Someone Still Has to Do the Work
I chair (lead) the Outreach and Development committee (sub-circle) for an international nonprofit—an organization that operates sociocratically. And… I believe in the process. I believe in the work. I believe in participation. I also see how difficult democratic decision making can be when something actually needs to get done. As you might imagine, that’s an uncomfortable thing to admit when so much of my work revolves around community and community building.
We want people to have a voice. We want their contributions respected. We want an organization where power is shared and people have some say in the decisions that affect them. These, of course, are good things to want. But wanting them doesn’t answer a fairly practical question.
How are we going to get the work done?
I’ve been thinking about this while looking at economist Richard Wolff’s advocacy for workplace democracy. He argues that workers should collectively govern the enterprises in which they work, including deciding how the wealth they produce is used. And there’s an obvious appeal to this. Why should people spend their working lives subject to decisions they have almost no power to influence? But then I find myself wondering how much we’re asking democracy to accomplish.
A democratic process can give us the power to make decisions. It cannot, however, give us the knowledge to make good ones.
A skilled carpenter may know far more about building a house than the person who owns the construction company. And that knowledge deserves real authority. But it doesn’t automatically prepare the carpenter to manage financing, insurance, contracts, or an expansion into another market. We all have limits. And the reality is that limits don’t disappear when someone gives you a vote.
Additionally, the problem becomes more complicated when we move from one person to a group. Ten people who don’t understand a financial problem can discuss it at considerable length without coming to understand it. They may reach agreement. They may feel good about the process. But the reality of limits hasn’t changed. Of course, a group can also see something that an expert misses. The person doing the work may recognize a problem long before it appears in a report. A leader who dismisses that knowledge deserves the consequences. But, unfortunately, it’s not always just the leader who pays for bad decisions.
So we need ways to bring knowledge into decisions. We also need to recognize where that knowledge ends.
My experience in nonprofit work gives me a place to think about these questions. A sociocratically governed nonprofit is different from a worker-owned factory, and one organization’s difficulties cannot settle the argument about an entire economic system. Still, the practical tension is familiar: how do we share authority while still allowing those in managerial positions to act?
Sociocracy does have an answer. It distinguishes collective policy decisions from operational decisions that can be delegated to people with defined responsibilities. Consent also differs from requiring everyone to agree that a proposal is their favorite option. But the people using the system still have to make delegation real. They have to agree on where someone’s authority begins and ends. They have to allow that person to exercise judgment. And they have to tolerate some decisions they would have made differently.
And that… can be difficult.
It’s easy to endorse shared leadership in principle. It can be much harder to let another person lead when we have an opinion about what they’re doing. I include myself in that. My conviction that something could be done better doesn’t necessarily mean it needs another round of discussion.
There’s a cost to participation. Time spent preparing, explaining, discussing, revising, and revisiting a decision is time that cannot be spent carrying it out. Sometimes that investment prevents a serious mistake. Sometimes it builds the understanding needed for people to work together. And sometimes we’re simply spending more time on a decision than the decision deserves. A nonprofit has to be especially honest about this. Volunteer time may not appear as a payroll expense, but it comes out of someone’s life.
Then there’s accountability.
If someone is responsible for an outcome but needs repeated group approval to act, what exactly are we holding them responsible for? And if the group makes the decision, who is responsible for following through when the discussion ends? These questions need names and boundaries attached to them. Someone has to know what they’re doing, have the authority to do it, and accept responsibility for the result.
We also need to leave room for people who want to contribute without helping manage the entire organization. A person may love teaching, repairing things, organizing an event, or helping a neighbor, but have very little interest in governance. Their time and contribution still matter, and we don’t necessarily want to turn an opportunity to participate into an unwanted obligation to govern; thus pushing the person away.
I don’t take any of this as an argument for giving an unchecked executive control over everyone else. A person at the top can make an expensive mistake very efficiently. Speed alone tells us very little about the quality of a decision. But I’m equally reluctant to treat a participatory process as evidence that an organization is functioning well. We have to look at what it accomplishes. The work has a purpose beyond the experience of governing it.
For me, this is where workplace democracy encounters its tremendous practical limitations. Good decision making requires knowledge, time, trust, clear authority, and a willingness to be accountable—those things have to be developed and maintained. And a purely democratic governance model cannot supply them on its own.
Sometimes it takes a more structured approach.
I want people to have a meaningful voice. I also want us to trust capable people with the work we’ve asked them to do, give them room to do it, and evaluate what happens. Even Wolff’s model relies on delegation.
We can agree on a great many admirable things around a table.
But someone still has to leave the table and do them.
