Vision, Mission, and Aims in Sociocracy

Language: Français

Sociocracy uses vision, mission, and aims to clarify the goals of the organization and what you’re working towards as a group.

Introduction: vision and mission

Organizations exist for a reason: humans enjoy the sense of belonging and collaboration and form organizations to reach something they wouldn’t be able to accomplish alone. 

Often, organizations form because the founder(s) have a vision of what they’d like to see in reality, like a world without hunger or education for everyone, a world where everyone belongs. 

That vision – and the fact that it is not yet a reality – motivates us to form organizations. We decide to set out on our mission of making the changes necessary to close the gap between the world we have and the world we want. That mission becomes the why of our organization. 

The mission of our organization will be somewhat broad and indicate what issue we’re going to focus on, like reducing hunger, providing education for everyone, promoting intentional communities – it speaks to the broader issue that the organization attempts to address.

Vision	Mission (Example)
a world without hunger education for everyone world where everyone belongs	reducing hunger providing education for everyone promoting intentional communities

Organizational aims

Let’s say we have a mission “to feed the hungry.” Where do we even start? This mission is not actionable because it’s too big and unspecific to act on it. That’s why we need aims. Aims are concrete descriptions of things that we can act on.

Vision	Mission	Aim
a world without hunger	to feed the hungry	running a food bank in Amherst MA
education for everyone	to provide education for everyone	Offering an affordable afterschool program in Chattanooga
world where everyone belongs	to promote intentional communities	writing blog articles about ecovillages in Latin America

In that, the aim describes what the organization is actually going to do to work towards its mission. A good test on whether we’ve described the aim is this: if your great aunt asks how you spend your time in the organization, and you say, “we are reducing hunger,” she will most likely not have a clue what you do. If you say, “We run a food bank in Amherst, MA,” it will be much more apparent. That shows the difference between a mission and an aim – the former is inspirational, the latter is actionable. 

Circle aims in sociocracy

How you find your aim in sociocracy

A simple prompt to find an organization’s aim is to ask: why does your organization exist? Typically, people’s response will be their mission: “Because we want to raise awareness about climate change.” 

How we’re going to do that can be expressed in a “by”-phrase. Example: “We want to raise awareness about climate change by conducting science projects that explore climate science with elementary students.” Or: “We want to raise awareness about climate change by writing articles about climate change for a general, progressive audience.” The by-phrase gives you the aim.

If your aims stay vague, your circles won’t know what the wider organization is tasking them with and might struggle to operationalize it. It’s almost best to over-specify because that’s easier to detect than aims that are under-specified. For example, in the above aim, if the organization decides to work with middle school students in addition to elementary school kids, the aim would need to be broadened. Yet, if the aim is underspecified – for example, “writing articles about climate change,” then the organization will spend a lot of time arguing where to publish and what our target audience will be.

From the overall aim to circle aims

What if we need to change our aims in sociocracy? 

Aims in sociocracy are not set in stone. The basic design principle is that aims are approved locally, which means the parent circle needs to consent to the aim change as well as all sub-circles who are affected by the change. (To change an organization’s overall aim, the Mission Circle and the General Circle need to consent.)

From here, it’s all easy. All we need to do is put the aims and domains into a table that corresponds to the circle structure. You can see an example table and a corresponding circle diagram below.

Name		Aim	Domain
Distribution Circle		Receiving and distributing items to those who need it.	Stocks, storage space, cooling room; contact to donor stores
	Store Circle	Offering a fully stocked walk-in store accessible to all.	Store space. Fridge. Counter space.
	Delivery Truck Circle	Delivering items into distribution points.	Truck. Driver schedules.
Fundraising Circle		Raising funds for the organization.	Donor management system
People Circle		Maintaining a welcoming and well-run working space to keep the food bank running.	Membership policies. Mailing list (CRM).
	Volunteer Management Circle	Attracting and onboarding volunteers, incl. running open houses.	Volunteer schedule. Volunteer policies.
	HR and schedule	Providing a healthy, safe and caring work environment for all staff.	All HR policies and processes Job listings. Insurance.
General Circle		Supporting circles and negotiating aim/domains of circles.	Budget
Mission Circle		Holding the organization true to its mission to feed the hungry Operationalizing the mission into aims.