Jump to: Sociocracy 3.0 – A Practical Guide
Sociocracy 3.0 — a.k.a. “S3” — is social technology for evolving agile and resilient organizations at any size, from small start-ups to large international networks and multi-agency collaboration.
Inside this practical guide you’ll discover a comprehensive collection of tried and tested concepts, principles and practices for improving performance, engagement and wellbeing in organizations.
Since its launch in 2015, S3 patterns have been helping people across a diverse range of organizational contexts to get the best out of collaboration. From start-ups to small and medium businesses, large international organizations, investor-funded and nonprofit organizations, families and communities.
Using S3 can help you to achieve your objectives and successfully navigate complexity. You can make changes one step at a time, without the need for sudden radical reorganization or planning a long-term change initiative:
- Simply start with identifying your areas of greatest need and select one or more practices or guidelines that help.
- Proceed at your own pace, and develop both your skills and a more sociocratic and agile mindset as you go.
Regardless of your position in the organization, you’ll find many proven ideas that are relevant and helpful for you.
Sociocracy 3.0 is free, and licensed under a Creative Commons Free Culture License.
How does Sociocracy 3.0 help?
S3 is a transformational technology for both individuals and the whole organization that will help you figure out how to meet your organization’s biggest challenges, take advantage of the opportunities you face and resolve the most persistent problems.
Sociocracy 3.0 is designed to be flexible and supports experimentation and learning. You can take whatever you need, adapt things to suit your context and enrich your existing approach.
S3 integrates core concepts and practices found in agile methodologies, lean management, Kanban (and KMM), Design Thinking, Teal Organizations and the family of sociocracy-based governance methods (SCM/Dynamic Governance, Holacracy® etc.). It’s complimentary and compatible with any agile or lean framework, including but not limited to Scrum and its various scaling frameworks.
With Sociocracy 3.0 you’ll discover:
- Useful concepts that will help you make more sense of your organization and communicate effectively about where change is needed.
- An organic, iterative approach to change that meets people where they are and helps them move forward at their own pace and according to their unique context and needs.
- Seven core principles of agile and sociocratic collaboration
- A coherent collection of 70+ practices and guidelines to help you navigate complexity, and improve collaboration:
- Simple, facilitated formats that support teams in drawing on the collective intelligence of the group and incrementally processing available information into continuous improvement of work processes, products, services and skills.
- Group-practices to help organizations make the best use of talent they already have, through people supporting each other in building skills, accountability and engagement.
- Simple tools for clarifying who does what, freeing people up to decide and act for themselves as much as possible, within clearly defined constraints that enable experimentation and development.
- Patterns for growing organizational structure beyond hierarchies into flexible, decentralized networks where the flow of information and influence directly supports the creation of value.
- A glossary with explanations for all the terms you might be unfamiliar with.
Read more: Sociocracy 3.0 – A Practical Guide