Being Weaved:
The Art of Collective Decision-Making

Introductory Half Day Taster:

Friday 13th September 2024, Schumacher College, Devon, England: FULLY BOOKED.

Email clairemilne@starterculture.net to be added to the wait list and/or be notified of future dates.

Being Weaved deeper dive:

January 24th - 26th 2024, south Devon, England
Register interest at end of page

How we make decisions in our groups and organisations is important. It holds up a vivid mirror to how we relate with and share power. It shines a light on the degree to which we are in alignment with our values around equity and justice.

Collective decision-making is at the heart of how we cultivate relational regenerative cultures of compassion and care. Learning how to make good decisions together is perhaps one of the most transformatory things we can do in these heart wrenching times, as it inherently requires us to compost power-over culture from the inside-out, within ourselves, our groups, organisations and movements. 

Most of us grew up in environments with adults who were not able to exercise their power in entirely healthy ways, which has resulted in us all having a lot of wounding around power and decision-making. It is this, alongside a lack of elders and healthy alternative examples - that can make this shift to collective decision-making so challenging.

It is helpful then to remember that our struggles around decision-making are part of a great historic untangling, a re-membering of how power, as life energy, flows through us all.  Transitioning from centralised power and top-down hierarchy, to healthier, more relational, regenerative, caring, equitable and just ways of making decisions together is inevitably messy and can, at times (often), feel very painful and despairing.

Even though it is often uncomfortable, without turning towards and investing in learning collective ways of making decisions in our groups and organisations we are guaranteed to replicate the very power-over culture that is the underbelly of our current crises in which those with less structural power and from more marginalised identities and communities tend to pay the price for.

Reclaiming Power: Supporting Emergence

Witnessing and experiencing just how disenfranchised and disempowered our relationships with power have become in the face of governmental institutions, corporations and technology, it is hard to not feel despairing. Collective decision-making offers us ways of reclaiming our sense of empowerment by collaborating and organising at a depth and scale that power-over culture cannot compete with. 

The particular flavour of collective decision-making we empower infuses structures and processes from sociocracy and holocracy with our Vital Ingredients and Design Principles for composting power-over into relatoinal cultures. This way of making decisions-together involves a range of tangible practices, processes and structures that will support you and your group or organisation to move towards organising and make decisions in ways that tune into the inherent power and potency of Earth’s Life-death-life cycle by:

• Creating the conditions that are needed to make make power more visible and shared, and for us each to become a clearer and more robust vessel for this Life-force to move through.
• Enabling dynamic collaborations within which we each feel a sense of freedom to unleash our creative potential and take action.  
• Becoming energised and informed by collective intelligence and a diversity of perspectives, especially those most marginalised by Modernity, drawing from across and beyond your collective of humans.
• Achieving more clarity about, and skill around; working in circles; inhabiting roles; emergent strategy; holding healthy flexible boundaries; and how radical self-responsibility meets regenerative feedback - for the benefit of your collective and those with whom you connect and collaborate.
• De-centring the individual human self, and even the human organisation, by learning how to become Earth-centric and reverent to what the world is longing for through you and your group or organisation, so that you can contribute to a time far beyond that of your organisation.  

What we’ll get up to

Our collective-decision making workshops offer a blend of the tangible processes and structures you need to transition to this way of making good decisions together - alongside depth-inquiries and practices that support you and your group or organisation to compost power-over culture from the inside-out. Together we will:

• Engage in inquiries and practices that support us to reveal the ways in which power-over shows up in us, our relationships, groups, organisations, workplaces, communities and families.
• Explore ways of working that help you and your team operate more effectively and transformatively in a complex and fast-changing world, responding to what emerges while staying connected to your organisational/ group purpose.
• Nurture and experience the modelling of group culture, processes and structures in which power and decision-making is visible, examined, composted and distributed.
• Invoke and experiment with processes and structures that enable a blend of vertical and horizontal power and decision-making that is supported by clarity and transparency around roles, accountabilities and where decision-making power lies, and why.
• Integrate earth-centric practices to support reverence to a power greater than the individual human self. 
• Create a tender, brave and compassionate space that supports us to stay with the discomfort that comes when we turn towards the decolonising at depth that is needed to hospice modernity.

Check out our Vital Ingredients and Design Principles for Composting Power-over Culture to better understand  our approach change and get a sense of the foundations of how we approach power and decision-making.

You can find out more about our approach to collective decision-making and how we put that into practice by checking out our Relational culture, Relational Agreements and agreed Rupture and Repair process.

Who are these workshops for?

These workshops are for those wanting to explore and transform their own relationships with power and decision-making and to learn practices, processes and structures that can support us to transition towards collective decision-making.

We offer workshops both for individuals (who are part of a group or organisation) and for groups and organisations themselves. Please be in touch via the form below to let us know about your needs and interests.

Want to dive in?

Friday 13th September 2024, Schumacher College: See here for more information about our half day introductory workshop at Schumacher College in Devon, England.

Being Weaved, 24th - 26th January 2024: To find out more about Being Weaved, our more in depth program happening in Devon in Novemeber/ December 2024 register your interest below.