A A hands-on, experience-based workshop with Bernhard Bockelbrink, at ALE 2015 in Sofia, Bulgaria. August 27, 10.45 – 12.15. More Details
Sociocracy 3.0 is a free and “open-source” framework for building and evolving agile teams and organizations. One way to look at it is as a collection of patterns that have been applied successfully in organizations around the globe for decades, and a set of underlying principles, to facilitate adaptation of patterns to an organization’s context without breaking them. The patterns were compiled from many different sources, most notably the Sociocratic Circleorganisation Method (SCM) (a.k.a. dynamic governance in the USA) , the Toyota Production System (TPS) and lean production, and agile and lean software development.
Some of the patterns are very basic (but still unknown to many organizations), others sustainably resolve impediments on a very abstract level. Every pattern brings value independently, but the patterns are also mutually reinforcing each other, especially since there are patterns addressing different domains, like management/governance, process improvement, collaboration, and organizational structure.
On a very basic level, what Sociocracy 3.0 does is help organizations identify and address their blind spots. The preferred way to go about that is to initiate continuous improvement of processes and implementation of patterns that resolve impediments discovered along the way.
The focus of this workshop is two key patterns that are applicable within the domain of a single self-organizing team:
- Consent Decision Making (a facilitated process for effective decision making in groups of
peers) - Proposal Forming (a process for co-creating solutions in groups)
Participants will engage with these patterns in a playful way, by role-playing a situation everyone should be able to relate to: a new team deciding on a process for developing a new product.
However, we will not create a process from scratch, instead we will have a go at Scrum, break it down into individual patterns, and in a second step, remix those patterns with other ingredients into a process we can all agree on.
If the resulting progress requires roles (and if time allows), we will also have a go at Elections (an application of Consent Decision Making for electing people to roles).
During the course of the game we will practice a lot, and learn enough about Sociocracy 3.0 to see the bigger picture.
As with all other resources about Sociocracy 3.0, we will publish outline and facilitation guide for this workshop with a Creative Commons Free Culture license.