This an intensely risky moment, emotionally and strategically. The phase change could knock you off your feet, especially if this is your first time participating in a major mobilisation. I’ve been in this position before, back in 2011 when we decided to close the camp at Occupy Wellington. So I wanted to write you this letter. Granddad Rich has a story for you. Please imagine a rocking chair, a pipe, a pot of tea.

Back in my day…

Joining Occupy absolutely blew my mind, and blew my heart right open. It was the first time I felt the courage that comes before hope, the first time that “solidarity” moved from my head down into my heart, my blood, my hands. I reckon I did 30 years of growing up in 3 weeks. It felt like we were on the front edge of history, wide awake and fully alive at last.

So leaving the camp feels super risky. At this moment, despair is the biggest threat. Is this the end? Do I go back to my normal life now? Was I deluded when I felt like we were changing the world?

First off, I know you know this, but humour me while I remind you anyway: the camp is closing but there’ll be more actions. These weeks in London were just one line of an epic beautiful song. Extinction Rebellion will carry the tune for maybe a verse or two, and then some other movement will pick it up and carry on. When I joined Occupy in 2011, I had no idea that I was entering into a lineage, generations of resistance made invisible by the histories I learned in school, a thousand grandmothers I never knew the names of. Occupy dispersed, but the lineage continues. I watched it surging through Hungary, Taiwan, Brazil, Korea… the movement of movements is everywhere. Your job is not to bring an end to injustice, to stop climate change, or to replace capitalism. You just have to keep going.

“It is not your responsibility to finish the work of perfecting the world, but you are not free to desist from it either.” — Rabbi Tarfon

The surest way to guarantee your endurance is with company.

If you’re not sure what to do next, I can tell you what worked for me. After we left Occupy, a small crew of my closest allies made a commitment to each other. We made a pledge to keep going: to let go of individualism and hold tight to the mutual aid, the care, the passion and the purpose that we found in camp.

Eventually we started a tech co-op to spread the meme of participatory democracy. Now I have a consulting company helping groups to get beyond hierarchy. For the past 7 years I’ve been paid to work on the problems that feel most urgent to me. I’m free from the discouraging, dehumanising, exhausting grind of my old bullshit jobs. I’m not rich, but I’m satisfied, deep down in my guts. It’s not all plain sailing, but I have an anchor, a rudder, and crewmates I trust with my life. I can’t tell you how much my life has improved since I found my meaningful work, and found the people to share it with. Sure, that’s partly down to privilege and good luck, but don’t underestimate the value of a clear intention. It’s in my head every day like a mantra: mutual aid, meaningful work, mutual aid, meaningful work.

Probably you’re not going to start a tech co-op. If you’re committed to Extinction Rebellion, you can join one of the many local XR groups. But XR doesn’t have a monopoly on solidarity: you can form a savings pool, a reading club, a shared house, a freelancer collective, a community choir… just don’t go on alone. At the very least, find 3 or 4 people you can meet with every couple of weeks: form your crew now while the enthusiasm is high, so you can hold each other up when the energy gets low. If you need inspiration or resources for how to do this well, check out microsolidarity.cc.

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you
Don’t go back to sleep
You must ask for what you really want
Don’t go back to sleep
People are going back and forth across the doorsill where the two worlds touch
The door is round and open
Don’t go back to sleep

— Rumi

p.s. This story is published by Richard D. Bartlett with no rights reserved: you have my consent to use it however you like. You’ll find files for easy reproduction on my website. The artwork is licensed for non-commercial use.

No rights reserved by the author.

The post The Morning After The Rebellion: An Open Letter To The People of #ExtinctionRebellion appeared first on P2P Foundation.

If you’re interested in the future of work, you may have heard rumours about Enspiral, a network of 200 entrepreneurs in New Zealand working on “stuff that matters”. The network is composed of many start-ups and small co-ops experimenting with radical self-management practices, decentralised ownership, and shared leadership.

Nati and Rich come from one of those co-ops in the network, a software company called Loomio. With Loomio we’re building a tool for deliberation and collaborative decision-making. Recently we launched The Hum, a consulting company providing practical guidance for decentralised organisations. Our focus has expanded beyond just software, to consider the cultural and structural elements that support people to thrive and create humming teams. With The Hum we travel all over the world, visiting organisations across a huge diversity of sectors: from the Seoul city government, to corporate consultants in New York, to anarchist activists in Barcelona.

What these unlikely neighbours have in common is a shared desire to work in a less hierarchical, more collaborative way. We present our Patterns For Decentralised Organising, based on our lived experience building Enspiral and Loomio, combined with our research over the past 2 years on the road. We propose that the ideal structure for any truly thriving organisation must be unique: the structure must respond to the unique context, opportunities and objectives of the particular people involved.

So while we reject any “one size fits all” prescription for organisations, we offer a collection of design patterns. These patterns offer solutions to the recurring challenges that humans encounter whenever they try to work together in harmony. In this talk we’ll share a sample of the patterns, considering the cultural and structural elements required for a thriving decentralised organisation. We’ll look at decision-making methods, digital collaboration tools, and rhythms for continuous improvement, as well as more subtle topics such as power imbalances, interpersonal skills, and emotional intelligence.

The post Patterns for Decentralised Organising / Richard D. Barlett and Natalia Lombardo / Intersection18 appeared first on P2P Foundation.

At one point I said, “I don’t care about hierarchy, hierarchy is not the problem,” and immediately felt the temperature in the room drop by a few degrees.

I know I can be provocative with my overly-concise use of language, so I wanted to take some space here to explain more thoroughly. It will take me a few minutes to describe my understanding of hierarchy and power, making the argument that this focus on “hierarchy” is a dangerous misdirection. Then in part 2, I share 11 practical steps that you can take to improve the power dynamics at your workplace, whether you’re in a horizontal collective, decentralised company, hierarchical organisation, or a post-consensus social foam.

Hierarchy Is Just a Shape

For this argument, we need to set aside our emotional and political reactions to the word “hierarchy”. Let’s pretend for a few minutes that we’ve never seen the horrible coercive inefficient hierarchies of human organisations, and just treat the word as a neutral scientific term. I’m thinking of hierarchy purely as a taxonomy, a way to map a system into nested relationships.

Take language for instance. If you tell me you hate fruit, I know not to offer you an apple. It would be impossible to make sense of the world without these hierarchical relationships.

Many natural systems can be understood through a hierarchical metaphor: a tree has a trunk and branches and twigs and leaves. I have no issue with that hierarchy. I don’t think we need a revolution for leaves to overthrow their branches.

In this taxonomical view, hierarchy is an amoral metaphor, a map, a shape which allows me to efficiently explain that this is contained by that.

I don’t think it is inherently unjust to have an organisation with some hierarchical forms. You might have a communications department, alongside an engineering department, and they may both be contained by some coordinating function.

In the kind of “self-managing” “flat” “non-hierarchical” or “less-hierarchical” organisations we work with at The Hum, org charts are usually drawn with friendly circles instead of evil triangles.

Take Enspiral, for instance. We frequently use a circular metaphor to draw a map of our the different roles in the network. I know the circle has symbolic importance for us, but… isn’t it just a pyramid viewed from a different angle?

So What?

More than just an abstract semantic debate for word nerds, I believe that this fascination with “hierarchy” and “non-hierarchy” is a major problem. Focussing on “hierarchy” doesn’t just miss the point, it creates cover for extremely toxic behaviour.

I have encountered so many organisations who describe themselves as “non-hierarchical”, and wear that label as a badge of pride.

I’m guilty of this myself: having declared ourselves to be a “non-hierarchical” organisation, I’m unable to clearly see the un-just, un-accountable, un-inclusive, un-transparent, un-healthy dynamics that inevitably emerge in any human group. Calling ourselves “non-hierarchical” is like a free pass that gets in the way of our self-awareness.

Jo Freeman named this beautifully in The Tyranny of Structurelessness, where she argues that the informal hierarchies of a “structureless” group will always be less accountable and fair than a more formal organisation. It’s worth reading the essay in full, but I’ll pull out a couple paragraphs here to give you the flavour:

“Contrary to what we would like to believe, there is no such thing as a structureless group. Any group of people of whatever nature that comes together for any length of time for any purpose will inevitably structure itself in some fashion. The structure may be flexible; it may vary over time; it may evenly or unevenly distribute tasks, power and resources over the members of the group. But it will be formed regardless of the abilities, personalities, or intentions of the people involved. (…)

“This means that to strive for a structureless group is as useful, and as deceptive, as to aim at an “objective” news story, “value-free” social science, or a “free” economy. A “laissez faire” group is about as realistic as a “laissez faire” society; the idea becomes a smokescreen for the strong or the lucky to establish unquestioned hegemony over others. This hegemony can be so easily established because the idea of “structurelessness” does not prevent the formation of informal structures, only formal ones. Similarly “laissez faire” philosophy did not prevent the economically powerful from establishing control over wages, prices, and distribution of goods; it only prevented the government from doing so. Thus structurelessness becomes a way of masking power, (…) usually most strongly advocated by those who are the most powerful (whether they are conscious of their power or not). As long as the structure of the group is informal, the rules of how decisions are made are known only to a few and awareness of power is limited to those who know the rules. Those who do not know the rules and are not chosen for initiation must remain in confusion, or suffer from paranoid delusions that something is happening of which they are not quite aware.

Freeman uses the word “structureless”, which is specific to the context of her 1960’s feminism. Today, you could swap “structureless” for “non-hierarchical” and get a very accurate diagnosis of a sickness that afflicts nearly every group that rejects hierarchical structures.

We’re coming up to the 50th anniversary of this essay, and still it seems the majority of radical organisations have missed the point.

So I repeat: I don’t care about hierarchy. It’s just a shape. I care about power dynamics.

Yes, when a hierarchical shape is applied to a human group, it tends to encourage coercive power dynamics. Usually the people at the top are given more importance than the rest. But the problem is the power, not the shape. So let’s focus on the problem.

More Feminists Talking About “Power”

“Power” is a complex, loaded word, so let’s slow down again and unpack it.

My understanding borrows a lot from Miki Kashtan and Starhawk, who in turn borrow from Mary Parker Follett. (To follow this train of thought, read Kashtan’s Myths of Power-With series and Starhawk’s excellent short book The Empowerment Manual.)

Follett coined the terms “power-over” and “power-with” in 1924. Starhawk adds a third category “power-from-within”. These labels provide three useful lenses for analysing the power dynamics of an organisation. With apologies to the original authors, here’s my definitions:

• power-from-within or empowerment — the creative force you feel when you’re making art, or speaking up for something you believe in
• power-with or social power — influence, status, rank, or reputation that determines how much you are listened to in a group
• power-over or coercion — power used by one person to control another

I think words like “non-hierarchical”, “self-managing” and “horizontal” are kind of vague codes, pointing to our intention to create healthy power relations. In the past, when I said “Enspiral is a non-hierarchical organisation”, what I really meant was “Enspiral is a non-coercive organisation”. That’s the important piece, we’re trying to work without coercion.

These days I have mostly removed “non-hierarchical” from my vocabulary. I still haven’t found a great replacement, but for now I say “decentralised”. But again, it’s not the shape that’s interesting, it’s the power dynamics.

Here are the power dynamics I’m striving for in a “decentralised organisation”:

1. Maximise power-from-within: everyone feels empowered; they are confident to speak up, knowing their voice matters; good ideas can come from anywhere; people play to their strengths; creativity is celebrated; growth is encouraged; anyone can lead some of the time.
2. Make power-with transparent: we’re honest about who has influence; pathways to social power are clearly signposted; influential roles are distributed and rotated; the formal org chart maps closely to the informal influence network.
3. Minimise power-over: one person cannot force another to do something; we are sensitive to coercion; any restrictions on behaviour are developed with a collective mandate.

This sounds nice in theory, but how does it work in practice? I’ve been experimenting with these questions for years as a cofounder and a coach, so I have some practical suggestions for shifting power in each of the three dimensions.

You can read all about it in the second part of this essay: 11 Practical Steps Towards Healthy Power Dynamics at Work.

p.s. Published by Richard D. Bartlett, with no rights reserved. You have my consent to reproduce without permission: different file formats are on my website. If you’re feeling grateful you can support me on Patreon.No rights reserved by the author.

Drawing of 3 org charts: hierarchy, consensus, blah blah… they’re just shapes!

The post Hierarchy Is Not the Problem… It’s the Power Dynamics appeared first on P2P Foundation.

There are also some useful shared notes and links in the working doc from this session.

Photo by nigel_appleton

The post Open 2018: Richard Bartlett and Natalia Lombardo on Patterns for Decentralised Organising appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Excerpt:

“I’ve always had an ideological critique about Facebook; the privatization of profit, and the socialization of all the effort, the value exchange there is really off, and I think that there’s major abuses of power. I think there’s lots of things that I don’t like about the Facebook business model. But, sort of around that Occupy time, I made a commitment like – look, it’s really popular to hate Facebook, and with people with my sort of values, we’re all proud of saying how Facebook sucks, and we’re so much cooler than that. But, I made a commitment to be, like, look, almost everyone that I know, all of my friends are here, and – if you’re at a party and all your friends are there, and you’re having a bad party, that’s kind of your own fault. If everyone’s there, then surely we can do something fun, and creative, and constructive with it. So, I really put a lot of effort into it, for a few years, trying to create a positive experience on Facebook. And it’s quite strange but I would actually have quite a few people mention to me, in person, they’d say, “Rich, I really appreciate what you’re doing on Facebook.” They’d give me this strange compliment, that I’m hosting kinds of conversations and bringing insight and drawing in sources of news that no one else is paying attention to, and so on – and quite intentionally doing it.

And then, it was January (of this year). We were really starting to pay attention to the abuses of Facebook, where it’s not just about ad selling, it’s now about vote selling…where the algorithms have really made a significant impact on the way that our democracies are functioning. And that, to me, was just a bridge too far. I felt like, instead of what I was trying to create – a bubble of positivity within this kind of shopping mall – I just crossed the line. I said, look, I feel like I’m actually propping up a really toxic and abusive place. So, I pulled out. I’ll come in and comment from time to time, but I’ve just stopped posting altogether. Which was a major shift for me, I was putting a lot of energy in there for a long time…but more and more, my energy is going into Scuttlebutt, because it’s constructive.”

Rich’s personal site: richdecibels.com/
The Hum: www.thehum.org/
Thread on Reinventing Organisations: www.facebook.com/stephenreid321/posts/2175422099199363

My personal site: stephenreid.net
Follow me on Facebook: facebook.com/stephenreid321

Photo by RAVEfinity

The post Podcast of the day: Rich Decibels on Teal, Scuttlebutt and Solarpunk appeared first on P2P Foundation.