A Comparison of Sociocracy and Holacracy® – The Sociocracy Consulting Group

In a March 16th, 2021 NextGen Enterprise Net session, Sheella Mierson, Ph.D., a founding member of The Sociocracy Consulting Group, and Anna McGrath, Head of Culture and Transformation at Godrey Dadich Partners, and Fellow at Center for Innovative Cultures, presented A Comparison of Sociocracy and Holacracy. See the recording.

To request a copy of the slides in this presentation, or a table with much more detail comparing sociocracy and Holacracy, send an e-mail to Tanya Spelts.

To support you in your journey, Sheella and Anna are each offering a one hour Q&A for you and other team members who are passionate about moving to a self-organizing system. Send an e-mail to Tanya Spelts, and she will direct you to the relevant person.

To learn more about sociocracy:

Get our white paper, 5 Pitfalls of a Top-down Hierarchy and What to Do About Them.
Get our one-pager, Three Tips for Meetings that Sizzle
Watch Sociocracy: Unleashing the Creative Forces of Self-Organization, a Responsive Org webinar interview of Sheella Mierson by Glenn Marks, Ph.D., MBA.
Send an e-mail to Sheella or connect with her on LinkedIn.

To learn more about Holacracy^®:

Why Holacracy?
Tactical Meeting Process
GlassFrog
Send an e-mail to Anna McGrath and/or connect with her on LinkedIn.

An Innovative Community Leader

Before adopting sociocracy, Rainbow Community School had a flagging reputation and struggled to fill empty enrollment slots. Since adopting sociocracy, enrollment has almost doubled and there is a long waitlist. The size of its campus has doubled, and the school has gained a reputation for being an innovative community leader.

Renee Owen, Executive Director, Rainbow Community School, Asheville, North Carolina

Productive Give and Take

Sociocracy is very effective at creating a productive give-and-take between the manifold perspectives that exist in any university. The inner core of an organization can express itself more fully once the rigid categories of levels and hierarchies are abandoned in favor of a more integrated model.

Dr. Edward Clift, Dean, The School of Media Culture and Design at Woodbury University, Burbank, CA

Problems Solved From Both Ends

When I was an enlisted man in the Navy, I wondered why the officers didn’t listen to our good ideas. When I became an officer, I wondered why I could never get the enlisted men to tell me what they were thinking. I tell you from experience that sociocracy solves this problem from both ends.

Richard Heitfield, President, Creative Urethanes, Winchester, Virginia

Professional Support Pays Off

My advice to organizations planning on implementing sociocracy is to get assistance from a sociocracy consultant. Doing that improved and speeded up the process for us, rather than leaving us to reinvent the wheel, which can be time consuming and costly.

Richard Heitfield, President, Creative Urethanes, Winchester, Virginia

High Quality Employee Engagement

Recently, the University of Regina unveiled the results of a survey on employee engagement in its various faculties and units, the second of its kind in two years...the Institut distinguished itself not only by a high level of employee engagement, but especially by a high level of psychological safety, cooperation and individual citizenship behaviour towards their colleagues. We attribute these results largely to the Institut’s decision-making culture: dynamic governance (sociocracy). The sociocracy premise is simple. You do not change the relationships in an organization by changing the leader or the organizational chart, but rather by changing the structure of communication and decision-making.

Abdoulaye Yoh, Director of Finance, Institut français, University of Regina

All voices heard

I was especially struck by how the structure of the meeting allowed all voices to be heard, and resisted any one person dominating the discussion. I have held leadership positions in several nonprofit organizations and work with nonprofits in my consulting business, so I have spent a lot of time in meetings! I think so many organizations -- not just nonprofits -- will find they can accomplish more, and more inclusively, using a sociocratic meeting model.

Kristen Sbrogna, parent at Five Creeks Studio educational resource center for homeschooling families