My guest this week is Ted Rau, operational leader of Sociocracy For All. If you’re not familiar with sociocracy, Ted does a great job of explaining it during our conversation, but I’ll just say briefly here that it’s a fantastic way that people can organise themselves to get things done in an inclusive and democratic way – whether that’s in intentional communities, for profit or non-profit organisations, neighbourhoods – or who knows, maybe one day, even governments.

Ted spends most of his time training and consulting in sociocracy and leading SoFA as an organisation. He is co-author of the sociocracy handbook Many Voices, One Song. When he’s not busy sociocratising, he writes articles, and teaches meeting facilitation, and also takes an active interest the co-housing movement, transgender rights, and non-violent communication. His background is in linguistics, which taught him to find patterns that work well for the human mind, and break things down so they can be easily understood.

One of the reasons I get excited about sociocracy is that research shows that something like 85% of employees are disengaged in the workplace, but that figure improves dramatically when people work for themselves, meaning they have more power of self-determination. And yet we often need to work with others in order to get stuff done. So sociocracy seems to be the best of both worlds – it gives us a way to collaborate in ways that create trust, respect, autonomy, and engagement.

We have another conversation on sociocracy coming up in three weeks, with John Buck and Monika Megyesi, when you’ll have a chance to find out more about these important ideas.

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