NEW! Effective Meetings and the Art of Having Both Bottom-Up and Top-Down Governance with John Buck

Upon completion of this training, learners will be able to: 

• Distinguish and compare various approaches to decision-making and the strengths and drawbacks of each, if used in their organization.
• Discuss and practice consent decision-making for policies and selecting individuals for roles.
• Demonstrate basic processes and interpersonal skills for facilitating consent decision-making in a meeting.

In today's popular business literature there is frequent mention of types of organizing based on distributed authority, worker autonomy, and peer relationships. Such ideas are attractive to many, especially now that the pandemic has demonstrated that staff can work effectively from home without traditional management controls. However, businesses fail to operate without clear assignment of accountability and well-organized oversight of the complex issues involved in business management. This training provides a basic approach to combining and synthesizing the values of both worker autonomy and traditional time tested, top-down controls and business expertise that ensure clear responsibility and well-informed business strategies that promote both investor and worker interests.

This training delivers the building blocks for learning to create a practical synthesis of bottom-up and top-down approaches to organizing meetings, where both voices can be equally heard and respected. It starts with a brief history of attempts to create effective teams where workers and managers are on the same side of the playing field. Those methods include beyond budgeting, organizational open space, sociocracy, and agile approaches. The focus will be on sociocracy because it offers very specific guidance on facilitating meetings. Using many practical exercises, it then explores new ways to distinguish between policy and operations meetings and how to make policy decisions by consent (which is quite different than the boss says or majority vote). It provides experience with selecting people for roles and tasks by consent, as well as how to create a collective team memory. 

Learners will have the opportunity to experience facilitating circle meetings that focus on making decisions that everyone feels are good enough for now and safe enough to try. Everyone will be invited to bring actual situations from their organizations into facilitation exercises. In this way, much of the class learning will be immediately applicable to the learners’ day-to-day work. Further, learners will be able to apply the methods to other issues in their offices and they will then qualify to take other, more advanced trainings that address how to apply dynamic governance methods to whole-company structures.