Many of our Working Members find that Open Floor’s chosen style of leadership is the most gratifying, exciting part of working for the organization.
Dynamic Governance, also known as Sociocracy, is a radically elegant business model for a rapidly changing world. While there are leaders, the power is in the group rather than any individual. Open Floor International has chosen this model as the foundation of our non-profit organization. It best reflects what we value in our movement practice: group creativity, inclusion, and transparency.
Sociocracy vests power in the “socius” (from Latin, socius, “companion”) – companions, colleagues, people who regularly interact with one another and have a common aim.
Decisions are made in consultation with each other, in consideration of the needs of each person within the context of the aims of the group or organization.
Sociocracy is a whole systems design process for decision-making, organizational governance and action.
Sociocracy enables an organization to manage itself as an organic whole, by giving every sub-part a sovereign voice in the management.
Our Working Members sit on working circles according to their skills and interests, e.g., Training Design, Finance, Therapy in Motion, Membership, Technology, etc. There is a format for running meetings that allow us to efficiently collect all voices and wisdom in a circle to find our way to consented decisions. The difference between consensus decision-making and consent decision-making is:
All consented decisions have a Review Date, when the circle will look back and see which have been successful and which need to be updated.
This overview of key concepts in Sociocracy / Dynamic Governance is adapted from the work of John Schinnerer at Sociocracy Consulting and inspired by John Buck’s book: We The People.
Open Floor International is incorporated in the United States as a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization.
Open Floor content is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license (CC BY-SA 4.0) | Privacy Policy