and witnessed in your authentic truth and receive acceptance and approval as you are. In this way teams are their own unique entities which develop and utilize processes to extract the most collective wisdom in order to successfully accomplish a task in a way which cultivates the most innovation and creativity while being a therapeutic exercise in love, belonging, and trust.
Once a task is identified, a team is created, members feel stimulated to join through pure inspired desire, and a safe emotional space is established, then the collective intelligence process can begin. We utilize a multitude of methods, tools, techniques, and processes, to engage the principles of collective intelligence gathering. In his book Big Mind: How Collective Intelligence Can Change Our World, Geoff Mulgan presents five principles of successful collective intelligence among groups. “Five crucial but non-obvious factors make all the difference. These factors may sound abstract. But they quickly become practical, giving shape to the knowledge commons that holds the group together, and they are relevant to any large-scale group wanting to think, act, and learn coherently and successfully. These are the organizing principles for collective intelligence.
The first is the extent of what I call the autonomous commons of the intelligence in the system. By this I mean how much the elements of intelligence are allowed free rein, and not subordinated too easily to ego, hierarchy, assumption, or ownership. Autonomy means allowing arguments to grow and become more refined. It requires a dialectical approach to intelligence — seeking out alternatives and refutations as a way of sharpening understanding. A group where people quickly become attached to their assertions, where secrets are guarded, or where too much weight is put on the speaker instead of what they say will tend to be collectively less intelligent. So will one that narrows options too quickly.
The second factor will be a contextually proportionate balance: how balanced the intelligence is between its different elements, and how well-suited the balance is to the tasks at hand. Intelligence combines many distinct elements, from observation and focus to memory and creativity. Groups, like individuals, need to keep these in balance, and a high proportion of the cases where collective intelligence goes wrong reflect problems of imbalance, such as where groups are rich in data but poor in judgment, or rich in memory and poor in creativity, and vice versa. Knowing how to orchestrate these different elements of intelligence in a coherent way is one of the fundamental tasks facing any group and leader.
The third factor will be how well the group can focus. Focus means attending to what really matters and not being distracted. Knowing what to ignore matters as much as knowing what to attend to. That may not be so obvious. For the group stranded at an airport, there will certainly need to be a focus on getting through to someone out there. But if they are to be stuck for a long period, then holding the group intact and preventing conflict may matter even more. Focus also has a subtler meaning since it introduces granularity — knowing what is relevant on different scales.
The fourth factor will be the group’s capacity to be reflexive — to be intelligent about itself and recursive. Knowledge needs knowledge about the knowledge, and this requires loops — what I describe as the three loops of active intelligence: thinking about things, changing the categories with which we think about things, and changing how we think. The more reflexive any group is, the more intelligent it is in the long run. As I will show, this reflexiveness works best when it is most visible — for example, with predictions made explicitly, and explicit learning when the anticipated doesn’t happen, all feeding into a shared knowledge commons. And it works best when it is helped by what I call self-suspicion — the ability to question the patterns that make most sense.
Finally, the fifth factor will be the group’s ability to integrate for action, drawing on different types of data and ways of thinking to make a decision. It’s not enough to think great thoughts and host glorious arguments. Life depends on action. So this type of integrative thinking is what marks out the most sophisticated civilizations. It’s much of what we and our ancestors call wisdom, and it tends to develop through experience rather than only logic. It’s where thought and action come together. We complicate to understand, but simplify to act, and search for a simplicity that lies on the far side of complexity. What I call high-dimensional choices — complex in terms of cognitive tools, social relationships, and time — require more work and loops to arrive at a composite picture that can guide action, whether that action is physical in nature or communicational.
Together, these five organizing principles help any group to think more clearly about the past (the relevant collective memories), present (the facts of what is happening), and future (the options for resolving the situation). They help the group to imagine possible future options, discover them, and then realize them.”
