Description
“Ted, what is Collective Power: Patterns for a Self-Organized Future about?”
There are so many answers to this question!
Sense-making
For myself, I think of it as the list of things I have learned in
the last ten or 15 years. That includes everything I know,
from studying linguistics and self-management, plus lived
experience in two self-governed organizations that are
central in my life – my workplace and my community. It’s
putting all the threads together into one coherent story of
how I understand governance.
Patterns
For others, reading it will hopefully provide an overview
of how we can act as individuals, as teams, and as organizations.
For each of those levels, what are the emergent properties for that
level? What are the patterns for a team, for an organization? And how could we organize a whole society in a self-managed way without any coercion?
Stories
A third answer is this: in my countless classes over the years, people would always tell me things like “Ted, this was great; the most useful things, however, were your stories.” I always knew I should write them down so it could become a shared treasure box of life stories from which we all can learn.
“What’s the difference between Collective Power and your other books?”
Ted J. Rau is also the author of Who Decides Who Decides and co-author of Many Voices One Song.
There are two main differences.
- Collective Power goes beyond sociocracy and looks at general patterns of self-organizing.
- Collective Power doesn’t teach how to do things. it describes patterns and the underlying reasons for those patterns.
Some things do show up in both – but in a different context. that I hope is enlightening. This book looks more at the why of different practices.
