What's in this guide?
Inside this practical guide book you’ll discover:
- Useful concepts that will help you make more sense of your organization and communicate effectively about where change is needed.
- An organic, iterative approach to change that meets people where they are and helps them move forward at their own pace and according to their unique context and needs.
- Seven core principles of agile and sociocratic collaboration
- A coherent collection of 70+ practices and guidelines to help you navigate complexity, and improve collaboration:
- Simple, facilitated formats that support teams in drawing on the collective intelligence of the group and incrementally processing available information into continuous improvement of work processes, products, services and skills.
- Group-practices to help organizations make the best use of talent they already have, through people supporting each other in building skills, accountability and engagement.
- Simple tools for clarifying who does what, freeing people up to decide and act for themselves as much as possible, within clearly defined constraints that enable experimentation and development.
- Patterns for growing organizational structure beyond hierarchies into flexible, decentralized networks where the flow of information and influence directly supports the creation of value.
- The Common Sense Framework, a tool for making sense of teams and organizations and figuring out how to get started with S3.
- A glossary with explanations for all the terms you might be unfamiliar with.
This practical guide to Sociocracy 3.0 is written and published by the three co-developers of Sociocracy 3.0.
True to the mindset behind S3, this book will always be a work in progress that grows and changes as we learn from people who are experimenting with S3 in organizations around the world. Since we started out in 2015, we have released several updates per year and we’ll continue to do so in the years to come.
Even though several sections in this book are brief and may still be rough around the edges, the content and explanations have been sufficient for many people to get started with S3 and achieve positive change in their organizations. We hope you’ll find it useful too.