Where many companies and organizations have a board of directors, we have a root leadership team. They coordinate with the community around us, and they facilitate and support the growth of the company as a whole. This is also where all the information from our environment and our operations come together to form the most abstract sense that anyone inside the company has of who we are, where we're going, and what we do.

Where many orgcharts define a single, linear, top-down hierarchy, led by a chief executive, we have a bidirectional hierarchy in which we can pass leadership around like we might pass food around a table at a shared meal. We still have a chief executive officer, whose role includes articulating our corporate identity, vision, and mission, and describing what we do to serve our customers. And that person will make operational decisions as needed. But mostly the role of the CEO in this company is to facilitate others' self-organizing work, integrate their guidance and feedback, and synthesize from all of that a clear coherent expression of who we are and what we're about. Because we make smarter decisions when we make them together, and no one person can possibly have all the information.

Classic middle-management teams map to the trunk and branches of this tree. Their job is to coordinate, support, and facilitate the customer-focused teams—the twigs and outer branches—that depend on them, while simultaneously helping integrate and articulate for our root team the guidance they're receiving from those outer branches.

And the twigs and leaves are our front-line workers, whose direct contact with our clients and customers gives them more information about the conditions of our business than is available anywhere else. Of course, none of them has all of it, and we need to bring the information together to understand it. So we ask each outer branch, twig, leaf, or bud to help guide us.

Short version: no.

Slightly longer version: we don't just appoint people from the roots up the trunk to tell the branches and the leaves what to do—we require the leaves and branches to appoint people going the other direction, too. Those people are accountable to the outer team that appointed them, and they participate as full members of the policy-making process in the team to which they were appointed.

Longer version (several pages, probably the best primer currently available): sign up for access to Sociocracy Basics on the website of A Fairer Society.

Longer longer version: go read some books about Sociocracy. In our founding CEO's words:

My first, in 2009, was We the People: Consenting to a Deeper Democracy, by John Buck and Sharon Villines. My second, that same summer, was Sociocracy: The Organization of Decision Making, by Gerard Endenburg.

Significantly longer version: get in touch with a practitioner, and connect or take a training. Here's Venn again:

I happened to be passing through Amsterdam as I finished We the People, so I contacted John Buck's mentor, Gerard Endenburg, whose office at the Sociocratisch Centrum (now The Sociocracy Group) was in Rotterdam. We spent a delightful afternoon sharing the chocolate I'd been collecting all over Europe and getting to know each other. I parted with a copy of his book, and an injunction to "do something with it."

I spent the following several years studying with—and then working alongside—John, Gerard, and many others in the global home of Sociocratic practice.

Longest version: dedicate your life to practicing Sociocracy, and continuing to co-develop it with us, by applying it to something you do.

Two warnings, though, for those who want to try a DIY approach:

1. the modern practice of Sociocracy was formulated by Dutch cyberneticists and electrical engineers, and it works with real power. There are hundreds of pages of engineering diagrams detailing the best known patterns of the practice, and what classic organizational pitfalls each of them addresses. The writing tends to be dense, and ... there are a lot of details. If you stick closely to the core principles, you'll probably develop something similar. But if you wander off into the wilderness, you may wind up wishing you'd had a guide.

2. Sociocracy is grounded in consent, and the practice requires that we connect. You cannot do this alone. Certainly there are useful ways to apply insights and techniques from Sociocracy to solo work and life, but the real practice of consent requires that we guide and be guided by others with whom we choose to associate. Even as various groups of Sociocratic practitioners have split and recombined our activities over the years that any of us have been involved, we have remained connected with one another.