Organizational Democracy

Yesterday I presented WorkInTown.com, a web app to help companies be democratic.

The presentation was part of OneWebDay, about online tools for democracy, and was held at NYU’s Courant Institute.  The video is below — my clip is 15 minutes long, starting at 45 minutes, 30 seconds in. Q&A is at 57:10, and the presentation ends at 01:00:30.  To set the time on the video, click into the long black bar next to the time below.

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I also love MixedInk.com, which Vanessa Scanfeld describes as “a collaborative writing tool which allows large groups of people to brainstorm with each other and then combine their best ideas into a final document.” The MixedInk presentation starts at 29 minutes, 30 seconds.

iYear.us, presented by Britt Blaser, has some very neat ideas and tools to influence the U.S. government. The iYear presentation starts at an hour and 30 seconds in.

Thanks to Matt Cooperrider for leading the New York conference of OneWebDay, and Susan Crawford for organizing OneWebDay.

“But as time passed, the fact that I had never written about my travels became oddly burdensome.

If you’re a writer, the assimilation of important experiences almost obliges you to write about them.  Writing is how you make the experience your own, how you explore what it means to you, how you come to possess it, and ultimately release it.”

- Michael Crichton, Travels

Passages below are from Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals.  He well expresses my beliefs:

- that any person or group of people can figure out what they want and what to do about it,

- that you cannot give someone what they want, and

- that people learn by doing.

ANY PERSON OR GROUP CAN FIGURE OUT WHAT THEY WANT AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT:

“One of the great problems in the beginning of [a democratic] organization is, often, that the people do not know what they want.

…

The issue that is not clear to organizers,…educators, or any outsider, is simply that if people feel they don’t have the power to change a bad situation, then they do not think about it.  Why start figuring out how you are going to spend a million dollars if you do not have a million dollars or are ever going to have a million dollars — unless you want to engage in fantasy?”

A SPECIFIC SERIES OF QUESTIONS:

“Once people are organized so that they have the power to make changes, then, when confronted with questions of change, they begin to think and to ask questions about how to make the changes.  If the teachers in the schools are bad then what do we mean by a good teacher?  What is a good teacher?  How do we get good teachers?  When we say our children do not understand what the teachers are talking about and our teachers do not understand what the children are talking about, then we ask how communication can be established.  Why cannot teachers communicate with the children and the latter with the teachers.  What are the hangups?  Why don’t the teachers understand what the values are in our neighborhood?  How can we make them understand?  All these and many other perceptive questions begin to arise. 

It is when people have a genuine opportunity to act and to change conditions that they begin to think their problems through — then they show their competence, raise the right questions, seek special professional counsel and look for the answers.  Then you begin to realize that believing in people is not just a romantic myth. 

But here you see that the first requirement for communication and education is for people to have a reason for knowing.  It is the creation of the instrument or the circumstances of power that provides the reason and makes knowledge essential.  Remember, too, that a powerless people will not be purposefully curious about life, and that they then cease being alive.”

YOU CANNOT GIVE SOMEONE WHAT THEY WANT:

“We learn, when we respect the dignity of the people, that they cannot be denied the elementary right to participate fully in the solutions to their own problems.  Self-respect arises only out of people who play an active role in solving their own crises and who are not helpless, passive, puppet-like recipients of private or public services.  To give people help, while denying them a significant part of the action, contributes nothing to the development of the individual.  In the deepest sense it is not giving but taking — taking their dignity.  Denial of the opportunity for participation is the denial of human dignity and democracy.  It will not work.

In Reveille for Radicals I described an incident in which the government of Mexico once decided to pay tribute to Mexican mothers.  A proclamation was issued that every mother whose sewing machine was being held by the Monte de Piedad (the national pawn shop of Mexico) should have her machine returned as a gift on Mother’s Day.  There was tremendous joy over the occasion.  Here was a gift being made outright, without any participation on the part of the recipients.  Inside of three weeks the exact same number of sewing machines was back in the pawn shop.”

LEARN BY DOING:

“Real education is the means by which the membership will begin to make sense out of their relationship as individuals to the organization and to the world they live in, so that they can make informed and intelligent judgments.  The stream of activities and programs of the organization provides a never-ending series of specific issues and situations that create a rich field for the learning process.

The concern and conflict about each specific issue leads to a speedily enlarging area of interest.  Competent organizers should be sensitive to these opportunities.  Without the learning process, the building of an organization becomes simply the substitution of one power group for another.”

[From pages 104, 105, and 123.]

Frequently asked questions:

Q: Why have a company with organizational democracy?
A: Have more fun, get more done. 

Q: Okay.  I’m a project manager.  I was hired, with a title and responsibilities, for an owner.  What do you mean when you say people in companies should choose who represents them?
A: The people you’re managing, they should be able to choose who is their project manager.  They could choose to hire from inside their group, or from a pool of project managers, or from outside.

Q: But they were hired to do a job.  I’m managing people to make sure they get the work done that the boss hired them for.  Why should the people choose me, instead of their boss?  Let’s say I own Dan’s Auto Shop.  I’m hiring you to work for me as my employee, right?
A: What if instead, it’s like a partnership.  As a partner, I’m still making $12/hr or whatever you pay employees.

Q: Okay, that makes sense.  So organizational democracy is not something that can be strapped onto an existing business structure?
A: Well, it can work with big companies too.  But keep picturing when you have Dan’s Auto Shop with yourself and one other person. 

When I worked with this company that sold TV’s, the sales and designers and marketing guys weren’t talking with each other, because whatever work they did would need to get approved by the guy who was President.  And he would tell them to make changes, and he’d hold off on his approval, and they would get frustrated and stop trying.  So my role was to help him back off. 

He said, “What, you’re making democratic teams?”  I said, “Yeah.”  We boosted profits by a million dollars, literally, in a short time.

Q: And these people chose their own managers?
A: They were able to start their own groups, and within the groups, they’d choose their own managers or leaders or representatives.”

Q: So the President said, “Basically, I’m going to stop micromanaging.  You guys self-organize if it makes sense.”
A: Within limits, which expanded over time.  So the groups couldn’t do just anything.  They coordinated.

Q: “Talk with each other and other departments.”
A: One way I got agreement from the President was for him to say, “I trust you to make decisions as a group if you all agree on how to proceed.”

Q: So you could say, “The people choose their leaders.”
A: Or, since everyone is responsible for leading in their own way, “The people choose their representatives.”

[Thanks to Tony for his help with editing.]

“I want the orange!”  ”I need the orange too!”  ”Fine. I could fight you, but I’ll split the orange with you so we each get half of what we want.”  ”Fine, I’ll give in and compromise.  I’ll take this half.”  ”Wait, why are you grinding up the peel?”  ”I’m using this orange peel to bake my Orangepeelicious Dessert!”  ”But you threw the orange in the trash!”  ”What, the juicy part?  I just need the peel.”  ”Oh!  I wanted to eat the juicy part!”  ”And you threw your half of the peel in the trash!  I could’ve made my Dessert twice as big!”  ”Sigh.  You know, we both could’ve had all of what we wanted.”

The following quote is from the classic Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In by Roger Fisher, William Ury and Bruce Patton:

“Dovetail differing interests.  Consider once again the two children quarreling over an orange.  Each child wanted the orange, so they split it, failing to realize that one wanted only the fruit to eat and the other only the peel for baking.  In this case as in many others, a satisfactory agreement is made possible because each side wants different things.  This is genuinely startling if you think about it.  People generally assume that differences between two parties create the problem.  Yet differences can also lead to a solution.

Agreement is often based on disagreement.”

Consider the fight at the local church over a pension plan for the man who’s maintained the building over the past 20 years and is ready to retire.  The church’s lawyer says the pension plan should be cut.  This causes a ruckus among the members of the church.  Some side with the lawyer, others with the man who’s waiting for his pension plan.  Meetings are called again and again, tensions rise, and members start to leave the church.

One day, the lawyer is overheard telling his wife how he resents that there’s no nursery room where they can leave their child during services.  The man waiting for his pension to be unblocked likes taking care of kids, and would actually very much like to make the church more family-friendly by converting the unused basement into a play area.  The lawyer has also wanted to make the church more family friendly, and his resentments about the church building not having a play area were displaced into his resentment for the man who maintained the building.  The building and the church rules are made more family-friendly, membership grows, and everyone is happy.