How Do We Make Decisions Differently (Better) – and Keep Practising?

by Matilde Zadig
I want to start with an expression of gratitude and acknowledgement for some of the people who have profoundly contributed to my understanding of Flow and internal systems within a group (Miki Kashtan and Nonviolent Global Liberation), Dialogical Systems and Restorative Circles (Dominic Barter and his co-creators in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro), Conflict Transformation, Transformative Justice and Human Living Systems (Paul Kahawatte and Navigate, Jana Light) and Conflict Mediation and Transformation (Ceri Buckmaster, Ben Yeger). My learnings are viewed through the lenses, perspectives of wisdom of these people, having worked with and/or learnt from them.
Systems and Policies
If we don’t have a different and conscious system that we agree on, we will revert to the inherited or unconscious system.

I spent my first six months (working 1 day/week) partly trying to observe and interact (the first of the permaculture principles) with our ways of making decisions within Belong in Plymouth Core Team.

During those first few months we also focused one particular meeting session on “How to make decisions together” and clustered things that are important when we are making decisions (notes here and photo of clusters here).

It took us a long time to figure out what systems (sometimes referred to as policies) we needed in BIP and what is helpful to include. I wish I had tried even better to support governance in a way so that we only build the systems/structures where it’s needed and when it’s needed. 

Sociocracy principles recommend that groups should only make policies if:
“[…] the operations are recurring and frequent enough, or the operations are very high stakes (e.g., safety).”
In my experience, unless very accessible, useful, simple and clearly crafted, many policies don’t necessarily mean we will actually follow the guidelines that we have intended to follow. I believe it’s even more about supporting a culture, ways of being, setting up enough scaffolding structures, practices that sustain that culture, and ways of catching us and holding us when there isn’t enough support. 
A few months down the line of BIP work I started writing down some principles we were following implicitly, obstacles and situations that kept coming up and that I had been tracking (first a Proposals process and later a Decision-making Process). These were my attempts to make the current system conscious, to see what was working well and less well, and try to make nudges towards an agreed decision-making system with more flow and ease. As this is quite the emergent project, and everyone involved is doing the work part-time, it wasn’t very straightforward. But then: 1,5 years after getting involved with the programme, I took the time to share some of my observations, learnings and recommendations.
Find them: “Learnings around Decision-making”, and Learnings around Governance”.