Sociacracy is a form of governance that creates and uses consent.
By contrast, in the well known democracy, dissent is created and seen as necessity for making decisions in a group.
In democracy everyone has a VOTE, in sociocracy everyone has a VETO.
Or, in other words, democracy asks WHO IS FOR, in sociocracy we ask WHO IS AGAINST (and why).
To see why we don't just use democracy, since it seems to work well enough, we need to step back a bit and unpack what that means. And by we, we don't just mean the Feenix community here, but most GEN Europe communities and all that follow Les Pas Sage.
The main reason here is that democracy does not really work that well, we just all got used to it. Got used to not really having a great amount of say, to not being asked, accepting that even things that affect us deeply are decided for us. Play along with the makebelieve that voting for almost strangers once every x years is all we can ask for, since it is after all better than tyranny or monarchy. As Churchill said, democracy is the worst form of governance, apart from all the others that were tried before.
Democracy is usually used as a blanket term for current Western governance systems that include much more than just how to vote, ie social equality, majority rule, minority rights, freedom and integrity. But since we are a small community, we just want to concentrate on how to make decision, and thus need to look at problems of majority rule.
In democratic majority rule, decisions can be made with almost half of the voters being against. That is of course extreme and unlikely to happen regularly, but some percentage of opposition is almost baked into the system.
With changing topics (and alliances) that means almost everyone sometimes ends up being outvoted. Outvoted, this rule of the majority, means that the individual(s) who were against, are forced to accept the decision of the majority. In stronger words they are coerced, with the "excuse" that it's everyones turn sometimes.
Since being coerced, and especially regularly, is not great, some resistance builds up. In a larger setting this results in disconnect, but in a small community it leads to conflict. Brooding, seething discontent coming out as misplaced anger and/or negativity. This is the main reason people have long ago started to develop alternatives like sociocracy.
Sociocracy removes the problem by turning the question around and actually listening to the answer.
Instead of asking who is for a proposal, in sociocracy it is asked who is against. This immediately turns people who were neutral from being against, to being for. And it puts a higher threshold on saying nay, as it is clear that it is not about opinions, but factual problems with the proposal.
For the second step, listening to opposition, we start by acknowledging that everyone is equal, everyone has a working brain and valid perception, and we all (in the group) have a common goal of what is best. This makes it almost essential to listen to any problems, so we can avoid them before they happen.
Good, factual opposition should in this way result in new and improved proposals (sometimes compromises) that everyone can accept without issues.
Of course sociocracy has problems too, and it is good to be aware of them, to possibly counteract them.
One of the biggest issues we though we would have is with naysayers. Since anyone can stop any decision, we thought this might be a problem. But it has not turned out to be a problem, probably because the process makes everyone more responsible. But also it is important to regulate who is on the table. We have updated our on-boarding to include a trial period, and added mandatory financial investment to alleviate this problem.
Another perceived and real problem is time. It is slower to make group decisions, and even more so with consent. But the consent (pun intended) is that it is worth it.
