Whether you’re in a position of leadership and influence or simply looking to make a meaningful contribution in your organization, building and maintaining a common understanding with your colleagues about how the organization works is highly valuable for building and maintaining effectiveness and making the best use of everyone’s time.

This chapter offers a foundational introduction to several concepts that are applicable, no matter what kind of organization you are involved with. Together, they form a straightforward yet powerful conceptual model that will help you and your colleagues make better sense of what’s happening in your organization, communicate more clearly, and work together efficiently and effectively to respond to the numerous opportunities, demands, and challenges you face. Learning about these concepts is a worthwhile investment of time, no matter what context you are working in. Understanding these concepts is also a necessary prerequisite for understanding and getting the best out of many of the patterns in S3.

The key concepts in S3 are:

  • Organization
  • Purpose
  • Intervention
  • Organizational Driver
  • Requirement
  • Domain
  • Governance
  • Operations
  • Policy
  • Complexity
  • Objection

This introduction provides an overview of these concepts: You’ll learn what each concept is about, how they interrelate, and why they are useful. In the sections that follow, we’ll go deeper into each one to help you understand more about their relevance and how you can use them to improve organizational effectiveness and perhaps even your life! Developing a thorough understanding of these concepts will help you get the best out of Sociocracy 3.0 and this Practical Guide.

At its core, an Organization is a group of people collaborating toward a common Purpose. In the pursuit of fulfilling the purpose, people make Interventions that ultimately lead to the delivery of products and services intended to meet the needs or desires of the customers they serve.

To describe purpose, we use two concepts: Organizational Driver and Requirement.

In their daily work, people face numerous situations that may be necessary or beneficial to respond to. It’s good practice to verify which situations are relevant for fulfilling the organization’s purpose, establish who has the responsibility and/or expertise to deal with them, and prioritize responding to them relative to other situations that are important. In Sociocracy 3.0 (S3), we refer to these situations as Organizational Drivers. By acknowledging organizational drivers and learning to articulate them clearly, you can improve shared understanding and communication regarding the numerous challenges and opportunities you face, which in turn can support effective prioritization and decision-making.

Once a priority driver has been identified, we suggest taking an additional step before making an intervention that addresses the situation — determining the Requirement: something you consider necessary or desirable to respond to the driver, either adequately or as a suitable incremental next step.

For some drivers, the corresponding requirement might be obvious, either because the situation is straightforward to deal with or because you have an existing policy in place that provides guidance on that. On all other occasions, determining the requirement will help clarify the general direction and scope for a suitable intervention while still leaving options open for creative thinking and exploration of various ideas for a specific intervention.

As people start working on fulfilling the overall purpose of the organization, they break down the work into smaller pieces, each of which has its own sub-purpose. Responsibility for fulfilling certain sub-purposes can be distributed among people as distinct areas of responsibility and authority. We refer to these areas as Domains. By dividing work into domains and clearly distributing responsibilities, organizations can clarify expectations, make the best use of people’s skills and experience, and ensure that important work gets addressed. This cohesive approach supports alignment with the organization’s purpose, contributing to its overall effectiveness and resilience while avoiding unnecessary dependencies and maintaining coherence throughout the system as a whole.

To deal with many of the requirements they are responsible for, people simply need to complete one or more tasks. We refer to these daily activities as Operations. Fulfilling more significant requirements, however, necessitates developing Policies (strategies, plans, guidelines, etc.) Policies are a specific type of intervention that govern how people should go about fulfilling a requirement. We refer to the activity of setting significant objectives — for the entire organization or specific people within it — and of making and evolving significant decisions that guide people toward achieving those objectives as Governance. Deciding on and evolving policies are the main activities of governance.

Since adhering to policies can significantly help or hinder the delivery of value, they are worth treating differently from less consequential decisions about day-to-day activity: Creating policies benefits from a deliberate and participatory approach, and the outcomes that result from implementing them should be evaluated regularly to identify what is working and what can be improved to ensure that they fulfill their intended purpose and remain relevant over time.

Making decisions on policy can feel daunting and overwhelming because there are so many things to consider, numerous risks and uncertainties, and solutions that appear obvious at first often turn out to make situations worse rather than improving them. That is because governance often deals with Complexity. Complexity is a property of a system in which a large number of elements are connected through an even larger number of relationships, interacting with each other and their environment in multiple ways.

In complexity, it is hard to predict the outcomes of interventions you make. Similarly, you can’t expect a policy to be correct or suitable, or even if it is initially, that it will remain so over time. Therefore, it is important to treat all policies and decisions as provisional and to regularly evaluate and adapt them when opportunities for improvement are discovered.

To better manage the complexity of governance, it’s beneficial to take a collaborative approach to decision-making that integrates different people’s perspectives, experiences, and expertise when developing policies. To maintain the effectiveness of collaborative decision-making, it’s important to consider who needs to be involved in which decision, in what way, and to what degree. A simple tool for harnessing distributed cognition is inviting people with a relevant perspective to share Objections: arguments that reveal undesirable consequences or risks or demonstrate worthwhile ways to improve a policy, a proposal, or an activity. As we explain in the section on the Principle of Consent, by raising, seeking out, and resolving objections, you focus people’s contribution toward ensuring that decisions and activities are improved whenever possible and align, so far as people can tell, with achieving the organization’s short-term and long-term goals.

Throughout this guide, you’ll learn about a wide array of Patterns — templates of processes, practices, and guidelines for successfully responding to specific challenges or opportunities people in organizations face. These patterns build on the other key concepts and are aligned with the Seven Principles. These patterns can be applied individually, adapted, and combined to address your specific organizational needs. By choosing patterns according to your current requirements, you can take an iterative and incremental approach to organizational change.

The concepts introduced above are not just informative — they have many practical applications for anyone seeking to lead or participate in an organization that not only survives but thrives.