[Article Review]Sociocracy: An Organization Model for Large-Scale Agile Development

[Article Review:] Sociocracy: An Organization Model for Large-Scale Agile Development, by Jutta Eckstein, May 24, 2016

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INTRODUCTION

This post will continue my research into self-organization methods for people in groups or organizations. In my first post on the topic, 7 Videos about Holacracy: A Social Technology for Human Self-Organization, I began learning about "holacracy," which is a hierarchy free form of self-organization that makes use of an open source "holacracy Constitution," and organizes people into circles, sub-circles, and roles. This is a flat organization structure that uses double-links to facilitate communication between circles. The founder describes it as analogous to human physiology, where autonomous cells join to form autonomous organs which join to make an autonomous whole.

In my second post, [Proposal] Supplemental Reward Groups to Raise the Price Of Steem, I alluded to the fact that I was reading about another self-organization technique known as "sociocracy," and proposed that groups of us on steemit could begin organizing ourselves by making use of self-organization protocols like holacracy or sociocracy in order to make the steemit experience more fulfilling and successful.

In this third post on the topic, I will review the paper that I alluded to before, Sociocracy: An Organization Model for Large-Scale Agile Development, by Jutta Eckstein. As the title of the article suggests, it is specifically targeted towards the use of sociocracy with large-scale Agile development, but it does a decent job of summarizing the concept for any use. Unfortunately, the article is paywalled, but if you have a way to access it, it's worth a read.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Eckstein describes herself as, "an experienced independent coach, consultant, and trainer from Braunschweig, Germany, for agile software development." Her website also lists her as the author of five books and describes her education background as: "Dipl.Eng. in Product Engineer, M.A. in Business Coaching & Change Management, B.A. in Education," and provides an extensive list of papers, publications, and talks, from 1997 to the present.

HISTORY OF SOCIOCRACY

I was surprised to learn that the fundamentals of sociocracy are centuries old. The concept emerged out of the Dutch Quaker community. Eckstein notes that,

The Quakers are known for organizing themselves in a very efficient and peaceful manner even with thousands of people being present in a meeting.

Civil engineer, Kees Boeke, who was a Quaker and pacifist, used their organizing principles in a private school that he established. From there, one of his students - Gerard Endenburg, merged the ideas with cybernetics and systems thinking in the 1970s to create sociocracy. The ideas were translated from German to English in the early 21st century by one of Eckstein's coauthors, John Buck.

SOCIOCRATIC PRINCIPLES

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According to Eckstein, there are four sociocratic principles:

1. Shared decision making based on consent,
2. Circles as semi-autonomous units,
3. Connecting circles by double-linking, and
4. Electing people to functions and tasks

She goes on to elaborate on each one.

Shared decision making based on consent

First, Eckstein lists some other common methods for making decisions. These include: autocratic, democratic, consensus, magic, and chaotic. In autocratic decision making, a single person makes the decision. In this case, the decision is often fast, but implementation is often slow due to lack of buy-in. Advantages and disadvantages are similar for democratic decision making, but it has the advantage that at least everyone is heard, even if minority views are ignored. In consensus, everyone decides. In this process, decision making is often slow, but it has the advantage of wide-spread buy-in. By "magic," Eckstein means that something random makes the decision, a toss of a coin or roll of a die, for example. This has the advantage that no one can be blamed for a bad decision, but the disadvantage that decision quality can be poor. And finally, by "chaotic," Eckstein means to abstain from choosing and let things sort themselves out. Advantages and disadvantages of this decision process are similar to magic.

Finally, that leads us to decision-making under sociocracy. Sociocracy uses consent. As stated in the article,

if a decision is made by consent the involved people are asked if they have a reasoned and paramount objection.

In this context, paramount means that the decision would place the group in jeopardy, and reasoned means that they can propose an argument describing how the risk is created. Endenberg described it thusly,

In applying the principle of consent, sociocracy doesn’t ask for a ‘yes’ but does provide an opportunity to give a reasoned ‘no’.

Accordingly, "I don't like it," is not a valid objection. According to Eckstein, this form of objection handling changes the group dynamic from one of ego and persuasion to one of problem solving. Eckstein further notes that decisions based on consent are often timestamped, which means that they are set up to be revisited at a later time. Of course, a group can also decide to delegate a particular decision to an autocrat such as a subject matter expert, or make use of any of the other decision protocols, such as democracy or even magic.

Circles as Semi-Autonomous Units

Circles are a fundamental building block of sociocracy. This can be any group of people with a common goal and equivalent rights.

Examples include the board of directors, department leaders, or a software development team. In the steem ecosystem, some of our circles could conceivably be the witnesses, Steemit.Inc, Busy.Org, developers, authors, voters, and traders. An important aspect of the circle is that because each person's rights are equivalent, no one outranks anyone else in terms of decision authority, therefore, everyone's consent is requested. As a result of these properties, the circle is self-organizing and semi-autonomous with regards to its own goals. Each circle also makes its own policy decisions - the rules, boundaries, and guidelines that help the group to work together.

Connecting Circles By Double Linking

We learned in a previous post that holacracy and sociocracy both make use of double links between circles. An important difference between the two, however, is that holacracy does not support a hierarchical structure. Sociocracy does. In a double link, circles that impact or influence one another choose representatives to attend meetings with the other circle. The example given in the paper is that a manager is in two circles, in one circle the manager is with a group of peers, in another circle the same manager is with a group of subordinates. In sociocracy, however, the link is also reversed, and someone is selected from the subordinate circle to attend meetings with the manager's peers, in a bottom-up fashion. This reverse link provides information from the subordinate group to the superior group, and is also asked for consent when decisions are made. This change in structure facilitates a feedback dynamic that is more difficult with only single links between circles.

Electing People to Functions and Tasks

The Better is the Enemy of the Good

Eckstein describes an eight step process to elect people to perform functions or tasks. She also notes that the elections are done by consent, and the decisions are timestamped. Here are the steps:

1. Identify and describe functions and tasks that need to be filled.
2. Everyone is invited to nominate someone to fill each role that is up for election. Nominations are done in a particular form:
   • I [name of nominator] propose [name of the proposed].
3. Proposals are collected and the nominations are read out loud.
4. In a round-table discussion, everyone provides the reason for their proposals. Again, reasons are provided in a particular form:
   • I nominated [name of proposed], because [reason].
5. In a round-table discussion, after hearing reasoning, everyone gets the opportunity to change their proposals.
6. The facilitator summarizes the results, and makes a proposal. This proposal need not be based on majority, but a transparent rationale must be provided.
7. Everyone is asked for their consent to the decision.
8. Celebrate the decision.

Eckstein highlights two additional points. First, sociocracy does not seek the best result, just one that is adequate. For this reason (and others) it is good to timestamp the decisions. Second, the person who is proposed to fill a role is always asked last. This is done because hearing feedback from one's peers often helps a person to gain confidence in their own ability.

APPLYING SOCIOCRACY TO LARGE-SCALE AGILE DEVELOPMENT

Although targeted towards Agile Development, I believe the opening paragraph is relevant to many forms of human organization, so I would like to quote from it at length:

For many teams self-organization at a small scale is already challenging. There are various reasons for that –sometimes it is the lack of trust from i.e. management in the team or from the team members in themselves, and at other times it is “just” a matter of habit. In practice, often people believe that these reasons are all based on the wrong mindset or rather that this is a “people problem”. According to Pieter van der Meché from The Sociocracy Group, Sociocracy suggests instead, that challenges like these are rather based on problems in the structure and not in the people or their culture, mindset, and the like.

When problems with people become complex, so-called "wicked problems," I think it is often necessary to look at the structure of the organization. Eckstein notes that two particular structural aspects of sociocracy enable decisions at scale: deciding by consent, and double-linking.

Using Consent for Team Decisions

Eckstein notes that even a single development team can benefit from using consent for team decisions, as it reduces the role for magic, and chaotic decision making. When decisions scale beyond teams to organizations and enterprises, buy-in becomes even more important, which means that the election of inter-circle representatives also becomes important as the decision scope increases. Finally, shared decision making in large organizations also helps to synchronize and focus the autonomous decisions that are made by the smaller teams.

Aligning Teams

Double linking provides a simple and powerful method for connecting teams inside a business domain and between business domains. These representations are often filled by volunteers, but care should be exercised so that qualified, but less assertive team members don't get locked out of the decision flow. The sociocratic election process can ensure more diversity of representation.

Connecting Agile Development to the Organization

For this section, I am going to generalize away from the Agile development focus by widening the author's points. Double linking empowers individuals in an organization to be more effective at the following activities:

• Leading and coaching the organization
• Planning implementations
• Helping employees and stakeholders understand organizational goals

RELATION AND DEMARCATION TO OTHER MODELS

Sociocracy does not replace Agile values, principles, and approaches (Scrum of Scrums, Communities of Practice, etc...). It supports and enhances them as well as helping them to scale for large organizations.

Eckstein briefly mentions two other self-organizing protocols, holacracy and Teal Organizations. I was surprised to learn that holacracy's Brian Robertson studied with sociocracy's John Buck, and that holacracy is a revision and extension of sociocracy. A major difference is that Holacracy and other Teal Organizations require flat organization structures while sociocracy can work within hierarchies.

CONCLUSION

As I have noted previously, the most valuable component of the steem ecosystem is the component of human creativity. Finding out how to enable that creativity to flourish should be one the community's highest priorities. However, I think that the current social dynamics of the steem ecosystem have morphed into a so-called wicked problem. If we want to gain traction on many of the issues that are frustrating people, I think we need to take a step back and start looking at higher order human dynamics. Decision making in the steem ecosystem runs the gamut from autocratic to magic to chaotic. The nice thing about self-organizing protocols like sociocracy and holacracy is that we don't need anyone's permission. We can begin acting, and the circles that form and become effective can act as role models for others.

REFERENCES

Jutta Eckstein. 2016. Sociocracy: An Organization Model for Large-Scale Agile Development. In Proceedings of the Scientific Workshop Proceedings of XP2016 (XP '16 Workshops). ACM, New York, NY, USA, , Article 6 , 5 pages. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2962695.2962701

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@remlaps is an IT professional with three decades of professional experience in data communications and information systems. He holds a bachelor's degree in mathematics, a master's degree in computer science, and a master's degree in information systems and technology management. He has also been awarded 3 US patents.

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