Introduction
Sociocracy For All (SoFA) is a movement support organization. We help people encounter, learn, and use sociocracy, a consent-based, decentralized governance system. After using sociocracy “by the book” for years and with success, we have started to introduce a new concept: a Help Desk circle. It introduces a small but powerful nuance in what circles are and how we can decentralize decisions and operations. while empowering everyone in the organization in moving things forward that they care about.
Circles, and roles
First, let’s review what a circle is. A circle consists of its members with shared responsibilities, namely the
- Aim: a stated purpose of a circle; a tangible result, product, or service that can be delivered
- Domain: the area of authority and responsibility for policy-making and operations
As an example, SoFA Webinar Circle has as its aim “Hosting, curating, and publishing webinars”, and as its domain “SoFA-hosted webinars”. That means all webinars that SoFA is hosting are put on by SoFA Webinar Circle. They make the policies and define the workflows of what a SoFA webinar is and how it’s run.
So far so good. This model works really well for organizations of a certain size, and for those organizations that have a strict division of labor. Yet, it wasn’t quite enough for us. So we extended it in our own sociocracy lab. We think what we did is worth sharing because it stretches sociocracy in an interesting way and it solves issues we had been facing. The concept of a Help Desk has caught on fast within SoFA General Circle and in many working circles within SoFA.
To stay with the example of the Webinar Circle, let’s see what happens if another circle wants to put on a webinar; for this example, let’s assume a circle of teachers and consultants working with sociocratic elementary schools – School Development Circle (SDC) – wants to put on a webinar through the SoFA platform. The natural way for this to happen is that SDC contacts Webinar Circle and says “Hey, we want to host a webinar on sociocratic schools”. And now Webinar Circle can either just take it on and do it as their regular operations like any work circle would, or they act as a Help Desk.
Acting as a Help Desk means supporting the members of the School Development Circle in running the webinar themselves. In that way, Webinar Circle is empowering and supporting School Development Circle in doing it, therefore only serving as a service provider in the domain of webinars. In a way, Webinar Circle can act as the birthing circle, or it can serve as a midwife, or the doula.
The level of involvement needs to be clarified by School Development Circle and Webinar Circle for this shared event. This is an easy contract between the involved circles. Ideally, Webinar Circle has a list prepared of things that need to be done and decided for a webinar that they can go over with School Development Circle to check for each item who does it.
For example, it might be that all School Development Circle wants to do is select the presenters. Or they might be doing a lot, like making the event post themselves, the visuals, the event description, the tech support during the event, and including sending the follow-up email to participants. This checklist of activities I call a domain activity agreement.
Domain activity agreement
The agreement defining which of the items on the domain activity checklist (like a menu of activities) are going to be decided and carried out in which of the circles.
Note that this is not a domain agreement – we’re not redistributing domains (it’s not that School Development Circle is, all of a sudden, responsible for all webinars) but only making a decision on a defined subset. School Development Circle is only interested in the school-related webinars, not all webinars. The general domain remains in Webinar Circle.
A domain activity agreement can be a one-time agreement like for one webinar, for example like the one below. (But there can also be standing agreements, for example, if School Development Circle wants to run their own webinars in general from now on.)
| Webinar Circle | School Development Circle | |
|---|---|---|
| Creating visuals and event description | ✓ | |
| Programming (speaker), interview | ✓ | |
| Tech support during event | ✓ | |
| Follow-up; recording | ✓ |
Domain activity agreement
Interestingly, some circles will have several relationships with the rest of the organization. For example, in Sociocracy For All, sector circles make agreements with the rest of the organization (e.g. we run our own webinars but we don’t run conferences; we write articles on sociocracy in schools but we aren’t responsible for the /schools sector page). In that case, there need to be agreements between the sector circle and the Conference Circle, Website Circle, etc.
Aim and domain of a Help Desk
Here’s how the aim and domain are modified as a Help Desk:
| Webinar Circle as a Work Circle | Webinar Circle as a Help Desk |
|---|---|
| Aim: Hosting, curating, and publishing webinars | Aim:
|
| Domain: SoFA-hosted webinars | Domain:
|
How to be a good Help Desk
A good Help Desk is findable, clear, and supportive.
It will support work circles in the organization in doing what they want to do. It will provide templates, sample workflows, documentation, and all other useful materials. Most importantly, a Help Desk needs to know what a complete Domain Activity Agreement needs to entail so it’s going to be easy to make agreements quickly that don’t have gaps or lack of clarity. Additionally, a Help Desk might be the aggregator of data that can help inform circle work.
A Help Desk is like living in our own apartment and also renting it out from time to time. The guest and the host are making an agreement on how that’s going to work (What closet can I use? Can I do laundry?). You’d expect a good host to have a list of those talking points ready, wouldn’t you? It just makes it easier to interact with that host. The same is true for a Help Desk.
Other, more complex examples
This concept of a Help Desk applies to many internal services of an organization. Within SoFA, this concept has ignited enthusiasm because the concept is so simple, versatile and flexible.
We’ve since identified dozens of spaces where the Help Desk model is useful. They are spread out over the whole organization!
- Website Circle supports other circles in making changes on the website instead of doing all the operations in Website Circle. This empowers circles in making changes on pages that they are in charge of, removes bottlenecks in Website Circle, and puts more power and action into decentralized, action-oriented circles.
- Content Production Circles (like videos) support language circles (like SoFA Italia Circle) in translating SoFA content. The energy in SoFA global goes into making content more easily translatable (aka internationalization of content), in full support of language-oriented groups.
- Budgeting Circle supports circles in making their own budget and in making budget agreements with their parent circle that approves their budget.
- Staffing Circle supports circles in a decentralized hiring process. Circles can do the hiring themselves or they can ask Staffing Circle to do most of the work.
- Training Circle runs sociocracy trainings but also supports circles in running their own sociocracy trainings, like sector-related circles.
- Community of Practice Circle supports communities of practice in being oriented. They’re matchmakers that provide info on how to support Communities of practice while supporting those communities of practice that aren’t supported elsewhere.
- Partnership Circle stewards organizational partnerships for the whole organization but also supports more specific circles in making their own partnerships (for example a local partnership in one country, i.e. a partnership between SoFA Germany and a German partner organization, or between SoFA Co-op Circle and a cooperative development partner).
- Conflict Resolution Circle can be called upon by all circles, either for support in resolving their own conflicts using Conflict Resolution Circle’s materials or in “using” conflict resolution services.
Evolution over time
One key aspect of this framework is that it allows for evolution and growth. For example, let’s imagine that SoFA Global has been running trainings mostly in English. A Hebrew-speaking circle forms and runs trainings in Hebrew, with lots of support from Training Circle; using Training Circle materials, training formats, etc. As time goes on, Hebrew Training Circle matures and adapts its content, develops its own training formats, and becomes more and more independent of (global) Training Circle.
During that evolution process, the agreement between the two circles will be adapted to hand over more and more authority and responsibility to Hebrew Training Circle. They can both decide how much authority they want to transition over as a final state. Of course, if for example, Hebrew Training Circle loses capacity, this transition is also reversible.
Advantages of this system
The advantage of this system is that it creates clarity without being rigid. Domain Activity Agreements are contracts based on self-commitment so they work without linking and can be negotiated between leaders.
From what I’ve seen, the Help Desk becomes useful as soon as
- The organization has a certain size, and more people are involved; it became useful as soon as SoFA had more than 100 active people in circles. We currently have ca. 190 members in about 60 circles.
- The organization has a “doubling” of activities, for example, because similar operations are carried out in different languages, geographical units, or sectors. SoFA has all three of those. (An application to a national-regional-local organization is written up here.)
As a connector between Help Desks and action-oriented circles, the organization itself becomes a platform for its own circles. Yet, we don’t lose the clarity that sociocratic domains, aims, and linking provide. Linking, domains, and circle-subcircle relationships stay exactly the same. We’re simply enhancing the structure with more intentionality around internal Help Desk-client relationships.
