Collective Power: Patterns for a Self-Organized Future

Rau, Ted J.

ISBN 10: 1949183246 / ISBN 13: 9781949183245

Published by Sociocracy For All, 2023

About this Item

Seller Inventory # I-9781949183245

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Collective Power: Patterns for a Self-Organized Future
• Publisher: Sociocracy For All
• Publication Date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1949183246
• ISBN 13: 9781949183245
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

Humans form groups, organizations, movements, countries. What are the deeper patterns at work that determine how those entities work?

This book shows the those underlying structures of alignment and autonomy, centralization and decentralization, power-over and power-with in teams, organizations and beyond.

Based on cultural evolution and Ostrom's work of the successful management of the commons as well as Beer's Viable Systems Model, this book opens our eyes to an invisible world: the world of governance. Governance rules who decides, how we decide, and who decides who decides what and how. Governance is the key to our collective power and agency - without governance to balance the powers, there is dysfunction, chaos, groupthink, or tyranny.

The book focuses on power-with governance and self-organization based on choice. Power-with governance is possible when every actor fills their power responsibly, with an integration of individual, collective and planetary needs.

All levels have their special emergent strategies: teams need topic management and decision-making, skills around pacing and agreements to move forward together and effectively. Organizations are effective when they let workers decide autonomously while fostering alignment and cohesion on strategy, values, budgeting, and information flow. New forms of power-with government need to consider economic factors, identities, education, legal system and planetary boundaries.

About the Author

Ted is an advocate, trainer and consultant for self-governance. His main focus is sociocracy. After his PhD in linguistics and work in Academia, he co-founded the membership organization Sociocracy For All in 2016. Ted spends his days consulting with mission-driven organizations, teaching and deeply immersed in the work as a member within Sociocracy For All. Ted has 5 children who are now teens and young adults. A German citizen, he lives between Massachusetts and Tübingen. He is (co)-author of four books on self-governance, Many Voices One Song (2018), Who Decides Who Decides (2021), Collective Power (2023), and From Here To There (2025). He is working on a book on the interface between governance, the deep code of modernity, and wisdom.