[INTRODUCTION]

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“Ted Rau (TR): That's typically what people think. Like, “Oh, if everybody does the inner work and everybody works at least enough on the issues, then none of the issues that we have should exist.” I think that's a huge blind spot that we all have, because we don't understand that actually, to form collective power, you need governance as that extra ingredient. If you think about it, it's actually fairly obvious, because I was defining power within as hitting that sweet spot between owning your power not too much, not too little, right? But how do you know where your power begins and ends?”

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[0:00:39] Jenny Stefanotti (JS): That's Ted Rau, Co-Founder of Sociocracy for All, governance expert and author of many books, most recently, Collective Power: Patterns for a Self-Organized Future. This is the Denizen Podcast. I'm your host and curator, Jenny Stefanotti. In this episode, we're discussing power, specifically, how we can govern at all levels from teams to organizations, to coalitions, to movements in a way that decentralizes power while also enabling coherence.

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Over the last few episodes, we've been exploring work that we can do on ourselves and in our intimate relationships. This conversation builds on those by extending that individual work into the group and organizational setting. We talk about how power relates to responsibility and agency, how to balance the tension between autonomy and alignment, principles for pro-social behavior, why Ted considers consent the only collectively-minded decision-making method, where legitimacy and authority comes from, and much more.

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You might recognize Ted's name and voice. We've had him on the podcast before, last year for an episode on sociocracy. Sociocracy is a pretty important governance concept to understand. That conversation is a great complement to this one, so I encourage you to listen to it if you haven't already.

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As always, you can find show notes and the transcript for this episode on our website, becomingdenizen.com. There, you can also sign up for our newsletter. I bring our latest content to your inbox alongside information about online and virtual denizen events and announcements from our partners. This is a really provocative conversation. I'm so excited to bring Ted back to the podcast and share his latest work with you.

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[INTERVIEW]

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[0:02:11] JS: All right, Ted Rau, thank you so much for coming back. Thank you so much for writing this book. It's an amazing resource for all of us. I love the way that it takes this critical concept that we talked about, about sociocracy and just puts it really into the big picture, and I'm really excited to touch on how it's relevant at all the levels of society in our conversation today. It's great to have you back.

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[0:02:36] TR: Well, thank you for having me back again.

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[0:02:38] JS: I always generally start the conversations with some very basics, to make sure that we're all on the same page about some things that may seem obvious, but aren't. Let's just talk about the title of your book is Collective Power. What does power mean to you?

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[0:02:52] TR: To me, it reads really the ability to do something, and then the collective power is the ability to do something together. There's, of course, a lot of footnotes here. What does together mean? That's what I was trying to tease apart. One side comment on collective power is I really wanted to call it collective agency. Because power is often tainted with all the stories that we have on the power, right? Agency is really where I'm going of how can we do something as a group together in some shape, or form? How can we stratify so that we have that?

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[0:03:28] JS: You also have some really important things to say in the book about how responsibility intertwines with power.

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[0:03:36] TR: Yeah. That's what so many people wake up to, right? It's easy to ask for more power and for more power and for more power. Once you have it, you realize, ooh, that actually comes with a bunch of responsibility. It's inseparable from that, right? At least in the way I think about it, as soon as you have power, that means you're also now responsible for whatever impact comes from that. Yeah, that's a package deal.

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[0:03:57] JS: I love that. I love that. I think it's so critical. There's some really important concepts that we need to talk about early on. Power over, power under, power within and power with.

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[0:04:11] TR: Yeah. Power over is typically the most obvious to people, right? If somebody basically is in your business and is trying to tell you what to do around something that you should really decide for yourself. Like, let's say, if I had a partner that told me what to eat, that would be mooning into my business. We all know that from hierarchical situations, when somebody micromanages us, for example, that's power over, or forces us to do things and so on. Of course, it gets more complicated. If, let's say, you're not really given a choice, like, let's say, you could in theory leave the job, but you don't really have any realistic alternatives. It gets more complicated. But generally, we understand what power over means.

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Power under people don't pay as much attention to. That's simply when people refuse to use the power that they've been given. It happens really astonishingly often, that people don't – the power that they have. That is whenever somebody for example, complains, or whines about things, right? Things that they could change. One gets a good lesson, or I'm getting a good lesson these days on power under when teenagers, I kind of in the pool need a thing, right? Just like, “I don't know what to do for my homework.” “Oh, okay. Have you looked it up?” “No, I don't want to look it up.” “Okay. Can you ask somebody?” “No, I don't want to ask them.” Okay. You want to keep the problem. Is that what we're saying here, right? That's typical behavior.

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I think we're all there a lot of the time, actually, because it's really hard to hit that balance between just playing exactly what you have, the power that you have, using it all, not more, not less.

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[0:05:57] JS: I love that. Then power within is really critical and we're going to double click on this in a minute.

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[0:06:04] TR: It's hitting that balance, right? That, yeah, basically, using the power that you have, not more, not less. Not overstepping into other people's business, but also, not under-stepping it.

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[0:06:16] JS: Power with. Power with is the central concept for the way that you envision the world being, from the individual level to the planetary level.

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[0:06:29] TR: Yeah. That comes because if you think about it, so many people, and that's actually really the point about the book. So many people think that if we all just have power within, so if we're all people who've done our work, we own our power, and all of that, where all humans ready to interface with the world in a healthy way, then there should be any problem. That's typically what people think like, “Oh, if everybody does the inner work and everybody works at least enough on the issues, then none of the issues that we have should exist.” I think that's a huge blind spot that we all have, because we don't understand that actually to form collective power, you need governance as that extra ingredient.

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If you think about it, it's actually fairly obvious, because I was defining power within as hitting that sweet spot between owning your power, not too much, not too little, right? But how do you know where your power begins and ends? How do you negotiate together where your power begins and ends? Because if you think about an organization, there is this idea that sometimes people have in self-organization of everybody just doing stuff, right? I understand that that has a draw as [inaudible 0:07:43]. I would also like to operate like that. But how do we negotiate where my role ends and where yours begins? We need language and concepts to have agreements about that. That is what for me governance is. That is in simple terms what it is. It's basically not just deciding things, but also, having a way to decide who decides what.

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[0:08:05] JS: The meta part of governance and we're going to talk about that. What is the governance process to get to the governance process? That's an interesting piece of the puzzle. There's power within. We've just finished this three-part series on a lot of inner work. There was a conversation on living authentically, which is connecting to your authentic self, your spiritual self, and what are all the ways that we're conditioned to be disconnected from that? What does the work look like to do that? Then we had this conversation about relational conflict and the way that we come together to address conflict.

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It's very interesting how conflict comes from, to some of the points that you were just making, not understanding where my boundaries are and your boundaries aren't overstepping, but also not having clarity around roles and responsibilities. We'll get to this more when we talk about conflict resolution later. Then we had this conversation about trauma and the nervous system, and this beautifully bridging some of that individual work into its relevance for the greater social issues that all the listeners on this podcast care about.

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I want to bring in two quotes of yours. One from the last podcast and one from the book. The podcast, when I asked you after we outlined sociocracy and what it is, I said, what are some of the impediments to this? The first thing you said was the people. You said, people need to be able to be self-responsible. That means they need to understand themselves, including their own needs and behaviors and all of that. Then this book ends with this beautiful fictional story about what the world looks like, when we've done our work and we have governance structures, where we collectively do work that's aligned for our shared issues and understands interdependence. You say, people work through, in this world, individuals work through their relationship with their own power and become less likely to play drama roles and more likely to be in an empowerment stance. They worked on their inner development tools. They heal from trauma and attachment issues.

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I just want to hear a little bit more. I mean, you just stated it at a high level, but a little bit more around, what is that inner work that you see from your perspective that needs to happen in parallel to enable these complex collective agency, governance structures that we're about to talk about in more detail?

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[0:10:35] TR: I mean, I'm borrowing a lot from the simple concepts that come from, I think the 50s, right? The drama triangle, common things.

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[0:10:45] JS: Do you want to explain the drama triangle? Because I'm sure a lot of people aren’t familiar, yeah?

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[0:10:49] TR: Yes. The idea is that we have three roles that we can fall into, or three stances, I want to say. Three stances that we can fall into. It's not so much that one person always holds one, or the other one, but we actually flip through them really fast. One is the poor me stage, right? That's when you're like, “Oh, everything's happening to me,” like teenagers who want to keep their problems. Sometimes that's us, right? I know that sometimes me, when I'm, I don't know, one out, or just whatever, run down and I actually just want to complain and I have, for whatever reason, no interest and energy to actually be a grown up and say, “Oh, what can I do about it, right?” That's one of the stances.

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Then another stance is the person who sees that things are off and then starts blaming, right? “Well, it's all your fault. It's obviously your fault.” Let's say, I say to my teenager, well, if you don't ask your teacher and you don't ask your friends about your homework, no wonder you’re going to fail. That's the stuff that we say that is just pouring out blame on it, not particularly helpful. It's these moments where we are more interested in being right than being helpful.

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Then there's a third role that's the enabling of that whole thing. That is when we do things like, trying to help the person and victim stance. But not to the extent that they can help themselves, but just the quick fix. I see that quite a bit actually. I mean, it happens some social justice issues, for example. But for example, around tech that's maybe a less easier way thing to talk about. I see sometimes people like to play the hero that find some tech solution, but then nobody else can use it, right? You always have to go back to the person who built it. That's great to play hero, but I use sustainably really helping, right? But the driving force is wanting to be the hero that fixes it. 

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[0:12:43] JS: This is the savior complex. The need to be needed. Yeah.

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[0:12:47] TR: Yes. Now, the nasty thing about those three roles is they feed off each other. Everybody needs the other two to be in place. We've trained them so well that as soon as, for example, the child goes into victim stance, we're right there with all the other ones, right? One parent says, “Well, why didn't you?” The other one says, “Stop blaming her all the time.” There we have them all at once. Then we cycle through them.

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The problem is they all basically are ways to not hold our responsibility or our power. You can almost use them interchangeably here. To not hold them well, right? Because the victim is doing the power under thing. Then blaming people is a form of overstepping. Also, enabling is a form of overstepping.

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[0:13:31] JS: Yeah, for sure, for sure.

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[0:13:34] TR: Basically, was so busy playing the drama that we don't realize that if we step back and said, “Okay. Let's see what is your responsibility? What is it that you could be doing?” We just look at that without feeding to each other's drama, we would actually get to clarity more easily.

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[0:13:51] JS: I appreciate that. We've had conversations about optimal zone resilience and the importance of just nervous system literacy and doing that work, so that you can show up in an organizational context as your optimal, calm, centered, compassionate self, but not reactive, defensive, hypervigilant. The version of us that shows up in the organization is such an important piece of that, too.

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[0:14:16] TR: Yeah. I mean, just adding to what you're saying, the point I'm making in the book is that there's a domino effect, right? The more complex layer showing up for the organization, or the organization as an entity is relying on people not carrying as much drama into that. Because then, we all know these situations, right? Where a group is so busy with people drama that they actually get around to actually doing the work. We go one level down into more of the individual needs if the individual needs aren't taken care of, or can take care of themselves, then we will never get to anything collective. I mean, we see that on all the levels. It's easy to say that people should just show up for the organization when that's not where things are at. That's very clear as well.

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[0:15:00] JS: Another important concept, multi-level selection.

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[0:15:04] TR: Yeah. This is, again, where I'm boring and piecing the pieces together.

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[0:15:08] JS: It's not boring at all. We like this stuff.

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[0:15:12] TR: Yes. Multi-level selection is the idea that there are competing forces pulling us into either direction, and that comes from evolutionary science. There's the away move and the towards move. Leads to a situation where, let's say, on a team, we have the individual that wants to take care of its own needs, like his or her own needs and then we have the collective wellbeing. Let's say, you and I and three others are on a team. We would probably all, of course, have other things that we want to do. Like, I want to take a nap. I want to take the evening off or whatever, but there's deadline, okay?

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Now we have competition over how we use our time. I would say, “Oh, my thing overrules what you want.” There we are competing for airtime. But there's the collective wellbeing. That's where we need to cooperate. That is, I think one has to be careful about how one thinks about it, because I don't to think about it as individual versus group, or at shorthand, that's fine. I think about it more like, there is the part of me that wants to contribute to my own wellbeing and the part of me that wants to contribute to something bigger than myself.

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[0:16:29] JS: Right, totally. I agree with you. A 100%.

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[0:16:32] TR: However we phrase it, there is that push towards, “Okay, here's the group. What does the group need?” There's the “Wait, what do I need?” there's the competition on one side for resources, attention, whatever. Then there is the cooperation towards the bigger, together collective thing that we're trying to do. Now, the cool thing about multi-level selection is that we see that on all levels.

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One can even start at parts work basically, right? In terms of – Can be, right? There's one part of wanting this, one part wanting that. Ultimately, I need to as a coherent human, being show up and do this or that, right? I will always need to make choices. Then it happens on group level, it also happens between teams. Let's say, we have several teams in an organization, they all might want to get more funding and I am more people, because they're all stretched thin, but we also know that there is a constraint on the organization level. Now teams compete over resources, but they all also want the organization to thrive. We always have to hit that balance.

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Then between organizations towards bigger things and so on, it just goes on and on and as a general pattern. I looked in collective power, mostly on the team and individual level and organization level.

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[0:17:45] JS: Yeah. But this is critical point of this tension between autonomy and alignment that occurs in individuals and groups, in groups across organizations and in organizations across coalition, or movement, where there's a balance that's to be struck between the two. I appreciate the point that you made, too, around like, you can think about it, like it's the individual balancing, how much they value the collective versus some of the individual things that are in tension with it. And likewise at each level. There are things that that core unit values and it's just the tension between them.

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[0:18:23] TR: Yeah, it gets really complicated. I mean, I simplified it to make the point and I think that's totally fine. I think, I also want to point out that it sounds complicated, right? Yet, we're used to this, right? We used to always different push and pulls. That's any family has to navigate that all the time, right? When do we say no, we're all going together? We are as human beings, I think, used to having these situations and having to negotiate and navigate that all the time. It's not an unusual thing, or even an unusual burden on organizations and teams and so on. I think we just have that all the time. And different groupings, right? It's not true that I'm only part of one group and that they nest into whatever level, but it's even more complex than that if we look at family as a unit and organization as a unit, for example, as all things at work.

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I think as a general way of looking at it, that alignment and autonomy thing is really interesting to tease apart and see more clearly, because then we can hit the right balance for the right moment, because it's also a dynamic balance, right? You don't have to perfectly hit the middle, but you can say, okay, everybody is straight in. Then let's give people a little bit more autonomy and taking more time on whatever they need, and sometimes you need the big push more showing up for the organization that all happens.

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[0:19:46] JS: Yeah. No, I appreciate that nuance. It's really important. I love the way that you thread it through all the layers throughout the book. There's a really important concept also that you introduce early on around Eleanor Ostrom's work, which is the principles for pro-social behavior. The comments that you were just making got me thinking about culture, right? What is the cultural context that leads us to weight some of the individual, or smaller group versus larger group objectives, right?

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If you think about, for example, companies, there's not a lot of cultural weight around individual needs. You're working these really long hours and it doesn't really matter that you need to rest and sleep and take some time off, right? That's a cultural context that doesn't weight those things. The principles for pro-social behavior, I think, carries a lot of the overarching context that leads to the type of outcomes that we care about. I wanna make sure that we talk about that.

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[0:20:44] TR: Yeah. Maybe we should also, at this point, say, where that word came from, right? Because it came from the idea that there's the tragedy of the commons that many people will have heard about, right, the idea that if we share some a common pool resource, like we share a piece of land or whatever, if everybody just takes whatever the heck they want, ultimately, we will deplete the resource, because I'm thinking of myself and I'm losing track of the collective layer where we’re like, “Wait. If we overfish or over whatever, we will simply not have enough left and that will be bad for all of us.”

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Then the idea was that that is actually not – I mean, yes, that is a true dynamic, but it's not that that is unavoidable. That's what Ostrom was looking at. Like, wait, if people do it successfully to take care, or share resource, how do they do it? That's where she saw then those principles of what needs to be in place so you can successfully access a commons together. Some of those things are conflict resolution and having fairness around who does and who contributes how much and gets how much. There has to be good decision making, so that just it's a finite number of factors that is known on how to successfully do that. That is very tightly woven together. It reflects the things that we do in sociocracy and that I'm also talking about in collective power, so that we can hit that balance.

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To me, the most interesting thing about it is just the whole concept of we need that collective level. Just with individuals doing their thing, it's not enough. That's too optimistic. That's what we learn about markets and that did all happens without intervening, that is true for certain conditions. There is also this setting the boundaries for that game to work out. Those are the boundaries that she's talking about, like conflict resolution has to be held on that collective level.

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[0:22:38] JS: Well, you mentioned a really important thing, which is decision making, so the crux of when you make decisions, that's actually where the power lies. There's a lot of conversations about reforming how companies are governed and stakeholder versus shareholder orientation for companies. So much of it boils down to how decisions are made. You said something, there's a great quote in the book where you say, “I consider consent the most collectively minded decision-making method, or even the only collectively minded decision-making method, because it only allows objections based on the collective purpose, instead of focusing on any number of personal preferences.”

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Let's talk about decision making, because this is really where the power ultimately lies. Because if somebody else decides what to do and then you just do it, you have agency over execution, but not exactly what you're executing. And particularly, the importance of consent.

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[0:23:35] TR: Yeah, and I'd love, actually, to go through the other methods, also, just for the contrast. As you were saying just now, if one person decides, that is a very common thing. We lose agency in that situation. Also, just if we look at that, let's say, we have a group, let's have a simple situation. Let's say, we have a group of eight people and we follow whatever the boss says. Now, we have the individual needs, like my needs and the collective needs. If we hold that frame in mind, we can look at now one person decides as a decision-making situation, or method. We can see that it's basically hit or miss. We're basically gambling. That person either decides for their personal advantage, or for the group advantage. The decision-making system by itself doesn't bias us in either direction. It’s hit or miss. That's what we see in hierarchical situations, right?

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The number of people that tell me, “Oh, a hierarchy isn't always bad. I once worked in this department. I loved the leader. That leader was great.” I'm like, yeah. Of course, that can happen. You can have a leader that decides appropriately and optimizes towards group outcomes. You can have that, but nothing in the system. You're basically just crossing your fingers. You're just crossing, it might happen, but it might not. You're doing nothing to support that. There's not actively incentivizing pro-social behavior here.

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[0:24:58] JS: I really appreciate that. I talk about this a lot, particularly in terms of different types of corporate forms and different types of corporate governance forms, where it's an unstable equilibrium, where it just happens to be that the person holding the seat of power is making decisions that are lined with collective, but it's a very fragile solution.

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[0:25:16] TR: Yes. Then the other ones that we're all used to, like voting, for example, if you think about it, I mean, one doesn't even have to talk about politics to see how basically, just the concept of voting biases us towards direct competition. Because let's say, if it's a simple one member, one vote situation, any vote that goes towards the other person doesn't go towards me, right? It’s like, okay, so it enforces that you’re either with us, or against us.

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Where group outcomes in that? Not really anywhere, right? I mean, they might all talk about what they're going to do for the group, but really, the game pits you against each other and just sets you up for competing. That's all it does. It only captures part of the equation. Yes, of course there has to be some competition, because that's what encourages innovation and new ideas and making do with what you have. That's all not bad. I'm really not vilifying that, but it is only one half. It completely lacks the talking about, wait, what is good for all of us? What's good for the group outcome? What is our group outcome in the first place? That is often not even clarified in voting situations.

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That's heavily towards the individual level. Then also, consensus is heavily towards the individual level, because any one person just can get a disproportionate level of power by saying, “I don't like it.”

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[0:26:38] JS: Well, let's make sure we distinguish between consensus and consent, because that's not obvious and it's a really critical distinction.

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[0:26:45] TR: That one can get a little, yeah. It gets a little tricky, because people have different views of what consensus is. That's the joke, right? There's no consensus of what consensus is. Let's use it as a shorthand for a situation where we have a group of seven or eight, and we say, we're only doing this if everybody agrees. Now, what we didn't do is be clear on, well, under what circumstances can somebody say no? Can they say no, because they personally don't like it? Because we didn't specify that, it's again, hit on it.

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It might be that all the people in the room have the collective wellbeing in mind. Or it might be that they just do their whole ego trip thing and say, “Well, I don't like it, so they can do it.” It has nothing to do with the collective wellbeing and only with their own. It's, again, gambling for group outcomes. Consent on the other hand is very clear on when you can object. You can object if something is at odds, or in conflict of whatever words you wanna use with the collective aim, so with the aim of that group. Now, we're very actively nudging people to think about the collective wellbeing and the collective outcome first.

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That's the point of that quote that you read of, it is really the only decision-making method that I know that takes collective wellbeing first and everything else second. We're optimizing for the things that we should be optimizing for an organization should make decisions that are good for the organization. It's almost a little embarrassing to say, but we don't do it typically.

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[0:28:14] JS: Yeah. Well, what's so compelling about consent is two things. One is that it requires a collective understanding of what it is that we're optimizing for. Because so often in organizations, you don't have that clear mission, or strategy to point to. So then, you just get this, everyone's talking past each other with their own interpretations of what sits in that vacuum, right? Two, unlike voting, everyone is responsible. Because it doesn't go forward unless you say, “I'm okay with this,” which means I take responsibility for the fact that we're making this decision.

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[0:28:52] TR: Mm-hmm. That shows, for example, and a good example that is actually a very clear contrast between consensus and consent. That is that most groups that I know that operate on consensus, you can stand aside, right? You can, basically, like abstaining, right? Typically, of course, people do that, because they're against it. Now, you have a situation where people want the group to move forward, because they understand that that's what the group needs, but they don't want to be co-responsible, so they're going to say, “Oh, I'm just going to stand aside. I don't want to be in your way,” kind of a thing.

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More often than not, I wanna say, what happens is that the person, if something goes wrong will say, “Well, see? I stood aside for that decision.” They don't want to be responsible. By the way, I'm also, for example, sometimes people in their sociocracy practicing consent border a little bit on that. I'm very allergic to that. When people, for example, say, “Well, I only have a concern, but I want it in the notes.” That's a big red flag for me, because they don't have the guts to object. Please object. An object is great. But this half in, half out just leads to, again, blurring the lines between where am I, where's my responsibility? Am I in, am I not? We can really only move as a group if we are co-responsible as a group. Standing aside is an absolute no-no for me.

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[0:30:15] JS: Well, also, just fundamentally reinforces the notion that we're all on the same team. We're not moving forward, unless we're all in agreement that this is what we're going to do.

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[0:30:25] TR: Right. Then just to tie it to something that we talked about earlier, often standing aside is associated with power-under behavior.

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[0:30:33] JS: Oh, I love that. I'm going to point people to the sociocracy episode, which gets it to all of this in great detail. There's two things I want to make sure that listeners understand about the consent method of decision-making, which is one, it has to be a relatively small group, because you have to – If you have an objection, you keep iterating on it, until that objection is considered and it is something that everyone feels comfortable with. There is also this really critical piece about information flows and feedback loops and experimentation that makes this work, so I want to make sure to make that point here in this conversation, too.

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[0:31:10] TR: Yes. Yeah, and that's also interesting, because that's where all the things come together. For example, it is oriented towards small groups and those small groups are not random, but those are the typically, a circle that uses consent and sociocracy is consists of the people who are most involved in the work that requires this decision. That means, those are the people that will be co-responsible and will also have to live the most with the outcomes of the decision. It's such a perfect fit. Talk about the co-responsibility. That's really, that's one of the preconditions that makes consent work. If you don't have a random set of people, but the people who will eventually live with it.

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Then, it's also less likely that somebody even has the urge to stand aside. Because it's like, well, it's going to deeply affect me. I'm not going to say, “Oh, this is a crappy decision, but go ahead.” That's just not behavior that makes sense in this context. It's all optimized in that direction.

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[0:32:06] JS: I love, too, the linkages with agency, right? The agency and power over what you are doing with your time and attention, where you're executing on a decision that you were a part of making. You also mentioned something about conflict. I think, I want to touch on conflict resolution, because we just had a conversation about that, the intimate relational level, but I think it's very relevant. Part of the reason, I think those intimate relationship conversations are relevant on this podcast is that relevance for the broader systemic, so I love the way this bridges it to the organizational context.

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I mean, a question that you pose in the book was conflict resolution, is it part of governance? Some systems see it in relationship care as the core part of group responsibilities, but some don't. They think you talked about care mode. In Denizen, we talk about, can we envision a society that's fundamentally just regenerative and caring? Care for us is a really important adjective. I want to talk about, just quickly touch on conflict resolution and care as you see it in the context of collective power.

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[0:33:10] TR: Oh, yeah. I mean, first, I want to say conflict resolution from a very practical standpoint is so necessary, because often, conflicts lead to a situation where information doesn't surface. If I'm in conflict with you, I'm not going to be as honest about the things that I'm going to make, whatever it might be. Anything that's in the way that blocks information from surfacing is dangerous to all of us, basically. Because the more we are operating on a foundation of information that has gaps, or that is wrong, the more likely we're going to build decisions on that that are off, right? We want to be as in touch with the reality as possible. That is our shared interest.

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When I talk about conflict resolution, that's really what's – that's the most important to me. I always think for the organization, right? That's just the perspective that I hold in this. The organization can't afford to lose information. An organization should have as its interest to help people to support figuring things out, so that that doesn't happen.

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[0:34:12] JS: Well, yeah. You said, this is a really critical concept that we didn't surface yet. I want to make sure we let everyone know how important it is, which is having a shared common ground. It is one of the most essential things for collective action. Tell us why, remind us why.

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[0:34:29] TR: We're making decisions based on what we assume is reality. Our narrative that reflects reality, however we want to say it, if we're not in the same reality, it's just almost impossible to make decisions together. I noticed that so often, that is the main problem. People say words, don't quite know what they mean. They mean different things and it's really hard to catch. Then you see yourself on just, I don't know, going backwards and backwards of what do you mean? Also, one of the concepts that I'm also talking about in the book is to clear enough, right? Because I'm also aware that common ground, yes, is super important. Otherwise, we're not going to talk about the same things, and not to best our assumptions on the same observations and interpretation and sense making of it. But there's also a limit to it, right? We can't just sit with the dictionary all day and talk about exactly what you mean there. that's just not a thing either.

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I think we have to all get better at navigating, or I guess, tracking, or sensing would be the better word. The sensing, are we enough on the same page? Just now, us, for example, right? We have a sense of, yeah, we're talking about the same thing. Good enough. If now you said something where I go like, “Whoa, that puts the last half hour into a weird light, and I'm not so sure whether we're talking about the same thing, I would have to bring that out, and that's the same in organizations.”

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Now, back to conflict resolution. The information piece is important to me and then the care mode is interesting. I want to flag something, because I always get a little bit of a bellyache around that, because care for what and who? That's why we go back to what I mentioned earlier, right? There's care for the group and care for myself. Now if we just globally say, we’re all about care, well, caring for the organization, caring for the individual can be at odds. Just care, right? It needs more framework and more words in it, which I'm sure you have. But just to flag that, I see so often that organizations are disappointed, because they want to be caring. It's like, okay. That's great. Of course, I'm all in, because care allows psychological safety, allows information to surface and so on.

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Again, just strictly, not even talking about humans and decency and all of that, but just strictly from an organization, like what is an organization to run well? Yes, we need that. I think, one has to be honest about the fact that the things that one cares for might be at odds with each other. Ultimately, what we need to is have that baseline of care, right? So, that then, we’re not triggered left and right, because it was so – we feel so deeply unsafe, or not hurt, all of that. So, that.

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Then we need to be really good negotiators that are honest about the constraints that we're in, so that then together in a safe way, we can find a solution that balances our response to the constraints in the most optimal way.

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[0:37:28] JS: Well, it's interesting how care – there's one which is care, which is a values question. How much do we value care for the individual within the context of our collective aims and how we balance those things, right? There's also the importance of care for trust and psychological safety, which are one of the most essential things for organizations to function well. This really ties to some of the conversations we've been having more at the intimate relational level. Trust and safety are essential for attachment.

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You also distinguish between two different types of conflict. Task conflict, which is more about ambiguity around who's responsible for what, and then relationship conflict, which gets more into subjective realities and centering hurt, and some of the things that we've talked about in the other conversations. Why don't we just underscore the importance of trust and psychological safety from your perspective?

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[0:38:25] TR: Yes, yes. I mean, it can't even be said enough, right? Yeah. I think, both the people sense of belonging for the organization, it's got the glue between everything. Recently, you spent some time mapping all the different forces, or factors within organizations. I noticed that while psychological safety for the organizational, like the product and the governance is, it doesn't have a direct impact, but it has impact on everything contributing to it, right? Were people honest in their meeting evaluations? Are we giving proper feedback on performance? All of it, right? Do I feel safe enough to ask a question when I didn't understand what he meant, right? On that common ground, on that decision-making, am I honest enough to object, and all of that. It basically just sits everywhere. It's like the glue in the system. That's, yes, it's everything.

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[0:39:16] JS: Yeah. No, I really appreciate that. Donnie, in our conversation on embodied leadership talks about just practices that he has in his meetings to just check in and see how everyone's doing and how valuable that is for working teams. A lot of these are dynamics that are relevant for working in groups. Then it becomes more complex. We move up to the organizational level where we have different groups and different teams all together towards a common name. 

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In this, I think, let's go back to what we talked about earlier, which is this balance between autonomy and alignment. I just love to hear from you some best practices and things that we need to know. We care about decentralization of power, but in a context where we're aligned with what we're doing. Let's talk about aims and mission to start.

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[0:40:02] TR: Sure. Let me, just one step back is, I think, the context in which we're talking is that often, when people think about self-organization, they do a certain level of glorification of decentralization. “Oh, if we just have a bunch of teams autonomously doing the thing, then it will all magically come together.” It doesn't magically come together a lot of the time, right? Because, well, because what is the thing that keeps us in alignment? Just having 50 teams, each doing something, whatever they want, does not lead to one organization. We want to have clarity on what our aim is. We want to have clarity on the why, or the bigger what that we're in. 

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That all gets a little tricky when one looks at it, I think, on a microscope, because what is a mission? How does mission and aim of the data? I say a few things about that, but that's still actually a question that I look at more deeply. Values as well. I think, what's obvious and what I feel pretty confident about saying is that we need to have clarity on what we're doing and have clarity on all the things that give us additional information, like the why and the how and all of that.

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What often gets lost and that is to the alignment piece between teams, so as you said earlier, we were talking about individuals and teams. The individual competing and then aligning around the team. Now, we're thinking more, right, teams competing with each other and then aligning on the organization level, so the next level up. What often in self-organized organizations is weak, I want to say is the organizational strategy and organization information flow and all of the things that glue together the organization. Yeah, so that's a tricky one. Especially in a certain, yeah, once you have a certain size of an organization, that becomes something that needs very deliberate design of, how do you make sure that a team has enough autonomy to do what it needs to do?

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Also, nudging towards the togetherness, especially if we define strategy as something more short-term maybe. When we focus for the next year, how can we make sure that all the teams also keep in mind, this or that?

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[0:42:17] JS: Yeah. No, it's interesting to think about their – my background is in strategy consulting, often with organizations that are doing complex, impact-oriented things. You have to have the mission, so we all know why we're there. Because often, I'll talk to team and I’d be, “Do you have a clearly defined mission statement? Because I can throw my perspective into the mix and it's totally irrelevant. What is the North Star?” Often, that needs to be there.

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More often than not, particularly around these complex social issues that we care about, that North Star is very big. Denizen’s North Star is accelerating a global awakening and galvanizing collective action towards comprehensive systems change. I could do a bazillion things within the context of that mission that are in scope. I think about the strategic layer, is the layer that's saying, okay, within that mission, here are the things that we're doing and why we're filtering for the universal things that are relevant to that, right?

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I think, it's also interesting the way that culture plays in here. Policies, you talk about policies and cultures, almost like, policies is more rigidity around what you're doing and culture is around norms around what you're doing and how you're doing it. I think those things provide the scaffolding for an organization to work in alignment, while having optimal decentralization and autonomy.

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[0:43:38] TR: Yeah, and then the game for me becomes, when I work with organizations of, okay, how much scaffolding do they need and how do I know? Because for example, if we have an organization where everybody has a very similar context, I'm aware that that might have its own issues. Then they might not have to sit down and write that up, because it's already obvious. How much alignment do they need and how much scaffolding and how much do we have to make explicit, so that happens more? Sometimes, for example, values don't need to be written down, because they're obvious to people. Sometimes they need it to be written down. Sometimes we have to put more work into that, to be more deliberate about that. I think they're all, yeah, there's some variety there.

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[0:44:20] JS: Sure.

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[0:44:21] TR: What I want to do more is similar to tracking what is clear enough as tracking, aligned enough, right? How do we know that we're aligned enough and where the areas are that we have to look at more to get more aligned?

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[0:44:36] JS: Well, it's interesting. One of the things that you raised is the subsidiary principle. I once did an envisioning exercise, where Donella Meadows took an audience through envisioning a sustainable future. The thing that came to me in that exercise was this notion that with respect to governance, things happen at the lowest level possible, which is the subsidiary principle. Let's just talk a little bit more about that, because I think that's such a central – as we think about this fractal levels of governance from this power with orientation, the subsidiary principle is really important, so let's talk to it.

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[0:45:13] TR: Yeah. Then I have a hard time even thinking. I mean, yes, yes. I want the power to always be on the most grassroots level possible. Then I also have a hard time thinking about that without thinking about information flow. Because I think some people throw them together and I want to keep them separate of, I can totally give the power to a very grassroots level and encourage information exchange, so that they have more information about the broader everything. Yeah, but where did you want to take this?

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[0:45:43] JS: It's a fundamental concept in political and social philosophy. I just wanted to make sure we introduced it into this conversation, which is that matters should be handled by the smallest, lowest, least centralized component authority, rather than a higher and more centralized one. Higher level authority should only step in when lower-level entities are unable to effectively handle a particular issue. Or when broader common interests are at stake. That leads to this dance between centralization and decentralization. But I think what's really interesting was the point that you just made around, how do we think about information flows, so that we can enable that structure? How do we think about North Stars and alignment and things like that, so that we're on the same team, or in alignment with optimal levels of autonomy? I think, yeah. So much of that is organizational structures and processes to enable that.

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[0:46:34] TR: Then who decides what level something can be most dealt with?

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[0:46:40] JS: Can we talk about blobs? Blobs are a particular type of organization. I think that was really interesting.

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[0:46:47] TR: I'm so tired of them. I mean, before we started recording and sharing, that it felt like my final report of like, okay, I've done this for a few years. I need to write up what I learned. Blobs are one of the things I – I've just been around this so much, I'm honestly a little tired of it. Yes, a blob is when an organization basically has a lot of agency – scratch that. Has a significant portion of agency shifted to the individual. But does not have enough stratification, scaffolding, whatever we want to call it, just governance tools on the organization level. Basically, gives away agency because there are things that you can only decide on that higher level.

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If you don't decide it on a higher level, it simply doesn't get decided. Then you just float around and everybody just shrugs, because nobody knows how to touch it. I'm just around this stuff a lot in particular because, I guess, just how I'm positioned is often, groups come to me, organizations come to me, because they want to be self-organized and then they hit that limit of okay, now we've self-organized, but we somehow didn't unlock the alignment piece. What happens next is that it's very unclear who even legitimizes the organizational piece. If we're just a bunch of individuals, then who gets to say, we should change organization and aim? How do you do that? That's really, that's hard to figure out and very tedious. Anyway, where did we come from? Sorry.

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[0:48:18] JS: No, no, no. Yeah. Yeah. The blobs. Just because it's, you don't understand, you're trying to do this really exciting, decentralized, give more autonomy to teams, and then suddenly, you've got a blob, instead of an organization that's actually executing well against a common aim.

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[0:48:33] TR: Exactly. Then in the worst case, you've locked yourself out of your own system, because nobody has the power to decide that you don't want to be a blob anymore, because you're just a blob.

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[0:48:45] JS: Well, you touched on something I wanted to get to. It's a great bridge. This concept of legitimacy, and where does legitimacy come from? You mentioned two different types of legitimacy and you also introduced Max Weber's types of legitimacy and authority, so let's talk about that.

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[0:48:59] TR: Yeah. See, and that's, again, I mean, I have a version that I'm happy with in the book, but it's still something I'm very actively thinking about, because it's such a tricky thing. I guess, a simple way and not wrong, but just simple way of seeing it is that by being an organization, by forming an organization, there is some legitimacy there to make decisions on behalf of the organization. For example, determining its governance system, or its mission, or its values, or whatever it might be. It’s strategy, all the things that can only be decided together because it's not a strategy if everybody's running into a different direction. Who decides which direction we run into? Then that legitimacy somehow needs to be built ideally bottom up, but it needs to come from somewhere. That's the tricky thing.

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[0:49:51] JS: Yeah. Then you also get this complexity of how big is your group? If we can only make consent-based decisions and small groups, we didn't actually mention the number, but it's four to eight, right? Because we had to be able to have this deliberation.

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[0:50:06] TR: Everything bigger then needs to be stratified somewhere, or somehow.

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[0:50:10] JS: Yeah. But it was interesting, this descriptive legitimacy, which is following the norms, versus normative legitimacy, which is that it's morally justifiable, wherever distinguishes between traditional, like this is just what we've always done. It's legit, versus charismatic. I'm inspired by this. It's legit versus legal. That's what the law says, so it's legit. I just think that's interesting as we're talking about this interplay between decentralization. What is the thing that brings us into alignment that makes it legitimate that we're doing this thing?

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[0:50:43] TR: Right. Often, many of these have to show up at the same time. If you're putting all your eggs on one basket, like, let's say our organization is whatever we decide is legit, because our founder, who we all love, gave their blessing. Then what if half of the people all of a sudden, doesn't believe that the charismatic leader knows everything, then all of a sudden, you have people running into different directions and nobody to say, “No. Actually, here's how we decide who decides them.” Yeah. Ideally, all of those come together and we know all this. That's why we believe it’s a good resource. We all know this, like for example, from failed democracies, right? If people are hungry, they're going to start questioning the system. Same as, too, in organizations as well. If things are not going well, they're going to say, “Well, wait. What's our system, so that you get to decide these things?”

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[0:51:30] JS: Yeah. It's interesting thinking about some subset of the group deciding and getting clarity on what it is, or evolving the governance, and then the rest of the group having a choice to opt in or out. That's a line for me, so I'm going to continue to be a part of it or not. Versus having a broader collective process to define something that is more reflective of the group, but it may drift from what some core initial founders, for example, envisioned it to be.

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[0:52:00] TR: Yeah. Really, it’s complicated. I mean, the good thing about organizations is they have it slightly easier, because as you're saying, people can just walk away. You can say, “Sorry, this is just what it is.” Which is different if you talk, for example, about government of, let's say, a nation-state. Then that's a different situation. But in organizations and organizations, it's fairly clean in that one can build, or maintain, or use from our legitimacy through incorporation, and so on. One has that, and then ideally, has supplemented with other forms of legitimacy. Like, let's say, we have the formal legitimacy through, well, it's my name on the paper and now I have the, whatever, my name at the bank, to then also make sure that we have good process, for example, that supports legitimacy, right?

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It's transparent that people understand, that they feel aligned with it. All of that ideally comes together and then it tends to work. What I have a hard time with often, especially in the self-organized world is when people don't see legitimacy, and it's a little bit subtle. They, again, have that very bottom-up view. I mean, it's a little ironic that I came from self-organization and rediscovered centralization for myself. There's actually good things to say about centralization, and that's a part of it, because it's really hard to build legitimacy in that blob, right? Do you want to have a place where you can negotiate the collective level things legitimately?

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Again, it's about balance. I think that's the point where I am at now, a few months after publishing this. Still, the right, we need to hit the right balance between centralization, decentralization all the time, and it's going to look differently everywhere. But as long as we understand the forces at work a little bit better, we can navigate it better. That's what I was trying to do with the books. Just put it all out there, so people can then navigate better in whatever system they're in.

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[0:53:56] JS: Yeah. You have a real mic drop passage around this legitimate – the page we talk about legitimacy, about ownership. I want to bring this into the conversation at the organizational level. You said, “In my world, an organization can't be owned, because we're so interdependent that formal ownership can feel like an arbitrary line we draw between the inside and the outside.” In any organization, including startup businesses, build on knowledge, skills, ideas, resources and the space that comes from somewhere else, or shared assets in the first place. No one is ever truly self-made. That undermines the legitimacy of the concept of absolute legitimacy.

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This reminds me of a several Donella Meadow quotes, that laughing at the paradigm that you hold as a paradigm. Or, she also talks about that systems are so complex, we're drawing these arbitrary lines to make sense of some part of it. This concept of ownership is so central to, and particularly, when we talk about corporations and economics and economic reforms. Can you speak a little bit more to this? It's a big one.

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[0:55:08] TR: It is a big one. Yeah, and that was almost a little bit of a foreshadowing, because I've done more work in that direction since then. I've just, I guess, the almost transpersonal view of all of this of just wait, how do we hold, for example, the relationship between an organization and its outside? I mean, for example, the whole concept of externalities is an interesting one. I'm like, what is that even supposed to be?

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In a way, I am intentionally keeping with the simplification of that in the book of saying, there is such an organization. But I did also want to hint of like, I'm aware that this is a simplification. It is, like Donella Meadows would do. That is the end of the system that I'm willing to look at here right now. This is what it is. It's neat and packaged, so that we can understand it. Of course, that's not true.

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Now, what I'm looking at more is, okay, so what are all the threads connecting all of that? How do we hold interdependence in an even more radical way, even blurring the lines between the neatly packaged units that we've told ourselves exist, like organizations? Yeah, and ownership is – I mean, problem is all of our systems are built around ownership and around incorporation and all of that. It's hard to think about things outside of that.

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[0:56:28] JS: Yeah. I think you get into some really deep philosophical questions about, again, this concept of what is the right compensation for me, for the value that I create when the work that I'm doing is built on top of a cultural legacy of hundreds of years, right? Or that I was born into privilege in some particular way. Your book moves from these organizational considerations that we've been talking about to thinking about coalitions and networks. Let's talk a little bit about that.

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[0:56:59] TR: Yeah. We have the same patterns at work again, right? We can form groups of organizations for a higher purpose that we can do alone and of course, we absolutely should. I mean, so much systemic change cannot be made by any one organization, or any one, like sourcing from any one sector. There we are, of course. Again, and so many people will be familiar with the dynamic of wanting to collaborate with other organizations, but then we’re trapped a little, right? Because like, “Wait, I'm paid to work here. How much time can I spend over there? What if my organization suffers, because all I do is coalition work?”

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We have, again, the autonomy, alignments, and competition, and cooperation piece. It needs to be carefully balanced. I'm often wondering about where we will get the resources to resource that next level up and the next level up. Yeah, but really, the bottom line is the same forces at work. Again, it's about making choices to maximize towards what we want, given what we have.

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[0:58:04] JS: No, I really appreciate the way that you're carrying this tension between autonomy and alignment from individual working with other individuals, into teams within organizations and now organizations within organizations. Then we talk about movements, which is a level even above that. Because when you speak to coalitions, you talk about some more formality. Actually, before we get to talk about movements, when I wanted to bring in something that I just hosted a conversation last night, and this will be on the podcast soon as well, where we talk about some of these really progressive corporate forms, like steward-owned structures and co-op structures. They represent a more equitable purpose-driven economy, but it's very hard to compete in the dominant economic paradigm.

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Particularly as an island, a single organizational unit with these types of structures. Some people in the community have just published a book that looks at some really interesting things that sit at this coalition-esque level of how organizations are interconnected and interdependent to be able to address some of the constraints that they face as islands in the dominant economic paradigm, whether that be scale to compete, or access to capital. I think Mondragon, the largest co-op in the world, is a really interesting example of this, because co-ops operate independently as part of the overarching co-op of co-ops, which is Mondragon. They're sharing a lot of information and resources, and there's labor fluidity. But each one opts in. It has its own agency to be a part of it or not be a part of it.

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Just recently, several co-ops that represented a very significant fraction of the labor force in Mondragon opted out. You still have that autonomy with that. As an entity, stitched together progressive structures are better equipped to compete, and the hope is eventually take on a larger and larger fraction of the economy. That was really interesting. It's just related to something that we're about to talk to.

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Let's talk about movement, because you mentioned some – I think we all consider ourselves part of this movement towards the systemic change that we believe is needed in the world. You talked about some of the challenges with movements. Just when we think, when we carry the concepts that we've been talking about throughout the conversations at the movement level, what comes out?

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[1:00:18] TR: Yeah, that there will be either somebody steering the movement somehow, that which raises interesting to do this with questions, right? Often, it is that actually an organization is a little under the radar feeding a movement. In a way, and not so under the radar, we do that in [inaudible 1:00:37]. We are clear that we're not the movement. There's a lot out there and that's all great. We consider ourselves a movement support organization. That now means that there will be the typical dynamics again, right? There's both the loose part of the movement, right? Where's the movement's head, as I guess, a way of asking this.

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[1:00:59] JS: Totally.

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[1:01:00] TR: What I think the biggest thing for me, there's two things that I want to be known about that. One is that I think people have a little bit of magic of thinking about what movements can do. I think they can do a lot, like exert pressure and so on, but there's not a lot of – Let's use an example. Let's say, you have student protests at a university. If we think of all of this as just an upswell of energy and individuals showing up, it's like, well, there's often – if they are done well, there's often a lot of organization, actually, in there to really make that happen, right? I'm looking at cases where then, for example, they had to pivot, right? Something happened and something changed, and how do you do that with a blob, right? What a movement often can be. That is where movements often end, because there's a lot of energy around one purpose, and then we need a nuance, or we need a shift, or we need to respond to something. Then we can’t as a large group respond, because we don't have enough internal governance and legitimacy, and so on. We simply don't know what spokesperson to send to the people.

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[1:02:08] JS: Yeah, it's interesting at the coalition level. You have organizations that it's like a small enough scale that they can coordinate more effectively. You mentioned five factors for success. We don't have the time to get into it right now, but it's in the book for coalition. In many cases, there's a central node that supports the coordination, and it's at a scale where you can do that. Whereas, a movement, by moving up a notch in scale, there's more diffusion. It balances a little bit more towards autonomy than alignment by necessity of the scale.

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[1:02:42] TR: Yes. Then the alignment piece, basically, is more fragile and just more simple. It's a one-cause thing, not a lot of nuance to it often. If you do have to change, you're lost, because nobody has the power to say, “Oh, we actually just noticed as a movement that we left out this particular detail, which will now actually change our mind on.” I was like, those moves are simply not possible. As an organization that's already hard. It has a team that's more possible. The more complex this gets, it gets watered down a little.

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The other piece, and that's the second piece that I want to be known, is just that I think, people sometimes, again, have that magic of thinking of what organizations can do, and then forget that they might be an organization actually putting the threads more than they think. Because I talk sometimes to people who are for example, networks, which is somewhat similar.

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[1:03:37] JS: Well, let's just define a network. It's relevant to define a network and how a network is distinct from a coalition.

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[1:03:43] TR: Yeah, and there's so many definitions around those things. That's where, yeah, sometimes people call themselves network, and I'm like, “Wait, you're in an organization.” I don't think we're also clear on that. I guess, what I would say is that a network is people who are somehow connected, but often that is hosted, but who hosts it? A movement might not be hosted. A network, often, people show up and with sociocracy fraud and they say, “Oh, we're completely self-organized, completely this, completely that.” Then I typically just ask the typical questions of, okay, do you have a website? Who decides what's on the website? “Oh, yeah. Well, that's the steering team.” Oh.

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Then you go like, “Oh, there's actually an organization doing things. You just told me about the shiny, everybody can just do whatever, magically aligned.” Well, how much magic is there? I just want more honesty around, okay, there can be networks, but what's the host thing? Where does it crystallize? Who are those people? How did they get there? I'm not against it at all. I just want more honesty. I think overall in the field, and that's where I've moved away from, there's just so much belief in decentralization, where I always wanna be like, “It's about balance. It's about balance. You need both.” A network can be great and can feel very smooth and easy, but then, it has to be very skillfully orchestrated to even create the platform, so people can find each other and be a network.

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[1:05:12] JS: Yeah. That is a distinction that I took away from the book was around network. You talk about supporting each other and influencing each other in a sense of belonging and sharing information, versus actually working together in a coordinated way. I think the unit with the organization, or the coalition, or whatever it is, I think supports coordination, versus everybody's doing their own thing and we have a shared goal and we're just finding.

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Interestingly, in that context, Denizen is more of a network. I mean, I guess, there's some curation of things that we do together around, like some of the work that we do at the individual level. But it was interesting to, I mean, Denizen also has a coalition attributes with its partnerships. But it was interesting to think about that complexity of what Denizen is in the context of the different concepts as you defined them in the book.

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[1:06:00] TR: Then, by the way, I'm super interested in the hybrids. Because I think, what I want to understand better, and here's my working hypothesis, is that there is natural pairings of different things. Like, being a coalition that also has a broader network around it.

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[1:06:16] JS: Totally.

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[1:06:18] TR: There are typical pairings of that, right? Understanding better, how do you combine a network with an organization, a coalition with it? How does that all work? Yeah, that's just something I'm super interested in.

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[1:06:29] JS: Yeah. I mean, it's interesting, in the context of Denizen, it's like, the partnerships represent more of a coalition, because we were touching base on a quarterly basis and understanding what we're doing and how we can support each other. Then there's the community piece, where there's more consistent relationships and ties. What I've always considered the Denizen network, I would consider you part of the Denizen network, right? You're not engaged, you don't have to do ties to everybody in the community, but we're all on the same team and the meta team. If somebody comes to me and they're interested in governance, well, I know Ted and I can direct them towards Ted. That's part of the landscape of what I'm aware of, of the shared goals. That's how I think about it, at least in the context of Denizen. But there's a lot of, yeah, complexity in terms of what we're doing, too.

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[1:07:15] TR: Yeah, and one thing just to comment on that one is that networks are often very individual relationship-based, which is great. Also, of course, lacks that then that collective power, right? That's often more than organization thing, right? Or coalition. Anything more formalized, organized, because, yes, if I had to draw it, it's a relationship between individual entities and the relationship.

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What's also another thing that I'm tracking that I would like to understand better is how to have relationships between organizations that are meaningful, like partnerships, about what you were just saying, about quarterly checking in and all of that. That is great. Where I just don't know how to do it is if you have an organization with, let's say, 150 people here, organization with 150 people here, and let's say, a third organization, for the fun of it, how do you meaningfully have a partnership that is not just the three executive directors need every quarter, or something like that?

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[1:08:16] JS: Yeah, totally.

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[1:08:18] TR: Then laterally.

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[1:08:19] JS: Absolutely. There's certainly a lot of low-hanging fruit in the space to do that, I think, to do more coordination and not having – I was just having a conversation with someone about this weekend. I want to close at the planetary level. You speak to doing this in the dominant socioeconomic, institutional context, and some of the complexity of doing that. Do you want to surface just some of the points that you make at the end of the book?

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[1:08:48] TR: Yeah. I mean, what we have, let's say, on a national level right now is we're playing out the tragedy of the commons, because people are using resources, some more than others. Nations are using resources more than others, impact of that. How could we have a collective level of reigning that in. Where the constraints and the collective? We're running into natural constraints, but we don't really have enough, I guess, political counterpart to deal with that. The things that do exist are all voluntary. 

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I’m really torn in so many directions there, because I think that's also great, that a coalition should be voluntary, but what if not everybody plays, right? What do you do then? Anyway, it's just the same dynamics again. No easy answers on that one. If we had a world government, would change things? I guess so. But the complexity of that is another nut job. There we have that. Then there's another piece that almost gets a little deeper than that of what is – if we make the collective bigger and bigger, eventually, you end up in that somewhat abstract, but also, yeah, let's call it abstract. Just everything, consideration of everything. Even if we just took life as, what does it mean to be in service of? That's the widest umbrella. What does cooperation on that level look like?

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I think one little take-home message that I had that was really a little nugget that stuck with me around looking at all of this was that, for example, values are that nudge into that highest level, right? It's basically, the way I imagine it is the wellbeing of everything is mirrored in my value for whatever beauty, or consideration. We carry all those levels in us. Even that highest level, we carry in us in the form of value. Whatever we call them, needs, whatever. It doesn't really matter to me. We have that. It's like, we're reflecting everything from all the levels and there we are. How does that relate? Because all of this multilevel selection thing assumes that there is a shell. Can you make it infinite? I don't know. I do not know. I struggle in thinking about that.

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[1:11:13] JS: I mean, I love that as you were speaking, I immediately was thinking about culture. I really appreciate the point you just made around values. That's why two of the pillars of the conversation are culture and consciousness. I think that's where you start to get these, without needing to have explicit governance structures, you start to get a shift in the outcomes away from extraction where we're headed now towards collectivism, right?

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This book is such a powerful contribution to this conversation. It's really amazing to just see – to see you move from a really important conversation about sociocracy and how you can implement these very progressive models of governance within organizations, to just the way that you put it into context in the book is so beautiful. I just really want to thank you for the contribution. I was so pleased to have – this is really why I do the podcast is just to be my commitment device to read books like yours. I'm super excited to see where you go from here.

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[1:12:14] TR: Me too. The biggest piece to me is actually, and that really makes sense now, given what we've talked about, is what I'm looking at right now is what I would call all the ineffable things. Because in a way, collective power is very – it's dealing with all the things that are explicit. What are governance rules? What are decisions? How do we have meetings? What's our aim? All of that. I think that's great. I think it's also yet again, just a part of, because as I was alluding to earlier, it's like, sometimes you don't even need to make those things explicit, because they're explicit, because they're clear. Or because we're all in the same situation, or whatever.

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Let me put it like this. My working hypothesis is that if we have a lot of shared reality and shared culture and shared everything, like all the ineffable things, similar perspectives and so on, experiences in life, we will probably need less governance, because it's already clear. We’re already shoulder to shoulder. We don't need to talk, we just do. The less we have that, the more we need to up our explicit level. I'm interested in, that's where my headspace is at of like, okay, if we take governance as one as a size, and let's say, simplified culture on the other side, all the things we can put into words. What's the relationship between those two? Because the reality is that making everything explicit takes a lot of time and effort.

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While I think it's great to have that spelled out, we can't spell everything out. How are we up at the other side, so that we need less governance, but we know exactly how governance works for all the things where we do need it? That's where I am at right now. Then on the other hand, also, what do organizations, or whatever might come after organizational in their place, how can we have that deeper bond between organizations and the, I guess, niche in which they live? How can we more better represent, or better mimic how nature works? For example, like biomedically on how organizations relate to the ecosystem that they're in. That's what I'm spending my time.

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[1:14:25] JS: Well, I can't wait for your next book. We'll come back and just continue to share with the community on the audience, the evolution of your thinking, because it's such a key piece of the puzzle. I'm super grateful for the connection to you and for your time coming on and sharing this with us.

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[1:14:41] TR: Well, thank you, Jenny, for having me.

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[END OF INTERVIEW]

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[1:14:42] JS:  Thank you so much for listening. Thanks to Scott Hanson, also known as Tyco, for our musical signature. In addition to this podcast, you can find resources for each episode on our website, www.becomingdenizen.com, including transcripts and background materials for our most essential topics, like universal basic income, decentralized social media, and long-term capitalism. We also have posts summarizing our research, which make it easy for listeners to very quickly get an overview of these particularly important and foundational topics.

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[END]

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