Minimal viable governance

This book is about dialogue, about sensing next steps in a project, about collective wisdom… and it is part of a wider paradigm shift, away from hierarchy and separation. As humanity, we are in a phase of transition, hence the constant learning, experimenting and inventing. Even if you look around in the professional world – business and NGO’s alike – we see the topics appearing of self-organisation, horizontal organization, boss-less jobs, etc… Stewards of specific open sessions – the mentoring – rolling planetary meeting – are our examples of the constant shifting form our organism takes.

Then there is the governance. Can we invent in this realm too? Governance is “the process of governing or overseeing the control and direction of something”. It’s about decisions affecting the whole, like this one: Where does our gift money go beyond the obvious costs such as maintaining a website, holding a zoom account and a database? The basic question is about inventing a governance form that is not a classic hierarchy, with a boss on top and layers of decision power flowing down, but a form where decision-making is more distributed.

This is the time where old habits around leadership and authority are totally re-written. Because the goal has shifted away from making progress to a deeper understanding of living AS nature: in coherence, in co-creation, in constant emergent flow. There are many experiments going on in the world about how to actually govern a business or a social organization in a less hierarchical way, which distributes the power to make decisions. There is a whole body of work that you can find online.

One question that can guide you: What is the minimal, viable governance form? Don’t make it more complicated than needed; it turns out you don’t need more than the minimum. These days there are services like Open Collective who hold the financial, official side of money coming in and out, so you don’t need to do the work of setting up a legal structure as long as it is not useful for your project.

Another useful principle is to grant authority. In our community we do that when people step forward to host sessions. We grant them that authority and we don’t interfere. They can ask for feedback, either in the group or in conversations with their mentor, and build up their capacity in that way.

Ultimately the topic of governance comes down to the question: who then takes the lead? This role is more about how it is done, than by whom. It’s the sensing into the potential that has the lead. Sensing what it is that wants to grow, sensing which seed is ready to germinate; hold it in a constant pregnant unfolding awareness; and then: create – find – call the web of relationships which is the fertile soil in which the seed can sprout and start to flourish. The people who do this hold the responsibility to constantly check in with the seed they hold. Sensing what is nurturing and what is not. Sensing what arms and legs it wants to grow. Sensing who could be good aunts and uncles to let the seed unfold its potential. Exceptional good bosses – also within classic hierarchies – know about this.

It is the initiator of the project, of the inquiry, that is this seed-keeper, or source-keeper. Still they don’t want to fall back on old hierarchical ways of working. They rely on authentic and sovereign individuals who dare to step forward to make the true self-organisation work for all. It happens a lot that team or community members project power dynamics on this/these persons, as hardly any of us have experience of how a natural hierarchy can look like.