Future Positive : Front Page

Several of my key solutions to making our world better -- Natural Enterprises, True Collaboration and Model Intentional Communities most notably -- rely on the ability of groups of people to self-manage more effectively than large hierarchical organizations are, or can be, managed top-down. Derek Woolverton over at Technical Difficulties... commented on my post on WL Gore ("no ranks, no titles, no bosses") that self-managed organizations, if they don't have any rules, can be much worse than badly-managed ones. He sent me a link to a manifesto written back in 1970 by Jo Freeman called The Tyranny of Structurelessness, lamenting how the women's liberation movement of that day had degenerated into anarchy, cliquishness and petty politics for exactly that reason. Her article lays out these seven principles of democratic structuring for self-managed organizations:

Delegate specific authority to specific individuals for specific tasks by democratic procedures, after they've expressed an interest or willingness to do it. Don't just let people choose their own jobs.
Require all those to whom authority has been delegated to be responsible to all those who selected them. The group retains the ultimate say over how the power is exercised.
Distribute authority among as many people as is reasonably possible, to prevent monopoly of power and encourage learning and consultation.
Rotate tasks among individuals often but not too often, so people learn many jobs adequately and to avoid turf wars.
Allocate tasks using objective criteria: competency, interest, responsibility, and opportunity to learn new things with appropriate mentoring.
Diffuse information to everyone in the organization as frequently as possible. The more one knows about how things work, the more politically effective one can be.
Provide equal access to resources (equipment, skills and information) needed by the group.

Freeman's manifesto is dated, but these principles make sense when dealing with the proclivity (I think it's learned, so I won't say 'natural tendency') of people in groups to dominate, bully, gang up, hoard, compete, take perverse pleasure in others' failure, and do things without adequate consultation.

My question is whether you can get people to follow these principles. If you have to impose them on the group, haven't you already made the group less democratic by that imposition? And can you impose them on a group?

My (admittedly idealistic) proposal in Natural Enterprise is that self-selection of the group should prevent these problems from occurring in the first place. Those who are disinclined to work for someone who tends to want to dominate will select the dominant types out of the group. Those who want to be dominated, to be told what to do and how to do it, will self-select into groups that include that type of individual. Furthermore, in Natural Enterprise, the self-selecting group's first task is to set out the mutually agreeable principles by which it will operate. Of course, this is a learning process, one that will be very new to most of us, so it should not be surprising that it takes some time for the self-selection process to work. In its early days, every Natural Enterprise will be expelling those who didn't work out, allowing others who didn't understand what they were getting into to select themselves out, and others to be invited or opt in in their place. Every system is messy when it first begins. And I have a great belief in instinct -- it is rare when my first instinctive impression of a work colleague, positive or negative, has proven dead wrong. Nature has given us this marvelous gift of instinct to make the process of group self-selection easier and more reliable.

In the aforementioned article on collaboration I described a four-step program for True Collaboration: teaching it as a core skill, recognizing and rewarding its successes, self-assessing our competency at it, and practice, practice, practice. I have seen domineering people humbled by this process, but I have also seen egotistical, inflexible and unimaginative leaders completely ignore brilliant collaborative work-products. I'm the first to confess that collaboration is not currently something most of us do well, but I believe strongly that it works, makes us stronger and more resilient and adaptable as a species, and that for that reason the ability to do it well should be in our genes.

But I have also seen petty despots and cliques who have ruined the communities and organizations they preside over, even though some of them were elected by a majority and believe fervently that they're acting in the majority's interest, by minimizing their diversity (in every sense of the word) and essentially expelling anyone with different views. And I've seen dictators and cult leaders who rule with an iron fist, some of whom are extraordinarily popular, even revered, despite flagrantly violating these principles of democracy, egalitarianism and collaboration.

Are these behaviours -- excessive dominance, bullying, ganging up, hoarding resources, competing instead of collaborating, and doing things without consulting others -- unlearnable? And how about the behaviours that make these foolish behaviours possible -- others' submissiveness, cowardice, self-victimization, self-isolation, passivity, meekness, resignation -- can they be unlearned too? Is it naive and unrealistic to think that we all have something valuable to contribute, we all instinctively seek and belong to communities, and, given a chance, we could and would all participate as equals in every community and organization to which we belong?

I appreciate that nature has endowed us with dominant and submissive genes, to establish a natural pecking order so that, even without language, we can maintain order in our groups. But in nature there is enormous collaboration and sharing of resources, infinitely more peace and equality and less suffering than we find in most human institutions. I'm not saying we need to learn to be exactly equal, just that by 'ousting the egos and outing the wallflowers', we need to learn to be more egalitarian.

I'd love to know more about how WL Gore really works, and how it doesn't work (Derek suggests the power vacuum spawns horrendous political infighting and undemocratic decision-making). Anyone know people working at Gore, or other organizations with 'no ranks, no titles, no bosses', who could share their lessons learned?