Can Organizations Self-govern?

Society, as a whole has been formed and organized with a structure of leaders and followers. With this design, all power and decision lie on the hands of the leaders. Leaders are then responsible for driving people towards a goal that they have set, sometimes setting methods and parameters that those at the lower brackets of the organizations do not necessarily agree with.

As leadership and organizations evolved, so did the decision making structure evolve. With more and more people educated, talent is recognized and inputs from the lower brackets are heard more. Still, the ultimate decision and responsibility lie on the leader. While suggestions may have been “heard,” those suggestions are easily vetoed since responsibilities and power are kept in pretty much the same place.

The evolution of organizations towards blurring the traditional organizational structures have brought in the idea of not only involving everyone in the organization on the decision-making, responsibilities are also shared. It has been found out that people actually want responsibilities. Responsibilities allow individuals to feel valued.

The idea of Sociocracy came up and it was for the use towards effective governance. In its latest iteration, Sociocracy 3.0 (or S3), the patterns are created with seven principles in mind: Effectiveness, Consent, Empiricism, Continuous Improvement, Equivalence, Transparency, and Accountability.

Holacracy, the system employed by the successful online company, Zappos, is a packaged system for organizations’ self-management. Holacracy has the idea of distributing authority and transparency in the organization’s rules to allow more involvement from the members.

Sociocracy and Holacracy has provided a different framework for organizations, allowing for more involvement and providing more motivation to the members of the organization. It allows individuals to really care about their place in the organization.