Transition Governance - Not Perfect, But Precious
Sarah McAdam recently joined Pedro Portela on his podcast, It Takes Two to Tango - Conversations Around Network Governance. In the series he gathers stories of governance from movements, networks and organisations that are trying to solve some of the world's most wicked problems. Sarah has been part of the Transition Network team for over a decade. She first joined as a Trustee, became Delivery Director in 2013, and since 2016 has been a Team Member - working within the team as it transitioned from having a hierarchical structure to a flat one. Her learning, practicing and experimenting with transformational governance hasnât only been within Transition Network, the charity. Over the past few years she has played an active role in the work of further distributing power, decision-making and resources across the wider Transition movement - working closely with Transition Hubs based in different parts of the world. Within the principles and practices of the Transition movement there is a clear theme that how we do things is as important as what we do. We think that the story of our shared governance model, and the journey that got us here, is an important one to tell. And we are grateful to Pedro for inviting Sarah to the dancefloor to do that. Weâre sharing an abridged version of their conversation. You can listen to the full podcast, and other episodes, here:
https://soundcloud.com/pedro-portela-168791914/sarah-mcadam-transition-network
https://soundcloud.com/pedro-portela-168791914/sarah-mcadam-transition-network
Joining me today from the UK is Sarah McAdam from Transition Network. Transition Network is a charity established in the UK which works to inspire, encourage, connect, support and train communities worldwide as they self-organise around the Transition model.
Letâs start off by talking a little bit about Transition Network and how you became involved with it. And what the organisation, and this Transition model, is all about.
What Transition Network is, as you mentioned, itâs a small charity registered in the UK. Currently, thereâs 13 members of staff and 7 trustees, which is a requirement by law in the UK. And I first came to it actually even before 2013. Initially I was a trustee, which I did almost as a sort of part time contribution. I thought the organisation sounded interesting and I was agreeing to go to a board meeting maybe four or five times a year to give them a bit of a strategic steer. And since then, weâve really shifted the way we work. I joined the staff team, but we also completely shifted the way that we do our governance. So that role of a trustee is very different now.
And what is Transition all about for those three people in the world who havenât heard about Transition?
Oh no, Iâm sure itâs much, much more than three. So the Transition model is a model of, I would say, community resilience. Itâs â how does a community, how do people get together with their neighbors, to work out what they want to shift in their community and feel that they have the energy and the power to do it? So thatâs what the model is about. Started very much with a focus on the concept of peak oil and reducing our use of energy. But I would say itâs become more sophisticated and adapted as itâs spread around the world. And in each place, in each country, in each community, people are exploring for themselves â what are the key things that need to change to make the place where they live happier, healthier, more resilient, more sustainable? And that does look, of course, very different in very different places. But I think some of the values and principles apply across the whole movement.
The Transition movement or the Transition network, not the charity, but the actual global network â is an incredible story of how something that started off as an idea in a small town in the U.K. became very quickly a trans-local international network with Hubs all around the world and in many cities in many countries. I was personally involved in a couple of initiatives here in Portugal.
Yeah, it was something that spread, I would say, virally, according to where people went, where people saw the films, where they got access to the resources. And for me, thatâs one of the joys of the movement â to see how itâs spread, but then also been adapted in different places. And we have a number of Hubs, as you mentioned. So groups of people in a particular territory that support Transition in that country, or maybe for the people who speak that language. And one of the areas where weâre really exploring different forms of governance is across that network of Hubs. Because itâs very important to us that those Hubs are not controlled from one place. Theyâre self-managing, theyâre self-organising. But how do they come together to collaborate? Thatâs one of the questions for us.
Letâs talk about that. So when did your organisation, Transition Network the charity, which has this fundamental role of providing the scaffolding and support for the whole movement around the world. When did you decide to invest in governance? And Iâm using the word invest purposefully. So itâs not only financial investment, but also time commitment of the people involved â sitting together and saying, âWeâre going to think differently on how weâre going to work togetherâ. Can you tell us the story of that?
Yes, I would say that the small charity, the organisation and the bigger movement was interested right from the start about how people, how groups work together. I mean, itâs pretty fundamental when youâre thinking about how to get together with your neighbors. Itâs fundamental to the movement to find good ways of working together. And for me, thatâs what governance is ultimately about. Itâs â how do we come together in a group, agree on a shared endeavor, some common purpose that weâre trying to achieve together, and then find good ways to make decisions, to allocate resources, to be with each other, to resolve conflict or respond to conflict.
So I would say that weâve been interested in that right from the start. And then as the international network of Hubs developed, I would say that there was quite an interesting challenge that arose from there. An interesting and useful challenge. This is just my perception. Iâm sure different people would have different ways of telling the story, but I would say at the beginning Transition Network the little organisation, the charity, was maybe a bit careless about how we worked with those Hubs. I think we absolutely recognised that they needed to be self-managing and making their own decisions. But I think we were maybe a little unconscious in the way that we were using our power, the power that we were wielding because we were an organisation with some resources, because we were seen, you know, we were quite a visible part of the movement. So often the way we told the story had extra weight. And I think we became aware of that and people rightly questioned, challenged us a bit about that. And we started experimenting in the Hubs group with consent decision making, which draws from sociocracy. And I would say that initially it was that response of â âwe want to be working in a different way that makes power more visible and then supports it to flow and to be distributed across the systemâ.
And then at the same time, Transition Network, the little organisation was, I would say, struggling with how we should work. We had a sort of technically hierarchical structure. We werenât very hierarchical in the way we operated. But we had a board of trustees who, in the legal system that we work in, were in charge of our strategy and the staff were just there to carry out the strategy. And we knew that wasnât real in terms of how we worked. So we experimented with various things. We struggled. And I think this relates to what you were just saying about investment. I would say up until 2016, we tried to deal with that a little bit on the margins of the work we were trying to do in the world. You know, we were trying to organise ourselves, but we didnât have enough time to pay attention to it. And in 2016, we realised that this wasnât good enough. It wasnât helping us to do the work we needed to do. And at that point we decided to invest properly, and we were very lucky that we found a funder who was also interested in our experiment and was prepared to give us, not huge funding, but a bit of support to help us invest time, and to find people who could help us explore how we wanted our governance to change.
You mentioned that in the beginning you were a little bit careless with the Hubs. And you mentioned even there was the question of the power that your organisation was wielding unconsciously. Just because it started there, youâve mobilised the resources and I guess the money for some initiatives. Could we spend five minutes talking about that phase? Because I think thatâs an issue that interests both funders and grantees. People who are in a position to fund some of these movements, but also people who are on the receiving end of these funds. Understanding how these power dynamics or this friction eventually between funders and recipients of funds could be interesting⊠and how this leads them to the governance conversation.
Yes. I would say it was in the early days. We werenât particularly operating as a channel for funding, and that probably in itself brought some friction. We were managing to secure some funding for our organisation. And of course, partly that was because of what we were doing as an organisation. But probably just as much it was about the excitement of the movement. You know, that was partly, of course, what funders were responding to and interested in was whatâs happening in these different communities around the world. So I think there was a piece there where maybe we were a little complacent about the fact that actually some of these resources were coming to us almost on the backs of the work that was being done in a distributed grassroots network.
I mean I say complacent⊠I think we thought about it quite a lot. I think one of the enemies of all of this, you know, trying to do work in a way that is healthy and thoughtful is the busyness, isnât it? So we were a busy, small team desperately trying to respond to all these different needs and potential and demands.
https://soundcloud.com/pedro-portela-168791914/sarah-mcadam-transition-network
Joining me today from the UK is Sarah McAdam from Transition Network. Transition Network is a charity established in the UK which works to inspire, encourage, connect, support and train communities worldwide as they self-organise around the Transition model.
Letâs start off by talking a little bit about Transition Network and how you became involved with it. And what the organisation, and this Transition model, is all about.
What Transition Network is, as you mentioned, itâs a small charity registered in the UK. Currently, thereâs 13 members of staff and 7 trustees, which is a requirement by law in the UK. And I first came to it actually even before 2013. Initially I was a trustee, which I did almost as a sort of part time contribution. I thought the organisation sounded interesting and I was agreeing to go to a board meeting maybe four or five times a year to give them a bit of a strategic steer. And since then, weâve really shifted the way we work. I joined the staff team, but we also completely shifted the way that we do our governance. So that role of a trustee is very different now.
And what is Transition all about for those three people in the world who havenât heard about Transition?
Oh no, Iâm sure itâs much, much more than three. So the Transition model is a model of, I would say, community resilience. Itâs â how does a community, how do people get together with their neighbors, to work out what they want to shift in their community and feel that they have the energy and the power to do it? So thatâs what the model is about. Started very much with a focus on the concept of peak oil and reducing our use of energy. But I would say itâs become more sophisticated and adapted as itâs spread around the world. And in each place, in each country, in each community, people are exploring for themselves â what are the key things that need to change to make the place where they live happier, healthier, more resilient, more sustainable? And that does look, of course, very different in very different places. But I think some of the values and principles apply across the whole movement.
The Transition movement or the Transition network, not the charity, but the actual global network â is an incredible story of how something that started off as an idea in a small town in the U.K. became very quickly a trans-local international network with Hubs all around the world and in many cities in many countries. I was personally involved in a couple of initiatives here in Portugal.
Yeah, it was something that spread, I would say, virally, according to where people went, where people saw the films, where they got access to the resources. And for me, thatâs one of the joys of the movement â to see how itâs spread, but then also been adapted in different places. And we have a number of Hubs, as you mentioned. So groups of people in a particular territory that support Transition in that country, or maybe for the people who speak that language. And one of the areas where weâre really exploring different forms of governance is across that network of Hubs. Because itâs very important to us that those Hubs are not controlled from one place. Theyâre self-managing, theyâre self-organising. But how do they come together to collaborate? Thatâs one of the questions for us.
Letâs talk about that. So when did your organisation, Transition Network the charity, which has this fundamental role of providing the scaffolding and support for the whole movement around the world. When did you decide to invest in governance? And Iâm using the word invest purposefully. So itâs not only financial investment, but also time commitment of the people involved â sitting together and saying, âWeâre going to think differently on how weâre going to work togetherâ. Can you tell us the story of that?
Yes, I would say that the small charity, the organisation and the bigger movement was interested right from the start about how people, how groups work together. I mean, itâs pretty fundamental when youâre thinking about how to get together with your neighbors. Itâs fundamental to the movement to find good ways of working together. And for me, thatâs what governance is ultimately about. Itâs â how do we come together in a group, agree on a shared endeavor, some common purpose that weâre trying to achieve together, and then find good ways to make decisions, to allocate resources, to be with each other, to resolve conflict or respond to conflict.
So I would say that weâve been interested in that right from the start. And then as the international network of Hubs developed, I would say that there was quite an interesting challenge that arose from there. An interesting and useful challenge. This is just my perception. Iâm sure different people would have different ways of telling the story, but I would say at the beginning Transition Network the little organisation, the charity, was maybe a bit careless about how we worked with those Hubs. I think we absolutely recognised that they needed to be self-managing and making their own decisions. But I think we were maybe a little unconscious in the way that we were using our power, the power that we were wielding because we were an organisation with some resources, because we were seen, you know, we were quite a visible part of the movement. So often the way we told the story had extra weight. And I think we became aware of that and people rightly questioned, challenged us a bit about that. And we started experimenting in the Hubs group with consent decision making, which draws from sociocracy. And I would say that initially it was that response of â âwe want to be working in a different way that makes power more visible and then supports it to flow and to be distributed across the systemâ.
And then at the same time, Transition Network, the little organisation was, I would say, struggling with how we should work. We had a sort of technically hierarchical structure. We werenât very hierarchical in the way we operated. But we had a board of trustees who, in the legal system that we work in, were in charge of our strategy and the staff were just there to carry out the strategy. And we knew that wasnât real in terms of how we worked. So we experimented with various things. We struggled. And I think this relates to what you were just saying about investment. I would say up until 2016, we tried to deal with that a little bit on the margins of the work we were trying to do in the world. You know, we were trying to organise ourselves, but we didnât have enough time to pay attention to it. And in 2016, we realised that this wasnât good enough. It wasnât helping us to do the work we needed to do. And at that point we decided to invest properly, and we were very lucky that we found a funder who was also interested in our experiment and was prepared to give us, not huge funding, but a bit of support to help us invest time, and to find people who could help us explore how we wanted our governance to change.
You mentioned that in the beginning you were a little bit careless with the Hubs. And you mentioned even there was the question of the power that your organisation was wielding unconsciously. Just because it started there, youâve mobilised the resources and I guess the money for some initiatives. Could we spend five minutes talking about that phase? Because I think thatâs an issue that interests both funders and grantees. People who are in a position to fund some of these movements, but also people who are on the receiving end of these funds. Understanding how these power dynamics or this friction eventually between funders and recipients of funds could be interesting⊠and how this leads them to the governance conversation.
Yes. I would say it was in the early days. We werenât particularly operating as a channel for funding, and that probably in itself brought some friction. We were managing to secure some funding for our organisation. And of course, partly that was because of what we were doing as an organisation. But probably just as much it was about the excitement of the movement. You know, that was partly, of course, what funders were responding to and interested in was whatâs happening in these different communities around the world. So I think there was a piece there where maybe we were a little complacent about the fact that actually some of these resources were coming to us almost on the backs of the work that was being done in a distributed grassroots network.
I mean I say complacent⊠I think we thought about it quite a lot. I think one of the enemies of all of this, you know, trying to do work in a way that is healthy and thoughtful is the busyness, isnât it? So we were a busy, small team desperately trying to respond to all these different needs and potential and demands.
And I think that's the moment where it's so good to just pause and think. Where are resources coming from? Who's impacted by this? Who's getting a say in the decision making? Which voices are being heard? Which are not part of the process yet? And what can we do about that? -
https://soundcloud.com/pedro-portela-168791914/sarah-mcadam-transition-network
Joining me today from the UK is Sarah McAdam from Transition Network. Transition Network is a charity established in the UK which works to inspire, encourage, connect, support and train communities worldwide as they self-organise around the Transition model.
Letâs start off by talking a little bit about Transition Network and how you became involved with it. And what the organisation, and this Transition model, is all about.
What Transition Network is, as you mentioned, itâs a small charity registered in the UK. Currently, thereâs 13 members of staff and 7 trustees, which is a requirement by law in the UK. And I first came to it actually even before 2013. Initially I was a trustee, which I did almost as a sort of part time contribution. I thought the organisation sounded interesting and I was agreeing to go to a board meeting maybe four or five times a year to give them a bit of a strategic steer. And since then, weâve really shifted the way we work. I joined the staff team, but we also completely shifted the way that we do our governance. So that role of a trustee is very different now.
And what is Transition all about for those three people in the world who havenât heard about Transition?
Oh no, Iâm sure itâs much, much more than three. So the Transition model is a model of, I would say, community resilience. Itâs â how does a community, how do people get together with their neighbors, to work out what they want to shift in their community and feel that they have the energy and the power to do it? So thatâs what the model is about. Started very much with a focus on the concept of peak oil and reducing our use of energy. But I would say itâs become more sophisticated and adapted as itâs spread around the world. And in each place, in each country, in each community, people are exploring for themselves â what are the key things that need to change to make the place where they live happier, healthier, more resilient, more sustainable? And that does look, of course, very different in very different places. But I think some of the values and principles apply across the whole movement.
The Transition movement or the Transition network, not the charity, but the actual global network â is an incredible story of how something that started off as an idea in a small town in the U.K. became very quickly a trans-local international network with Hubs all around the world and in many cities in many countries. I was personally involved in a couple of initiatives here in Portugal.
Yeah, it was something that spread, I would say, virally, according to where people went, where people saw the films, where they got access to the resources. And for me, thatâs one of the joys of the movement â to see how itâs spread, but then also been adapted in different places. And we have a number of Hubs, as you mentioned. So groups of people in a particular territory that support Transition in that country, or maybe for the people who speak that language. And one of the areas where weâre really exploring different forms of governance is across that network of Hubs. Because itâs very important to us that those Hubs are not controlled from one place. Theyâre self-managing, theyâre self-organising. But how do they come together to collaborate? Thatâs one of the questions for us.
Letâs talk about that. So when did your organisation, Transition Network the charity, which has this fundamental role of providing the scaffolding and support for the whole movement around the world. When did you decide to invest in governance? And Iâm using the word invest purposefully. So itâs not only financial investment, but also time commitment of the people involved â sitting together and saying, âWeâre going to think differently on how weâre going to work togetherâ. Can you tell us the story of that?
Yes, I would say that the small charity, the organisation and the bigger movement was interested right from the start about how people, how groups work together. I mean, itâs pretty fundamental when youâre thinking about how to get together with your neighbors. Itâs fundamental to the movement to find good ways of working together. And for me, thatâs what governance is ultimately about. Itâs â how do we come together in a group, agree on a shared endeavor, some common purpose that weâre trying to achieve together, and then find good ways to make decisions, to allocate resources, to be with each other, to resolve conflict or respond to conflict.
So I would say that weâve been interested in that right from the start. And then as the international network of Hubs developed, I would say that there was quite an interesting challenge that arose from there. An interesting and useful challenge. This is just my perception. Iâm sure different people would have different ways of telling the story, but I would say at the beginning Transition Network the little organisation, the charity, was maybe a bit careless about how we worked with those Hubs. I think we absolutely recognised that they needed to be self-managing and making their own decisions. But I think we were maybe a little unconscious in the way that we were using our power, the power that we were wielding because we were an organisation with some resources, because we were seen, you know, we were quite a visible part of the movement. So often the way we told the story had extra weight. And I think we became aware of that and people rightly questioned, challenged us a bit about that. And we started experimenting in the Hubs group with consent decision making, which draws from sociocracy. And I would say that initially it was that response of â âwe want to be working in a different way that makes power more visible and then supports it to flow and to be distributed across the systemâ.
And then at the same time, Transition Network, the little organisation was, I would say, struggling with how we should work. We had a sort of technically hierarchical structure. We werenât very hierarchical in the way we operated. But we had a board of trustees who, in the legal system that we work in, were in charge of our strategy and the staff were just there to carry out the strategy. And we knew that wasnât real in terms of how we worked. So we experimented with various things. We struggled. And I think this relates to what you were just saying about investment. I would say up until 2016, we tried to deal with that a little bit on the margins of the work we were trying to do in the world. You know, we were trying to organise ourselves, but we didnât have enough time to pay attention to it. And in 2016, we realised that this wasnât good enough. It wasnât helping us to do the work we needed to do. And at that point we decided to invest properly, and we were very lucky that we found a funder who was also interested in our experiment and was prepared to give us, not huge funding, but a bit of support to help us invest time, and to find people who could help us explore how we wanted our governance to change.
You mentioned that in the beginning you were a little bit careless with the Hubs. And you mentioned even there was the question of the power that your organisation was wielding unconsciously. Just because it started there, youâve mobilised the resources and I guess the money for some initiatives. Could we spend five minutes talking about that phase? Because I think thatâs an issue that interests both funders and grantees. People who are in a position to fund some of these movements, but also people who are on the receiving end of these funds. Understanding how these power dynamics or this friction eventually between funders and recipients of funds could be interesting⊠and how this leads them to the governance conversation.
Yes. I would say it was in the early days. We werenât particularly operating as a channel for funding, and that probably in itself brought some friction. We were managing to secure some funding for our organisation. And of course, partly that was because of what we were doing as an organisation. But probably just as much it was about the excitement of the movement. You know, that was partly, of course, what funders were responding to and interested in was whatâs happening in these different communities around the world. So I think there was a piece there where maybe we were a little complacent about the fact that actually some of these resources were coming to us almost on the backs of the work that was being done in a distributed grassroots network.
I mean I say complacent⊠I think we thought about it quite a lot. I think one of the enemies of all of this, you know, trying to do work in a way that is healthy and thoughtful is the busyness, isnât it? So we were a busy, small team desperately trying to respond to all these different needs and potential and demands.
And I think that's the moment where it's so good to just pause and think. Where are resources coming from? Who's impacted by this? Who's getting a say in the decision making? Which voices are being heard? Which are not part of the process yet? And what can we do about that? -
And I think for a while, sort of inevitably I guess, I think we made a lot of assumptions and we didnât even realise we were making assumptions.
And Iâm really conscious that coming from the UK with our whole history of colonialism â there we are yet again making those sort of assumptions that how we see the world is how everybody else is experiencing the world. Itâs so dangerous and itâs so easy to do. So I think for me, that was one of the things that we had to come to a realisation about. We were helped in that by some really constructive challenge from other people in other parts of the system.
Yeah, when it comes to governance I like to think of how quickly we fall back to the usual archetypes of ways of organising. Itâs a very innocent process, a very unconscious process, probably part of the collective unconscious of Jung. And how quickly we fall back to the traditional models of governance and decision making, which are part of our unconscious. But that in our case, weâre both in Europe, so we were both brought up in this culture and how much this is informing everything we do in terms of decision making and sense making and meaning making, right?
Yes.
So then, OK, flash forward â what happened then in 2016? What was the process? Walk us through this adventure that you started.
Well, we knew that we were interested in sociocracy in particular because weâd experienced a bit of consent decision making. And I donât know about you but for me, the moment I experienced that I felt a sort of tingling in my body of âthereâs something different hereâ. This is a different way of a group coming to a decision that feels like for once weâre properly listening to the collective intelligence. Weâre properly creating a space for us to find something that will work well enough for all of us. So we already had that excitement and that interest.
We found a team to help us, and they were a team from France called UniversitĂ© du Nous. So âUniversity of Usâ. And they had a lot of experience of sociocracy and holacracy, which is a different model, but some similarities. And they also had lots of other tools at their disposal and a lot of experienceâŠWe did a sort of action learning process â they gave us a little menu of different ways that you can organize⊠They talked to us about the concept of a safety framework.
https://soundcloud.com/pedro-portela-168791914/sarah-mcadam-transition-network
Joining me today from the UK is Sarah McAdam from Transition Network. Transition Network is a charity established in the UK which works to inspire, encourage, connect, support and train communities worldwide as they self-organise around the Transition model.
Letâs start off by talking a little bit about Transition Network and how you became involved with it. And what the organisation, and this Transition model, is all about.
What Transition Network is, as you mentioned, itâs a small charity registered in the UK. Currently, thereâs 13 members of staff and 7 trustees, which is a requirement by law in the UK. And I first came to it actually even before 2013. Initially I was a trustee, which I did almost as a sort of part time contribution. I thought the organisation sounded interesting and I was agreeing to go to a board meeting maybe four or five times a year to give them a bit of a strategic steer. And since then, weâve really shifted the way we work. I joined the staff team, but we also completely shifted the way that we do our governance. So that role of a trustee is very different now.
And what is Transition all about for those three people in the world who havenât heard about Transition?
Oh no, Iâm sure itâs much, much more than three. So the Transition model is a model of, I would say, community resilience. Itâs â how does a community, how do people get together with their neighbors, to work out what they want to shift in their community and feel that they have the energy and the power to do it? So thatâs what the model is about. Started very much with a focus on the concept of peak oil and reducing our use of energy. But I would say itâs become more sophisticated and adapted as itâs spread around the world. And in each place, in each country, in each community, people are exploring for themselves â what are the key things that need to change to make the place where they live happier, healthier, more resilient, more sustainable? And that does look, of course, very different in very different places. But I think some of the values and principles apply across the whole movement.
The Transition movement or the Transition network, not the charity, but the actual global network â is an incredible story of how something that started off as an idea in a small town in the U.K. became very quickly a trans-local international network with Hubs all around the world and in many cities in many countries. I was personally involved in a couple of initiatives here in Portugal.
Yeah, it was something that spread, I would say, virally, according to where people went, where people saw the films, where they got access to the resources. And for me, thatâs one of the joys of the movement â to see how itâs spread, but then also been adapted in different places. And we have a number of Hubs, as you mentioned. So groups of people in a particular territory that support Transition in that country, or maybe for the people who speak that language. And one of the areas where weâre really exploring different forms of governance is across that network of Hubs. Because itâs very important to us that those Hubs are not controlled from one place. Theyâre self-managing, theyâre self-organising. But how do they come together to collaborate? Thatâs one of the questions for us.
Letâs talk about that. So when did your organisation, Transition Network the charity, which has this fundamental role of providing the scaffolding and support for the whole movement around the world. When did you decide to invest in governance? And Iâm using the word invest purposefully. So itâs not only financial investment, but also time commitment of the people involved â sitting together and saying, âWeâre going to think differently on how weâre going to work togetherâ. Can you tell us the story of that?
Yes, I would say that the small charity, the organisation and the bigger movement was interested right from the start about how people, how groups work together. I mean, itâs pretty fundamental when youâre thinking about how to get together with your neighbors. Itâs fundamental to the movement to find good ways of working together. And for me, thatâs what governance is ultimately about. Itâs â how do we come together in a group, agree on a shared endeavor, some common purpose that weâre trying to achieve together, and then find good ways to make decisions, to allocate resources, to be with each other, to resolve conflict or respond to conflict.
So I would say that weâve been interested in that right from the start. And then as the international network of Hubs developed, I would say that there was quite an interesting challenge that arose from there. An interesting and useful challenge. This is just my perception. Iâm sure different people would have different ways of telling the story, but I would say at the beginning Transition Network the little organisation, the charity, was maybe a bit careless about how we worked with those Hubs. I think we absolutely recognised that they needed to be self-managing and making their own decisions. But I think we were maybe a little unconscious in the way that we were using our power, the power that we were wielding because we were an organisation with some resources, because we were seen, you know, we were quite a visible part of the movement. So often the way we told the story had extra weight. And I think we became aware of that and people rightly questioned, challenged us a bit about that. And we started experimenting in the Hubs group with consent decision making, which draws from sociocracy. And I would say that initially it was that response of â âwe want to be working in a different way that makes power more visible and then supports it to flow and to be distributed across the systemâ.
And then at the same time, Transition Network, the little organisation was, I would say, struggling with how we should work. We had a sort of technically hierarchical structure. We werenât very hierarchical in the way we operated. But we had a board of trustees who, in the legal system that we work in, were in charge of our strategy and the staff were just there to carry out the strategy. And we knew that wasnât real in terms of how we worked. So we experimented with various things. We struggled. And I think this relates to what you were just saying about investment. I would say up until 2016, we tried to deal with that a little bit on the margins of the work we were trying to do in the world. You know, we were trying to organise ourselves, but we didnât have enough time to pay attention to it. And in 2016, we realised that this wasnât good enough. It wasnât helping us to do the work we needed to do. And at that point we decided to invest properly, and we were very lucky that we found a funder who was also interested in our experiment and was prepared to give us, not huge funding, but a bit of support to help us invest time, and to find people who could help us explore how we wanted our governance to change.
You mentioned that in the beginning you were a little bit careless with the Hubs. And you mentioned even there was the question of the power that your organisation was wielding unconsciously. Just because it started there, youâve mobilised the resources and I guess the money for some initiatives. Could we spend five minutes talking about that phase? Because I think thatâs an issue that interests both funders and grantees. People who are in a position to fund some of these movements, but also people who are on the receiving end of these funds. Understanding how these power dynamics or this friction eventually between funders and recipients of funds could be interesting⊠and how this leads them to the governance conversation.
Yes. I would say it was in the early days. We werenât particularly operating as a channel for funding, and that probably in itself brought some friction. We were managing to secure some funding for our organisation. And of course, partly that was because of what we were doing as an organisation. But probably just as much it was about the excitement of the movement. You know, that was partly, of course, what funders were responding to and interested in was whatâs happening in these different communities around the world. So I think there was a piece there where maybe we were a little complacent about the fact that actually some of these resources were coming to us almost on the backs of the work that was being done in a distributed grassroots network.
I mean I say complacent⊠I think we thought about it quite a lot. I think one of the enemies of all of this, you know, trying to do work in a way that is healthy and thoughtful is the busyness, isnât it? So we were a busy, small team desperately trying to respond to all these different needs and potential and demands.
And I think that's the moment where it's so good to just pause and think. Where are resources coming from? Who's impacted by this? Who's getting a say in the decision making? Which voices are being heard? Which are not part of the process yet? And what can we do about that? -
And I think for a while, sort of inevitably I guess, I think we made a lot of assumptions and we didnât even realise we were making assumptions.
And Iâm really conscious that coming from the UK with our whole history of colonialism â there we are yet again making those sort of assumptions that how we see the world is how everybody else is experiencing the world. Itâs so dangerous and itâs so easy to do. So I think for me, that was one of the things that we had to come to a realisation about. We were helped in that by some really constructive challenge from other people in other parts of the system.
Yeah, when it comes to governance I like to think of how quickly we fall back to the usual archetypes of ways of organising. Itâs a very innocent process, a very unconscious process, probably part of the collective unconscious of Jung. And how quickly we fall back to the traditional models of governance and decision making, which are part of our unconscious. But that in our case, weâre both in Europe, so we were both brought up in this culture and how much this is informing everything we do in terms of decision making and sense making and meaning making, right?
Yes.
So then, OK, flash forward â what happened then in 2016? What was the process? Walk us through this adventure that you started.
Well, we knew that we were interested in sociocracy in particular because weâd experienced a bit of consent decision making. And I donât know about you but for me, the moment I experienced that I felt a sort of tingling in my body of âthereâs something different hereâ. This is a different way of a group coming to a decision that feels like for once weâre properly listening to the collective intelligence. Weâre properly creating a space for us to find something that will work well enough for all of us. So we already had that excitement and that interest.
We found a team to help us, and they were a team from France called UniversitĂ© du Nous. So âUniversity of Usâ. And they had a lot of experience of sociocracy and holacracy, which is a different model, but some similarities. And they also had lots of other tools at their disposal and a lot of experienceâŠWe did a sort of action learning process â they gave us a little menu of different ways that you can organize⊠They talked to us about the concept of a safety framework.
These are the sorts of things that a group needs to know about itself to know how its governance works. Some basic things that unless you know, then actually you keep falling into the same traps. Such as, how do people join this group? How do people leave this group? What expectations do we have about how we work together? How do we make decisions? What are the roles that people are playing?... How does this work in your organization now? And what would you like to change about it?... -
https://soundcloud.com/pedro-portela-168791914/sarah-mcadam-transition-network
Joining me today from the UK is Sarah McAdam from Transition Network. Transition Network is a charity established in the UK which works to inspire, encourage, connect, support and train communities worldwide as they self-organise around the Transition model.
Letâs start off by talking a little bit about Transition Network and how you became involved with it. And what the organisation, and this Transition model, is all about.
What Transition Network is, as you mentioned, itâs a small charity registered in the UK. Currently, thereâs 13 members of staff and 7 trustees, which is a requirement by law in the UK. And I first came to it actually even before 2013. Initially I was a trustee, which I did almost as a sort of part time contribution. I thought the organisation sounded interesting and I was agreeing to go to a board meeting maybe four or five times a year to give them a bit of a strategic steer. And since then, weâve really shifted the way we work. I joined the staff team, but we also completely shifted the way that we do our governance. So that role of a trustee is very different now.
And what is Transition all about for those three people in the world who havenât heard about Transition?
Oh no, Iâm sure itâs much, much more than three. So the Transition model is a model of, I would say, community resilience. Itâs â how does a community, how do people get together with their neighbors, to work out what they want to shift in their community and feel that they have the energy and the power to do it? So thatâs what the model is about. Started very much with a focus on the concept of peak oil and reducing our use of energy. But I would say itâs become more sophisticated and adapted as itâs spread around the world. And in each place, in each country, in each community, people are exploring for themselves â what are the key things that need to change to make the place where they live happier, healthier, more resilient, more sustainable? And that does look, of course, very different in very different places. But I think some of the values and principles apply across the whole movement.
The Transition movement or the Transition network, not the charity, but the actual global network â is an incredible story of how something that started off as an idea in a small town in the U.K. became very quickly a trans-local international network with Hubs all around the world and in many cities in many countries. I was personally involved in a couple of initiatives here in Portugal.
Yeah, it was something that spread, I would say, virally, according to where people went, where people saw the films, where they got access to the resources. And for me, thatâs one of the joys of the movement â to see how itâs spread, but then also been adapted in different places. And we have a number of Hubs, as you mentioned. So groups of people in a particular territory that support Transition in that country, or maybe for the people who speak that language. And one of the areas where weâre really exploring different forms of governance is across that network of Hubs. Because itâs very important to us that those Hubs are not controlled from one place. Theyâre self-managing, theyâre self-organising. But how do they come together to collaborate? Thatâs one of the questions for us.
Letâs talk about that. So when did your organisation, Transition Network the charity, which has this fundamental role of providing the scaffolding and support for the whole movement around the world. When did you decide to invest in governance? And Iâm using the word invest purposefully. So itâs not only financial investment, but also time commitment of the people involved â sitting together and saying, âWeâre going to think differently on how weâre going to work togetherâ. Can you tell us the story of that?
Yes, I would say that the small charity, the organisation and the bigger movement was interested right from the start about how people, how groups work together. I mean, itâs pretty fundamental when youâre thinking about how to get together with your neighbors. Itâs fundamental to the movement to find good ways of working together. And for me, thatâs what governance is ultimately about. Itâs â how do we come together in a group, agree on a shared endeavor, some common purpose that weâre trying to achieve together, and then find good ways to make decisions, to allocate resources, to be with each other, to resolve conflict or respond to conflict.
So I would say that weâve been interested in that right from the start. And then as the international network of Hubs developed, I would say that there was quite an interesting challenge that arose from there. An interesting and useful challenge. This is just my perception. Iâm sure different people would have different ways of telling the story, but I would say at the beginning Transition Network the little organisation, the charity, was maybe a bit careless about how we worked with those Hubs. I think we absolutely recognised that they needed to be self-managing and making their own decisions. But I think we were maybe a little unconscious in the way that we were using our power, the power that we were wielding because we were an organisation with some resources, because we were seen, you know, we were quite a visible part of the movement. So often the way we told the story had extra weight. And I think we became aware of that and people rightly questioned, challenged us a bit about that. And we started experimenting in the Hubs group with consent decision making, which draws from sociocracy. And I would say that initially it was that response of â âwe want to be working in a different way that makes power more visible and then supports it to flow and to be distributed across the systemâ.
And then at the same time, Transition Network, the little organisation was, I would say, struggling with how we should work. We had a sort of technically hierarchical structure. We werenât very hierarchical in the way we operated. But we had a board of trustees who, in the legal system that we work in, were in charge of our strategy and the staff were just there to carry out the strategy. And we knew that wasnât real in terms of how we worked. So we experimented with various things. We struggled. And I think this relates to what you were just saying about investment. I would say up until 2016, we tried to deal with that a little bit on the margins of the work we were trying to do in the world. You know, we were trying to organise ourselves, but we didnât have enough time to pay attention to it. And in 2016, we realised that this wasnât good enough. It wasnât helping us to do the work we needed to do. And at that point we decided to invest properly, and we were very lucky that we found a funder who was also interested in our experiment and was prepared to give us, not huge funding, but a bit of support to help us invest time, and to find people who could help us explore how we wanted our governance to change.
You mentioned that in the beginning you were a little bit careless with the Hubs. And you mentioned even there was the question of the power that your organisation was wielding unconsciously. Just because it started there, youâve mobilised the resources and I guess the money for some initiatives. Could we spend five minutes talking about that phase? Because I think thatâs an issue that interests both funders and grantees. People who are in a position to fund some of these movements, but also people who are on the receiving end of these funds. Understanding how these power dynamics or this friction eventually between funders and recipients of funds could be interesting⊠and how this leads them to the governance conversation.
Yes. I would say it was in the early days. We werenât particularly operating as a channel for funding, and that probably in itself brought some friction. We were managing to secure some funding for our organisation. And of course, partly that was because of what we were doing as an organisation. But probably just as much it was about the excitement of the movement. You know, that was partly, of course, what funders were responding to and interested in was whatâs happening in these different communities around the world. So I think there was a piece there where maybe we were a little complacent about the fact that actually some of these resources were coming to us almost on the backs of the work that was being done in a distributed grassroots network.
I mean I say complacent⊠I think we thought about it quite a lot. I think one of the enemies of all of this, you know, trying to do work in a way that is healthy and thoughtful is the busyness, isnât it? So we were a busy, small team desperately trying to respond to all these different needs and potential and demands.
And I think that's the moment where it's so good to just pause and think. Where are resources coming from? Who's impacted by this? Who's getting a say in the decision making? Which voices are being heard? Which are not part of the process yet? And what can we do about that? -
And I think for a while, sort of inevitably I guess, I think we made a lot of assumptions and we didnât even realise we were making assumptions.
And Iâm really conscious that coming from the UK with our whole history of colonialism â there we are yet again making those sort of assumptions that how we see the world is how everybody else is experiencing the world. Itâs so dangerous and itâs so easy to do. So I think for me, that was one of the things that we had to come to a realisation about. We were helped in that by some really constructive challenge from other people in other parts of the system.
Yeah, when it comes to governance I like to think of how quickly we fall back to the usual archetypes of ways of organising. Itâs a very innocent process, a very unconscious process, probably part of the collective unconscious of Jung. And how quickly we fall back to the traditional models of governance and decision making, which are part of our unconscious. But that in our case, weâre both in Europe, so we were both brought up in this culture and how much this is informing everything we do in terms of decision making and sense making and meaning making, right?
Yes.
So then, OK, flash forward â what happened then in 2016? What was the process? Walk us through this adventure that you started.
Well, we knew that we were interested in sociocracy in particular because weâd experienced a bit of consent decision making. And I donât know about you but for me, the moment I experienced that I felt a sort of tingling in my body of âthereâs something different hereâ. This is a different way of a group coming to a decision that feels like for once weâre properly listening to the collective intelligence. Weâre properly creating a space for us to find something that will work well enough for all of us. So we already had that excitement and that interest.
We found a team to help us, and they were a team from France called UniversitĂ© du Nous. So âUniversity of Usâ. And they had a lot of experience of sociocracy and holacracy, which is a different model, but some similarities. And they also had lots of other tools at their disposal and a lot of experienceâŠWe did a sort of action learning process â they gave us a little menu of different ways that you can organize⊠They talked to us about the concept of a safety framework.
These are the sorts of things that a group needs to know about itself to know how its governance works. Some basic things that unless you know, then actually you keep falling into the same traps. Such as, how do people join this group? How do people leave this group? What expectations do we have about how we work together? How do we make decisions? What are the roles that people are playing?... How does this work in your organization now? And what would you like to change about it?... -
We tried little experiments in various project groups trying out working in a sociocratic circle, trying out some of the things that they were offering us. We also did some sessions altogether as a team⊠We have trustees who have legal responsibility for the organisation, and it was very important for us that they were part of the process. We didnât want this to be a situation where the staff team were finding a whole new culture and a new way of working. And then we still had trustees above us who had a different culture. That was a recipe for disaster. So we did all sorts of little two-day sessions, three day sessions with this team over a couple of years. It was quite a long process, including, I would say, some things that might surprise people. We did quite a lot of movement exercises, as a group, learning how to move almost like birds flocking. You know, when you have the murmuration of swallows or starlings. That movement where sometimes youâre in a leadership role, youâre moving the group forward, sometimes youâre following others and the leadership flows around the group. So getting that sense of how leadership could be something really different from what weâd experienced traditionally. We did music sessions⊠improvising music together as another way of building that sense of âhow do I listen to this group and respond to the group, but also feel that I can bring my own creativity into what weâre doing together?â
That makes a lot of sense. And itâs, of course, completely aligned with the values around Transition and the values of â mind and body and heart. I wonder, how did the people in the organisation respond to these hints or suggestions that there are other ways of knowing and other ways of perceiving that are not necessarily mental, rational? That are embodied or somatic.
Well, as you say, thatâs always been quite a strong belief within the Transition movement. So it was something that was already part of our culture. And I think that helped us a lot that we werenât starting from zero. Weâd already done quite a lot of work on a culture that was trying to balance being and doing, balance relationships with output. So I would say that people were very receptive to it.
I think all of us, at different points, had moments where we struggled. I mean, Iâm not going to pretend it was a process where it all flowed smoothly and we ended up agreeing easily on how we were going to change our governance model. So there were moments, I would say, for all of us where we felt frustrated â this was taking a long time. Guilty, you know, we needed to be out there in the world doing things. Was it OK for us to be spending time looking inwardly at how we work? We had to process that a bit. And sometimes we had to accept that this was a time where we had something to deliver. We needed to prioritise that for a bit. But we needed to commit to coming back to this piece that was about âhow do we work?â. Not letting that go. Because I think we did have a strong sense that there was a potential for it to unlock something very important for us.
Did you have an endgame in sight? Meaning when you were in the difficult parts of this process â did you know that⊠this will come to an end eventually, and we know what that end is.
Yes, weâd given ourselves two years to experiment, and then to design a new governance model, and to move to that new governance model⊠I mean, we werenât dogmatic about it. We thought, âWell, if it really doesnât work, weâll have to go backwardsâ. But our idea was, we want to find a way to work in a way that isnât hierarchical. So we want to create a new model thatâs a flat structure. But also one that will give us more of an ability as an organisation to respond to whatâs happening in the wider movement, in the wider world â to be more responsive. So not so rigid.
And also we knew that one of the things we were doing as an organisation before this was we were spending endless time in meetings. All of the whole team, because all of our work, everything that any of us did related to what everybody else was doing. You know, of course it did, nothing was really standalone.
https://soundcloud.com/pedro-portela-168791914/sarah-mcadam-transition-network
Joining me today from the UK is Sarah McAdam from Transition Network. Transition Network is a charity established in the UK which works to inspire, encourage, connect, support and train communities worldwide as they self-organise around the Transition model.
Letâs start off by talking a little bit about Transition Network and how you became involved with it. And what the organisation, and this Transition model, is all about.
What Transition Network is, as you mentioned, itâs a small charity registered in the UK. Currently, thereâs 13 members of staff and 7 trustees, which is a requirement by law in the UK. And I first came to it actually even before 2013. Initially I was a trustee, which I did almost as a sort of part time contribution. I thought the organisation sounded interesting and I was agreeing to go to a board meeting maybe four or five times a year to give them a bit of a strategic steer. And since then, weâve really shifted the way we work. I joined the staff team, but we also completely shifted the way that we do our governance. So that role of a trustee is very different now.
And what is Transition all about for those three people in the world who havenât heard about Transition?
Oh no, Iâm sure itâs much, much more than three. So the Transition model is a model of, I would say, community resilience. Itâs â how does a community, how do people get together with their neighbors, to work out what they want to shift in their community and feel that they have the energy and the power to do it? So thatâs what the model is about. Started very much with a focus on the concept of peak oil and reducing our use of energy. But I would say itâs become more sophisticated and adapted as itâs spread around the world. And in each place, in each country, in each community, people are exploring for themselves â what are the key things that need to change to make the place where they live happier, healthier, more resilient, more sustainable? And that does look, of course, very different in very different places. But I think some of the values and principles apply across the whole movement.
The Transition movement or the Transition network, not the charity, but the actual global network â is an incredible story of how something that started off as an idea in a small town in the U.K. became very quickly a trans-local international network with Hubs all around the world and in many cities in many countries. I was personally involved in a couple of initiatives here in Portugal.
Yeah, it was something that spread, I would say, virally, according to where people went, where people saw the films, where they got access to the resources. And for me, thatâs one of the joys of the movement â to see how itâs spread, but then also been adapted in different places. And we have a number of Hubs, as you mentioned. So groups of people in a particular territory that support Transition in that country, or maybe for the people who speak that language. And one of the areas where weâre really exploring different forms of governance is across that network of Hubs. Because itâs very important to us that those Hubs are not controlled from one place. Theyâre self-managing, theyâre self-organising. But how do they come together to collaborate? Thatâs one of the questions for us.
Letâs talk about that. So when did your organisation, Transition Network the charity, which has this fundamental role of providing the scaffolding and support for the whole movement around the world. When did you decide to invest in governance? And Iâm using the word invest purposefully. So itâs not only financial investment, but also time commitment of the people involved â sitting together and saying, âWeâre going to think differently on how weâre going to work togetherâ. Can you tell us the story of that?
Yes, I would say that the small charity, the organisation and the bigger movement was interested right from the start about how people, how groups work together. I mean, itâs pretty fundamental when youâre thinking about how to get together with your neighbors. Itâs fundamental to the movement to find good ways of working together. And for me, thatâs what governance is ultimately about. Itâs â how do we come together in a group, agree on a shared endeavor, some common purpose that weâre trying to achieve together, and then find good ways to make decisions, to allocate resources, to be with each other, to resolve conflict or respond to conflict.
So I would say that weâve been interested in that right from the start. And then as the international network of Hubs developed, I would say that there was quite an interesting challenge that arose from there. An interesting and useful challenge. This is just my perception. Iâm sure different people would have different ways of telling the story, but I would say at the beginning Transition Network the little organisation, the charity, was maybe a bit careless about how we worked with those Hubs. I think we absolutely recognised that they needed to be self-managing and making their own decisions. But I think we were maybe a little unconscious in the way that we were using our power, the power that we were wielding because we were an organisation with some resources, because we were seen, you know, we were quite a visible part of the movement. So often the way we told the story had extra weight. And I think we became aware of that and people rightly questioned, challenged us a bit about that. And we started experimenting in the Hubs group with consent decision making, which draws from sociocracy. And I would say that initially it was that response of â âwe want to be working in a different way that makes power more visible and then supports it to flow and to be distributed across the systemâ.
And then at the same time, Transition Network, the little organisation was, I would say, struggling with how we should work. We had a sort of technically hierarchical structure. We werenât very hierarchical in the way we operated. But we had a board of trustees who, in the legal system that we work in, were in charge of our strategy and the staff were just there to carry out the strategy. And we knew that wasnât real in terms of how we worked. So we experimented with various things. We struggled. And I think this relates to what you were just saying about investment. I would say up until 2016, we tried to deal with that a little bit on the margins of the work we were trying to do in the world. You know, we were trying to organise ourselves, but we didnât have enough time to pay attention to it. And in 2016, we realised that this wasnât good enough. It wasnât helping us to do the work we needed to do. And at that point we decided to invest properly, and we were very lucky that we found a funder who was also interested in our experiment and was prepared to give us, not huge funding, but a bit of support to help us invest time, and to find people who could help us explore how we wanted our governance to change.
You mentioned that in the beginning you were a little bit careless with the Hubs. And you mentioned even there was the question of the power that your organisation was wielding unconsciously. Just because it started there, youâve mobilised the resources and I guess the money for some initiatives. Could we spend five minutes talking about that phase? Because I think thatâs an issue that interests both funders and grantees. People who are in a position to fund some of these movements, but also people who are on the receiving end of these funds. Understanding how these power dynamics or this friction eventually between funders and recipients of funds could be interesting⊠and how this leads them to the governance conversation.
Yes. I would say it was in the early days. We werenât particularly operating as a channel for funding, and that probably in itself brought some friction. We were managing to secure some funding for our organisation. And of course, partly that was because of what we were doing as an organisation. But probably just as much it was about the excitement of the movement. You know, that was partly, of course, what funders were responding to and interested in was whatâs happening in these different communities around the world. So I think there was a piece there where maybe we were a little complacent about the fact that actually some of these resources were coming to us almost on the backs of the work that was being done in a distributed grassroots network.
I mean I say complacent⊠I think we thought about it quite a lot. I think one of the enemies of all of this, you know, trying to do work in a way that is healthy and thoughtful is the busyness, isnât it? So we were a busy, small team desperately trying to respond to all these different needs and potential and demands.
And I think that's the moment where it's so good to just pause and think. Where are resources coming from? Who's impacted by this? Who's getting a say in the decision making? Which voices are being heard? Which are not part of the process yet? And what can we do about that? -
And I think for a while, sort of inevitably I guess, I think we made a lot of assumptions and we didnât even realise we were making assumptions.
And Iâm really conscious that coming from the UK with our whole history of colonialism â there we are yet again making those sort of assumptions that how we see the world is how everybody else is experiencing the world. Itâs so dangerous and itâs so easy to do. So I think for me, that was one of the things that we had to come to a realisation about. We were helped in that by some really constructive challenge from other people in other parts of the system.
Yeah, when it comes to governance I like to think of how quickly we fall back to the usual archetypes of ways of organising. Itâs a very innocent process, a very unconscious process, probably part of the collective unconscious of Jung. And how quickly we fall back to the traditional models of governance and decision making, which are part of our unconscious. But that in our case, weâre both in Europe, so we were both brought up in this culture and how much this is informing everything we do in terms of decision making and sense making and meaning making, right?
Yes.
So then, OK, flash forward â what happened then in 2016? What was the process? Walk us through this adventure that you started.
Well, we knew that we were interested in sociocracy in particular because weâd experienced a bit of consent decision making. And I donât know about you but for me, the moment I experienced that I felt a sort of tingling in my body of âthereâs something different hereâ. This is a different way of a group coming to a decision that feels like for once weâre properly listening to the collective intelligence. Weâre properly creating a space for us to find something that will work well enough for all of us. So we already had that excitement and that interest.
We found a team to help us, and they were a team from France called UniversitĂ© du Nous. So âUniversity of Usâ. And they had a lot of experience of sociocracy and holacracy, which is a different model, but some similarities. And they also had lots of other tools at their disposal and a lot of experienceâŠWe did a sort of action learning process â they gave us a little menu of different ways that you can organize⊠They talked to us about the concept of a safety framework.
These are the sorts of things that a group needs to know about itself to know how its governance works. Some basic things that unless you know, then actually you keep falling into the same traps. Such as, how do people join this group? How do people leave this group? What expectations do we have about how we work together? How do we make decisions? What are the roles that people are playing?... How does this work in your organization now? And what would you like to change about it?... -
We tried little experiments in various project groups trying out working in a sociocratic circle, trying out some of the things that they were offering us. We also did some sessions altogether as a team⊠We have trustees who have legal responsibility for the organisation, and it was very important for us that they were part of the process. We didnât want this to be a situation where the staff team were finding a whole new culture and a new way of working. And then we still had trustees above us who had a different culture. That was a recipe for disaster. So we did all sorts of little two-day sessions, three day sessions with this team over a couple of years. It was quite a long process, including, I would say, some things that might surprise people. We did quite a lot of movement exercises, as a group, learning how to move almost like birds flocking. You know, when you have the murmuration of swallows or starlings. That movement where sometimes youâre in a leadership role, youâre moving the group forward, sometimes youâre following others and the leadership flows around the group. So getting that sense of how leadership could be something really different from what weâd experienced traditionally. We did music sessions⊠improvising music together as another way of building that sense of âhow do I listen to this group and respond to the group, but also feel that I can bring my own creativity into what weâre doing together?â
That makes a lot of sense. And itâs, of course, completely aligned with the values around Transition and the values of â mind and body and heart. I wonder, how did the people in the organisation respond to these hints or suggestions that there are other ways of knowing and other ways of perceiving that are not necessarily mental, rational? That are embodied or somatic.
Well, as you say, thatâs always been quite a strong belief within the Transition movement. So it was something that was already part of our culture. And I think that helped us a lot that we werenât starting from zero. Weâd already done quite a lot of work on a culture that was trying to balance being and doing, balance relationships with output. So I would say that people were very receptive to it.
I think all of us, at different points, had moments where we struggled. I mean, Iâm not going to pretend it was a process where it all flowed smoothly and we ended up agreeing easily on how we were going to change our governance model. So there were moments, I would say, for all of us where we felt frustrated â this was taking a long time. Guilty, you know, we needed to be out there in the world doing things. Was it OK for us to be spending time looking inwardly at how we work? We had to process that a bit. And sometimes we had to accept that this was a time where we had something to deliver. We needed to prioritise that for a bit. But we needed to commit to coming back to this piece that was about âhow do we work?â. Not letting that go. Because I think we did have a strong sense that there was a potential for it to unlock something very important for us.
Did you have an endgame in sight? Meaning when you were in the difficult parts of this process â did you know that⊠this will come to an end eventually, and we know what that end is.
Yes, weâd given ourselves two years to experiment, and then to design a new governance model, and to move to that new governance model⊠I mean, we werenât dogmatic about it. We thought, âWell, if it really doesnât work, weâll have to go backwardsâ. But our idea was, we want to find a way to work in a way that isnât hierarchical. So we want to create a new model thatâs a flat structure. But also one that will give us more of an ability as an organisation to respond to whatâs happening in the wider movement, in the wider world â to be more responsive. So not so rigid.
And also we knew that one of the things we were doing as an organisation before this was we were spending endless time in meetings. All of the whole team, because all of our work, everything that any of us did related to what everybody else was doing. You know, of course it did, nothing was really standalone.
We didn't want to have a completely dictatorial structure where we followed the instructions of one person or a group of managers. So the only way we knew how to cope with that was to constantly have meetings where everybody came. And we'd talk about it and we'd go around in circles and we'd keep finding that the interrelationship of everything was too complex and we didn't know which bit to start with. So we knew we needed to do something about that. -
https://soundcloud.com/pedro-portela-168791914/sarah-mcadam-transition-network
Joining me today from the UK is Sarah McAdam from Transition Network. Transition Network is a charity established in the UK which works to inspire, encourage, connect, support and train communities worldwide as they self-organise around the Transition model.
Letâs start off by talking a little bit about Transition Network and how you became involved with it. And what the organisation, and this Transition model, is all about.
What Transition Network is, as you mentioned, itâs a small charity registered in the UK. Currently, thereâs 13 members of staff and 7 trustees, which is a requirement by law in the UK. And I first came to it actually even before 2013. Initially I was a trustee, which I did almost as a sort of part time contribution. I thought the organisation sounded interesting and I was agreeing to go to a board meeting maybe four or five times a year to give them a bit of a strategic steer. And since then, weâve really shifted the way we work. I joined the staff team, but we also completely shifted the way that we do our governance. So that role of a trustee is very different now.
And what is Transition all about for those three people in the world who havenât heard about Transition?
Oh no, Iâm sure itâs much, much more than three. So the Transition model is a model of, I would say, community resilience. Itâs â how does a community, how do people get together with their neighbors, to work out what they want to shift in their community and feel that they have the energy and the power to do it? So thatâs what the model is about. Started very much with a focus on the concept of peak oil and reducing our use of energy. But I would say itâs become more sophisticated and adapted as itâs spread around the world. And in each place, in each country, in each community, people are exploring for themselves â what are the key things that need to change to make the place where they live happier, healthier, more resilient, more sustainable? And that does look, of course, very different in very different places. But I think some of the values and principles apply across the whole movement.
The Transition movement or the Transition network, not the charity, but the actual global network â is an incredible story of how something that started off as an idea in a small town in the U.K. became very quickly a trans-local international network with Hubs all around the world and in many cities in many countries. I was personally involved in a couple of initiatives here in Portugal.
Yeah, it was something that spread, I would say, virally, according to where people went, where people saw the films, where they got access to the resources. And for me, thatâs one of the joys of the movement â to see how itâs spread, but then also been adapted in different places. And we have a number of Hubs, as you mentioned. So groups of people in a particular territory that support Transition in that country, or maybe for the people who speak that language. And one of the areas where weâre really exploring different forms of governance is across that network of Hubs. Because itâs very important to us that those Hubs are not controlled from one place. Theyâre self-managing, theyâre self-organising. But how do they come together to collaborate? Thatâs one of the questions for us.
Letâs talk about that. So when did your organisation, Transition Network the charity, which has this fundamental role of providing the scaffolding and support for the whole movement around the world. When did you decide to invest in governance? And Iâm using the word invest purposefully. So itâs not only financial investment, but also time commitment of the people involved â sitting together and saying, âWeâre going to think differently on how weâre going to work togetherâ. Can you tell us the story of that?
Yes, I would say that the small charity, the organisation and the bigger movement was interested right from the start about how people, how groups work together. I mean, itâs pretty fundamental when youâre thinking about how to get together with your neighbors. Itâs fundamental to the movement to find good ways of working together. And for me, thatâs what governance is ultimately about. Itâs â how do we come together in a group, agree on a shared endeavor, some common purpose that weâre trying to achieve together, and then find good ways to make decisions, to allocate resources, to be with each other, to resolve conflict or respond to conflict.
So I would say that weâve been interested in that right from the start. And then as the international network of Hubs developed, I would say that there was quite an interesting challenge that arose from there. An interesting and useful challenge. This is just my perception. Iâm sure different people would have different ways of telling the story, but I would say at the beginning Transition Network the little organisation, the charity, was maybe a bit careless about how we worked with those Hubs. I think we absolutely recognised that they needed to be self-managing and making their own decisions. But I think we were maybe a little unconscious in the way that we were using our power, the power that we were wielding because we were an organisation with some resources, because we were seen, you know, we were quite a visible part of the movement. So often the way we told the story had extra weight. And I think we became aware of that and people rightly questioned, challenged us a bit about that. And we started experimenting in the Hubs group with consent decision making, which draws from sociocracy. And I would say that initially it was that response of â âwe want to be working in a different way that makes power more visible and then supports it to flow and to be distributed across the systemâ.
And then at the same time, Transition Network, the little organisation was, I would say, struggling with how we should work. We had a sort of technically hierarchical structure. We werenât very hierarchical in the way we operated. But we had a board of trustees who, in the legal system that we work in, were in charge of our strategy and the staff were just there to carry out the strategy. And we knew that wasnât real in terms of how we worked. So we experimented with various things. We struggled. And I think this relates to what you were just saying about investment. I would say up until 2016, we tried to deal with that a little bit on the margins of the work we were trying to do in the world. You know, we were trying to organise ourselves, but we didnât have enough time to pay attention to it. And in 2016, we realised that this wasnât good enough. It wasnât helping us to do the work we needed to do. And at that point we decided to invest properly, and we were very lucky that we found a funder who was also interested in our experiment and was prepared to give us, not huge funding, but a bit of support to help us invest time, and to find people who could help us explore how we wanted our governance to change.
You mentioned that in the beginning you were a little bit careless with the Hubs. And you mentioned even there was the question of the power that your organisation was wielding unconsciously. Just because it started there, youâve mobilised the resources and I guess the money for some initiatives. Could we spend five minutes talking about that phase? Because I think thatâs an issue that interests both funders and grantees. People who are in a position to fund some of these movements, but also people who are on the receiving end of these funds. Understanding how these power dynamics or this friction eventually between funders and recipients of funds could be interesting⊠and how this leads them to the governance conversation.
Yes. I would say it was in the early days. We werenât particularly operating as a channel for funding, and that probably in itself brought some friction. We were managing to secure some funding for our organisation. And of course, partly that was because of what we were doing as an organisation. But probably just as much it was about the excitement of the movement. You know, that was partly, of course, what funders were responding to and interested in was whatâs happening in these different communities around the world. So I think there was a piece there where maybe we were a little complacent about the fact that actually some of these resources were coming to us almost on the backs of the work that was being done in a distributed grassroots network.
I mean I say complacent⊠I think we thought about it quite a lot. I think one of the enemies of all of this, you know, trying to do work in a way that is healthy and thoughtful is the busyness, isnât it? So we were a busy, small team desperately trying to respond to all these different needs and potential and demands.
And I think that's the moment where it's so good to just pause and think. Where are resources coming from? Who's impacted by this? Who's getting a say in the decision making? Which voices are being heard? Which are not part of the process yet? And what can we do about that? -
And I think for a while, sort of inevitably I guess, I think we made a lot of assumptions and we didnât even realise we were making assumptions.
And Iâm really conscious that coming from the UK with our whole history of colonialism â there we are yet again making those sort of assumptions that how we see the world is how everybody else is experiencing the world. Itâs so dangerous and itâs so easy to do. So I think for me, that was one of the things that we had to come to a realisation about. We were helped in that by some really constructive challenge from other people in other parts of the system.
Yeah, when it comes to governance I like to think of how quickly we fall back to the usual archetypes of ways of organising. Itâs a very innocent process, a very unconscious process, probably part of the collective unconscious of Jung. And how quickly we fall back to the traditional models of governance and decision making, which are part of our unconscious. But that in our case, weâre both in Europe, so we were both brought up in this culture and how much this is informing everything we do in terms of decision making and sense making and meaning making, right?
Yes.
So then, OK, flash forward â what happened then in 2016? What was the process? Walk us through this adventure that you started.
Well, we knew that we were interested in sociocracy in particular because weâd experienced a bit of consent decision making. And I donât know about you but for me, the moment I experienced that I felt a sort of tingling in my body of âthereâs something different hereâ. This is a different way of a group coming to a decision that feels like for once weâre properly listening to the collective intelligence. Weâre properly creating a space for us to find something that will work well enough for all of us. So we already had that excitement and that interest.
We found a team to help us, and they were a team from France called UniversitĂ© du Nous. So âUniversity of Usâ. And they had a lot of experience of sociocracy and holacracy, which is a different model, but some similarities. And they also had lots of other tools at their disposal and a lot of experienceâŠWe did a sort of action learning process â they gave us a little menu of different ways that you can organize⊠They talked to us about the concept of a safety framework.
These are the sorts of things that a group needs to know about itself to know how its governance works. Some basic things that unless you know, then actually you keep falling into the same traps. Such as, how do people join this group? How do people leave this group? What expectations do we have about how we work together? How do we make decisions? What are the roles that people are playing?... How does this work in your organization now? And what would you like to change about it?... -
We tried little experiments in various project groups trying out working in a sociocratic circle, trying out some of the things that they were offering us. We also did some sessions altogether as a team⊠We have trustees who have legal responsibility for the organisation, and it was very important for us that they were part of the process. We didnât want this to be a situation where the staff team were finding a whole new culture and a new way of working. And then we still had trustees above us who had a different culture. That was a recipe for disaster. So we did all sorts of little two-day sessions, three day sessions with this team over a couple of years. It was quite a long process, including, I would say, some things that might surprise people. We did quite a lot of movement exercises, as a group, learning how to move almost like birds flocking. You know, when you have the murmuration of swallows or starlings. That movement where sometimes youâre in a leadership role, youâre moving the group forward, sometimes youâre following others and the leadership flows around the group. So getting that sense of how leadership could be something really different from what weâd experienced traditionally. We did music sessions⊠improvising music together as another way of building that sense of âhow do I listen to this group and respond to the group, but also feel that I can bring my own creativity into what weâre doing together?â
That makes a lot of sense. And itâs, of course, completely aligned with the values around Transition and the values of â mind and body and heart. I wonder, how did the people in the organisation respond to these hints or suggestions that there are other ways of knowing and other ways of perceiving that are not necessarily mental, rational? That are embodied or somatic.
Well, as you say, thatâs always been quite a strong belief within the Transition movement. So it was something that was already part of our culture. And I think that helped us a lot that we werenât starting from zero. Weâd already done quite a lot of work on a culture that was trying to balance being and doing, balance relationships with output. So I would say that people were very receptive to it.
I think all of us, at different points, had moments where we struggled. I mean, Iâm not going to pretend it was a process where it all flowed smoothly and we ended up agreeing easily on how we were going to change our governance model. So there were moments, I would say, for all of us where we felt frustrated â this was taking a long time. Guilty, you know, we needed to be out there in the world doing things. Was it OK for us to be spending time looking inwardly at how we work? We had to process that a bit. And sometimes we had to accept that this was a time where we had something to deliver. We needed to prioritise that for a bit. But we needed to commit to coming back to this piece that was about âhow do we work?â. Not letting that go. Because I think we did have a strong sense that there was a potential for it to unlock something very important for us.
Did you have an endgame in sight? Meaning when you were in the difficult parts of this process â did you know that⊠this will come to an end eventually, and we know what that end is.
Yes, weâd given ourselves two years to experiment, and then to design a new governance model, and to move to that new governance model⊠I mean, we werenât dogmatic about it. We thought, âWell, if it really doesnât work, weâll have to go backwardsâ. But our idea was, we want to find a way to work in a way that isnât hierarchical. So we want to create a new model thatâs a flat structure. But also one that will give us more of an ability as an organisation to respond to whatâs happening in the wider movement, in the wider world â to be more responsive. So not so rigid.
And also we knew that one of the things we were doing as an organisation before this was we were spending endless time in meetings. All of the whole team, because all of our work, everything that any of us did related to what everybody else was doing. You know, of course it did, nothing was really standalone.
We didn't want to have a completely dictatorial structure where we followed the instructions of one person or a group of managers. So the only way we knew how to cope with that was to constantly have meetings where everybody came. And we'd talk about it and we'd go around in circles and we'd keep finding that the interrelationship of everything was too complex and we didn't know which bit to start with. So we knew we needed to do something about that. -
We felt that we werenât being⊠I always wonder about the word efficient because I think it has a sort of connotation of⊠an efficient corporate body. But we knew we werenât being efficient in terms of our time. We wanted to know that the time that we were spending was actually delivering some impact in the world, not going round and round in circles within the organisation. So that was one of the key things that we were saying. We need to find a model that gives us more clarity about who will be making decisions about what sort of stuff. And it doesnât have to be, everybody will make all the decisions about everything.
And did you find that model? The million dollar question.
Of course we didnât find the perfect model because that will never happen, I donât think. But by 2017 we were designing a model that we thought would work for us. And in 2018, we made the leap. Because one of the things that we found is that there comes a point where working in two systems just is not good for your health or your sanity. So there came a point where we were experimenting so much we said, now we need to shift. And the whole organisation needs to move into this new model. So we called it shared governance. Thatâs a term that UniversitĂ© du Nous use. And we created a system of circles and roles and clarity about decision making that draws heavily on sociocracy but has elements of our existing culture, and some of the things that feel particularly important about the movement and about our organisation.
So we donât follow exactly the model of sociocracy, but weâre doing some very similar stuff. And key to that is that itâs an evolutionary model.
https://soundcloud.com/pedro-portela-168791914/sarah-mcadam-transition-network
Joining me today from the UK is Sarah McAdam from Transition Network. Transition Network is a charity established in the UK which works to inspire, encourage, connect, support and train communities worldwide as they self-organise around the Transition model.
Letâs start off by talking a little bit about Transition Network and how you became involved with it. And what the organisation, and this Transition model, is all about.
What Transition Network is, as you mentioned, itâs a small charity registered in the UK. Currently, thereâs 13 members of staff and 7 trustees, which is a requirement by law in the UK. And I first came to it actually even before 2013. Initially I was a trustee, which I did almost as a sort of part time contribution. I thought the organisation sounded interesting and I was agreeing to go to a board meeting maybe four or five times a year to give them a bit of a strategic steer. And since then, weâve really shifted the way we work. I joined the staff team, but we also completely shifted the way that we do our governance. So that role of a trustee is very different now.
And what is Transition all about for those three people in the world who havenât heard about Transition?
Oh no, Iâm sure itâs much, much more than three. So the Transition model is a model of, I would say, community resilience. Itâs â how does a community, how do people get together with their neighbors, to work out what they want to shift in their community and feel that they have the energy and the power to do it? So thatâs what the model is about. Started very much with a focus on the concept of peak oil and reducing our use of energy. But I would say itâs become more sophisticated and adapted as itâs spread around the world. And in each place, in each country, in each community, people are exploring for themselves â what are the key things that need to change to make the place where they live happier, healthier, more resilient, more sustainable? And that does look, of course, very different in very different places. But I think some of the values and principles apply across the whole movement.
The Transition movement or the Transition network, not the charity, but the actual global network â is an incredible story of how something that started off as an idea in a small town in the U.K. became very quickly a trans-local international network with Hubs all around the world and in many cities in many countries. I was personally involved in a couple of initiatives here in Portugal.
Yeah, it was something that spread, I would say, virally, according to where people went, where people saw the films, where they got access to the resources. And for me, thatâs one of the joys of the movement â to see how itâs spread, but then also been adapted in different places. And we have a number of Hubs, as you mentioned. So groups of people in a particular territory that support Transition in that country, or maybe for the people who speak that language. And one of the areas where weâre really exploring different forms of governance is across that network of Hubs. Because itâs very important to us that those Hubs are not controlled from one place. Theyâre self-managing, theyâre self-organising. But how do they come together to collaborate? Thatâs one of the questions for us.
Letâs talk about that. So when did your organisation, Transition Network the charity, which has this fundamental role of providing the scaffolding and support for the whole movement around the world. When did you decide to invest in governance? And Iâm using the word invest purposefully. So itâs not only financial investment, but also time commitment of the people involved â sitting together and saying, âWeâre going to think differently on how weâre going to work togetherâ. Can you tell us the story of that?
Yes, I would say that the small charity, the organisation and the bigger movement was interested right from the start about how people, how groups work together. I mean, itâs pretty fundamental when youâre thinking about how to get together with your neighbors. Itâs fundamental to the movement to find good ways of working together. And for me, thatâs what governance is ultimately about. Itâs â how do we come together in a group, agree on a shared endeavor, some common purpose that weâre trying to achieve together, and then find good ways to make decisions, to allocate resources, to be with each other, to resolve conflict or respond to conflict.
So I would say that weâve been interested in that right from the start. And then as the international network of Hubs developed, I would say that there was quite an interesting challenge that arose from there. An interesting and useful challenge. This is just my perception. Iâm sure different people would have different ways of telling the story, but I would say at the beginning Transition Network the little organisation, the charity, was maybe a bit careless about how we worked with those Hubs. I think we absolutely recognised that they needed to be self-managing and making their own decisions. But I think we were maybe a little unconscious in the way that we were using our power, the power that we were wielding because we were an organisation with some resources, because we were seen, you know, we were quite a visible part of the movement. So often the way we told the story had extra weight. And I think we became aware of that and people rightly questioned, challenged us a bit about that. And we started experimenting in the Hubs group with consent decision making, which draws from sociocracy. And I would say that initially it was that response of â âwe want to be working in a different way that makes power more visible and then supports it to flow and to be distributed across the systemâ.
And then at the same time, Transition Network, the little organisation was, I would say, struggling with how we should work. We had a sort of technically hierarchical structure. We werenât very hierarchical in the way we operated. But we had a board of trustees who, in the legal system that we work in, were in charge of our strategy and the staff were just there to carry out the strategy. And we knew that wasnât real in terms of how we worked. So we experimented with various things. We struggled. And I think this relates to what you were just saying about investment. I would say up until 2016, we tried to deal with that a little bit on the margins of the work we were trying to do in the world. You know, we were trying to organise ourselves, but we didnât have enough time to pay attention to it. And in 2016, we realised that this wasnât good enough. It wasnât helping us to do the work we needed to do. And at that point we decided to invest properly, and we were very lucky that we found a funder who was also interested in our experiment and was prepared to give us, not huge funding, but a bit of support to help us invest time, and to find people who could help us explore how we wanted our governance to change.
You mentioned that in the beginning you were a little bit careless with the Hubs. And you mentioned even there was the question of the power that your organisation was wielding unconsciously. Just because it started there, youâve mobilised the resources and I guess the money for some initiatives. Could we spend five minutes talking about that phase? Because I think thatâs an issue that interests both funders and grantees. People who are in a position to fund some of these movements, but also people who are on the receiving end of these funds. Understanding how these power dynamics or this friction eventually between funders and recipients of funds could be interesting⊠and how this leads them to the governance conversation.
Yes. I would say it was in the early days. We werenât particularly operating as a channel for funding, and that probably in itself brought some friction. We were managing to secure some funding for our organisation. And of course, partly that was because of what we were doing as an organisation. But probably just as much it was about the excitement of the movement. You know, that was partly, of course, what funders were responding to and interested in was whatâs happening in these different communities around the world. So I think there was a piece there where maybe we were a little complacent about the fact that actually some of these resources were coming to us almost on the backs of the work that was being done in a distributed grassroots network.
I mean I say complacent⊠I think we thought about it quite a lot. I think one of the enemies of all of this, you know, trying to do work in a way that is healthy and thoughtful is the busyness, isnât it? So we were a busy, small team desperately trying to respond to all these different needs and potential and demands.
And I think that's the moment where it's so good to just pause and think. Where are resources coming from? Who's impacted by this? Who's getting a say in the decision making? Which voices are being heard? Which are not part of the process yet? And what can we do about that? -
And I think for a while, sort of inevitably I guess, I think we made a lot of assumptions and we didnât even realise we were making assumptions.
And Iâm really conscious that coming from the UK with our whole history of colonialism â there we are yet again making those sort of assumptions that how we see the world is how everybody else is experiencing the world. Itâs so dangerous and itâs so easy to do. So I think for me, that was one of the things that we had to come to a realisation about. We were helped in that by some really constructive challenge from other people in other parts of the system.
Yeah, when it comes to governance I like to think of how quickly we fall back to the usual archetypes of ways of organising. Itâs a very innocent process, a very unconscious process, probably part of the collective unconscious of Jung. And how quickly we fall back to the traditional models of governance and decision making, which are part of our unconscious. But that in our case, weâre both in Europe, so we were both brought up in this culture and how much this is informing everything we do in terms of decision making and sense making and meaning making, right?
Yes.
So then, OK, flash forward â what happened then in 2016? What was the process? Walk us through this adventure that you started.
Well, we knew that we were interested in sociocracy in particular because weâd experienced a bit of consent decision making. And I donât know about you but for me, the moment I experienced that I felt a sort of tingling in my body of âthereâs something different hereâ. This is a different way of a group coming to a decision that feels like for once weâre properly listening to the collective intelligence. Weâre properly creating a space for us to find something that will work well enough for all of us. So we already had that excitement and that interest.
We found a team to help us, and they were a team from France called UniversitĂ© du Nous. So âUniversity of Usâ. And they had a lot of experience of sociocracy and holacracy, which is a different model, but some similarities. And they also had lots of other tools at their disposal and a lot of experienceâŠWe did a sort of action learning process â they gave us a little menu of different ways that you can organize⊠They talked to us about the concept of a safety framework.
These are the sorts of things that a group needs to know about itself to know how its governance works. Some basic things that unless you know, then actually you keep falling into the same traps. Such as, how do people join this group? How do people leave this group? What expectations do we have about how we work together? How do we make decisions? What are the roles that people are playing?... How does this work in your organization now? And what would you like to change about it?... -
We tried little experiments in various project groups trying out working in a sociocratic circle, trying out some of the things that they were offering us. We also did some sessions altogether as a team⊠We have trustees who have legal responsibility for the organisation, and it was very important for us that they were part of the process. We didnât want this to be a situation where the staff team were finding a whole new culture and a new way of working. And then we still had trustees above us who had a different culture. That was a recipe for disaster. So we did all sorts of little two-day sessions, three day sessions with this team over a couple of years. It was quite a long process, including, I would say, some things that might surprise people. We did quite a lot of movement exercises, as a group, learning how to move almost like birds flocking. You know, when you have the murmuration of swallows or starlings. That movement where sometimes youâre in a leadership role, youâre moving the group forward, sometimes youâre following others and the leadership flows around the group. So getting that sense of how leadership could be something really different from what weâd experienced traditionally. We did music sessions⊠improvising music together as another way of building that sense of âhow do I listen to this group and respond to the group, but also feel that I can bring my own creativity into what weâre doing together?â
That makes a lot of sense. And itâs, of course, completely aligned with the values around Transition and the values of â mind and body and heart. I wonder, how did the people in the organisation respond to these hints or suggestions that there are other ways of knowing and other ways of perceiving that are not necessarily mental, rational? That are embodied or somatic.
Well, as you say, thatâs always been quite a strong belief within the Transition movement. So it was something that was already part of our culture. And I think that helped us a lot that we werenât starting from zero. Weâd already done quite a lot of work on a culture that was trying to balance being and doing, balance relationships with output. So I would say that people were very receptive to it.
I think all of us, at different points, had moments where we struggled. I mean, Iâm not going to pretend it was a process where it all flowed smoothly and we ended up agreeing easily on how we were going to change our governance model. So there were moments, I would say, for all of us where we felt frustrated â this was taking a long time. Guilty, you know, we needed to be out there in the world doing things. Was it OK for us to be spending time looking inwardly at how we work? We had to process that a bit. And sometimes we had to accept that this was a time where we had something to deliver. We needed to prioritise that for a bit. But we needed to commit to coming back to this piece that was about âhow do we work?â. Not letting that go. Because I think we did have a strong sense that there was a potential for it to unlock something very important for us.
Did you have an endgame in sight? Meaning when you were in the difficult parts of this process â did you know that⊠this will come to an end eventually, and we know what that end is.
Yes, weâd given ourselves two years to experiment, and then to design a new governance model, and to move to that new governance model⊠I mean, we werenât dogmatic about it. We thought, âWell, if it really doesnât work, weâll have to go backwardsâ. But our idea was, we want to find a way to work in a way that isnât hierarchical. So we want to create a new model thatâs a flat structure. But also one that will give us more of an ability as an organisation to respond to whatâs happening in the wider movement, in the wider world â to be more responsive. So not so rigid.
And also we knew that one of the things we were doing as an organisation before this was we were spending endless time in meetings. All of the whole team, because all of our work, everything that any of us did related to what everybody else was doing. You know, of course it did, nothing was really standalone.
We didn't want to have a completely dictatorial structure where we followed the instructions of one person or a group of managers. So the only way we knew how to cope with that was to constantly have meetings where everybody came. And we'd talk about it and we'd go around in circles and we'd keep finding that the interrelationship of everything was too complex and we didn't know which bit to start with. So we knew we needed to do something about that. -
We felt that we werenât being⊠I always wonder about the word efficient because I think it has a sort of connotation of⊠an efficient corporate body. But we knew we werenât being efficient in terms of our time. We wanted to know that the time that we were spending was actually delivering some impact in the world, not going round and round in circles within the organisation. So that was one of the key things that we were saying. We need to find a model that gives us more clarity about who will be making decisions about what sort of stuff. And it doesnât have to be, everybody will make all the decisions about everything.
And did you find that model? The million dollar question.
Of course we didnât find the perfect model because that will never happen, I donât think. But by 2017 we were designing a model that we thought would work for us. And in 2018, we made the leap. Because one of the things that we found is that there comes a point where working in two systems just is not good for your health or your sanity. So there came a point where we were experimenting so much we said, now we need to shift. And the whole organisation needs to move into this new model. So we called it shared governance. Thatâs a term that UniversitĂ© du Nous use. And we created a system of circles and roles and clarity about decision making that draws heavily on sociocracy but has elements of our existing culture, and some of the things that feel particularly important about the movement and about our organisation.
So we donât follow exactly the model of sociocracy, but weâre doing some very similar stuff. And key to that is that itâs an evolutionary model.
What we said when we were trying to design it was it doesn't have to be perfect. We don't have to find all the answers. We need something that's good enough for now, safe enough to try - and we'll move into that model. And what we've got to make sure then is that the model's got the capacity to change. -
https://soundcloud.com/pedro-portela-168791914/sarah-mcadam-transition-network
Joining me today from the UK is Sarah McAdam from Transition Network. Transition Network is a charity established in the UK which works to inspire, encourage, connect, support and train communities worldwide as they self-organise around the Transition model.
Letâs start off by talking a little bit about Transition Network and how you became involved with it. And what the organisation, and this Transition model, is all about.
What Transition Network is, as you mentioned, itâs a small charity registered in the UK. Currently, thereâs 13 members of staff and 7 trustees, which is a requirement by law in the UK. And I first came to it actually even before 2013. Initially I was a trustee, which I did almost as a sort of part time contribution. I thought the organisation sounded interesting and I was agreeing to go to a board meeting maybe four or five times a year to give them a bit of a strategic steer. And since then, weâve really shifted the way we work. I joined the staff team, but we also completely shifted the way that we do our governance. So that role of a trustee is very different now.
And what is Transition all about for those three people in the world who havenât heard about Transition?
Oh no, Iâm sure itâs much, much more than three. So the Transition model is a model of, I would say, community resilience. Itâs â how does a community, how do people get together with their neighbors, to work out what they want to shift in their community and feel that they have the energy and the power to do it? So thatâs what the model is about. Started very much with a focus on the concept of peak oil and reducing our use of energy. But I would say itâs become more sophisticated and adapted as itâs spread around the world. And in each place, in each country, in each community, people are exploring for themselves â what are the key things that need to change to make the place where they live happier, healthier, more resilient, more sustainable? And that does look, of course, very different in very different places. But I think some of the values and principles apply across the whole movement.
The Transition movement or the Transition network, not the charity, but the actual global network â is an incredible story of how something that started off as an idea in a small town in the U.K. became very quickly a trans-local international network with Hubs all around the world and in many cities in many countries. I was personally involved in a couple of initiatives here in Portugal.
Yeah, it was something that spread, I would say, virally, according to where people went, where people saw the films, where they got access to the resources. And for me, thatâs one of the joys of the movement â to see how itâs spread, but then also been adapted in different places. And we have a number of Hubs, as you mentioned. So groups of people in a particular territory that support Transition in that country, or maybe for the people who speak that language. And one of the areas where weâre really exploring different forms of governance is across that network of Hubs. Because itâs very important to us that those Hubs are not controlled from one place. Theyâre self-managing, theyâre self-organising. But how do they come together to collaborate? Thatâs one of the questions for us.
Letâs talk about that. So when did your organisation, Transition Network the charity, which has this fundamental role of providing the scaffolding and support for the whole movement around the world. When did you decide to invest in governance? And Iâm using the word invest purposefully. So itâs not only financial investment, but also time commitment of the people involved â sitting together and saying, âWeâre going to think differently on how weâre going to work togetherâ. Can you tell us the story of that?
Yes, I would say that the small charity, the organisation and the bigger movement was interested right from the start about how people, how groups work together. I mean, itâs pretty fundamental when youâre thinking about how to get together with your neighbors. Itâs fundamental to the movement to find good ways of working together. And for me, thatâs what governance is ultimately about. Itâs â how do we come together in a group, agree on a shared endeavor, some common purpose that weâre trying to achieve together, and then find good ways to make decisions, to allocate resources, to be with each other, to resolve conflict or respond to conflict.
So I would say that weâve been interested in that right from the start. And then as the international network of Hubs developed, I would say that there was quite an interesting challenge that arose from there. An interesting and useful challenge. This is just my perception. Iâm sure different people would have different ways of telling the story, but I would say at the beginning Transition Network the little organisation, the charity, was maybe a bit careless about how we worked with those Hubs. I think we absolutely recognised that they needed to be self-managing and making their own decisions. But I think we were maybe a little unconscious in the way that we were using our power, the power that we were wielding because we were an organisation with some resources, because we were seen, you know, we were quite a visible part of the movement. So often the way we told the story had extra weight. And I think we became aware of that and people rightly questioned, challenged us a bit about that. And we started experimenting in the Hubs group with consent decision making, which draws from sociocracy. And I would say that initially it was that response of â âwe want to be working in a different way that makes power more visible and then supports it to flow and to be distributed across the systemâ.
And then at the same time, Transition Network, the little organisation was, I would say, struggling with how we should work. We had a sort of technically hierarchical structure. We werenât very hierarchical in the way we operated. But we had a board of trustees who, in the legal system that we work in, were in charge of our strategy and the staff were just there to carry out the strategy. And we knew that wasnât real in terms of how we worked. So we experimented with various things. We struggled. And I think this relates to what you were just saying about investment. I would say up until 2016, we tried to deal with that a little bit on the margins of the work we were trying to do in the world. You know, we were trying to organise ourselves, but we didnât have enough time to pay attention to it. And in 2016, we realised that this wasnât good enough. It wasnât helping us to do the work we needed to do. And at that point we decided to invest properly, and we were very lucky that we found a funder who was also interested in our experiment and was prepared to give us, not huge funding, but a bit of support to help us invest time, and to find people who could help us explore how we wanted our governance to change.
You mentioned that in the beginning you were a little bit careless with the Hubs. And you mentioned even there was the question of the power that your organisation was wielding unconsciously. Just because it started there, youâve mobilised the resources and I guess the money for some initiatives. Could we spend five minutes talking about that phase? Because I think thatâs an issue that interests both funders and grantees. People who are in a position to fund some of these movements, but also people who are on the receiving end of these funds. Understanding how these power dynamics or this friction eventually between funders and recipients of funds could be interesting⊠and how this leads them to the governance conversation.
Yes. I would say it was in the early days. We werenât particularly operating as a channel for funding, and that probably in itself brought some friction. We were managing to secure some funding for our organisation. And of course, partly that was because of what we were doing as an organisation. But probably just as much it was about the excitement of the movement. You know, that was partly, of course, what funders were responding to and interested in was whatâs happening in these different communities around the world. So I think there was a piece there where maybe we were a little complacent about the fact that actually some of these resources were coming to us almost on the backs of the work that was being done in a distributed grassroots network.
I mean I say complacent⊠I think we thought about it quite a lot. I think one of the enemies of all of this, you know, trying to do work in a way that is healthy and thoughtful is the busyness, isnât it? So we were a busy, small team desperately trying to respond to all these different needs and potential and demands.
And I think that's the moment where it's so good to just pause and think. Where are resources coming from? Who's impacted by this? Who's getting a say in the decision making? Which voices are being heard? Which are not part of the process yet? And what can we do about that? -
And I think for a while, sort of inevitably I guess, I think we made a lot of assumptions and we didnât even realise we were making assumptions.
And Iâm really conscious that coming from the UK with our whole history of colonialism â there we are yet again making those sort of assumptions that how we see the world is how everybody else is experiencing the world. Itâs so dangerous and itâs so easy to do. So I think for me, that was one of the things that we had to come to a realisation about. We were helped in that by some really constructive challenge from other people in other parts of the system.
Yeah, when it comes to governance I like to think of how quickly we fall back to the usual archetypes of ways of organising. Itâs a very innocent process, a very unconscious process, probably part of the collective unconscious of Jung. And how quickly we fall back to the traditional models of governance and decision making, which are part of our unconscious. But that in our case, weâre both in Europe, so we were both brought up in this culture and how much this is informing everything we do in terms of decision making and sense making and meaning making, right?
Yes.
So then, OK, flash forward â what happened then in 2016? What was the process? Walk us through this adventure that you started.
Well, we knew that we were interested in sociocracy in particular because weâd experienced a bit of consent decision making. And I donât know about you but for me, the moment I experienced that I felt a sort of tingling in my body of âthereâs something different hereâ. This is a different way of a group coming to a decision that feels like for once weâre properly listening to the collective intelligence. Weâre properly creating a space for us to find something that will work well enough for all of us. So we already had that excitement and that interest.
We found a team to help us, and they were a team from France called UniversitĂ© du Nous. So âUniversity of Usâ. And they had a lot of experience of sociocracy and holacracy, which is a different model, but some similarities. And they also had lots of other tools at their disposal and a lot of experienceâŠWe did a sort of action learning process â they gave us a little menu of different ways that you can organize⊠They talked to us about the concept of a safety framework.
These are the sorts of things that a group needs to know about itself to know how its governance works. Some basic things that unless you know, then actually you keep falling into the same traps. Such as, how do people join this group? How do people leave this group? What expectations do we have about how we work together? How do we make decisions? What are the roles that people are playing?... How does this work in your organization now? And what would you like to change about it?... -
We tried little experiments in various project groups trying out working in a sociocratic circle, trying out some of the things that they were offering us. We also did some sessions altogether as a team⊠We have trustees who have legal responsibility for the organisation, and it was very important for us that they were part of the process. We didnât want this to be a situation where the staff team were finding a whole new culture and a new way of working. And then we still had trustees above us who had a different culture. That was a recipe for disaster. So we did all sorts of little two-day sessions, three day sessions with this team over a couple of years. It was quite a long process, including, I would say, some things that might surprise people. We did quite a lot of movement exercises, as a group, learning how to move almost like birds flocking. You know, when you have the murmuration of swallows or starlings. That movement where sometimes youâre in a leadership role, youâre moving the group forward, sometimes youâre following others and the leadership flows around the group. So getting that sense of how leadership could be something really different from what weâd experienced traditionally. We did music sessions⊠improvising music together as another way of building that sense of âhow do I listen to this group and respond to the group, but also feel that I can bring my own creativity into what weâre doing together?â
That makes a lot of sense. And itâs, of course, completely aligned with the values around Transition and the values of â mind and body and heart. I wonder, how did the people in the organisation respond to these hints or suggestions that there are other ways of knowing and other ways of perceiving that are not necessarily mental, rational? That are embodied or somatic.
Well, as you say, thatâs always been quite a strong belief within the Transition movement. So it was something that was already part of our culture. And I think that helped us a lot that we werenât starting from zero. Weâd already done quite a lot of work on a culture that was trying to balance being and doing, balance relationships with output. So I would say that people were very receptive to it.
I think all of us, at different points, had moments where we struggled. I mean, Iâm not going to pretend it was a process where it all flowed smoothly and we ended up agreeing easily on how we were going to change our governance model. So there were moments, I would say, for all of us where we felt frustrated â this was taking a long time. Guilty, you know, we needed to be out there in the world doing things. Was it OK for us to be spending time looking inwardly at how we work? We had to process that a bit. And sometimes we had to accept that this was a time where we had something to deliver. We needed to prioritise that for a bit. But we needed to commit to coming back to this piece that was about âhow do we work?â. Not letting that go. Because I think we did have a strong sense that there was a potential for it to unlock something very important for us.
Did you have an endgame in sight? Meaning when you were in the difficult parts of this process â did you know that⊠this will come to an end eventually, and we know what that end is.
Yes, weâd given ourselves two years to experiment, and then to design a new governance model, and to move to that new governance model⊠I mean, we werenât dogmatic about it. We thought, âWell, if it really doesnât work, weâll have to go backwardsâ. But our idea was, we want to find a way to work in a way that isnât hierarchical. So we want to create a new model thatâs a flat structure. But also one that will give us more of an ability as an organisation to respond to whatâs happening in the wider movement, in the wider world â to be more responsive. So not so rigid.
And also we knew that one of the things we were doing as an organisation before this was we were spending endless time in meetings. All of the whole team, because all of our work, everything that any of us did related to what everybody else was doing. You know, of course it did, nothing was really standalone.
We didn't want to have a completely dictatorial structure where we followed the instructions of one person or a group of managers. So the only way we knew how to cope with that was to constantly have meetings where everybody came. And we'd talk about it and we'd go around in circles and we'd keep finding that the interrelationship of everything was too complex and we didn't know which bit to start with. So we knew we needed to do something about that. -
We felt that we werenât being⊠I always wonder about the word efficient because I think it has a sort of connotation of⊠an efficient corporate body. But we knew we werenât being efficient in terms of our time. We wanted to know that the time that we were spending was actually delivering some impact in the world, not going round and round in circles within the organisation. So that was one of the key things that we were saying. We need to find a model that gives us more clarity about who will be making decisions about what sort of stuff. And it doesnât have to be, everybody will make all the decisions about everything.
And did you find that model? The million dollar question.
Of course we didnât find the perfect model because that will never happen, I donât think. But by 2017 we were designing a model that we thought would work for us. And in 2018, we made the leap. Because one of the things that we found is that there comes a point where working in two systems just is not good for your health or your sanity. So there came a point where we were experimenting so much we said, now we need to shift. And the whole organisation needs to move into this new model. So we called it shared governance. Thatâs a term that UniversitĂ© du Nous use. And we created a system of circles and roles and clarity about decision making that draws heavily on sociocracy but has elements of our existing culture, and some of the things that feel particularly important about the movement and about our organisation.
So we donât follow exactly the model of sociocracy, but weâre doing some very similar stuff. And key to that is that itâs an evolutionary model.
What we said when we were trying to design it was it doesn't have to be perfect. We don't have to find all the answers. We need something that's good enough for now, safe enough to try - and we'll move into that model. And what we've got to make sure then is that the model's got the capacity to change. -
One of the things that I remember finding really helpful was when Guillame, who was the person who was helping us from UniversitĂ© du Nous,⊠said to me; âas soon as you move into this model you will find things wrong with it. And thatâs exactly what should happen. Then the tensions will come up and then youâll see what needs to change.â So that reassurance you donât need to try and think ahead and predict everything that will be needed because you just need to create a model thatâs got the capacity to shift as needs change.
To evolve, to become alive. Practically speaking now â can you give us some examples of how this shared governance model works right now? And how is it different from what you previously had in terms of flow of power? And what do you think would be the next evolutionary mutation?
So some of the key elements of it⊠One really fundamental piece early on was that we created a single circle. We call it the Primary Circle, which is the circle that takes care of the strategy, the purpose of the organisation, and its governance. And that circle is open to any member of the staff who would like to join it, and most people did. We didnât insist on people joining it, but we made it available to any member of the staff who wanted to join, and to the trustees. So rather than having this fundamental hierarchy in the system â the group that holds equivalent power to decide what needs to shift in terms of our purpose and our governance includes everybody who wants to be part of it, and has got the capacity to be part of it.
So thatâs a pretty big change. Itâs actually not a change that the legal system in the UK is capable of recognising, for a charity. So we still have these trustees whoâve got legal responsibility, but they made a commitment that they would exercise that responsibility through this collective system, that they wouldnât sit outside the system and exercise that power. So thatâs really significant. And then as part of that⊠we really defined âwhatâs our purpose as an organisation?â We spent quite a lot of time thinking about that, feeling about that, exploring that with the wider movement, getting feedback, listening to the feedback. And that has become then the thing that steers us. So in all our decisions, in all our different ways of working â weâre constantly thinking, aligning to âhow does this best serve the purpose of the organisation?â Thatâs our compass. And for me, thereâs something there about how that enables a lot more trust. That because weâve spent time knowing what it is weâre trying to achieve⊠I donât need to know what this personâs doing and what that circle are doing. I can trust that weâre all aligned to this purpose, and I also trust that if a real tension arises between us we have a way of processing it.
We created this idea that there are roles in the system. So rather than having a team where people have fixed jobs where you stay forever. âWe recruited you to be in this role and youâre going to stay in this role.â We created a system of âletâs name all the different roles that people play in our systemâ, knowing that often some of the invisible roles are ones that hold a lot of power⊠Theyâre not official in the structure chart, but itâs actually a role that somebody takes, might use a lot of power, exercise a lot of power, or sometimes will exercise a lot of responsibility, but without any recognition. And that was a really interesting piece to see. Well whoâs spending a lot of time investing in the relationships in the organisation and supporting the health of the organisation? But thatâs not visible on the structure chart. And actually, if thatâs a role, letâs name it as a role and make sure weâve put it somewhere in the system.
And thereâs a much clearer idea now that people will move between roles. This is all part of the evolution of the system. At any given time I might be holding 2, 3, 4 roles in the system. But theyâre not my identity in the organisation. Theyâre the things that Iâm doing at the moment to help serve our purpose. At various points I might be asked to step out of a role because it makes sense for somebody else to go in there. I might be asked to hand over something else. I might be asked to take on something else. And all the time guided by, âwhat best serves our purposeâ, rather than this idea that Iâm fixed in this role and Iâm the only person that can hold it. And seeing the health of roles shifting around the system. And I want to be honest and say, thatâs probably something weâve found quite difficult. You know, I think weâre getting much better at it. But it is very easy for people to just get embedded in a role, and to build up knowledge, and to feel nobody else can do this, and for the team to feel nobody else could do that. But weâre really trying to shift our thinking and recognise that there are some roles that have very specific skills attached, but thereâs an awful lot that can be done in different ways by different people. That actually having that flexibility really supports us to pivot as an organisation, as we see things⊠that the needs are changing, or our priorities are changing.
Yeah, that must have been a very interesting step⊠Identifying the invisible roles and maybe even uncovering that some of these invisible roles are key to how the whole organisation actually works.
It really was⊠It was particularly interesting for me personally because, until we made the shift, I was holding this role of Delivery Director. And that role managed everybody else, all the other members of staff. And what we realised⊠I think I had already been feeling the discomfort of that role, but also the power of that role. That was a role that weâd added lots of different elements to⊠It was the role that had a lot of control over resources, and a lot of control over how peopleâs time was spent⊠I tended to work in a very collaborative way with people. But still, it was me that was the point of connection that would help see what needed to happen, and make it happen across the system. And I think, for me, one of the most exciting things we did was to disentangle all the stuff that weâd put onto that role and see that it could be done by different people in different ways⊠I was doing a lot of coaching and support. But did it make sense for that to be done by the same person who was also making decisions about money? It didnât need to be. That actually we could distribute these leadership responsibilities in a much more transparent way. And you know, the reality was I couldnât have carried on doing that job, it was becoming impossible and a bottleneck in the system. And suddenly by bringing more people in it opened up new energies and new ideas.
Yeah, and itâs usually how people end up burning themselves out⊠by accumulating all of these rolesâŠ
I have a slightly more personal question about this process of picking apart all of these roles that are concentrated around a single node in the network. Because some people might think that this is actually a process of stripping away power from your position. And of course, no matter how much we work on our own personal development and our own capacity to see ourselves, you know, disconnected from the organisation. Thereâs always probably some fear that may come with this process of picking yourself apart and decentralising yourself from the organisation, right?⊠In the process of unbecoming this central node â does it bring up feelings of uncertainty or insecurity?
⊠There were definite moments of insecurity. I think ⊠there were definite moments where I struggled to let go of control⊠We talked about a posture that you need to learn to work in this way. Thereâs a culture as a group that needs to shift, but also for each of us individually thereâs a new posture, a new way of behaving, that we need to learn. And thereâs lots of times where itâs not comfortable because itâs not familiar⊠How I grew up and how I worked in other organisations taught me exactly the opposite of the posture that I think is needed in this sort of system. So for me a key bit was about letting go of control. And there were moments when I could feel the sort of message in my brain of âIâm not sure that this person can do it. I know how to do it. Is it safe to let it go to somebody else?â And also, I guess, a piece about my identity⊠My identity is to be a leader in this organisation. What is it if Iâm part of a circle where I donât have any more of a claim to be a leader than anyone else whoâs sharing in these responsibilities? I have to say for me personally, it was so exciting that that really helped me. And I think also the fact that I could feel how completely unsustainable my old job was, that really helped me as well. That sense of, well Iâm just going to break if I carry on trying to do it this way.
And for me, one of the things that we need to try and support in the world is people holding on to power, supporting them to feel the toll that is taking on them⊠And once you can feel that I think that really helps you connect with the sense of, âI want to distribute this more. I donât want to be holding all of this to myself.â And I remember that there were key moments, really beautiful moments⊠along our journey where I would suddenly find myself in, say, consent decision making or a strategy meeting with a circle where I was no longer holding power. Everybody had a right to object to what we were doing. Everybody had a responsibility to try and find the right answer. And I noticed that we came up with a solution or a way forward that I would never have thought of.. That was never going to come into my brain. And even if I had been facilitating the meeting, in the old way I think I would have been facilitating to get to the solution that I thought I could see⊠we wouldnât have got to this actually much better solutionâŠ.
Yeah. Itâs interesting you mentioned something that is this burden of power⊠the issue of people holding onto power. I see it sometimes in two ways, like on one hand it could be Iâm holding onto power because Iâm addicted to it or I really like the feeling of being powerful. But thereâs also the other alternative, the more positive alternative, which is Iâm holding onto power because I care deeply about where this thing goes. And I think I know exactly where this thing needs to go. And a process, like you mentioned, of experiencing the moment when the organisation as a whole comes up with a path forward that is beyond your wildest dreams. And that is actually the right one⊠is liberating. In liberating I mean, from the perspective of someone who needs to hold power because he or she doesnât trust that the organisation can find a way forward. So this is really powerful.
I agree, and I also think this is relevant to the point you raised earlier about funders. Because I see with funders this huge and completely understandable sense of responsibility. You know, âweâve got access to these resources. And somehow, weâve got to make decisions that mean that these resources have the most possible impact⊠we can see the huge need.â Itâs a huge responsibility⊠Iâve rarely met a funder who doesnât care. Thatâs not the issue. Itâs that they care hugely about what to do with these resources. But I also see how difficult it is to let go of control. And for me personally, itâs what needs to happen⊠When the system starts to find the best use of the resources you get to transformational solutions. But⊠I really recognise how hard that is for funders.
Do you think itâs a leap of faith?
⊠Iâm very interested in working with funders because I feel their interest in working differently and I feel what pulls them back. So there is something about how do you give people a real taste of whatâs possible in a way that feels safe enough?⊠How can they trial this and then start to gain confidence, start to see whatâs possible. But I do think⊠with any piece that theyâre going to experiment with, there is this moment where they have to let go of control. And if they havenât properly done that, then the power that theyâre exercising, even if itâs not explicit, will distort the process and it will mean they probably wonât get the sort of outcome that theyâre looking for and that weâve just been talking about. So until youâve genuinely let go, even if youâre saying all the right things⊠it wonât genuinely make that shift a transformative change.
⊠Formally, itâs possible to let go of that control. But is it possible to completely isolate yourself from the perception of power or the perception of expectations that receivers might have from you?
Thatâs impossible. So when Iâm saying let go of control I donât mean let go of all power, because thereâs rank, thereâs all sorts of things that will still be operating in the system, whether youâre explicitly changing the way decisions are made or notâŠ
https://soundcloud.com/pedro-portela-168791914/sarah-mcadam-transition-network
Joining me today from the UK is Sarah McAdam from Transition Network. Transition Network is a charity established in the UK which works to inspire, encourage, connect, support and train communities worldwide as they self-organise around the Transition model.
Letâs start off by talking a little bit about Transition Network and how you became involved with it. And what the organisation, and this Transition model, is all about.
What Transition Network is, as you mentioned, itâs a small charity registered in the UK. Currently, thereâs 13 members of staff and 7 trustees, which is a requirement by law in the UK. And I first came to it actually even before 2013. Initially I was a trustee, which I did almost as a sort of part time contribution. I thought the organisation sounded interesting and I was agreeing to go to a board meeting maybe four or five times a year to give them a bit of a strategic steer. And since then, weâve really shifted the way we work. I joined the staff team, but we also completely shifted the way that we do our governance. So that role of a trustee is very different now.
And what is Transition all about for those three people in the world who havenât heard about Transition?
Oh no, Iâm sure itâs much, much more than three. So the Transition model is a model of, I would say, community resilience. Itâs â how does a community, how do people get together with their neighbors, to work out what they want to shift in their community and feel that they have the energy and the power to do it? So thatâs what the model is about. Started very much with a focus on the concept of peak oil and reducing our use of energy. But I would say itâs become more sophisticated and adapted as itâs spread around the world. And in each place, in each country, in each community, people are exploring for themselves â what are the key things that need to change to make the place where they live happier, healthier, more resilient, more sustainable? And that does look, of course, very different in very different places. But I think some of the values and principles apply across the whole movement.
The Transition movement or the Transition network, not the charity, but the actual global network â is an incredible story of how something that started off as an idea in a small town in the U.K. became very quickly a trans-local international network with Hubs all around the world and in many cities in many countries. I was personally involved in a couple of initiatives here in Portugal.
Yeah, it was something that spread, I would say, virally, according to where people went, where people saw the films, where they got access to the resources. And for me, thatâs one of the joys of the movement â to see how itâs spread, but then also been adapted in different places. And we have a number of Hubs, as you mentioned. So groups of people in a particular territory that support Transition in that country, or maybe for the people who speak that language. And one of the areas where weâre really exploring different forms of governance is across that network of Hubs. Because itâs very important to us that those Hubs are not controlled from one place. Theyâre self-managing, theyâre self-organising. But how do they come together to collaborate? Thatâs one of the questions for us.
Letâs talk about that. So when did your organisation, Transition Network the charity, which has this fundamental role of providing the scaffolding and support for the whole movement around the world. When did you decide to invest in governance? And Iâm using the word invest purposefully. So itâs not only financial investment, but also time commitment of the people involved â sitting together and saying, âWeâre going to think differently on how weâre going to work togetherâ. Can you tell us the story of that?
Yes, I would say that the small charity, the organisation and the bigger movement was interested right from the start about how people, how groups work together. I mean, itâs pretty fundamental when youâre thinking about how to get together with your neighbors. Itâs fundamental to the movement to find good ways of working together. And for me, thatâs what governance is ultimately about. Itâs â how do we come together in a group, agree on a shared endeavor, some common purpose that weâre trying to achieve together, and then find good ways to make decisions, to allocate resources, to be with each other, to resolve conflict or respond to conflict.
So I would say that weâve been interested in that right from the start. And then as the international network of Hubs developed, I would say that there was quite an interesting challenge that arose from there. An interesting and useful challenge. This is just my perception. Iâm sure different people would have different ways of telling the story, but I would say at the beginning Transition Network the little organisation, the charity, was maybe a bit careless about how we worked with those Hubs. I think we absolutely recognised that they needed to be self-managing and making their own decisions. But I think we were maybe a little unconscious in the way that we were using our power, the power that we were wielding because we were an organisation with some resources, because we were seen, you know, we were quite a visible part of the movement. So often the way we told the story had extra weight. And I think we became aware of that and people rightly questioned, challenged us a bit about that. And we started experimenting in the Hubs group with consent decision making, which draws from sociocracy. And I would say that initially it was that response of â âwe want to be working in a different way that makes power more visible and then supports it to flow and to be distributed across the systemâ.
And then at the same time, Transition Network, the little organisation was, I would say, struggling with how we should work. We had a sort of technically hierarchical structure. We werenât very hierarchical in the way we operated. But we had a board of trustees who, in the legal system that we work in, were in charge of our strategy and the staff were just there to carry out the strategy. And we knew that wasnât real in terms of how we worked. So we experimented with various things. We struggled. And I think this relates to what you were just saying about investment. I would say up until 2016, we tried to deal with that a little bit on the margins of the work we were trying to do in the world. You know, we were trying to organise ourselves, but we didnât have enough time to pay attention to it. And in 2016, we realised that this wasnât good enough. It wasnât helping us to do the work we needed to do. And at that point we decided to invest properly, and we were very lucky that we found a funder who was also interested in our experiment and was prepared to give us, not huge funding, but a bit of support to help us invest time, and to find people who could help us explore how we wanted our governance to change.
You mentioned that in the beginning you were a little bit careless with the Hubs. And you mentioned even there was the question of the power that your organisation was wielding unconsciously. Just because it started there, youâve mobilised the resources and I guess the money for some initiatives. Could we spend five minutes talking about that phase? Because I think thatâs an issue that interests both funders and grantees. People who are in a position to fund some of these movements, but also people who are on the receiving end of these funds. Understanding how these power dynamics or this friction eventually between funders and recipients of funds could be interesting⊠and how this leads them to the governance conversation.
Yes. I would say it was in the early days. We werenât particularly operating as a channel for funding, and that probably in itself brought some friction. We were managing to secure some funding for our organisation. And of course, partly that was because of what we were doing as an organisation. But probably just as much it was about the excitement of the movement. You know, that was partly, of course, what funders were responding to and interested in was whatâs happening in these different communities around the world. So I think there was a piece there where maybe we were a little complacent about the fact that actually some of these resources were coming to us almost on the backs of the work that was being done in a distributed grassroots network.
I mean I say complacent⊠I think we thought about it quite a lot. I think one of the enemies of all of this, you know, trying to do work in a way that is healthy and thoughtful is the busyness, isnât it? So we were a busy, small team desperately trying to respond to all these different needs and potential and demands.
And I think that's the moment where it's so good to just pause and think. Where are resources coming from? Who's impacted by this? Who's getting a say in the decision making? Which voices are being heard? Which are not part of the process yet? And what can we do about that? -
And I think for a while, sort of inevitably I guess, I think we made a lot of assumptions and we didnât even realise we were making assumptions.
And Iâm really conscious that coming from the UK with our whole history of colonialism â there we are yet again making those sort of assumptions that how we see the world is how everybody else is experiencing the world. Itâs so dangerous and itâs so easy to do. So I think for me, that was one of the things that we had to come to a realisation about. We were helped in that by some really constructive challenge from other people in other parts of the system.
Yeah, when it comes to governance I like to think of how quickly we fall back to the usual archetypes of ways of organising. Itâs a very innocent process, a very unconscious process, probably part of the collective unconscious of Jung. And how quickly we fall back to the traditional models of governance and decision making, which are part of our unconscious. But that in our case, weâre both in Europe, so we were both brought up in this culture and how much this is informing everything we do in terms of decision making and sense making and meaning making, right?
Yes.
So then, OK, flash forward â what happened then in 2016? What was the process? Walk us through this adventure that you started.
Well, we knew that we were interested in sociocracy in particular because weâd experienced a bit of consent decision making. And I donât know about you but for me, the moment I experienced that I felt a sort of tingling in my body of âthereâs something different hereâ. This is a different way of a group coming to a decision that feels like for once weâre properly listening to the collective intelligence. Weâre properly creating a space for us to find something that will work well enough for all of us. So we already had that excitement and that interest.
We found a team to help us, and they were a team from France called UniversitĂ© du Nous. So âUniversity of Usâ. And they had a lot of experience of sociocracy and holacracy, which is a different model, but some similarities. And they also had lots of other tools at their disposal and a lot of experienceâŠWe did a sort of action learning process â they gave us a little menu of different ways that you can organize⊠They talked to us about the concept of a safety framework.
These are the sorts of things that a group needs to know about itself to know how its governance works. Some basic things that unless you know, then actually you keep falling into the same traps. Such as, how do people join this group? How do people leave this group? What expectations do we have about how we work together? How do we make decisions? What are the roles that people are playing?... How does this work in your organization now? And what would you like to change about it?... -
We tried little experiments in various project groups trying out working in a sociocratic circle, trying out some of the things that they were offering us. We also did some sessions altogether as a team⊠We have trustees who have legal responsibility for the organisation, and it was very important for us that they were part of the process. We didnât want this to be a situation where the staff team were finding a whole new culture and a new way of working. And then we still had trustees above us who had a different culture. That was a recipe for disaster. So we did all sorts of little two-day sessions, three day sessions with this team over a couple of years. It was quite a long process, including, I would say, some things that might surprise people. We did quite a lot of movement exercises, as a group, learning how to move almost like birds flocking. You know, when you have the murmuration of swallows or starlings. That movement where sometimes youâre in a leadership role, youâre moving the group forward, sometimes youâre following others and the leadership flows around the group. So getting that sense of how leadership could be something really different from what weâd experienced traditionally. We did music sessions⊠improvising music together as another way of building that sense of âhow do I listen to this group and respond to the group, but also feel that I can bring my own creativity into what weâre doing together?â
That makes a lot of sense. And itâs, of course, completely aligned with the values around Transition and the values of â mind and body and heart. I wonder, how did the people in the organisation respond to these hints or suggestions that there are other ways of knowing and other ways of perceiving that are not necessarily mental, rational? That are embodied or somatic.
Well, as you say, thatâs always been quite a strong belief within the Transition movement. So it was something that was already part of our culture. And I think that helped us a lot that we werenât starting from zero. Weâd already done quite a lot of work on a culture that was trying to balance being and doing, balance relationships with output. So I would say that people were very receptive to it.
I think all of us, at different points, had moments where we struggled. I mean, Iâm not going to pretend it was a process where it all flowed smoothly and we ended up agreeing easily on how we were going to change our governance model. So there were moments, I would say, for all of us where we felt frustrated â this was taking a long time. Guilty, you know, we needed to be out there in the world doing things. Was it OK for us to be spending time looking inwardly at how we work? We had to process that a bit. And sometimes we had to accept that this was a time where we had something to deliver. We needed to prioritise that for a bit. But we needed to commit to coming back to this piece that was about âhow do we work?â. Not letting that go. Because I think we did have a strong sense that there was a potential for it to unlock something very important for us.
Did you have an endgame in sight? Meaning when you were in the difficult parts of this process â did you know that⊠this will come to an end eventually, and we know what that end is.
Yes, weâd given ourselves two years to experiment, and then to design a new governance model, and to move to that new governance model⊠I mean, we werenât dogmatic about it. We thought, âWell, if it really doesnât work, weâll have to go backwardsâ. But our idea was, we want to find a way to work in a way that isnât hierarchical. So we want to create a new model thatâs a flat structure. But also one that will give us more of an ability as an organisation to respond to whatâs happening in the wider movement, in the wider world â to be more responsive. So not so rigid.
And also we knew that one of the things we were doing as an organisation before this was we were spending endless time in meetings. All of the whole team, because all of our work, everything that any of us did related to what everybody else was doing. You know, of course it did, nothing was really standalone.
We didn't want to have a completely dictatorial structure where we followed the instructions of one person or a group of managers. So the only way we knew how to cope with that was to constantly have meetings where everybody came. And we'd talk about it and we'd go around in circles and we'd keep finding that the interrelationship of everything was too complex and we didn't know which bit to start with. So we knew we needed to do something about that. -
We felt that we werenât being⊠I always wonder about the word efficient because I think it has a sort of connotation of⊠an efficient corporate body. But we knew we werenât being efficient in terms of our time. We wanted to know that the time that we were spending was actually delivering some impact in the world, not going round and round in circles within the organisation. So that was one of the key things that we were saying. We need to find a model that gives us more clarity about who will be making decisions about what sort of stuff. And it doesnât have to be, everybody will make all the decisions about everything.
And did you find that model? The million dollar question.
Of course we didnât find the perfect model because that will never happen, I donât think. But by 2017 we were designing a model that we thought would work for us. And in 2018, we made the leap. Because one of the things that we found is that there comes a point where working in two systems just is not good for your health or your sanity. So there came a point where we were experimenting so much we said, now we need to shift. And the whole organisation needs to move into this new model. So we called it shared governance. Thatâs a term that UniversitĂ© du Nous use. And we created a system of circles and roles and clarity about decision making that draws heavily on sociocracy but has elements of our existing culture, and some of the things that feel particularly important about the movement and about our organisation.
So we donât follow exactly the model of sociocracy, but weâre doing some very similar stuff. And key to that is that itâs an evolutionary model.
What we said when we were trying to design it was it doesn't have to be perfect. We don't have to find all the answers. We need something that's good enough for now, safe enough to try - and we'll move into that model. And what we've got to make sure then is that the model's got the capacity to change. -
One of the things that I remember finding really helpful was when Guillame, who was the person who was helping us from UniversitĂ© du Nous,⊠said to me; âas soon as you move into this model you will find things wrong with it. And thatâs exactly what should happen. Then the tensions will come up and then youâll see what needs to change.â So that reassurance you donât need to try and think ahead and predict everything that will be needed because you just need to create a model thatâs got the capacity to shift as needs change.
To evolve, to become alive. Practically speaking now â can you give us some examples of how this shared governance model works right now? And how is it different from what you previously had in terms of flow of power? And what do you think would be the next evolutionary mutation?
So some of the key elements of it⊠One really fundamental piece early on was that we created a single circle. We call it the Primary Circle, which is the circle that takes care of the strategy, the purpose of the organisation, and its governance. And that circle is open to any member of the staff who would like to join it, and most people did. We didnât insist on people joining it, but we made it available to any member of the staff who wanted to join, and to the trustees. So rather than having this fundamental hierarchy in the system â the group that holds equivalent power to decide what needs to shift in terms of our purpose and our governance includes everybody who wants to be part of it, and has got the capacity to be part of it.
So thatâs a pretty big change. Itâs actually not a change that the legal system in the UK is capable of recognising, for a charity. So we still have these trustees whoâve got legal responsibility, but they made a commitment that they would exercise that responsibility through this collective system, that they wouldnât sit outside the system and exercise that power. So thatâs really significant. And then as part of that⊠we really defined âwhatâs our purpose as an organisation?â We spent quite a lot of time thinking about that, feeling about that, exploring that with the wider movement, getting feedback, listening to the feedback. And that has become then the thing that steers us. So in all our decisions, in all our different ways of working â weâre constantly thinking, aligning to âhow does this best serve the purpose of the organisation?â Thatâs our compass. And for me, thereâs something there about how that enables a lot more trust. That because weâve spent time knowing what it is weâre trying to achieve⊠I donât need to know what this personâs doing and what that circle are doing. I can trust that weâre all aligned to this purpose, and I also trust that if a real tension arises between us we have a way of processing it.
We created this idea that there are roles in the system. So rather than having a team where people have fixed jobs where you stay forever. âWe recruited you to be in this role and youâre going to stay in this role.â We created a system of âletâs name all the different roles that people play in our systemâ, knowing that often some of the invisible roles are ones that hold a lot of power⊠Theyâre not official in the structure chart, but itâs actually a role that somebody takes, might use a lot of power, exercise a lot of power, or sometimes will exercise a lot of responsibility, but without any recognition. And that was a really interesting piece to see. Well whoâs spending a lot of time investing in the relationships in the organisation and supporting the health of the organisation? But thatâs not visible on the structure chart. And actually, if thatâs a role, letâs name it as a role and make sure weâve put it somewhere in the system.
And thereâs a much clearer idea now that people will move between roles. This is all part of the evolution of the system. At any given time I might be holding 2, 3, 4 roles in the system. But theyâre not my identity in the organisation. Theyâre the things that Iâm doing at the moment to help serve our purpose. At various points I might be asked to step out of a role because it makes sense for somebody else to go in there. I might be asked to hand over something else. I might be asked to take on something else. And all the time guided by, âwhat best serves our purposeâ, rather than this idea that Iâm fixed in this role and Iâm the only person that can hold it. And seeing the health of roles shifting around the system. And I want to be honest and say, thatâs probably something weâve found quite difficult. You know, I think weâre getting much better at it. But it is very easy for people to just get embedded in a role, and to build up knowledge, and to feel nobody else can do this, and for the team to feel nobody else could do that. But weâre really trying to shift our thinking and recognise that there are some roles that have very specific skills attached, but thereâs an awful lot that can be done in different ways by different people. That actually having that flexibility really supports us to pivot as an organisation, as we see things⊠that the needs are changing, or our priorities are changing.
Yeah, that must have been a very interesting step⊠Identifying the invisible roles and maybe even uncovering that some of these invisible roles are key to how the whole organisation actually works.
It really was⊠It was particularly interesting for me personally because, until we made the shift, I was holding this role of Delivery Director. And that role managed everybody else, all the other members of staff. And what we realised⊠I think I had already been feeling the discomfort of that role, but also the power of that role. That was a role that weâd added lots of different elements to⊠It was the role that had a lot of control over resources, and a lot of control over how peopleâs time was spent⊠I tended to work in a very collaborative way with people. But still, it was me that was the point of connection that would help see what needed to happen, and make it happen across the system. And I think, for me, one of the most exciting things we did was to disentangle all the stuff that weâd put onto that role and see that it could be done by different people in different ways⊠I was doing a lot of coaching and support. But did it make sense for that to be done by the same person who was also making decisions about money? It didnât need to be. That actually we could distribute these leadership responsibilities in a much more transparent way. And you know, the reality was I couldnât have carried on doing that job, it was becoming impossible and a bottleneck in the system. And suddenly by bringing more people in it opened up new energies and new ideas.
Yeah, and itâs usually how people end up burning themselves out⊠by accumulating all of these rolesâŠ
I have a slightly more personal question about this process of picking apart all of these roles that are concentrated around a single node in the network. Because some people might think that this is actually a process of stripping away power from your position. And of course, no matter how much we work on our own personal development and our own capacity to see ourselves, you know, disconnected from the organisation. Thereâs always probably some fear that may come with this process of picking yourself apart and decentralising yourself from the organisation, right?⊠In the process of unbecoming this central node â does it bring up feelings of uncertainty or insecurity?
⊠There were definite moments of insecurity. I think ⊠there were definite moments where I struggled to let go of control⊠We talked about a posture that you need to learn to work in this way. Thereâs a culture as a group that needs to shift, but also for each of us individually thereâs a new posture, a new way of behaving, that we need to learn. And thereâs lots of times where itâs not comfortable because itâs not familiar⊠How I grew up and how I worked in other organisations taught me exactly the opposite of the posture that I think is needed in this sort of system. So for me a key bit was about letting go of control. And there were moments when I could feel the sort of message in my brain of âIâm not sure that this person can do it. I know how to do it. Is it safe to let it go to somebody else?â And also, I guess, a piece about my identity⊠My identity is to be a leader in this organisation. What is it if Iâm part of a circle where I donât have any more of a claim to be a leader than anyone else whoâs sharing in these responsibilities? I have to say for me personally, it was so exciting that that really helped me. And I think also the fact that I could feel how completely unsustainable my old job was, that really helped me as well. That sense of, well Iâm just going to break if I carry on trying to do it this way.
And for me, one of the things that we need to try and support in the world is people holding on to power, supporting them to feel the toll that is taking on them⊠And once you can feel that I think that really helps you connect with the sense of, âI want to distribute this more. I donât want to be holding all of this to myself.â And I remember that there were key moments, really beautiful moments⊠along our journey where I would suddenly find myself in, say, consent decision making or a strategy meeting with a circle where I was no longer holding power. Everybody had a right to object to what we were doing. Everybody had a responsibility to try and find the right answer. And I noticed that we came up with a solution or a way forward that I would never have thought of.. That was never going to come into my brain. And even if I had been facilitating the meeting, in the old way I think I would have been facilitating to get to the solution that I thought I could see⊠we wouldnât have got to this actually much better solutionâŠ.
Yeah. Itâs interesting you mentioned something that is this burden of power⊠the issue of people holding onto power. I see it sometimes in two ways, like on one hand it could be Iâm holding onto power because Iâm addicted to it or I really like the feeling of being powerful. But thereâs also the other alternative, the more positive alternative, which is Iâm holding onto power because I care deeply about where this thing goes. And I think I know exactly where this thing needs to go. And a process, like you mentioned, of experiencing the moment when the organisation as a whole comes up with a path forward that is beyond your wildest dreams. And that is actually the right one⊠is liberating. In liberating I mean, from the perspective of someone who needs to hold power because he or she doesnât trust that the organisation can find a way forward. So this is really powerful.
I agree, and I also think this is relevant to the point you raised earlier about funders. Because I see with funders this huge and completely understandable sense of responsibility. You know, âweâve got access to these resources. And somehow, weâve got to make decisions that mean that these resources have the most possible impact⊠we can see the huge need.â Itâs a huge responsibility⊠Iâve rarely met a funder who doesnât care. Thatâs not the issue. Itâs that they care hugely about what to do with these resources. But I also see how difficult it is to let go of control. And for me personally, itâs what needs to happen⊠When the system starts to find the best use of the resources you get to transformational solutions. But⊠I really recognise how hard that is for funders.
Do you think itâs a leap of faith?
⊠Iâm very interested in working with funders because I feel their interest in working differently and I feel what pulls them back. So there is something about how do you give people a real taste of whatâs possible in a way that feels safe enough?⊠How can they trial this and then start to gain confidence, start to see whatâs possible. But I do think⊠with any piece that theyâre going to experiment with, there is this moment where they have to let go of control. And if they havenât properly done that, then the power that theyâre exercising, even if itâs not explicit, will distort the process and it will mean they probably wonât get the sort of outcome that theyâre looking for and that weâve just been talking about. So until youâve genuinely let go, even if youâre saying all the right things⊠it wonât genuinely make that shift a transformative change.
⊠Formally, itâs possible to let go of that control. But is it possible to completely isolate yourself from the perception of power or the perception of expectations that receivers might have from you?
Thatâs impossible. So when Iâm saying let go of control I donât mean let go of all power, because thereâs rank, thereâs all sorts of things that will still be operating in the system, whether youâre explicitly changing the way decisions are made or notâŠ
... for me when you're thinking about governance - culture and individual posture is as important as the structures and processes. Because for me the thing that makes it possible to shift to healthy power, it's not about saying power doesn't exist, but it's about how do we name it? How do we make it visible? How do we name what's going on? You know where we see, "I think I might be having an influence here that is probably not a healthy influence? How do I talk about that? How do I invite feedback? How do I encourage people to trust that they can give me feedback and they won't be punished for it? And how do I really train myself to listen to the feedback?â -
https://soundcloud.com/pedro-portela-168791914/sarah-mcadam-transition-network
Joining me today from the UK is Sarah McAdam from Transition Network. Transition Network is a charity established in the UK which works to inspire, encourage, connect, support and train communities worldwide as they self-organise around the Transition model.
Letâs start off by talking a little bit about Transition Network and how you became involved with it. And what the organisation, and this Transition model, is all about.
What Transition Network is, as you mentioned, itâs a small charity registered in the UK. Currently, thereâs 13 members of staff and 7 trustees, which is a requirement by law in the UK. And I first came to it actually even before 2013. Initially I was a trustee, which I did almost as a sort of part time contribution. I thought the organisation sounded interesting and I was agreeing to go to a board meeting maybe four or five times a year to give them a bit of a strategic steer. And since then, weâve really shifted the way we work. I joined the staff team, but we also completely shifted the way that we do our governance. So that role of a trustee is very different now.
And what is Transition all about for those three people in the world who havenât heard about Transition?
Oh no, Iâm sure itâs much, much more than three. So the Transition model is a model of, I would say, community resilience. Itâs â how does a community, how do people get together with their neighbors, to work out what they want to shift in their community and feel that they have the energy and the power to do it? So thatâs what the model is about. Started very much with a focus on the concept of peak oil and reducing our use of energy. But I would say itâs become more sophisticated and adapted as itâs spread around the world. And in each place, in each country, in each community, people are exploring for themselves â what are the key things that need to change to make the place where they live happier, healthier, more resilient, more sustainable? And that does look, of course, very different in very different places. But I think some of the values and principles apply across the whole movement.
The Transition movement or the Transition network, not the charity, but the actual global network â is an incredible story of how something that started off as an idea in a small town in the U.K. became very quickly a trans-local international network with Hubs all around the world and in many cities in many countries. I was personally involved in a couple of initiatives here in Portugal.
Yeah, it was something that spread, I would say, virally, according to where people went, where people saw the films, where they got access to the resources. And for me, thatâs one of the joys of the movement â to see how itâs spread, but then also been adapted in different places. And we have a number of Hubs, as you mentioned. So groups of people in a particular territory that support Transition in that country, or maybe for the people who speak that language. And one of the areas where weâre really exploring different forms of governance is across that network of Hubs. Because itâs very important to us that those Hubs are not controlled from one place. Theyâre self-managing, theyâre self-organising. But how do they come together to collaborate? Thatâs one of the questions for us.
Letâs talk about that. So when did your organisation, Transition Network the charity, which has this fundamental role of providing the scaffolding and support for the whole movement around the world. When did you decide to invest in governance? And Iâm using the word invest purposefully. So itâs not only financial investment, but also time commitment of the people involved â sitting together and saying, âWeâre going to think differently on how weâre going to work togetherâ. Can you tell us the story of that?
Yes, I would say that the small charity, the organisation and the bigger movement was interested right from the start about how people, how groups work together. I mean, itâs pretty fundamental when youâre thinking about how to get together with your neighbors. Itâs fundamental to the movement to find good ways of working together. And for me, thatâs what governance is ultimately about. Itâs â how do we come together in a group, agree on a shared endeavor, some common purpose that weâre trying to achieve together, and then find good ways to make decisions, to allocate resources, to be with each other, to resolve conflict or respond to conflict.
So I would say that weâve been interested in that right from the start. And then as the international network of Hubs developed, I would say that there was quite an interesting challenge that arose from there. An interesting and useful challenge. This is just my perception. Iâm sure different people would have different ways of telling the story, but I would say at the beginning Transition Network the little organisation, the charity, was maybe a bit careless about how we worked with those Hubs. I think we absolutely recognised that they needed to be self-managing and making their own decisions. But I think we were maybe a little unconscious in the way that we were using our power, the power that we were wielding because we were an organisation with some resources, because we were seen, you know, we were quite a visible part of the movement. So often the way we told the story had extra weight. And I think we became aware of that and people rightly questioned, challenged us a bit about that. And we started experimenting in the Hubs group with consent decision making, which draws from sociocracy. And I would say that initially it was that response of â âwe want to be working in a different way that makes power more visible and then supports it to flow and to be distributed across the systemâ.
And then at the same time, Transition Network, the little organisation was, I would say, struggling with how we should work. We had a sort of technically hierarchical structure. We werenât very hierarchical in the way we operated. But we had a board of trustees who, in the legal system that we work in, were in charge of our strategy and the staff were just there to carry out the strategy. And we knew that wasnât real in terms of how we worked. So we experimented with various things. We struggled. And I think this relates to what you were just saying about investment. I would say up until 2016, we tried to deal with that a little bit on the margins of the work we were trying to do in the world. You know, we were trying to organise ourselves, but we didnât have enough time to pay attention to it. And in 2016, we realised that this wasnât good enough. It wasnât helping us to do the work we needed to do. And at that point we decided to invest properly, and we were very lucky that we found a funder who was also interested in our experiment and was prepared to give us, not huge funding, but a bit of support to help us invest time, and to find people who could help us explore how we wanted our governance to change.
You mentioned that in the beginning you were a little bit careless with the Hubs. And you mentioned even there was the question of the power that your organisation was wielding unconsciously. Just because it started there, youâve mobilised the resources and I guess the money for some initiatives. Could we spend five minutes talking about that phase? Because I think thatâs an issue that interests both funders and grantees. People who are in a position to fund some of these movements, but also people who are on the receiving end of these funds. Understanding how these power dynamics or this friction eventually between funders and recipients of funds could be interesting⊠and how this leads them to the governance conversation.
Yes. I would say it was in the early days. We werenât particularly operating as a channel for funding, and that probably in itself brought some friction. We were managing to secure some funding for our organisation. And of course, partly that was because of what we were doing as an organisation. But probably just as much it was about the excitement of the movement. You know, that was partly, of course, what funders were responding to and interested in was whatâs happening in these different communities around the world. So I think there was a piece there where maybe we were a little complacent about the fact that actually some of these resources were coming to us almost on the backs of the work that was being done in a distributed grassroots network.
I mean I say complacent⊠I think we thought about it quite a lot. I think one of the enemies of all of this, you know, trying to do work in a way that is healthy and thoughtful is the busyness, isnât it? So we were a busy, small team desperately trying to respond to all these different needs and potential and demands.
And I think that's the moment where it's so good to just pause and think. Where are resources coming from? Who's impacted by this? Who's getting a say in the decision making? Which voices are being heard? Which are not part of the process yet? And what can we do about that? -
And I think for a while, sort of inevitably I guess, I think we made a lot of assumptions and we didnât even realise we were making assumptions.
And Iâm really conscious that coming from the UK with our whole history of colonialism â there we are yet again making those sort of assumptions that how we see the world is how everybody else is experiencing the world. Itâs so dangerous and itâs so easy to do. So I think for me, that was one of the things that we had to come to a realisation about. We were helped in that by some really constructive challenge from other people in other parts of the system.
Yeah, when it comes to governance I like to think of how quickly we fall back to the usual archetypes of ways of organising. Itâs a very innocent process, a very unconscious process, probably part of the collective unconscious of Jung. And how quickly we fall back to the traditional models of governance and decision making, which are part of our unconscious. But that in our case, weâre both in Europe, so we were both brought up in this culture and how much this is informing everything we do in terms of decision making and sense making and meaning making, right?
Yes.
So then, OK, flash forward â what happened then in 2016? What was the process? Walk us through this adventure that you started.
Well, we knew that we were interested in sociocracy in particular because weâd experienced a bit of consent decision making. And I donât know about you but for me, the moment I experienced that I felt a sort of tingling in my body of âthereâs something different hereâ. This is a different way of a group coming to a decision that feels like for once weâre properly listening to the collective intelligence. Weâre properly creating a space for us to find something that will work well enough for all of us. So we already had that excitement and that interest.
We found a team to help us, and they were a team from France called UniversitĂ© du Nous. So âUniversity of Usâ. And they had a lot of experience of sociocracy and holacracy, which is a different model, but some similarities. And they also had lots of other tools at their disposal and a lot of experienceâŠWe did a sort of action learning process â they gave us a little menu of different ways that you can organize⊠They talked to us about the concept of a safety framework.
These are the sorts of things that a group needs to know about itself to know how its governance works. Some basic things that unless you know, then actually you keep falling into the same traps. Such as, how do people join this group? How do people leave this group? What expectations do we have about how we work together? How do we make decisions? What are the roles that people are playing?... How does this work in your organization now? And what would you like to change about it?... -
We tried little experiments in various project groups trying out working in a sociocratic circle, trying out some of the things that they were offering us. We also did some sessions altogether as a team⊠We have trustees who have legal responsibility for the organisation, and it was very important for us that they were part of the process. We didnât want this to be a situation where the staff team were finding a whole new culture and a new way of working. And then we still had trustees above us who had a different culture. That was a recipe for disaster. So we did all sorts of little two-day sessions, three day sessions with this team over a couple of years. It was quite a long process, including, I would say, some things that might surprise people. We did quite a lot of movement exercises, as a group, learning how to move almost like birds flocking. You know, when you have the murmuration of swallows or starlings. That movement where sometimes youâre in a leadership role, youâre moving the group forward, sometimes youâre following others and the leadership flows around the group. So getting that sense of how leadership could be something really different from what weâd experienced traditionally. We did music sessions⊠improvising music together as another way of building that sense of âhow do I listen to this group and respond to the group, but also feel that I can bring my own creativity into what weâre doing together?â
That makes a lot of sense. And itâs, of course, completely aligned with the values around Transition and the values of â mind and body and heart. I wonder, how did the people in the organisation respond to these hints or suggestions that there are other ways of knowing and other ways of perceiving that are not necessarily mental, rational? That are embodied or somatic.
Well, as you say, thatâs always been quite a strong belief within the Transition movement. So it was something that was already part of our culture. And I think that helped us a lot that we werenât starting from zero. Weâd already done quite a lot of work on a culture that was trying to balance being and doing, balance relationships with output. So I would say that people were very receptive to it.
I think all of us, at different points, had moments where we struggled. I mean, Iâm not going to pretend it was a process where it all flowed smoothly and we ended up agreeing easily on how we were going to change our governance model. So there were moments, I would say, for all of us where we felt frustrated â this was taking a long time. Guilty, you know, we needed to be out there in the world doing things. Was it OK for us to be spending time looking inwardly at how we work? We had to process that a bit. And sometimes we had to accept that this was a time where we had something to deliver. We needed to prioritise that for a bit. But we needed to commit to coming back to this piece that was about âhow do we work?â. Not letting that go. Because I think we did have a strong sense that there was a potential for it to unlock something very important for us.
Did you have an endgame in sight? Meaning when you were in the difficult parts of this process â did you know that⊠this will come to an end eventually, and we know what that end is.
Yes, weâd given ourselves two years to experiment, and then to design a new governance model, and to move to that new governance model⊠I mean, we werenât dogmatic about it. We thought, âWell, if it really doesnât work, weâll have to go backwardsâ. But our idea was, we want to find a way to work in a way that isnât hierarchical. So we want to create a new model thatâs a flat structure. But also one that will give us more of an ability as an organisation to respond to whatâs happening in the wider movement, in the wider world â to be more responsive. So not so rigid.
And also we knew that one of the things we were doing as an organisation before this was we were spending endless time in meetings. All of the whole team, because all of our work, everything that any of us did related to what everybody else was doing. You know, of course it did, nothing was really standalone.
We didn't want to have a completely dictatorial structure where we followed the instructions of one person or a group of managers. So the only way we knew how to cope with that was to constantly have meetings where everybody came. And we'd talk about it and we'd go around in circles and we'd keep finding that the interrelationship of everything was too complex and we didn't know which bit to start with. So we knew we needed to do something about that. -
We felt that we werenât being⊠I always wonder about the word efficient because I think it has a sort of connotation of⊠an efficient corporate body. But we knew we werenât being efficient in terms of our time. We wanted to know that the time that we were spending was actually delivering some impact in the world, not going round and round in circles within the organisation. So that was one of the key things that we were saying. We need to find a model that gives us more clarity about who will be making decisions about what sort of stuff. And it doesnât have to be, everybody will make all the decisions about everything.
And did you find that model? The million dollar question.
Of course we didnât find the perfect model because that will never happen, I donât think. But by 2017 we were designing a model that we thought would work for us. And in 2018, we made the leap. Because one of the things that we found is that there comes a point where working in two systems just is not good for your health or your sanity. So there came a point where we were experimenting so much we said, now we need to shift. And the whole organisation needs to move into this new model. So we called it shared governance. Thatâs a term that UniversitĂ© du Nous use. And we created a system of circles and roles and clarity about decision making that draws heavily on sociocracy but has elements of our existing culture, and some of the things that feel particularly important about the movement and about our organisation.
So we donât follow exactly the model of sociocracy, but weâre doing some very similar stuff. And key to that is that itâs an evolutionary model.
What we said when we were trying to design it was it doesn't have to be perfect. We don't have to find all the answers. We need something that's good enough for now, safe enough to try - and we'll move into that model. And what we've got to make sure then is that the model's got the capacity to change. -
One of the things that I remember finding really helpful was when Guillame, who was the person who was helping us from UniversitĂ© du Nous,⊠said to me; âas soon as you move into this model you will find things wrong with it. And thatâs exactly what should happen. Then the tensions will come up and then youâll see what needs to change.â So that reassurance you donât need to try and think ahead and predict everything that will be needed because you just need to create a model thatâs got the capacity to shift as needs change.
To evolve, to become alive. Practically speaking now â can you give us some examples of how this shared governance model works right now? And how is it different from what you previously had in terms of flow of power? And what do you think would be the next evolutionary mutation?
So some of the key elements of it⊠One really fundamental piece early on was that we created a single circle. We call it the Primary Circle, which is the circle that takes care of the strategy, the purpose of the organisation, and its governance. And that circle is open to any member of the staff who would like to join it, and most people did. We didnât insist on people joining it, but we made it available to any member of the staff who wanted to join, and to the trustees. So rather than having this fundamental hierarchy in the system â the group that holds equivalent power to decide what needs to shift in terms of our purpose and our governance includes everybody who wants to be part of it, and has got the capacity to be part of it.
So thatâs a pretty big change. Itâs actually not a change that the legal system in the UK is capable of recognising, for a charity. So we still have these trustees whoâve got legal responsibility, but they made a commitment that they would exercise that responsibility through this collective system, that they wouldnât sit outside the system and exercise that power. So thatâs really significant. And then as part of that⊠we really defined âwhatâs our purpose as an organisation?â We spent quite a lot of time thinking about that, feeling about that, exploring that with the wider movement, getting feedback, listening to the feedback. And that has become then the thing that steers us. So in all our decisions, in all our different ways of working â weâre constantly thinking, aligning to âhow does this best serve the purpose of the organisation?â Thatâs our compass. And for me, thereâs something there about how that enables a lot more trust. That because weâve spent time knowing what it is weâre trying to achieve⊠I donât need to know what this personâs doing and what that circle are doing. I can trust that weâre all aligned to this purpose, and I also trust that if a real tension arises between us we have a way of processing it.
We created this idea that there are roles in the system. So rather than having a team where people have fixed jobs where you stay forever. âWe recruited you to be in this role and youâre going to stay in this role.â We created a system of âletâs name all the different roles that people play in our systemâ, knowing that often some of the invisible roles are ones that hold a lot of power⊠Theyâre not official in the structure chart, but itâs actually a role that somebody takes, might use a lot of power, exercise a lot of power, or sometimes will exercise a lot of responsibility, but without any recognition. And that was a really interesting piece to see. Well whoâs spending a lot of time investing in the relationships in the organisation and supporting the health of the organisation? But thatâs not visible on the structure chart. And actually, if thatâs a role, letâs name it as a role and make sure weâve put it somewhere in the system.
And thereâs a much clearer idea now that people will move between roles. This is all part of the evolution of the system. At any given time I might be holding 2, 3, 4 roles in the system. But theyâre not my identity in the organisation. Theyâre the things that Iâm doing at the moment to help serve our purpose. At various points I might be asked to step out of a role because it makes sense for somebody else to go in there. I might be asked to hand over something else. I might be asked to take on something else. And all the time guided by, âwhat best serves our purposeâ, rather than this idea that Iâm fixed in this role and Iâm the only person that can hold it. And seeing the health of roles shifting around the system. And I want to be honest and say, thatâs probably something weâve found quite difficult. You know, I think weâre getting much better at it. But it is very easy for people to just get embedded in a role, and to build up knowledge, and to feel nobody else can do this, and for the team to feel nobody else could do that. But weâre really trying to shift our thinking and recognise that there are some roles that have very specific skills attached, but thereâs an awful lot that can be done in different ways by different people. That actually having that flexibility really supports us to pivot as an organisation, as we see things⊠that the needs are changing, or our priorities are changing.
Yeah, that must have been a very interesting step⊠Identifying the invisible roles and maybe even uncovering that some of these invisible roles are key to how the whole organisation actually works.
It really was⊠It was particularly interesting for me personally because, until we made the shift, I was holding this role of Delivery Director. And that role managed everybody else, all the other members of staff. And what we realised⊠I think I had already been feeling the discomfort of that role, but also the power of that role. That was a role that weâd added lots of different elements to⊠It was the role that had a lot of control over resources, and a lot of control over how peopleâs time was spent⊠I tended to work in a very collaborative way with people. But still, it was me that was the point of connection that would help see what needed to happen, and make it happen across the system. And I think, for me, one of the most exciting things we did was to disentangle all the stuff that weâd put onto that role and see that it could be done by different people in different ways⊠I was doing a lot of coaching and support. But did it make sense for that to be done by the same person who was also making decisions about money? It didnât need to be. That actually we could distribute these leadership responsibilities in a much more transparent way. And you know, the reality was I couldnât have carried on doing that job, it was becoming impossible and a bottleneck in the system. And suddenly by bringing more people in it opened up new energies and new ideas.
Yeah, and itâs usually how people end up burning themselves out⊠by accumulating all of these rolesâŠ
I have a slightly more personal question about this process of picking apart all of these roles that are concentrated around a single node in the network. Because some people might think that this is actually a process of stripping away power from your position. And of course, no matter how much we work on our own personal development and our own capacity to see ourselves, you know, disconnected from the organisation. Thereâs always probably some fear that may come with this process of picking yourself apart and decentralising yourself from the organisation, right?⊠In the process of unbecoming this central node â does it bring up feelings of uncertainty or insecurity?
⊠There were definite moments of insecurity. I think ⊠there were definite moments where I struggled to let go of control⊠We talked about a posture that you need to learn to work in this way. Thereâs a culture as a group that needs to shift, but also for each of us individually thereâs a new posture, a new way of behaving, that we need to learn. And thereâs lots of times where itâs not comfortable because itâs not familiar⊠How I grew up and how I worked in other organisations taught me exactly the opposite of the posture that I think is needed in this sort of system. So for me a key bit was about letting go of control. And there were moments when I could feel the sort of message in my brain of âIâm not sure that this person can do it. I know how to do it. Is it safe to let it go to somebody else?â And also, I guess, a piece about my identity⊠My identity is to be a leader in this organisation. What is it if Iâm part of a circle where I donât have any more of a claim to be a leader than anyone else whoâs sharing in these responsibilities? I have to say for me personally, it was so exciting that that really helped me. And I think also the fact that I could feel how completely unsustainable my old job was, that really helped me as well. That sense of, well Iâm just going to break if I carry on trying to do it this way.
And for me, one of the things that we need to try and support in the world is people holding on to power, supporting them to feel the toll that is taking on them⊠And once you can feel that I think that really helps you connect with the sense of, âI want to distribute this more. I donât want to be holding all of this to myself.â And I remember that there were key moments, really beautiful moments⊠along our journey where I would suddenly find myself in, say, consent decision making or a strategy meeting with a circle where I was no longer holding power. Everybody had a right to object to what we were doing. Everybody had a responsibility to try and find the right answer. And I noticed that we came up with a solution or a way forward that I would never have thought of.. That was never going to come into my brain. And even if I had been facilitating the meeting, in the old way I think I would have been facilitating to get to the solution that I thought I could see⊠we wouldnât have got to this actually much better solutionâŠ.
Yeah. Itâs interesting you mentioned something that is this burden of power⊠the issue of people holding onto power. I see it sometimes in two ways, like on one hand it could be Iâm holding onto power because Iâm addicted to it or I really like the feeling of being powerful. But thereâs also the other alternative, the more positive alternative, which is Iâm holding onto power because I care deeply about where this thing goes. And I think I know exactly where this thing needs to go. And a process, like you mentioned, of experiencing the moment when the organisation as a whole comes up with a path forward that is beyond your wildest dreams. And that is actually the right one⊠is liberating. In liberating I mean, from the perspective of someone who needs to hold power because he or she doesnât trust that the organisation can find a way forward. So this is really powerful.
I agree, and I also think this is relevant to the point you raised earlier about funders. Because I see with funders this huge and completely understandable sense of responsibility. You know, âweâve got access to these resources. And somehow, weâve got to make decisions that mean that these resources have the most possible impact⊠we can see the huge need.â Itâs a huge responsibility⊠Iâve rarely met a funder who doesnât care. Thatâs not the issue. Itâs that they care hugely about what to do with these resources. But I also see how difficult it is to let go of control. And for me personally, itâs what needs to happen⊠When the system starts to find the best use of the resources you get to transformational solutions. But⊠I really recognise how hard that is for funders.
Do you think itâs a leap of faith?
⊠Iâm very interested in working with funders because I feel their interest in working differently and I feel what pulls them back. So there is something about how do you give people a real taste of whatâs possible in a way that feels safe enough?⊠How can they trial this and then start to gain confidence, start to see whatâs possible. But I do think⊠with any piece that theyâre going to experiment with, there is this moment where they have to let go of control. And if they havenât properly done that, then the power that theyâre exercising, even if itâs not explicit, will distort the process and it will mean they probably wonât get the sort of outcome that theyâre looking for and that weâve just been talking about. So until youâve genuinely let go, even if youâre saying all the right things⊠it wonât genuinely make that shift a transformative change.
⊠Formally, itâs possible to let go of that control. But is it possible to completely isolate yourself from the perception of power or the perception of expectations that receivers might have from you?
Thatâs impossible. So when Iâm saying let go of control I donât mean let go of all power, because thereâs rank, thereâs all sorts of things that will still be operating in the system, whether youâre explicitly changing the way decisions are made or notâŠ
... for me when you're thinking about governance - culture and individual posture is as important as the structures and processes. Because for me the thing that makes it possible to shift to healthy power, it's not about saying power doesn't exist, but it's about how do we name it? How do we make it visible? How do we name what's going on? You know where we see, "I think I might be having an influence here that is probably not a healthy influence? How do I talk about that? How do I invite feedback? How do I encourage people to trust that they can give me feedback and they won't be punished for it? And how do I really train myself to listen to the feedback?â -
âŠOne of the big things that we always say is a key part of doing shared governance well is having curiosity. So when something comes up, whether itâs an unexpected tension in the system, whether itâs an objection to a decision that you thought was going to be a really straightforward decision⊠Whether itâs feedback that feels a bit uncomfortable. The piece about âhow do I cultivate a sense of instead of defending myself, and proving that itâs wrong, and overcoming it. How do I cultivate this sense of, Oh, thatâs interesting. Whatâs going on there? Why is the system telling me this?â It doesnât mean that everybody who gives you feedback is right. But how can you be interested in whatâs come up for them and why itâs come up?
Yeah, a lot of how and why questions instead of what.
Iâm curious what you make of this⊠I believe that working with governance within the organisations that support movements⊠Be it charities like Transition Network or even funders⊠I believe that this is actually a leverage point or something that can have and can propagate impact in the various different areas social movements are struggling. Be it climate change, social justice, peace building, you name it. Governance is almost like a thread that ties all of these groups together. Because itâs always a matter of organising. Itâs always a matter of how we show up togetherâŠ
I wonder if you share this hypothesis that working on governance, or at least hosting conversations on governance and going through this process like you did â at the level of funders, at the level of charities, at the level of formal organisations â can actually propagate to civil society, can actually then propagate to providing other models of how conflict is addressed in communities? Eventually to the scale of how conflict between larger communities and even nations are addressed. Or is it just my utopia?
⊠So for me, governance is about how we work together, how we make decisions, how we distribute power and resources at every level of scale. So from within my family to within a group, within a network, an organisation, as you say, at regional, national, international level. For me⊠lots of us at lots of different levels of scale are currently doing that in ways that seem to me to be deeply flawed. Unhealthy, destructive, disconnecting. Disconnecting where the power is held from where the impacts are felt. And for me, thatâs a fundamental flaw⊠youâre not bringing together accountability, responsibility. Where is the risk? Where is the impact? If the right voices arenât involved in decisions and shaping of what weâre doing together as human beings, then youâll come up with deeply flawed solutions. You wonât see the solutions that could really be transformative. They wonât even be visible. And there will be all sorts of reasons why people will feel unable to shiftâŠ
https://soundcloud.com/pedro-portela-168791914/sarah-mcadam-transition-network
Joining me today from the UK is Sarah McAdam from Transition Network. Transition Network is a charity established in the UK which works to inspire, encourage, connect, support and train communities worldwide as they self-organise around the Transition model.
Letâs start off by talking a little bit about Transition Network and how you became involved with it. And what the organisation, and this Transition model, is all about.
What Transition Network is, as you mentioned, itâs a small charity registered in the UK. Currently, thereâs 13 members of staff and 7 trustees, which is a requirement by law in the UK. And I first came to it actually even before 2013. Initially I was a trustee, which I did almost as a sort of part time contribution. I thought the organisation sounded interesting and I was agreeing to go to a board meeting maybe four or five times a year to give them a bit of a strategic steer. And since then, weâve really shifted the way we work. I joined the staff team, but we also completely shifted the way that we do our governance. So that role of a trustee is very different now.
And what is Transition all about for those three people in the world who havenât heard about Transition?
Oh no, Iâm sure itâs much, much more than three. So the Transition model is a model of, I would say, community resilience. Itâs â how does a community, how do people get together with their neighbors, to work out what they want to shift in their community and feel that they have the energy and the power to do it? So thatâs what the model is about. Started very much with a focus on the concept of peak oil and reducing our use of energy. But I would say itâs become more sophisticated and adapted as itâs spread around the world. And in each place, in each country, in each community, people are exploring for themselves â what are the key things that need to change to make the place where they live happier, healthier, more resilient, more sustainable? And that does look, of course, very different in very different places. But I think some of the values and principles apply across the whole movement.
The Transition movement or the Transition network, not the charity, but the actual global network â is an incredible story of how something that started off as an idea in a small town in the U.K. became very quickly a trans-local international network with Hubs all around the world and in many cities in many countries. I was personally involved in a couple of initiatives here in Portugal.
Yeah, it was something that spread, I would say, virally, according to where people went, where people saw the films, where they got access to the resources. And for me, thatâs one of the joys of the movement â to see how itâs spread, but then also been adapted in different places. And we have a number of Hubs, as you mentioned. So groups of people in a particular territory that support Transition in that country, or maybe for the people who speak that language. And one of the areas where weâre really exploring different forms of governance is across that network of Hubs. Because itâs very important to us that those Hubs are not controlled from one place. Theyâre self-managing, theyâre self-organising. But how do they come together to collaborate? Thatâs one of the questions for us.
Letâs talk about that. So when did your organisation, Transition Network the charity, which has this fundamental role of providing the scaffolding and support for the whole movement around the world. When did you decide to invest in governance? And Iâm using the word invest purposefully. So itâs not only financial investment, but also time commitment of the people involved â sitting together and saying, âWeâre going to think differently on how weâre going to work togetherâ. Can you tell us the story of that?
Yes, I would say that the small charity, the organisation and the bigger movement was interested right from the start about how people, how groups work together. I mean, itâs pretty fundamental when youâre thinking about how to get together with your neighbors. Itâs fundamental to the movement to find good ways of working together. And for me, thatâs what governance is ultimately about. Itâs â how do we come together in a group, agree on a shared endeavor, some common purpose that weâre trying to achieve together, and then find good ways to make decisions, to allocate resources, to be with each other, to resolve conflict or respond to conflict.
So I would say that weâve been interested in that right from the start. And then as the international network of Hubs developed, I would say that there was quite an interesting challenge that arose from there. An interesting and useful challenge. This is just my perception. Iâm sure different people would have different ways of telling the story, but I would say at the beginning Transition Network the little organisation, the charity, was maybe a bit careless about how we worked with those Hubs. I think we absolutely recognised that they needed to be self-managing and making their own decisions. But I think we were maybe a little unconscious in the way that we were using our power, the power that we were wielding because we were an organisation with some resources, because we were seen, you know, we were quite a visible part of the movement. So often the way we told the story had extra weight. And I think we became aware of that and people rightly questioned, challenged us a bit about that. And we started experimenting in the Hubs group with consent decision making, which draws from sociocracy. And I would say that initially it was that response of â âwe want to be working in a different way that makes power more visible and then supports it to flow and to be distributed across the systemâ.
And then at the same time, Transition Network, the little organisation was, I would say, struggling with how we should work. We had a sort of technically hierarchical structure. We werenât very hierarchical in the way we operated. But we had a board of trustees who, in the legal system that we work in, were in charge of our strategy and the staff were just there to carry out the strategy. And we knew that wasnât real in terms of how we worked. So we experimented with various things. We struggled. And I think this relates to what you were just saying about investment. I would say up until 2016, we tried to deal with that a little bit on the margins of the work we were trying to do in the world. You know, we were trying to organise ourselves, but we didnât have enough time to pay attention to it. And in 2016, we realised that this wasnât good enough. It wasnât helping us to do the work we needed to do. And at that point we decided to invest properly, and we were very lucky that we found a funder who was also interested in our experiment and was prepared to give us, not huge funding, but a bit of support to help us invest time, and to find people who could help us explore how we wanted our governance to change.
You mentioned that in the beginning you were a little bit careless with the Hubs. And you mentioned even there was the question of the power that your organisation was wielding unconsciously. Just because it started there, youâve mobilised the resources and I guess the money for some initiatives. Could we spend five minutes talking about that phase? Because I think thatâs an issue that interests both funders and grantees. People who are in a position to fund some of these movements, but also people who are on the receiving end of these funds. Understanding how these power dynamics or this friction eventually between funders and recipients of funds could be interesting⊠and how this leads them to the governance conversation.
Yes. I would say it was in the early days. We werenât particularly operating as a channel for funding, and that probably in itself brought some friction. We were managing to secure some funding for our organisation. And of course, partly that was because of what we were doing as an organisation. But probably just as much it was about the excitement of the movement. You know, that was partly, of course, what funders were responding to and interested in was whatâs happening in these different communities around the world. So I think there was a piece there where maybe we were a little complacent about the fact that actually some of these resources were coming to us almost on the backs of the work that was being done in a distributed grassroots network.
I mean I say complacent⊠I think we thought about it quite a lot. I think one of the enemies of all of this, you know, trying to do work in a way that is healthy and thoughtful is the busyness, isnât it? So we were a busy, small team desperately trying to respond to all these different needs and potential and demands.
And I think that's the moment where it's so good to just pause and think. Where are resources coming from? Who's impacted by this? Who's getting a say in the decision making? Which voices are being heard? Which are not part of the process yet? And what can we do about that? -
And I think for a while, sort of inevitably I guess, I think we made a lot of assumptions and we didnât even realise we were making assumptions.
And Iâm really conscious that coming from the UK with our whole history of colonialism â there we are yet again making those sort of assumptions that how we see the world is how everybody else is experiencing the world. Itâs so dangerous and itâs so easy to do. So I think for me, that was one of the things that we had to come to a realisation about. We were helped in that by some really constructive challenge from other people in other parts of the system.
Yeah, when it comes to governance I like to think of how quickly we fall back to the usual archetypes of ways of organising. Itâs a very innocent process, a very unconscious process, probably part of the collective unconscious of Jung. And how quickly we fall back to the traditional models of governance and decision making, which are part of our unconscious. But that in our case, weâre both in Europe, so we were both brought up in this culture and how much this is informing everything we do in terms of decision making and sense making and meaning making, right?
Yes.
So then, OK, flash forward â what happened then in 2016? What was the process? Walk us through this adventure that you started.
Well, we knew that we were interested in sociocracy in particular because weâd experienced a bit of consent decision making. And I donât know about you but for me, the moment I experienced that I felt a sort of tingling in my body of âthereâs something different hereâ. This is a different way of a group coming to a decision that feels like for once weâre properly listening to the collective intelligence. Weâre properly creating a space for us to find something that will work well enough for all of us. So we already had that excitement and that interest.
We found a team to help us, and they were a team from France called UniversitĂ© du Nous. So âUniversity of Usâ. And they had a lot of experience of sociocracy and holacracy, which is a different model, but some similarities. And they also had lots of other tools at their disposal and a lot of experienceâŠWe did a sort of action learning process â they gave us a little menu of different ways that you can organize⊠They talked to us about the concept of a safety framework.
These are the sorts of things that a group needs to know about itself to know how its governance works. Some basic things that unless you know, then actually you keep falling into the same traps. Such as, how do people join this group? How do people leave this group? What expectations do we have about how we work together? How do we make decisions? What are the roles that people are playing?... How does this work in your organization now? And what would you like to change about it?... -
We tried little experiments in various project groups trying out working in a sociocratic circle, trying out some of the things that they were offering us. We also did some sessions altogether as a team⊠We have trustees who have legal responsibility for the organisation, and it was very important for us that they were part of the process. We didnât want this to be a situation where the staff team were finding a whole new culture and a new way of working. And then we still had trustees above us who had a different culture. That was a recipe for disaster. So we did all sorts of little two-day sessions, three day sessions with this team over a couple of years. It was quite a long process, including, I would say, some things that might surprise people. We did quite a lot of movement exercises, as a group, learning how to move almost like birds flocking. You know, when you have the murmuration of swallows or starlings. That movement where sometimes youâre in a leadership role, youâre moving the group forward, sometimes youâre following others and the leadership flows around the group. So getting that sense of how leadership could be something really different from what weâd experienced traditionally. We did music sessions⊠improvising music together as another way of building that sense of âhow do I listen to this group and respond to the group, but also feel that I can bring my own creativity into what weâre doing together?â
That makes a lot of sense. And itâs, of course, completely aligned with the values around Transition and the values of â mind and body and heart. I wonder, how did the people in the organisation respond to these hints or suggestions that there are other ways of knowing and other ways of perceiving that are not necessarily mental, rational? That are embodied or somatic.
Well, as you say, thatâs always been quite a strong belief within the Transition movement. So it was something that was already part of our culture. And I think that helped us a lot that we werenât starting from zero. Weâd already done quite a lot of work on a culture that was trying to balance being and doing, balance relationships with output. So I would say that people were very receptive to it.
I think all of us, at different points, had moments where we struggled. I mean, Iâm not going to pretend it was a process where it all flowed smoothly and we ended up agreeing easily on how we were going to change our governance model. So there were moments, I would say, for all of us where we felt frustrated â this was taking a long time. Guilty, you know, we needed to be out there in the world doing things. Was it OK for us to be spending time looking inwardly at how we work? We had to process that a bit. And sometimes we had to accept that this was a time where we had something to deliver. We needed to prioritise that for a bit. But we needed to commit to coming back to this piece that was about âhow do we work?â. Not letting that go. Because I think we did have a strong sense that there was a potential for it to unlock something very important for us.
Did you have an endgame in sight? Meaning when you were in the difficult parts of this process â did you know that⊠this will come to an end eventually, and we know what that end is.
Yes, weâd given ourselves two years to experiment, and then to design a new governance model, and to move to that new governance model⊠I mean, we werenât dogmatic about it. We thought, âWell, if it really doesnât work, weâll have to go backwardsâ. But our idea was, we want to find a way to work in a way that isnât hierarchical. So we want to create a new model thatâs a flat structure. But also one that will give us more of an ability as an organisation to respond to whatâs happening in the wider movement, in the wider world â to be more responsive. So not so rigid.
And also we knew that one of the things we were doing as an organisation before this was we were spending endless time in meetings. All of the whole team, because all of our work, everything that any of us did related to what everybody else was doing. You know, of course it did, nothing was really standalone.
We didn't want to have a completely dictatorial structure where we followed the instructions of one person or a group of managers. So the only way we knew how to cope with that was to constantly have meetings where everybody came. And we'd talk about it and we'd go around in circles and we'd keep finding that the interrelationship of everything was too complex and we didn't know which bit to start with. So we knew we needed to do something about that. -
We felt that we werenât being⊠I always wonder about the word efficient because I think it has a sort of connotation of⊠an efficient corporate body. But we knew we werenât being efficient in terms of our time. We wanted to know that the time that we were spending was actually delivering some impact in the world, not going round and round in circles within the organisation. So that was one of the key things that we were saying. We need to find a model that gives us more clarity about who will be making decisions about what sort of stuff. And it doesnât have to be, everybody will make all the decisions about everything.
And did you find that model? The million dollar question.
Of course we didnât find the perfect model because that will never happen, I donât think. But by 2017 we were designing a model that we thought would work for us. And in 2018, we made the leap. Because one of the things that we found is that there comes a point where working in two systems just is not good for your health or your sanity. So there came a point where we were experimenting so much we said, now we need to shift. And the whole organisation needs to move into this new model. So we called it shared governance. Thatâs a term that UniversitĂ© du Nous use. And we created a system of circles and roles and clarity about decision making that draws heavily on sociocracy but has elements of our existing culture, and some of the things that feel particularly important about the movement and about our organisation.
So we donât follow exactly the model of sociocracy, but weâre doing some very similar stuff. And key to that is that itâs an evolutionary model.
What we said when we were trying to design it was it doesn't have to be perfect. We don't have to find all the answers. We need something that's good enough for now, safe enough to try - and we'll move into that model. And what we've got to make sure then is that the model's got the capacity to change. -
One of the things that I remember finding really helpful was when Guillame, who was the person who was helping us from UniversitĂ© du Nous,⊠said to me; âas soon as you move into this model you will find things wrong with it. And thatâs exactly what should happen. Then the tensions will come up and then youâll see what needs to change.â So that reassurance you donât need to try and think ahead and predict everything that will be needed because you just need to create a model thatâs got the capacity to shift as needs change.
To evolve, to become alive. Practically speaking now â can you give us some examples of how this shared governance model works right now? And how is it different from what you previously had in terms of flow of power? And what do you think would be the next evolutionary mutation?
So some of the key elements of it⊠One really fundamental piece early on was that we created a single circle. We call it the Primary Circle, which is the circle that takes care of the strategy, the purpose of the organisation, and its governance. And that circle is open to any member of the staff who would like to join it, and most people did. We didnât insist on people joining it, but we made it available to any member of the staff who wanted to join, and to the trustees. So rather than having this fundamental hierarchy in the system â the group that holds equivalent power to decide what needs to shift in terms of our purpose and our governance includes everybody who wants to be part of it, and has got the capacity to be part of it.
So thatâs a pretty big change. Itâs actually not a change that the legal system in the UK is capable of recognising, for a charity. So we still have these trustees whoâve got legal responsibility, but they made a commitment that they would exercise that responsibility through this collective system, that they wouldnât sit outside the system and exercise that power. So thatâs really significant. And then as part of that⊠we really defined âwhatâs our purpose as an organisation?â We spent quite a lot of time thinking about that, feeling about that, exploring that with the wider movement, getting feedback, listening to the feedback. And that has become then the thing that steers us. So in all our decisions, in all our different ways of working â weâre constantly thinking, aligning to âhow does this best serve the purpose of the organisation?â Thatâs our compass. And for me, thereâs something there about how that enables a lot more trust. That because weâve spent time knowing what it is weâre trying to achieve⊠I donât need to know what this personâs doing and what that circle are doing. I can trust that weâre all aligned to this purpose, and I also trust that if a real tension arises between us we have a way of processing it.
We created this idea that there are roles in the system. So rather than having a team where people have fixed jobs where you stay forever. âWe recruited you to be in this role and youâre going to stay in this role.â We created a system of âletâs name all the different roles that people play in our systemâ, knowing that often some of the invisible roles are ones that hold a lot of power⊠Theyâre not official in the structure chart, but itâs actually a role that somebody takes, might use a lot of power, exercise a lot of power, or sometimes will exercise a lot of responsibility, but without any recognition. And that was a really interesting piece to see. Well whoâs spending a lot of time investing in the relationships in the organisation and supporting the health of the organisation? But thatâs not visible on the structure chart. And actually, if thatâs a role, letâs name it as a role and make sure weâve put it somewhere in the system.
And thereâs a much clearer idea now that people will move between roles. This is all part of the evolution of the system. At any given time I might be holding 2, 3, 4 roles in the system. But theyâre not my identity in the organisation. Theyâre the things that Iâm doing at the moment to help serve our purpose. At various points I might be asked to step out of a role because it makes sense for somebody else to go in there. I might be asked to hand over something else. I might be asked to take on something else. And all the time guided by, âwhat best serves our purposeâ, rather than this idea that Iâm fixed in this role and Iâm the only person that can hold it. And seeing the health of roles shifting around the system. And I want to be honest and say, thatâs probably something weâve found quite difficult. You know, I think weâre getting much better at it. But it is very easy for people to just get embedded in a role, and to build up knowledge, and to feel nobody else can do this, and for the team to feel nobody else could do that. But weâre really trying to shift our thinking and recognise that there are some roles that have very specific skills attached, but thereâs an awful lot that can be done in different ways by different people. That actually having that flexibility really supports us to pivot as an organisation, as we see things⊠that the needs are changing, or our priorities are changing.
Yeah, that must have been a very interesting step⊠Identifying the invisible roles and maybe even uncovering that some of these invisible roles are key to how the whole organisation actually works.
It really was⊠It was particularly interesting for me personally because, until we made the shift, I was holding this role of Delivery Director. And that role managed everybody else, all the other members of staff. And what we realised⊠I think I had already been feeling the discomfort of that role, but also the power of that role. That was a role that weâd added lots of different elements to⊠It was the role that had a lot of control over resources, and a lot of control over how peopleâs time was spent⊠I tended to work in a very collaborative way with people. But still, it was me that was the point of connection that would help see what needed to happen, and make it happen across the system. And I think, for me, one of the most exciting things we did was to disentangle all the stuff that weâd put onto that role and see that it could be done by different people in different ways⊠I was doing a lot of coaching and support. But did it make sense for that to be done by the same person who was also making decisions about money? It didnât need to be. That actually we could distribute these leadership responsibilities in a much more transparent way. And you know, the reality was I couldnât have carried on doing that job, it was becoming impossible and a bottleneck in the system. And suddenly by bringing more people in it opened up new energies and new ideas.
Yeah, and itâs usually how people end up burning themselves out⊠by accumulating all of these rolesâŠ
I have a slightly more personal question about this process of picking apart all of these roles that are concentrated around a single node in the network. Because some people might think that this is actually a process of stripping away power from your position. And of course, no matter how much we work on our own personal development and our own capacity to see ourselves, you know, disconnected from the organisation. Thereâs always probably some fear that may come with this process of picking yourself apart and decentralising yourself from the organisation, right?⊠In the process of unbecoming this central node â does it bring up feelings of uncertainty or insecurity?
⊠There were definite moments of insecurity. I think ⊠there were definite moments where I struggled to let go of control⊠We talked about a posture that you need to learn to work in this way. Thereâs a culture as a group that needs to shift, but also for each of us individually thereâs a new posture, a new way of behaving, that we need to learn. And thereâs lots of times where itâs not comfortable because itâs not familiar⊠How I grew up and how I worked in other organisations taught me exactly the opposite of the posture that I think is needed in this sort of system. So for me a key bit was about letting go of control. And there were moments when I could feel the sort of message in my brain of âIâm not sure that this person can do it. I know how to do it. Is it safe to let it go to somebody else?â And also, I guess, a piece about my identity⊠My identity is to be a leader in this organisation. What is it if Iâm part of a circle where I donât have any more of a claim to be a leader than anyone else whoâs sharing in these responsibilities? I have to say for me personally, it was so exciting that that really helped me. And I think also the fact that I could feel how completely unsustainable my old job was, that really helped me as well. That sense of, well Iâm just going to break if I carry on trying to do it this way.
And for me, one of the things that we need to try and support in the world is people holding on to power, supporting them to feel the toll that is taking on them⊠And once you can feel that I think that really helps you connect with the sense of, âI want to distribute this more. I donât want to be holding all of this to myself.â And I remember that there were key moments, really beautiful moments⊠along our journey where I would suddenly find myself in, say, consent decision making or a strategy meeting with a circle where I was no longer holding power. Everybody had a right to object to what we were doing. Everybody had a responsibility to try and find the right answer. And I noticed that we came up with a solution or a way forward that I would never have thought of.. That was never going to come into my brain. And even if I had been facilitating the meeting, in the old way I think I would have been facilitating to get to the solution that I thought I could see⊠we wouldnât have got to this actually much better solutionâŠ.
Yeah. Itâs interesting you mentioned something that is this burden of power⊠the issue of people holding onto power. I see it sometimes in two ways, like on one hand it could be Iâm holding onto power because Iâm addicted to it or I really like the feeling of being powerful. But thereâs also the other alternative, the more positive alternative, which is Iâm holding onto power because I care deeply about where this thing goes. And I think I know exactly where this thing needs to go. And a process, like you mentioned, of experiencing the moment when the organisation as a whole comes up with a path forward that is beyond your wildest dreams. And that is actually the right one⊠is liberating. In liberating I mean, from the perspective of someone who needs to hold power because he or she doesnât trust that the organisation can find a way forward. So this is really powerful.
I agree, and I also think this is relevant to the point you raised earlier about funders. Because I see with funders this huge and completely understandable sense of responsibility. You know, âweâve got access to these resources. And somehow, weâve got to make decisions that mean that these resources have the most possible impact⊠we can see the huge need.â Itâs a huge responsibility⊠Iâve rarely met a funder who doesnât care. Thatâs not the issue. Itâs that they care hugely about what to do with these resources. But I also see how difficult it is to let go of control. And for me personally, itâs what needs to happen⊠When the system starts to find the best use of the resources you get to transformational solutions. But⊠I really recognise how hard that is for funders.
Do you think itâs a leap of faith?
⊠Iâm very interested in working with funders because I feel their interest in working differently and I feel what pulls them back. So there is something about how do you give people a real taste of whatâs possible in a way that feels safe enough?⊠How can they trial this and then start to gain confidence, start to see whatâs possible. But I do think⊠with any piece that theyâre going to experiment with, there is this moment where they have to let go of control. And if they havenât properly done that, then the power that theyâre exercising, even if itâs not explicit, will distort the process and it will mean they probably wonât get the sort of outcome that theyâre looking for and that weâve just been talking about. So until youâve genuinely let go, even if youâre saying all the right things⊠it wonât genuinely make that shift a transformative change.
⊠Formally, itâs possible to let go of that control. But is it possible to completely isolate yourself from the perception of power or the perception of expectations that receivers might have from you?
Thatâs impossible. So when Iâm saying let go of control I donât mean let go of all power, because thereâs rank, thereâs all sorts of things that will still be operating in the system, whether youâre explicitly changing the way decisions are made or notâŠ
... for me when you're thinking about governance - culture and individual posture is as important as the structures and processes. Because for me the thing that makes it possible to shift to healthy power, it's not about saying power doesn't exist, but it's about how do we name it? How do we make it visible? How do we name what's going on? You know where we see, "I think I might be having an influence here that is probably not a healthy influence? How do I talk about that? How do I invite feedback? How do I encourage people to trust that they can give me feedback and they won't be punished for it? And how do I really train myself to listen to the feedback?â -
âŠOne of the big things that we always say is a key part of doing shared governance well is having curiosity. So when something comes up, whether itâs an unexpected tension in the system, whether itâs an objection to a decision that you thought was going to be a really straightforward decision⊠Whether itâs feedback that feels a bit uncomfortable. The piece about âhow do I cultivate a sense of instead of defending myself, and proving that itâs wrong, and overcoming it. How do I cultivate this sense of, Oh, thatâs interesting. Whatâs going on there? Why is the system telling me this?â It doesnât mean that everybody who gives you feedback is right. But how can you be interested in whatâs come up for them and why itâs come up?
Yeah, a lot of how and why questions instead of what.
Iâm curious what you make of this⊠I believe that working with governance within the organisations that support movements⊠Be it charities like Transition Network or even funders⊠I believe that this is actually a leverage point or something that can have and can propagate impact in the various different areas social movements are struggling. Be it climate change, social justice, peace building, you name it. Governance is almost like a thread that ties all of these groups together. Because itâs always a matter of organising. Itâs always a matter of how we show up togetherâŠ
I wonder if you share this hypothesis that working on governance, or at least hosting conversations on governance and going through this process like you did â at the level of funders, at the level of charities, at the level of formal organisations â can actually propagate to civil society, can actually then propagate to providing other models of how conflict is addressed in communities? Eventually to the scale of how conflict between larger communities and even nations are addressed. Or is it just my utopia?
⊠So for me, governance is about how we work together, how we make decisions, how we distribute power and resources at every level of scale. So from within my family to within a group, within a network, an organisation, as you say, at regional, national, international level. For me⊠lots of us at lots of different levels of scale are currently doing that in ways that seem to me to be deeply flawed. Unhealthy, destructive, disconnecting. Disconnecting where the power is held from where the impacts are felt. And for me, thatâs a fundamental flaw⊠youâre not bringing together accountability, responsibility. Where is the risk? Where is the impact? If the right voices arenât involved in decisions and shaping of what weâre doing together as human beings, then youâll come up with deeply flawed solutions. You wonât see the solutions that could really be transformative. They wonât even be visible. And there will be all sorts of reasons why people will feel unable to shiftâŠ
The systems that we've got at the moment don't support us to shift. They support us to hold onto what we've got and to protect it... So for me, organisations who are working in this way, it's not just "is it helpful?" I think I'd put it even more strongly that it's necessary⊠Until we're looking at how we work there's a fundamental fault in what we're doing. That will keep showing up in what we put out in the world, it will just keep showing up and we won't have a way to notice that and adjust, which is what we need. -
https://soundcloud.com/pedro-portela-168791914/sarah-mcadam-transition-network
Joining me today from the UK is Sarah McAdam from Transition Network. Transition Network is a charity established in the UK which works to inspire, encourage, connect, support and train communities worldwide as they self-organise around the Transition model.
Letâs start off by talking a little bit about Transition Network and how you became involved with it. And what the organisation, and this Transition model, is all about.
What Transition Network is, as you mentioned, itâs a small charity registered in the UK. Currently, thereâs 13 members of staff and 7 trustees, which is a requirement by law in the UK. And I first came to it actually even before 2013. Initially I was a trustee, which I did almost as a sort of part time contribution. I thought the organisation sounded interesting and I was agreeing to go to a board meeting maybe four or five times a year to give them a bit of a strategic steer. And since then, weâve really shifted the way we work. I joined the staff team, but we also completely shifted the way that we do our governance. So that role of a trustee is very different now.
And what is Transition all about for those three people in the world who havenât heard about Transition?
Oh no, Iâm sure itâs much, much more than three. So the Transition model is a model of, I would say, community resilience. Itâs â how does a community, how do people get together with their neighbors, to work out what they want to shift in their community and feel that they have the energy and the power to do it? So thatâs what the model is about. Started very much with a focus on the concept of peak oil and reducing our use of energy. But I would say itâs become more sophisticated and adapted as itâs spread around the world. And in each place, in each country, in each community, people are exploring for themselves â what are the key things that need to change to make the place where they live happier, healthier, more resilient, more sustainable? And that does look, of course, very different in very different places. But I think some of the values and principles apply across the whole movement.
The Transition movement or the Transition network, not the charity, but the actual global network â is an incredible story of how something that started off as an idea in a small town in the U.K. became very quickly a trans-local international network with Hubs all around the world and in many cities in many countries. I was personally involved in a couple of initiatives here in Portugal.
Yeah, it was something that spread, I would say, virally, according to where people went, where people saw the films, where they got access to the resources. And for me, thatâs one of the joys of the movement â to see how itâs spread, but then also been adapted in different places. And we have a number of Hubs, as you mentioned. So groups of people in a particular territory that support Transition in that country, or maybe for the people who speak that language. And one of the areas where weâre really exploring different forms of governance is across that network of Hubs. Because itâs very important to us that those Hubs are not controlled from one place. Theyâre self-managing, theyâre self-organising. But how do they come together to collaborate? Thatâs one of the questions for us.
Letâs talk about that. So when did your organisation, Transition Network the charity, which has this fundamental role of providing the scaffolding and support for the whole movement around the world. When did you decide to invest in governance? And Iâm using the word invest purposefully. So itâs not only financial investment, but also time commitment of the people involved â sitting together and saying, âWeâre going to think differently on how weâre going to work togetherâ. Can you tell us the story of that?
Yes, I would say that the small charity, the organisation and the bigger movement was interested right from the start about how people, how groups work together. I mean, itâs pretty fundamental when youâre thinking about how to get together with your neighbors. Itâs fundamental to the movement to find good ways of working together. And for me, thatâs what governance is ultimately about. Itâs â how do we come together in a group, agree on a shared endeavor, some common purpose that weâre trying to achieve together, and then find good ways to make decisions, to allocate resources, to be with each other, to resolve conflict or respond to conflict.
So I would say that weâve been interested in that right from the start. And then as the international network of Hubs developed, I would say that there was quite an interesting challenge that arose from there. An interesting and useful challenge. This is just my perception. Iâm sure different people would have different ways of telling the story, but I would say at the beginning Transition Network the little organisation, the charity, was maybe a bit careless about how we worked with those Hubs. I think we absolutely recognised that they needed to be self-managing and making their own decisions. But I think we were maybe a little unconscious in the way that we were using our power, the power that we were wielding because we were an organisation with some resources, because we were seen, you know, we were quite a visible part of the movement. So often the way we told the story had extra weight. And I think we became aware of that and people rightly questioned, challenged us a bit about that. And we started experimenting in the Hubs group with consent decision making, which draws from sociocracy. And I would say that initially it was that response of â âwe want to be working in a different way that makes power more visible and then supports it to flow and to be distributed across the systemâ.
And then at the same time, Transition Network, the little organisation was, I would say, struggling with how we should work. We had a sort of technically hierarchical structure. We werenât very hierarchical in the way we operated. But we had a board of trustees who, in the legal system that we work in, were in charge of our strategy and the staff were just there to carry out the strategy. And we knew that wasnât real in terms of how we worked. So we experimented with various things. We struggled. And I think this relates to what you were just saying about investment. I would say up until 2016, we tried to deal with that a little bit on the margins of the work we were trying to do in the world. You know, we were trying to organise ourselves, but we didnât have enough time to pay attention to it. And in 2016, we realised that this wasnât good enough. It wasnât helping us to do the work we needed to do. And at that point we decided to invest properly, and we were very lucky that we found a funder who was also interested in our experiment and was prepared to give us, not huge funding, but a bit of support to help us invest time, and to find people who could help us explore how we wanted our governance to change.
You mentioned that in the beginning you were a little bit careless with the Hubs. And you mentioned even there was the question of the power that your organisation was wielding unconsciously. Just because it started there, youâve mobilised the resources and I guess the money for some initiatives. Could we spend five minutes talking about that phase? Because I think thatâs an issue that interests both funders and grantees. People who are in a position to fund some of these movements, but also people who are on the receiving end of these funds. Understanding how these power dynamics or this friction eventually between funders and recipients of funds could be interesting⊠and how this leads them to the governance conversation.
Yes. I would say it was in the early days. We werenât particularly operating as a channel for funding, and that probably in itself brought some friction. We were managing to secure some funding for our organisation. And of course, partly that was because of what we were doing as an organisation. But probably just as much it was about the excitement of the movement. You know, that was partly, of course, what funders were responding to and interested in was whatâs happening in these different communities around the world. So I think there was a piece there where maybe we were a little complacent about the fact that actually some of these resources were coming to us almost on the backs of the work that was being done in a distributed grassroots network.
I mean I say complacent⊠I think we thought about it quite a lot. I think one of the enemies of all of this, you know, trying to do work in a way that is healthy and thoughtful is the busyness, isnât it? So we were a busy, small team desperately trying to respond to all these different needs and potential and demands.
And I think that's the moment where it's so good to just pause and think. Where are resources coming from? Who's impacted by this? Who's getting a say in the decision making? Which voices are being heard? Which are not part of the process yet? And what can we do about that? -
And I think for a while, sort of inevitably I guess, I think we made a lot of assumptions and we didnât even realise we were making assumptions.
And Iâm really conscious that coming from the UK with our whole history of colonialism â there we are yet again making those sort of assumptions that how we see the world is how everybody else is experiencing the world. Itâs so dangerous and itâs so easy to do. So I think for me, that was one of the things that we had to come to a realisation about. We were helped in that by some really constructive challenge from other people in other parts of the system.
Yeah, when it comes to governance I like to think of how quickly we fall back to the usual archetypes of ways of organising. Itâs a very innocent process, a very unconscious process, probably part of the collective unconscious of Jung. And how quickly we fall back to the traditional models of governance and decision making, which are part of our unconscious. But that in our case, weâre both in Europe, so we were both brought up in this culture and how much this is informing everything we do in terms of decision making and sense making and meaning making, right?
Yes.
So then, OK, flash forward â what happened then in 2016? What was the process? Walk us through this adventure that you started.
Well, we knew that we were interested in sociocracy in particular because weâd experienced a bit of consent decision making. And I donât know about you but for me, the moment I experienced that I felt a sort of tingling in my body of âthereâs something different hereâ. This is a different way of a group coming to a decision that feels like for once weâre properly listening to the collective intelligence. Weâre properly creating a space for us to find something that will work well enough for all of us. So we already had that excitement and that interest.
We found a team to help us, and they were a team from France called UniversitĂ© du Nous. So âUniversity of Usâ. And they had a lot of experience of sociocracy and holacracy, which is a different model, but some similarities. And they also had lots of other tools at their disposal and a lot of experienceâŠWe did a sort of action learning process â they gave us a little menu of different ways that you can organize⊠They talked to us about the concept of a safety framework.
These are the sorts of things that a group needs to know about itself to know how its governance works. Some basic things that unless you know, then actually you keep falling into the same traps. Such as, how do people join this group? How do people leave this group? What expectations do we have about how we work together? How do we make decisions? What are the roles that people are playing?... How does this work in your organization now? And what would you like to change about it?... -
We tried little experiments in various project groups trying out working in a sociocratic circle, trying out some of the things that they were offering us. We also did some sessions altogether as a team⊠We have trustees who have legal responsibility for the organisation, and it was very important for us that they were part of the process. We didnât want this to be a situation where the staff team were finding a whole new culture and a new way of working. And then we still had trustees above us who had a different culture. That was a recipe for disaster. So we did all sorts of little two-day sessions, three day sessions with this team over a couple of years. It was quite a long process, including, I would say, some things that might surprise people. We did quite a lot of movement exercises, as a group, learning how to move almost like birds flocking. You know, when you have the murmuration of swallows or starlings. That movement where sometimes youâre in a leadership role, youâre moving the group forward, sometimes youâre following others and the leadership flows around the group. So getting that sense of how leadership could be something really different from what weâd experienced traditionally. We did music sessions⊠improvising music together as another way of building that sense of âhow do I listen to this group and respond to the group, but also feel that I can bring my own creativity into what weâre doing together?â
That makes a lot of sense. And itâs, of course, completely aligned with the values around Transition and the values of â mind and body and heart. I wonder, how did the people in the organisation respond to these hints or suggestions that there are other ways of knowing and other ways of perceiving that are not necessarily mental, rational? That are embodied or somatic.
Well, as you say, thatâs always been quite a strong belief within the Transition movement. So it was something that was already part of our culture. And I think that helped us a lot that we werenât starting from zero. Weâd already done quite a lot of work on a culture that was trying to balance being and doing, balance relationships with output. So I would say that people were very receptive to it.
I think all of us, at different points, had moments where we struggled. I mean, Iâm not going to pretend it was a process where it all flowed smoothly and we ended up agreeing easily on how we were going to change our governance model. So there were moments, I would say, for all of us where we felt frustrated â this was taking a long time. Guilty, you know, we needed to be out there in the world doing things. Was it OK for us to be spending time looking inwardly at how we work? We had to process that a bit. And sometimes we had to accept that this was a time where we had something to deliver. We needed to prioritise that for a bit. But we needed to commit to coming back to this piece that was about âhow do we work?â. Not letting that go. Because I think we did have a strong sense that there was a potential for it to unlock something very important for us.
Did you have an endgame in sight? Meaning when you were in the difficult parts of this process â did you know that⊠this will come to an end eventually, and we know what that end is.
Yes, weâd given ourselves two years to experiment, and then to design a new governance model, and to move to that new governance model⊠I mean, we werenât dogmatic about it. We thought, âWell, if it really doesnât work, weâll have to go backwardsâ. But our idea was, we want to find a way to work in a way that isnât hierarchical. So we want to create a new model thatâs a flat structure. But also one that will give us more of an ability as an organisation to respond to whatâs happening in the wider movement, in the wider world â to be more responsive. So not so rigid.
And also we knew that one of the things we were doing as an organisation before this was we were spending endless time in meetings. All of the whole team, because all of our work, everything that any of us did related to what everybody else was doing. You know, of course it did, nothing was really standalone.
We didn't want to have a completely dictatorial structure where we followed the instructions of one person or a group of managers. So the only way we knew how to cope with that was to constantly have meetings where everybody came. And we'd talk about it and we'd go around in circles and we'd keep finding that the interrelationship of everything was too complex and we didn't know which bit to start with. So we knew we needed to do something about that. -
We felt that we werenât being⊠I always wonder about the word efficient because I think it has a sort of connotation of⊠an efficient corporate body. But we knew we werenât being efficient in terms of our time. We wanted to know that the time that we were spending was actually delivering some impact in the world, not going round and round in circles within the organisation. So that was one of the key things that we were saying. We need to find a model that gives us more clarity about who will be making decisions about what sort of stuff. And it doesnât have to be, everybody will make all the decisions about everything.
And did you find that model? The million dollar question.
Of course we didnât find the perfect model because that will never happen, I donât think. But by 2017 we were designing a model that we thought would work for us. And in 2018, we made the leap. Because one of the things that we found is that there comes a point where working in two systems just is not good for your health or your sanity. So there came a point where we were experimenting so much we said, now we need to shift. And the whole organisation needs to move into this new model. So we called it shared governance. Thatâs a term that UniversitĂ© du Nous use. And we created a system of circles and roles and clarity about decision making that draws heavily on sociocracy but has elements of our existing culture, and some of the things that feel particularly important about the movement and about our organisation.
So we donât follow exactly the model of sociocracy, but weâre doing some very similar stuff. And key to that is that itâs an evolutionary model.
What we said when we were trying to design it was it doesn't have to be perfect. We don't have to find all the answers. We need something that's good enough for now, safe enough to try - and we'll move into that model. And what we've got to make sure then is that the model's got the capacity to change. -
One of the things that I remember finding really helpful was when Guillame, who was the person who was helping us from UniversitĂ© du Nous,⊠said to me; âas soon as you move into this model you will find things wrong with it. And thatâs exactly what should happen. Then the tensions will come up and then youâll see what needs to change.â So that reassurance you donât need to try and think ahead and predict everything that will be needed because you just need to create a model thatâs got the capacity to shift as needs change.
To evolve, to become alive. Practically speaking now â can you give us some examples of how this shared governance model works right now? And how is it different from what you previously had in terms of flow of power? And what do you think would be the next evolutionary mutation?
So some of the key elements of it⊠One really fundamental piece early on was that we created a single circle. We call it the Primary Circle, which is the circle that takes care of the strategy, the purpose of the organisation, and its governance. And that circle is open to any member of the staff who would like to join it, and most people did. We didnât insist on people joining it, but we made it available to any member of the staff who wanted to join, and to the trustees. So rather than having this fundamental hierarchy in the system â the group that holds equivalent power to decide what needs to shift in terms of our purpose and our governance includes everybody who wants to be part of it, and has got the capacity to be part of it.
So thatâs a pretty big change. Itâs actually not a change that the legal system in the UK is capable of recognising, for a charity. So we still have these trustees whoâve got legal responsibility, but they made a commitment that they would exercise that responsibility through this collective system, that they wouldnât sit outside the system and exercise that power. So thatâs really significant. And then as part of that⊠we really defined âwhatâs our purpose as an organisation?â We spent quite a lot of time thinking about that, feeling about that, exploring that with the wider movement, getting feedback, listening to the feedback. And that has become then the thing that steers us. So in all our decisions, in all our different ways of working â weâre constantly thinking, aligning to âhow does this best serve the purpose of the organisation?â Thatâs our compass. And for me, thereâs something there about how that enables a lot more trust. That because weâve spent time knowing what it is weâre trying to achieve⊠I donât need to know what this personâs doing and what that circle are doing. I can trust that weâre all aligned to this purpose, and I also trust that if a real tension arises between us we have a way of processing it.
We created this idea that there are roles in the system. So rather than having a team where people have fixed jobs where you stay forever. âWe recruited you to be in this role and youâre going to stay in this role.â We created a system of âletâs name all the different roles that people play in our systemâ, knowing that often some of the invisible roles are ones that hold a lot of power⊠Theyâre not official in the structure chart, but itâs actually a role that somebody takes, might use a lot of power, exercise a lot of power, or sometimes will exercise a lot of responsibility, but without any recognition. And that was a really interesting piece to see. Well whoâs spending a lot of time investing in the relationships in the organisation and supporting the health of the organisation? But thatâs not visible on the structure chart. And actually, if thatâs a role, letâs name it as a role and make sure weâve put it somewhere in the system.
And thereâs a much clearer idea now that people will move between roles. This is all part of the evolution of the system. At any given time I might be holding 2, 3, 4 roles in the system. But theyâre not my identity in the organisation. Theyâre the things that Iâm doing at the moment to help serve our purpose. At various points I might be asked to step out of a role because it makes sense for somebody else to go in there. I might be asked to hand over something else. I might be asked to take on something else. And all the time guided by, âwhat best serves our purposeâ, rather than this idea that Iâm fixed in this role and Iâm the only person that can hold it. And seeing the health of roles shifting around the system. And I want to be honest and say, thatâs probably something weâve found quite difficult. You know, I think weâre getting much better at it. But it is very easy for people to just get embedded in a role, and to build up knowledge, and to feel nobody else can do this, and for the team to feel nobody else could do that. But weâre really trying to shift our thinking and recognise that there are some roles that have very specific skills attached, but thereâs an awful lot that can be done in different ways by different people. That actually having that flexibility really supports us to pivot as an organisation, as we see things⊠that the needs are changing, or our priorities are changing.
Yeah, that must have been a very interesting step⊠Identifying the invisible roles and maybe even uncovering that some of these invisible roles are key to how the whole organisation actually works.
It really was⊠It was particularly interesting for me personally because, until we made the shift, I was holding this role of Delivery Director. And that role managed everybody else, all the other members of staff. And what we realised⊠I think I had already been feeling the discomfort of that role, but also the power of that role. That was a role that weâd added lots of different elements to⊠It was the role that had a lot of control over resources, and a lot of control over how peopleâs time was spent⊠I tended to work in a very collaborative way with people. But still, it was me that was the point of connection that would help see what needed to happen, and make it happen across the system. And I think, for me, one of the most exciting things we did was to disentangle all the stuff that weâd put onto that role and see that it could be done by different people in different ways⊠I was doing a lot of coaching and support. But did it make sense for that to be done by the same person who was also making decisions about money? It didnât need to be. That actually we could distribute these leadership responsibilities in a much more transparent way. And you know, the reality was I couldnât have carried on doing that job, it was becoming impossible and a bottleneck in the system. And suddenly by bringing more people in it opened up new energies and new ideas.
Yeah, and itâs usually how people end up burning themselves out⊠by accumulating all of these rolesâŠ
I have a slightly more personal question about this process of picking apart all of these roles that are concentrated around a single node in the network. Because some people might think that this is actually a process of stripping away power from your position. And of course, no matter how much we work on our own personal development and our own capacity to see ourselves, you know, disconnected from the organisation. Thereâs always probably some fear that may come with this process of picking yourself apart and decentralising yourself from the organisation, right?⊠In the process of unbecoming this central node â does it bring up feelings of uncertainty or insecurity?
⊠There were definite moments of insecurity. I think ⊠there were definite moments where I struggled to let go of control⊠We talked about a posture that you need to learn to work in this way. Thereâs a culture as a group that needs to shift, but also for each of us individually thereâs a new posture, a new way of behaving, that we need to learn. And thereâs lots of times where itâs not comfortable because itâs not familiar⊠How I grew up and how I worked in other organisations taught me exactly the opposite of the posture that I think is needed in this sort of system. So for me a key bit was about letting go of control. And there were moments when I could feel the sort of message in my brain of âIâm not sure that this person can do it. I know how to do it. Is it safe to let it go to somebody else?â And also, I guess, a piece about my identity⊠My identity is to be a leader in this organisation. What is it if Iâm part of a circle where I donât have any more of a claim to be a leader than anyone else whoâs sharing in these responsibilities? I have to say for me personally, it was so exciting that that really helped me. And I think also the fact that I could feel how completely unsustainable my old job was, that really helped me as well. That sense of, well Iâm just going to break if I carry on trying to do it this way.
And for me, one of the things that we need to try and support in the world is people holding on to power, supporting them to feel the toll that is taking on them⊠And once you can feel that I think that really helps you connect with the sense of, âI want to distribute this more. I donât want to be holding all of this to myself.â And I remember that there were key moments, really beautiful moments⊠along our journey where I would suddenly find myself in, say, consent decision making or a strategy meeting with a circle where I was no longer holding power. Everybody had a right to object to what we were doing. Everybody had a responsibility to try and find the right answer. And I noticed that we came up with a solution or a way forward that I would never have thought of.. That was never going to come into my brain. And even if I had been facilitating the meeting, in the old way I think I would have been facilitating to get to the solution that I thought I could see⊠we wouldnât have got to this actually much better solutionâŠ.
Yeah. Itâs interesting you mentioned something that is this burden of power⊠the issue of people holding onto power. I see it sometimes in two ways, like on one hand it could be Iâm holding onto power because Iâm addicted to it or I really like the feeling of being powerful. But thereâs also the other alternative, the more positive alternative, which is Iâm holding onto power because I care deeply about where this thing goes. And I think I know exactly where this thing needs to go. And a process, like you mentioned, of experiencing the moment when the organisation as a whole comes up with a path forward that is beyond your wildest dreams. And that is actually the right one⊠is liberating. In liberating I mean, from the perspective of someone who needs to hold power because he or she doesnât trust that the organisation can find a way forward. So this is really powerful.
I agree, and I also think this is relevant to the point you raised earlier about funders. Because I see with funders this huge and completely understandable sense of responsibility. You know, âweâve got access to these resources. And somehow, weâve got to make decisions that mean that these resources have the most possible impact⊠we can see the huge need.â Itâs a huge responsibility⊠Iâve rarely met a funder who doesnât care. Thatâs not the issue. Itâs that they care hugely about what to do with these resources. But I also see how difficult it is to let go of control. And for me personally, itâs what needs to happen⊠When the system starts to find the best use of the resources you get to transformational solutions. But⊠I really recognise how hard that is for funders.
Do you think itâs a leap of faith?
⊠Iâm very interested in working with funders because I feel their interest in working differently and I feel what pulls them back. So there is something about how do you give people a real taste of whatâs possible in a way that feels safe enough?⊠How can they trial this and then start to gain confidence, start to see whatâs possible. But I do think⊠with any piece that theyâre going to experiment with, there is this moment where they have to let go of control. And if they havenât properly done that, then the power that theyâre exercising, even if itâs not explicit, will distort the process and it will mean they probably wonât get the sort of outcome that theyâre looking for and that weâve just been talking about. So until youâve genuinely let go, even if youâre saying all the right things⊠it wonât genuinely make that shift a transformative change.
⊠Formally, itâs possible to let go of that control. But is it possible to completely isolate yourself from the perception of power or the perception of expectations that receivers might have from you?
Thatâs impossible. So when Iâm saying let go of control I donât mean let go of all power, because thereâs rank, thereâs all sorts of things that will still be operating in the system, whether youâre explicitly changing the way decisions are made or notâŠ
... for me when you're thinking about governance - culture and individual posture is as important as the structures and processes. Because for me the thing that makes it possible to shift to healthy power, it's not about saying power doesn't exist, but it's about how do we name it? How do we make it visible? How do we name what's going on? You know where we see, "I think I might be having an influence here that is probably not a healthy influence? How do I talk about that? How do I invite feedback? How do I encourage people to trust that they can give me feedback and they won't be punished for it? And how do I really train myself to listen to the feedback?â -
âŠOne of the big things that we always say is a key part of doing shared governance well is having curiosity. So when something comes up, whether itâs an unexpected tension in the system, whether itâs an objection to a decision that you thought was going to be a really straightforward decision⊠Whether itâs feedback that feels a bit uncomfortable. The piece about âhow do I cultivate a sense of instead of defending myself, and proving that itâs wrong, and overcoming it. How do I cultivate this sense of, Oh, thatâs interesting. Whatâs going on there? Why is the system telling me this?â It doesnât mean that everybody who gives you feedback is right. But how can you be interested in whatâs come up for them and why itâs come up?
Yeah, a lot of how and why questions instead of what.
Iâm curious what you make of this⊠I believe that working with governance within the organisations that support movements⊠Be it charities like Transition Network or even funders⊠I believe that this is actually a leverage point or something that can have and can propagate impact in the various different areas social movements are struggling. Be it climate change, social justice, peace building, you name it. Governance is almost like a thread that ties all of these groups together. Because itâs always a matter of organising. Itâs always a matter of how we show up togetherâŠ
I wonder if you share this hypothesis that working on governance, or at least hosting conversations on governance and going through this process like you did â at the level of funders, at the level of charities, at the level of formal organisations â can actually propagate to civil society, can actually then propagate to providing other models of how conflict is addressed in communities? Eventually to the scale of how conflict between larger communities and even nations are addressed. Or is it just my utopia?
⊠So for me, governance is about how we work together, how we make decisions, how we distribute power and resources at every level of scale. So from within my family to within a group, within a network, an organisation, as you say, at regional, national, international level. For me⊠lots of us at lots of different levels of scale are currently doing that in ways that seem to me to be deeply flawed. Unhealthy, destructive, disconnecting. Disconnecting where the power is held from where the impacts are felt. And for me, thatâs a fundamental flaw⊠youâre not bringing together accountability, responsibility. Where is the risk? Where is the impact? If the right voices arenât involved in decisions and shaping of what weâre doing together as human beings, then youâll come up with deeply flawed solutions. You wonât see the solutions that could really be transformative. They wonât even be visible. And there will be all sorts of reasons why people will feel unable to shiftâŠ
The systems that we've got at the moment don't support us to shift. They support us to hold onto what we've got and to protect it... So for me, organisations who are working in this way, it's not just "is it helpful?" I think I'd put it even more strongly that it's necessary⊠Until we're looking at how we work there's a fundamental fault in what we're doing. That will keep showing up in what we put out in the world, it will just keep showing up and we won't have a way to notice that and adjust, which is what we need. -
Itâs not about getting it right⊠For me, itâs about finding a way to take a step forward, whether itâs me as a person or the organization that Iâm part of. How do we take a step forward and hear the feedback and then see what needs to be adjusted? So that I have agency. I can be creative, but also⊠recognising that Iâm part of a bigger system, that I canât possibly know how what Iâm doing is going to land or make a difference. I can only know that by listening to the feedback.
⊠Iâm working with a collaboration in the UK at the moment where weâre talking about transformational governance because governance, in a way, is a neutral term. You know, thereâs lots of different ways we can do governanceâŠ
https://soundcloud.com/pedro-portela-168791914/sarah-mcadam-transition-network
Joining me today from the UK is Sarah McAdam from Transition Network. Transition Network is a charity established in the UK which works to inspire, encourage, connect, support and train communities worldwide as they self-organise around the Transition model.
Letâs start off by talking a little bit about Transition Network and how you became involved with it. And what the organisation, and this Transition model, is all about.
What Transition Network is, as you mentioned, itâs a small charity registered in the UK. Currently, thereâs 13 members of staff and 7 trustees, which is a requirement by law in the UK. And I first came to it actually even before 2013. Initially I was a trustee, which I did almost as a sort of part time contribution. I thought the organisation sounded interesting and I was agreeing to go to a board meeting maybe four or five times a year to give them a bit of a strategic steer. And since then, weâve really shifted the way we work. I joined the staff team, but we also completely shifted the way that we do our governance. So that role of a trustee is very different now.
And what is Transition all about for those three people in the world who havenât heard about Transition?
Oh no, Iâm sure itâs much, much more than three. So the Transition model is a model of, I would say, community resilience. Itâs â how does a community, how do people get together with their neighbors, to work out what they want to shift in their community and feel that they have the energy and the power to do it? So thatâs what the model is about. Started very much with a focus on the concept of peak oil and reducing our use of energy. But I would say itâs become more sophisticated and adapted as itâs spread around the world. And in each place, in each country, in each community, people are exploring for themselves â what are the key things that need to change to make the place where they live happier, healthier, more resilient, more sustainable? And that does look, of course, very different in very different places. But I think some of the values and principles apply across the whole movement.
The Transition movement or the Transition network, not the charity, but the actual global network â is an incredible story of how something that started off as an idea in a small town in the U.K. became very quickly a trans-local international network with Hubs all around the world and in many cities in many countries. I was personally involved in a couple of initiatives here in Portugal.
Yeah, it was something that spread, I would say, virally, according to where people went, where people saw the films, where they got access to the resources. And for me, thatâs one of the joys of the movement â to see how itâs spread, but then also been adapted in different places. And we have a number of Hubs, as you mentioned. So groups of people in a particular territory that support Transition in that country, or maybe for the people who speak that language. And one of the areas where weâre really exploring different forms of governance is across that network of Hubs. Because itâs very important to us that those Hubs are not controlled from one place. Theyâre self-managing, theyâre self-organising. But how do they come together to collaborate? Thatâs one of the questions for us.
Letâs talk about that. So when did your organisation, Transition Network the charity, which has this fundamental role of providing the scaffolding and support for the whole movement around the world. When did you decide to invest in governance? And Iâm using the word invest purposefully. So itâs not only financial investment, but also time commitment of the people involved â sitting together and saying, âWeâre going to think differently on how weâre going to work togetherâ. Can you tell us the story of that?
Yes, I would say that the small charity, the organisation and the bigger movement was interested right from the start about how people, how groups work together. I mean, itâs pretty fundamental when youâre thinking about how to get together with your neighbors. Itâs fundamental to the movement to find good ways of working together. And for me, thatâs what governance is ultimately about. Itâs â how do we come together in a group, agree on a shared endeavor, some common purpose that weâre trying to achieve together, and then find good ways to make decisions, to allocate resources, to be with each other, to resolve conflict or respond to conflict.
So I would say that weâve been interested in that right from the start. And then as the international network of Hubs developed, I would say that there was quite an interesting challenge that arose from there. An interesting and useful challenge. This is just my perception. Iâm sure different people would have different ways of telling the story, but I would say at the beginning Transition Network the little organisation, the charity, was maybe a bit careless about how we worked with those Hubs. I think we absolutely recognised that they needed to be self-managing and making their own decisions. But I think we were maybe a little unconscious in the way that we were using our power, the power that we were wielding because we were an organisation with some resources, because we were seen, you know, we were quite a visible part of the movement. So often the way we told the story had extra weight. And I think we became aware of that and people rightly questioned, challenged us a bit about that. And we started experimenting in the Hubs group with consent decision making, which draws from sociocracy. And I would say that initially it was that response of â âwe want to be working in a different way that makes power more visible and then supports it to flow and to be distributed across the systemâ.
And then at the same time, Transition Network, the little organisation was, I would say, struggling with how we should work. We had a sort of technically hierarchical structure. We werenât very hierarchical in the way we operated. But we had a board of trustees who, in the legal system that we work in, were in charge of our strategy and the staff were just there to carry out the strategy. And we knew that wasnât real in terms of how we worked. So we experimented with various things. We struggled. And I think this relates to what you were just saying about investment. I would say up until 2016, we tried to deal with that a little bit on the margins of the work we were trying to do in the world. You know, we were trying to organise ourselves, but we didnât have enough time to pay attention to it. And in 2016, we realised that this wasnât good enough. It wasnât helping us to do the work we needed to do. And at that point we decided to invest properly, and we were very lucky that we found a funder who was also interested in our experiment and was prepared to give us, not huge funding, but a bit of support to help us invest time, and to find people who could help us explore how we wanted our governance to change.
You mentioned that in the beginning you were a little bit careless with the Hubs. And you mentioned even there was the question of the power that your organisation was wielding unconsciously. Just because it started there, youâve mobilised the resources and I guess the money for some initiatives. Could we spend five minutes talking about that phase? Because I think thatâs an issue that interests both funders and grantees. People who are in a position to fund some of these movements, but also people who are on the receiving end of these funds. Understanding how these power dynamics or this friction eventually between funders and recipients of funds could be interesting⊠and how this leads them to the governance conversation.
Yes. I would say it was in the early days. We werenât particularly operating as a channel for funding, and that probably in itself brought some friction. We were managing to secure some funding for our organisation. And of course, partly that was because of what we were doing as an organisation. But probably just as much it was about the excitement of the movement. You know, that was partly, of course, what funders were responding to and interested in was whatâs happening in these different communities around the world. So I think there was a piece there where maybe we were a little complacent about the fact that actually some of these resources were coming to us almost on the backs of the work that was being done in a distributed grassroots network.
I mean I say complacent⊠I think we thought about it quite a lot. I think one of the enemies of all of this, you know, trying to do work in a way that is healthy and thoughtful is the busyness, isnât it? So we were a busy, small team desperately trying to respond to all these different needs and potential and demands.
And I think that's the moment where it's so good to just pause and think. Where are resources coming from? Who's impacted by this? Who's getting a say in the decision making? Which voices are being heard? Which are not part of the process yet? And what can we do about that? -
And I think for a while, sort of inevitably I guess, I think we made a lot of assumptions and we didnât even realise we were making assumptions.
And Iâm really conscious that coming from the UK with our whole history of colonialism â there we are yet again making those sort of assumptions that how we see the world is how everybody else is experiencing the world. Itâs so dangerous and itâs so easy to do. So I think for me, that was one of the things that we had to come to a realisation about. We were helped in that by some really constructive challenge from other people in other parts of the system.
Yeah, when it comes to governance I like to think of how quickly we fall back to the usual archetypes of ways of organising. Itâs a very innocent process, a very unconscious process, probably part of the collective unconscious of Jung. And how quickly we fall back to the traditional models of governance and decision making, which are part of our unconscious. But that in our case, weâre both in Europe, so we were both brought up in this culture and how much this is informing everything we do in terms of decision making and sense making and meaning making, right?
Yes.
So then, OK, flash forward â what happened then in 2016? What was the process? Walk us through this adventure that you started.
Well, we knew that we were interested in sociocracy in particular because weâd experienced a bit of consent decision making. And I donât know about you but for me, the moment I experienced that I felt a sort of tingling in my body of âthereâs something different hereâ. This is a different way of a group coming to a decision that feels like for once weâre properly listening to the collective intelligence. Weâre properly creating a space for us to find something that will work well enough for all of us. So we already had that excitement and that interest.
We found a team to help us, and they were a team from France called UniversitĂ© du Nous. So âUniversity of Usâ. And they had a lot of experience of sociocracy and holacracy, which is a different model, but some similarities. And they also had lots of other tools at their disposal and a lot of experienceâŠWe did a sort of action learning process â they gave us a little menu of different ways that you can organize⊠They talked to us about the concept of a safety framework.
These are the sorts of things that a group needs to know about itself to know how its governance works. Some basic things that unless you know, then actually you keep falling into the same traps. Such as, how do people join this group? How do people leave this group? What expectations do we have about how we work together? How do we make decisions? What are the roles that people are playing?... How does this work in your organization now? And what would you like to change about it?... -
We tried little experiments in various project groups trying out working in a sociocratic circle, trying out some of the things that they were offering us. We also did some sessions altogether as a team⊠We have trustees who have legal responsibility for the organisation, and it was very important for us that they were part of the process. We didnât want this to be a situation where the staff team were finding a whole new culture and a new way of working. And then we still had trustees above us who had a different culture. That was a recipe for disaster. So we did all sorts of little two-day sessions, three day sessions with this team over a couple of years. It was quite a long process, including, I would say, some things that might surprise people. We did quite a lot of movement exercises, as a group, learning how to move almost like birds flocking. You know, when you have the murmuration of swallows or starlings. That movement where sometimes youâre in a leadership role, youâre moving the group forward, sometimes youâre following others and the leadership flows around the group. So getting that sense of how leadership could be something really different from what weâd experienced traditionally. We did music sessions⊠improvising music together as another way of building that sense of âhow do I listen to this group and respond to the group, but also feel that I can bring my own creativity into what weâre doing together?â
That makes a lot of sense. And itâs, of course, completely aligned with the values around Transition and the values of â mind and body and heart. I wonder, how did the people in the organisation respond to these hints or suggestions that there are other ways of knowing and other ways of perceiving that are not necessarily mental, rational? That are embodied or somatic.
Well, as you say, thatâs always been quite a strong belief within the Transition movement. So it was something that was already part of our culture. And I think that helped us a lot that we werenât starting from zero. Weâd already done quite a lot of work on a culture that was trying to balance being and doing, balance relationships with output. So I would say that people were very receptive to it.
I think all of us, at different points, had moments where we struggled. I mean, Iâm not going to pretend it was a process where it all flowed smoothly and we ended up agreeing easily on how we were going to change our governance model. So there were moments, I would say, for all of us where we felt frustrated â this was taking a long time. Guilty, you know, we needed to be out there in the world doing things. Was it OK for us to be spending time looking inwardly at how we work? We had to process that a bit. And sometimes we had to accept that this was a time where we had something to deliver. We needed to prioritise that for a bit. But we needed to commit to coming back to this piece that was about âhow do we work?â. Not letting that go. Because I think we did have a strong sense that there was a potential for it to unlock something very important for us.
Did you have an endgame in sight? Meaning when you were in the difficult parts of this process â did you know that⊠this will come to an end eventually, and we know what that end is.
Yes, weâd given ourselves two years to experiment, and then to design a new governance model, and to move to that new governance model⊠I mean, we werenât dogmatic about it. We thought, âWell, if it really doesnât work, weâll have to go backwardsâ. But our idea was, we want to find a way to work in a way that isnât hierarchical. So we want to create a new model thatâs a flat structure. But also one that will give us more of an ability as an organisation to respond to whatâs happening in the wider movement, in the wider world â to be more responsive. So not so rigid.
And also we knew that one of the things we were doing as an organisation before this was we were spending endless time in meetings. All of the whole team, because all of our work, everything that any of us did related to what everybody else was doing. You know, of course it did, nothing was really standalone.
We didn't want to have a completely dictatorial structure where we followed the instructions of one person or a group of managers. So the only way we knew how to cope with that was to constantly have meetings where everybody came. And we'd talk about it and we'd go around in circles and we'd keep finding that the interrelationship of everything was too complex and we didn't know which bit to start with. So we knew we needed to do something about that. -
We felt that we werenât being⊠I always wonder about the word efficient because I think it has a sort of connotation of⊠an efficient corporate body. But we knew we werenât being efficient in terms of our time. We wanted to know that the time that we were spending was actually delivering some impact in the world, not going round and round in circles within the organisation. So that was one of the key things that we were saying. We need to find a model that gives us more clarity about who will be making decisions about what sort of stuff. And it doesnât have to be, everybody will make all the decisions about everything.
And did you find that model? The million dollar question.
Of course we didnât find the perfect model because that will never happen, I donât think. But by 2017 we were designing a model that we thought would work for us. And in 2018, we made the leap. Because one of the things that we found is that there comes a point where working in two systems just is not good for your health or your sanity. So there came a point where we were experimenting so much we said, now we need to shift. And the whole organisation needs to move into this new model. So we called it shared governance. Thatâs a term that UniversitĂ© du Nous use. And we created a system of circles and roles and clarity about decision making that draws heavily on sociocracy but has elements of our existing culture, and some of the things that feel particularly important about the movement and about our organisation.
So we donât follow exactly the model of sociocracy, but weâre doing some very similar stuff. And key to that is that itâs an evolutionary model.
What we said when we were trying to design it was it doesn't have to be perfect. We don't have to find all the answers. We need something that's good enough for now, safe enough to try - and we'll move into that model. And what we've got to make sure then is that the model's got the capacity to change. -
One of the things that I remember finding really helpful was when Guillame, who was the person who was helping us from UniversitĂ© du Nous,⊠said to me; âas soon as you move into this model you will find things wrong with it. And thatâs exactly what should happen. Then the tensions will come up and then youâll see what needs to change.â So that reassurance you donât need to try and think ahead and predict everything that will be needed because you just need to create a model thatâs got the capacity to shift as needs change.
To evolve, to become alive. Practically speaking now â can you give us some examples of how this shared governance model works right now? And how is it different from what you previously had in terms of flow of power? And what do you think would be the next evolutionary mutation?
So some of the key elements of it⊠One really fundamental piece early on was that we created a single circle. We call it the Primary Circle, which is the circle that takes care of the strategy, the purpose of the organisation, and its governance. And that circle is open to any member of the staff who would like to join it, and most people did. We didnât insist on people joining it, but we made it available to any member of the staff who wanted to join, and to the trustees. So rather than having this fundamental hierarchy in the system â the group that holds equivalent power to decide what needs to shift in terms of our purpose and our governance includes everybody who wants to be part of it, and has got the capacity to be part of it.
So thatâs a pretty big change. Itâs actually not a change that the legal system in the UK is capable of recognising, for a charity. So we still have these trustees whoâve got legal responsibility, but they made a commitment that they would exercise that responsibility through this collective system, that they wouldnât sit outside the system and exercise that power. So thatâs really significant. And then as part of that⊠we really defined âwhatâs our purpose as an organisation?â We spent quite a lot of time thinking about that, feeling about that, exploring that with the wider movement, getting feedback, listening to the feedback. And that has become then the thing that steers us. So in all our decisions, in all our different ways of working â weâre constantly thinking, aligning to âhow does this best serve the purpose of the organisation?â Thatâs our compass. And for me, thereâs something there about how that enables a lot more trust. That because weâve spent time knowing what it is weâre trying to achieve⊠I donât need to know what this personâs doing and what that circle are doing. I can trust that weâre all aligned to this purpose, and I also trust that if a real tension arises between us we have a way of processing it.
We created this idea that there are roles in the system. So rather than having a team where people have fixed jobs where you stay forever. âWe recruited you to be in this role and youâre going to stay in this role.â We created a system of âletâs name all the different roles that people play in our systemâ, knowing that often some of the invisible roles are ones that hold a lot of power⊠Theyâre not official in the structure chart, but itâs actually a role that somebody takes, might use a lot of power, exercise a lot of power, or sometimes will exercise a lot of responsibility, but without any recognition. And that was a really interesting piece to see. Well whoâs spending a lot of time investing in the relationships in the organisation and supporting the health of the organisation? But thatâs not visible on the structure chart. And actually, if thatâs a role, letâs name it as a role and make sure weâve put it somewhere in the system.
And thereâs a much clearer idea now that people will move between roles. This is all part of the evolution of the system. At any given time I might be holding 2, 3, 4 roles in the system. But theyâre not my identity in the organisation. Theyâre the things that Iâm doing at the moment to help serve our purpose. At various points I might be asked to step out of a role because it makes sense for somebody else to go in there. I might be asked to hand over something else. I might be asked to take on something else. And all the time guided by, âwhat best serves our purposeâ, rather than this idea that Iâm fixed in this role and Iâm the only person that can hold it. And seeing the health of roles shifting around the system. And I want to be honest and say, thatâs probably something weâve found quite difficult. You know, I think weâre getting much better at it. But it is very easy for people to just get embedded in a role, and to build up knowledge, and to feel nobody else can do this, and for the team to feel nobody else could do that. But weâre really trying to shift our thinking and recognise that there are some roles that have very specific skills attached, but thereâs an awful lot that can be done in different ways by different people. That actually having that flexibility really supports us to pivot as an organisation, as we see things⊠that the needs are changing, or our priorities are changing.
Yeah, that must have been a very interesting step⊠Identifying the invisible roles and maybe even uncovering that some of these invisible roles are key to how the whole organisation actually works.
It really was⊠It was particularly interesting for me personally because, until we made the shift, I was holding this role of Delivery Director. And that role managed everybody else, all the other members of staff. And what we realised⊠I think I had already been feeling the discomfort of that role, but also the power of that role. That was a role that weâd added lots of different elements to⊠It was the role that had a lot of control over resources, and a lot of control over how peopleâs time was spent⊠I tended to work in a very collaborative way with people. But still, it was me that was the point of connection that would help see what needed to happen, and make it happen across the system. And I think, for me, one of the most exciting things we did was to disentangle all the stuff that weâd put onto that role and see that it could be done by different people in different ways⊠I was doing a lot of coaching and support. But did it make sense for that to be done by the same person who was also making decisions about money? It didnât need to be. That actually we could distribute these leadership responsibilities in a much more transparent way. And you know, the reality was I couldnât have carried on doing that job, it was becoming impossible and a bottleneck in the system. And suddenly by bringing more people in it opened up new energies and new ideas.
Yeah, and itâs usually how people end up burning themselves out⊠by accumulating all of these rolesâŠ
I have a slightly more personal question about this process of picking apart all of these roles that are concentrated around a single node in the network. Because some people might think that this is actually a process of stripping away power from your position. And of course, no matter how much we work on our own personal development and our own capacity to see ourselves, you know, disconnected from the organisation. Thereâs always probably some fear that may come with this process of picking yourself apart and decentralising yourself from the organisation, right?⊠In the process of unbecoming this central node â does it bring up feelings of uncertainty or insecurity?
⊠There were definite moments of insecurity. I think ⊠there were definite moments where I struggled to let go of control⊠We talked about a posture that you need to learn to work in this way. Thereâs a culture as a group that needs to shift, but also for each of us individually thereâs a new posture, a new way of behaving, that we need to learn. And thereâs lots of times where itâs not comfortable because itâs not familiar⊠How I grew up and how I worked in other organisations taught me exactly the opposite of the posture that I think is needed in this sort of system. So for me a key bit was about letting go of control. And there were moments when I could feel the sort of message in my brain of âIâm not sure that this person can do it. I know how to do it. Is it safe to let it go to somebody else?â And also, I guess, a piece about my identity⊠My identity is to be a leader in this organisation. What is it if Iâm part of a circle where I donât have any more of a claim to be a leader than anyone else whoâs sharing in these responsibilities? I have to say for me personally, it was so exciting that that really helped me. And I think also the fact that I could feel how completely unsustainable my old job was, that really helped me as well. That sense of, well Iâm just going to break if I carry on trying to do it this way.
And for me, one of the things that we need to try and support in the world is people holding on to power, supporting them to feel the toll that is taking on them⊠And once you can feel that I think that really helps you connect with the sense of, âI want to distribute this more. I donât want to be holding all of this to myself.â And I remember that there were key moments, really beautiful moments⊠along our journey where I would suddenly find myself in, say, consent decision making or a strategy meeting with a circle where I was no longer holding power. Everybody had a right to object to what we were doing. Everybody had a responsibility to try and find the right answer. And I noticed that we came up with a solution or a way forward that I would never have thought of.. That was never going to come into my brain. And even if I had been facilitating the meeting, in the old way I think I would have been facilitating to get to the solution that I thought I could see⊠we wouldnât have got to this actually much better solutionâŠ.
Yeah. Itâs interesting you mentioned something that is this burden of power⊠the issue of people holding onto power. I see it sometimes in two ways, like on one hand it could be Iâm holding onto power because Iâm addicted to it or I really like the feeling of being powerful. But thereâs also the other alternative, the more positive alternative, which is Iâm holding onto power because I care deeply about where this thing goes. And I think I know exactly where this thing needs to go. And a process, like you mentioned, of experiencing the moment when the organisation as a whole comes up with a path forward that is beyond your wildest dreams. And that is actually the right one⊠is liberating. In liberating I mean, from the perspective of someone who needs to hold power because he or she doesnât trust that the organisation can find a way forward. So this is really powerful.
I agree, and I also think this is relevant to the point you raised earlier about funders. Because I see with funders this huge and completely understandable sense of responsibility. You know, âweâve got access to these resources. And somehow, weâve got to make decisions that mean that these resources have the most possible impact⊠we can see the huge need.â Itâs a huge responsibility⊠Iâve rarely met a funder who doesnât care. Thatâs not the issue. Itâs that they care hugely about what to do with these resources. But I also see how difficult it is to let go of control. And for me personally, itâs what needs to happen⊠When the system starts to find the best use of the resources you get to transformational solutions. But⊠I really recognise how hard that is for funders.
Do you think itâs a leap of faith?
⊠Iâm very interested in working with funders because I feel their interest in working differently and I feel what pulls them back. So there is something about how do you give people a real taste of whatâs possible in a way that feels safe enough?⊠How can they trial this and then start to gain confidence, start to see whatâs possible. But I do think⊠with any piece that theyâre going to experiment with, there is this moment where they have to let go of control. And if they havenât properly done that, then the power that theyâre exercising, even if itâs not explicit, will distort the process and it will mean they probably wonât get the sort of outcome that theyâre looking for and that weâve just been talking about. So until youâve genuinely let go, even if youâre saying all the right things⊠it wonât genuinely make that shift a transformative change.
⊠Formally, itâs possible to let go of that control. But is it possible to completely isolate yourself from the perception of power or the perception of expectations that receivers might have from you?
Thatâs impossible. So when Iâm saying let go of control I donât mean let go of all power, because thereâs rank, thereâs all sorts of things that will still be operating in the system, whether youâre explicitly changing the way decisions are made or notâŠ
... for me when you're thinking about governance - culture and individual posture is as important as the structures and processes. Because for me the thing that makes it possible to shift to healthy power, it's not about saying power doesn't exist, but it's about how do we name it? How do we make it visible? How do we name what's going on? You know where we see, "I think I might be having an influence here that is probably not a healthy influence? How do I talk about that? How do I invite feedback? How do I encourage people to trust that they can give me feedback and they won't be punished for it? And how do I really train myself to listen to the feedback?â -
âŠOne of the big things that we always say is a key part of doing shared governance well is having curiosity. So when something comes up, whether itâs an unexpected tension in the system, whether itâs an objection to a decision that you thought was going to be a really straightforward decision⊠Whether itâs feedback that feels a bit uncomfortable. The piece about âhow do I cultivate a sense of instead of defending myself, and proving that itâs wrong, and overcoming it. How do I cultivate this sense of, Oh, thatâs interesting. Whatâs going on there? Why is the system telling me this?â It doesnât mean that everybody who gives you feedback is right. But how can you be interested in whatâs come up for them and why itâs come up?
Yeah, a lot of how and why questions instead of what.
Iâm curious what you make of this⊠I believe that working with governance within the organisations that support movements⊠Be it charities like Transition Network or even funders⊠I believe that this is actually a leverage point or something that can have and can propagate impact in the various different areas social movements are struggling. Be it climate change, social justice, peace building, you name it. Governance is almost like a thread that ties all of these groups together. Because itâs always a matter of organising. Itâs always a matter of how we show up togetherâŠ
I wonder if you share this hypothesis that working on governance, or at least hosting conversations on governance and going through this process like you did â at the level of funders, at the level of charities, at the level of formal organisations â can actually propagate to civil society, can actually then propagate to providing other models of how conflict is addressed in communities? Eventually to the scale of how conflict between larger communities and even nations are addressed. Or is it just my utopia?
⊠So for me, governance is about how we work together, how we make decisions, how we distribute power and resources at every level of scale. So from within my family to within a group, within a network, an organisation, as you say, at regional, national, international level. For me⊠lots of us at lots of different levels of scale are currently doing that in ways that seem to me to be deeply flawed. Unhealthy, destructive, disconnecting. Disconnecting where the power is held from where the impacts are felt. And for me, thatâs a fundamental flaw⊠youâre not bringing together accountability, responsibility. Where is the risk? Where is the impact? If the right voices arenât involved in decisions and shaping of what weâre doing together as human beings, then youâll come up with deeply flawed solutions. You wonât see the solutions that could really be transformative. They wonât even be visible. And there will be all sorts of reasons why people will feel unable to shiftâŠ
The systems that we've got at the moment don't support us to shift. They support us to hold onto what we've got and to protect it... So for me, organisations who are working in this way, it's not just "is it helpful?" I think I'd put it even more strongly that it's necessary⊠Until we're looking at how we work there's a fundamental fault in what we're doing. That will keep showing up in what we put out in the world, it will just keep showing up and we won't have a way to notice that and adjust, which is what we need. -
Itâs not about getting it right⊠For me, itâs about finding a way to take a step forward, whether itâs me as a person or the organization that Iâm part of. How do we take a step forward and hear the feedback and then see what needs to be adjusted? So that I have agency. I can be creative, but also⊠recognising that Iâm part of a bigger system, that I canât possibly know how what Iâm doing is going to land or make a difference. I can only know that by listening to the feedback.
⊠Iâm working with a collaboration in the UK at the moment where weâre talking about transformational governance because governance, in a way, is a neutral term. You know, thereâs lots of different ways we can do governanceâŠ
Transformational governance... is explicitly designed to disrupt the way that power operates in the dominant system, that it's explicitly designed to support healthy collaboration across difference, and distance, and to bring about justice and resilient outcomes... -
https://soundcloud.com/pedro-portela-168791914/sarah-mcadam-transition-network
Joining me today from the UK is Sarah McAdam from Transition Network. Transition Network is a charity established in the UK which works to inspire, encourage, connect, support and train communities worldwide as they self-organise around the Transition model.
Letâs start off by talking a little bit about Transition Network and how you became involved with it. And what the organisation, and this Transition model, is all about.
What Transition Network is, as you mentioned, itâs a small charity registered in the UK. Currently, thereâs 13 members of staff and 7 trustees, which is a requirement by law in the UK. And I first came to it actually even before 2013. Initially I was a trustee, which I did almost as a sort of part time contribution. I thought the organisation sounded interesting and I was agreeing to go to a board meeting maybe four or five times a year to give them a bit of a strategic steer. And since then, weâve really shifted the way we work. I joined the staff team, but we also completely shifted the way that we do our governance. So that role of a trustee is very different now.
And what is Transition all about for those three people in the world who havenât heard about Transition?
Oh no, Iâm sure itâs much, much more than three. So the Transition model is a model of, I would say, community resilience. Itâs â how does a community, how do people get together with their neighbors, to work out what they want to shift in their community and feel that they have the energy and the power to do it? So thatâs what the model is about. Started very much with a focus on the concept of peak oil and reducing our use of energy. But I would say itâs become more sophisticated and adapted as itâs spread around the world. And in each place, in each country, in each community, people are exploring for themselves â what are the key things that need to change to make the place where they live happier, healthier, more resilient, more sustainable? And that does look, of course, very different in very different places. But I think some of the values and principles apply across the whole movement.
The Transition movement or the Transition network, not the charity, but the actual global network â is an incredible story of how something that started off as an idea in a small town in the U.K. became very quickly a trans-local international network with Hubs all around the world and in many cities in many countries. I was personally involved in a couple of initiatives here in Portugal.
Yeah, it was something that spread, I would say, virally, according to where people went, where people saw the films, where they got access to the resources. And for me, thatâs one of the joys of the movement â to see how itâs spread, but then also been adapted in different places. And we have a number of Hubs, as you mentioned. So groups of people in a particular territory that support Transition in that country, or maybe for the people who speak that language. And one of the areas where weâre really exploring different forms of governance is across that network of Hubs. Because itâs very important to us that those Hubs are not controlled from one place. Theyâre self-managing, theyâre self-organising. But how do they come together to collaborate? Thatâs one of the questions for us.
Letâs talk about that. So when did your organisation, Transition Network the charity, which has this fundamental role of providing the scaffolding and support for the whole movement around the world. When did you decide to invest in governance? And Iâm using the word invest purposefully. So itâs not only financial investment, but also time commitment of the people involved â sitting together and saying, âWeâre going to think differently on how weâre going to work togetherâ. Can you tell us the story of that?
Yes, I would say that the small charity, the organisation and the bigger movement was interested right from the start about how people, how groups work together. I mean, itâs pretty fundamental when youâre thinking about how to get together with your neighbors. Itâs fundamental to the movement to find good ways of working together. And for me, thatâs what governance is ultimately about. Itâs â how do we come together in a group, agree on a shared endeavor, some common purpose that weâre trying to achieve together, and then find good ways to make decisions, to allocate resources, to be with each other, to resolve conflict or respond to conflict.
So I would say that weâve been interested in that right from the start. And then as the international network of Hubs developed, I would say that there was quite an interesting challenge that arose from there. An interesting and useful challenge. This is just my perception. Iâm sure different people would have different ways of telling the story, but I would say at the beginning Transition Network the little organisation, the charity, was maybe a bit careless about how we worked with those Hubs. I think we absolutely recognised that they needed to be self-managing and making their own decisions. But I think we were maybe a little unconscious in the way that we were using our power, the power that we were wielding because we were an organisation with some resources, because we were seen, you know, we were quite a visible part of the movement. So often the way we told the story had extra weight. And I think we became aware of that and people rightly questioned, challenged us a bit about that. And we started experimenting in the Hubs group with consent decision making, which draws from sociocracy. And I would say that initially it was that response of â âwe want to be working in a different way that makes power more visible and then supports it to flow and to be distributed across the systemâ.
And then at the same time, Transition Network, the little organisation was, I would say, struggling with how we should work. We had a sort of technically hierarchical structure. We werenât very hierarchical in the way we operated. But we had a board of trustees who, in the legal system that we work in, were in charge of our strategy and the staff were just there to carry out the strategy. And we knew that wasnât real in terms of how we worked. So we experimented with various things. We struggled. And I think this relates to what you were just saying about investment. I would say up until 2016, we tried to deal with that a little bit on the margins of the work we were trying to do in the world. You know, we were trying to organise ourselves, but we didnât have enough time to pay attention to it. And in 2016, we realised that this wasnât good enough. It wasnât helping us to do the work we needed to do. And at that point we decided to invest properly, and we were very lucky that we found a funder who was also interested in our experiment and was prepared to give us, not huge funding, but a bit of support to help us invest time, and to find people who could help us explore how we wanted our governance to change.
You mentioned that in the beginning you were a little bit careless with the Hubs. And you mentioned even there was the question of the power that your organisation was wielding unconsciously. Just because it started there, youâve mobilised the resources and I guess the money for some initiatives. Could we spend five minutes talking about that phase? Because I think thatâs an issue that interests both funders and grantees. People who are in a position to fund some of these movements, but also people who are on the receiving end of these funds. Understanding how these power dynamics or this friction eventually between funders and recipients of funds could be interesting⊠and how this leads them to the governance conversation.
Yes. I would say it was in the early days. We werenât particularly operating as a channel for funding, and that probably in itself brought some friction. We were managing to secure some funding for our organisation. And of course, partly that was because of what we were doing as an organisation. But probably just as much it was about the excitement of the movement. You know, that was partly, of course, what funders were responding to and interested in was whatâs happening in these different communities around the world. So I think there was a piece there where maybe we were a little complacent about the fact that actually some of these resources were coming to us almost on the backs of the work that was being done in a distributed grassroots network.
I mean I say complacent⊠I think we thought about it quite a lot. I think one of the enemies of all of this, you know, trying to do work in a way that is healthy and thoughtful is the busyness, isnât it? So we were a busy, small team desperately trying to respond to all these different needs and potential and demands.
And I think that's the moment where it's so good to just pause and think. Where are resources coming from? Who's impacted by this? Who's getting a say in the decision making? Which voices are being heard? Which are not part of the process yet? And what can we do about that? -
And I think for a while, sort of inevitably I guess, I think we made a lot of assumptions and we didnât even realise we were making assumptions.
And Iâm really conscious that coming from the UK with our whole history of colonialism â there we are yet again making those sort of assumptions that how we see the world is how everybody else is experiencing the world. Itâs so dangerous and itâs so easy to do. So I think for me, that was one of the things that we had to come to a realisation about. We were helped in that by some really constructive challenge from other people in other parts of the system.
Yeah, when it comes to governance I like to think of how quickly we fall back to the usual archetypes of ways of organising. Itâs a very innocent process, a very unconscious process, probably part of the collective unconscious of Jung. And how quickly we fall back to the traditional models of governance and decision making, which are part of our unconscious. But that in our case, weâre both in Europe, so we were both brought up in this culture and how much this is informing everything we do in terms of decision making and sense making and meaning making, right?
Yes.
So then, OK, flash forward â what happened then in 2016? What was the process? Walk us through this adventure that you started.
Well, we knew that we were interested in sociocracy in particular because weâd experienced a bit of consent decision making. And I donât know about you but for me, the moment I experienced that I felt a sort of tingling in my body of âthereâs something different hereâ. This is a different way of a group coming to a decision that feels like for once weâre properly listening to the collective intelligence. Weâre properly creating a space for us to find something that will work well enough for all of us. So we already had that excitement and that interest.
We found a team to help us, and they were a team from France called UniversitĂ© du Nous. So âUniversity of Usâ. And they had a lot of experience of sociocracy and holacracy, which is a different model, but some similarities. And they also had lots of other tools at their disposal and a lot of experienceâŠWe did a sort of action learning process â they gave us a little menu of different ways that you can organize⊠They talked to us about the concept of a safety framework.
These are the sorts of things that a group needs to know about itself to know how its governance works. Some basic things that unless you know, then actually you keep falling into the same traps. Such as, how do people join this group? How do people leave this group? What expectations do we have about how we work together? How do we make decisions? What are the roles that people are playing?... How does this work in your organization now? And what would you like to change about it?... -
We tried little experiments in various project groups trying out working in a sociocratic circle, trying out some of the things that they were offering us. We also did some sessions altogether as a team⊠We have trustees who have legal responsibility for the organisation, and it was very important for us that they were part of the process. We didnât want this to be a situation where the staff team were finding a whole new culture and a new way of working. And then we still had trustees above us who had a different culture. That was a recipe for disaster. So we did all sorts of little two-day sessions, three day sessions with this team over a couple of years. It was quite a long process, including, I would say, some things that might surprise people. We did quite a lot of movement exercises, as a group, learning how to move almost like birds flocking. You know, when you have the murmuration of swallows or starlings. That movement where sometimes youâre in a leadership role, youâre moving the group forward, sometimes youâre following others and the leadership flows around the group. So getting that sense of how leadership could be something really different from what weâd experienced traditionally. We did music sessions⊠improvising music together as another way of building that sense of âhow do I listen to this group and respond to the group, but also feel that I can bring my own creativity into what weâre doing together?â
That makes a lot of sense. And itâs, of course, completely aligned with the values around Transition and the values of â mind and body and heart. I wonder, how did the people in the organisation respond to these hints or suggestions that there are other ways of knowing and other ways of perceiving that are not necessarily mental, rational? That are embodied or somatic.
Well, as you say, thatâs always been quite a strong belief within the Transition movement. So it was something that was already part of our culture. And I think that helped us a lot that we werenât starting from zero. Weâd already done quite a lot of work on a culture that was trying to balance being and doing, balance relationships with output. So I would say that people were very receptive to it.
I think all of us, at different points, had moments where we struggled. I mean, Iâm not going to pretend it was a process where it all flowed smoothly and we ended up agreeing easily on how we were going to change our governance model. So there were moments, I would say, for all of us where we felt frustrated â this was taking a long time. Guilty, you know, we needed to be out there in the world doing things. Was it OK for us to be spending time looking inwardly at how we work? We had to process that a bit. And sometimes we had to accept that this was a time where we had something to deliver. We needed to prioritise that for a bit. But we needed to commit to coming back to this piece that was about âhow do we work?â. Not letting that go. Because I think we did have a strong sense that there was a potential for it to unlock something very important for us.
Did you have an endgame in sight? Meaning when you were in the difficult parts of this process â did you know that⊠this will come to an end eventually, and we know what that end is.
Yes, weâd given ourselves two years to experiment, and then to design a new governance model, and to move to that new governance model⊠I mean, we werenât dogmatic about it. We thought, âWell, if it really doesnât work, weâll have to go backwardsâ. But our idea was, we want to find a way to work in a way that isnât hierarchical. So we want to create a new model thatâs a flat structure. But also one that will give us more of an ability as an organisation to respond to whatâs happening in the wider movement, in the wider world â to be more responsive. So not so rigid.
And also we knew that one of the things we were doing as an organisation before this was we were spending endless time in meetings. All of the whole team, because all of our work, everything that any of us did related to what everybody else was doing. You know, of course it did, nothing was really standalone.
We didn't want to have a completely dictatorial structure where we followed the instructions of one person or a group of managers. So the only way we knew how to cope with that was to constantly have meetings where everybody came. And we'd talk about it and we'd go around in circles and we'd keep finding that the interrelationship of everything was too complex and we didn't know which bit to start with. So we knew we needed to do something about that. -
We felt that we werenât being⊠I always wonder about the word efficient because I think it has a sort of connotation of⊠an efficient corporate body. But we knew we werenât being efficient in terms of our time. We wanted to know that the time that we were spending was actually delivering some impact in the world, not going round and round in circles within the organisation. So that was one of the key things that we were saying. We need to find a model that gives us more clarity about who will be making decisions about what sort of stuff. And it doesnât have to be, everybody will make all the decisions about everything.
And did you find that model? The million dollar question.
Of course we didnât find the perfect model because that will never happen, I donât think. But by 2017 we were designing a model that we thought would work for us. And in 2018, we made the leap. Because one of the things that we found is that there comes a point where working in two systems just is not good for your health or your sanity. So there came a point where we were experimenting so much we said, now we need to shift. And the whole organisation needs to move into this new model. So we called it shared governance. Thatâs a term that UniversitĂ© du Nous use. And we created a system of circles and roles and clarity about decision making that draws heavily on sociocracy but has elements of our existing culture, and some of the things that feel particularly important about the movement and about our organisation.
So we donât follow exactly the model of sociocracy, but weâre doing some very similar stuff. And key to that is that itâs an evolutionary model.
What we said when we were trying to design it was it doesn't have to be perfect. We don't have to find all the answers. We need something that's good enough for now, safe enough to try - and we'll move into that model. And what we've got to make sure then is that the model's got the capacity to change. -
One of the things that I remember finding really helpful was when Guillame, who was the person who was helping us from UniversitĂ© du Nous,⊠said to me; âas soon as you move into this model you will find things wrong with it. And thatâs exactly what should happen. Then the tensions will come up and then youâll see what needs to change.â So that reassurance you donât need to try and think ahead and predict everything that will be needed because you just need to create a model thatâs got the capacity to shift as needs change.
To evolve, to become alive. Practically speaking now â can you give us some examples of how this shared governance model works right now? And how is it different from what you previously had in terms of flow of power? And what do you think would be the next evolutionary mutation?
So some of the key elements of it⊠One really fundamental piece early on was that we created a single circle. We call it the Primary Circle, which is the circle that takes care of the strategy, the purpose of the organisation, and its governance. And that circle is open to any member of the staff who would like to join it, and most people did. We didnât insist on people joining it, but we made it available to any member of the staff who wanted to join, and to the trustees. So rather than having this fundamental hierarchy in the system â the group that holds equivalent power to decide what needs to shift in terms of our purpose and our governance includes everybody who wants to be part of it, and has got the capacity to be part of it.
So thatâs a pretty big change. Itâs actually not a change that the legal system in the UK is capable of recognising, for a charity. So we still have these trustees whoâve got legal responsibility, but they made a commitment that they would exercise that responsibility through this collective system, that they wouldnât sit outside the system and exercise that power. So thatâs really significant. And then as part of that⊠we really defined âwhatâs our purpose as an organisation?â We spent quite a lot of time thinking about that, feeling about that, exploring that with the wider movement, getting feedback, listening to the feedback. And that has become then the thing that steers us. So in all our decisions, in all our different ways of working â weâre constantly thinking, aligning to âhow does this best serve the purpose of the organisation?â Thatâs our compass. And for me, thereâs something there about how that enables a lot more trust. That because weâve spent time knowing what it is weâre trying to achieve⊠I donât need to know what this personâs doing and what that circle are doing. I can trust that weâre all aligned to this purpose, and I also trust that if a real tension arises between us we have a way of processing it.
We created this idea that there are roles in the system. So rather than having a team where people have fixed jobs where you stay forever. âWe recruited you to be in this role and youâre going to stay in this role.â We created a system of âletâs name all the different roles that people play in our systemâ, knowing that often some of the invisible roles are ones that hold a lot of power⊠Theyâre not official in the structure chart, but itâs actually a role that somebody takes, might use a lot of power, exercise a lot of power, or sometimes will exercise a lot of responsibility, but without any recognition. And that was a really interesting piece to see. Well whoâs spending a lot of time investing in the relationships in the organisation and supporting the health of the organisation? But thatâs not visible on the structure chart. And actually, if thatâs a role, letâs name it as a role and make sure weâve put it somewhere in the system.
And thereâs a much clearer idea now that people will move between roles. This is all part of the evolution of the system. At any given time I might be holding 2, 3, 4 roles in the system. But theyâre not my identity in the organisation. Theyâre the things that Iâm doing at the moment to help serve our purpose. At various points I might be asked to step out of a role because it makes sense for somebody else to go in there. I might be asked to hand over something else. I might be asked to take on something else. And all the time guided by, âwhat best serves our purposeâ, rather than this idea that Iâm fixed in this role and Iâm the only person that can hold it. And seeing the health of roles shifting around the system. And I want to be honest and say, thatâs probably something weâve found quite difficult. You know, I think weâre getting much better at it. But it is very easy for people to just get embedded in a role, and to build up knowledge, and to feel nobody else can do this, and for the team to feel nobody else could do that. But weâre really trying to shift our thinking and recognise that there are some roles that have very specific skills attached, but thereâs an awful lot that can be done in different ways by different people. That actually having that flexibility really supports us to pivot as an organisation, as we see things⊠that the needs are changing, or our priorities are changing.
Yeah, that must have been a very interesting step⊠Identifying the invisible roles and maybe even uncovering that some of these invisible roles are key to how the whole organisation actually works.
It really was⊠It was particularly interesting for me personally because, until we made the shift, I was holding this role of Delivery Director. And that role managed everybody else, all the other members of staff. And what we realised⊠I think I had already been feeling the discomfort of that role, but also the power of that role. That was a role that weâd added lots of different elements to⊠It was the role that had a lot of control over resources, and a lot of control over how peopleâs time was spent⊠I tended to work in a very collaborative way with people. But still, it was me that was the point of connection that would help see what needed to happen, and make it happen across the system. And I think, for me, one of the most exciting things we did was to disentangle all the stuff that weâd put onto that role and see that it could be done by different people in different ways⊠I was doing a lot of coaching and support. But did it make sense for that to be done by the same person who was also making decisions about money? It didnât need to be. That actually we could distribute these leadership responsibilities in a much more transparent way. And you know, the reality was I couldnât have carried on doing that job, it was becoming impossible and a bottleneck in the system. And suddenly by bringing more people in it opened up new energies and new ideas.
Yeah, and itâs usually how people end up burning themselves out⊠by accumulating all of these rolesâŠ
I have a slightly more personal question about this process of picking apart all of these roles that are concentrated around a single node in the network. Because some people might think that this is actually a process of stripping away power from your position. And of course, no matter how much we work on our own personal development and our own capacity to see ourselves, you know, disconnected from the organisation. Thereâs always probably some fear that may come with this process of picking yourself apart and decentralising yourself from the organisation, right?⊠In the process of unbecoming this central node â does it bring up feelings of uncertainty or insecurity?
⊠There were definite moments of insecurity. I think ⊠there were definite moments where I struggled to let go of control⊠We talked about a posture that you need to learn to work in this way. Thereâs a culture as a group that needs to shift, but also for each of us individually thereâs a new posture, a new way of behaving, that we need to learn. And thereâs lots of times where itâs not comfortable because itâs not familiar⊠How I grew up and how I worked in other organisations taught me exactly the opposite of the posture that I think is needed in this sort of system. So for me a key bit was about letting go of control. And there were moments when I could feel the sort of message in my brain of âIâm not sure that this person can do it. I know how to do it. Is it safe to let it go to somebody else?â And also, I guess, a piece about my identity⊠My identity is to be a leader in this organisation. What is it if Iâm part of a circle where I donât have any more of a claim to be a leader than anyone else whoâs sharing in these responsibilities? I have to say for me personally, it was so exciting that that really helped me. And I think also the fact that I could feel how completely unsustainable my old job was, that really helped me as well. That sense of, well Iâm just going to break if I carry on trying to do it this way.
And for me, one of the things that we need to try and support in the world is people holding on to power, supporting them to feel the toll that is taking on them⊠And once you can feel that I think that really helps you connect with the sense of, âI want to distribute this more. I donât want to be holding all of this to myself.â And I remember that there were key moments, really beautiful moments⊠along our journey where I would suddenly find myself in, say, consent decision making or a strategy meeting with a circle where I was no longer holding power. Everybody had a right to object to what we were doing. Everybody had a responsibility to try and find the right answer. And I noticed that we came up with a solution or a way forward that I would never have thought of.. That was never going to come into my brain. And even if I had been facilitating the meeting, in the old way I think I would have been facilitating to get to the solution that I thought I could see⊠we wouldnât have got to this actually much better solutionâŠ.
Yeah. Itâs interesting you mentioned something that is this burden of power⊠the issue of people holding onto power. I see it sometimes in two ways, like on one hand it could be Iâm holding onto power because Iâm addicted to it or I really like the feeling of being powerful. But thereâs also the other alternative, the more positive alternative, which is Iâm holding onto power because I care deeply about where this thing goes. And I think I know exactly where this thing needs to go. And a process, like you mentioned, of experiencing the moment when the organisation as a whole comes up with a path forward that is beyond your wildest dreams. And that is actually the right one⊠is liberating. In liberating I mean, from the perspective of someone who needs to hold power because he or she doesnât trust that the organisation can find a way forward. So this is really powerful.
I agree, and I also think this is relevant to the point you raised earlier about funders. Because I see with funders this huge and completely understandable sense of responsibility. You know, âweâve got access to these resources. And somehow, weâve got to make decisions that mean that these resources have the most possible impact⊠we can see the huge need.â Itâs a huge responsibility⊠Iâve rarely met a funder who doesnât care. Thatâs not the issue. Itâs that they care hugely about what to do with these resources. But I also see how difficult it is to let go of control. And for me personally, itâs what needs to happen⊠When the system starts to find the best use of the resources you get to transformational solutions. But⊠I really recognise how hard that is for funders.
Do you think itâs a leap of faith?
⊠Iâm very interested in working with funders because I feel their interest in working differently and I feel what pulls them back. So there is something about how do you give people a real taste of whatâs possible in a way that feels safe enough?⊠How can they trial this and then start to gain confidence, start to see whatâs possible. But I do think⊠with any piece that theyâre going to experiment with, there is this moment where they have to let go of control. And if they havenât properly done that, then the power that theyâre exercising, even if itâs not explicit, will distort the process and it will mean they probably wonât get the sort of outcome that theyâre looking for and that weâve just been talking about. So until youâve genuinely let go, even if youâre saying all the right things⊠it wonât genuinely make that shift a transformative change.
⊠Formally, itâs possible to let go of that control. But is it possible to completely isolate yourself from the perception of power or the perception of expectations that receivers might have from you?
Thatâs impossible. So when Iâm saying let go of control I donât mean let go of all power, because thereâs rank, thereâs all sorts of things that will still be operating in the system, whether youâre explicitly changing the way decisions are made or notâŠ
... for me when you're thinking about governance - culture and individual posture is as important as the structures and processes. Because for me the thing that makes it possible to shift to healthy power, it's not about saying power doesn't exist, but it's about how do we name it? How do we make it visible? How do we name what's going on? You know where we see, "I think I might be having an influence here that is probably not a healthy influence? How do I talk about that? How do I invite feedback? How do I encourage people to trust that they can give me feedback and they won't be punished for it? And how do I really train myself to listen to the feedback?â -
âŠOne of the big things that we always say is a key part of doing shared governance well is having curiosity. So when something comes up, whether itâs an unexpected tension in the system, whether itâs an objection to a decision that you thought was going to be a really straightforward decision⊠Whether itâs feedback that feels a bit uncomfortable. The piece about âhow do I cultivate a sense of instead of defending myself, and proving that itâs wrong, and overcoming it. How do I cultivate this sense of, Oh, thatâs interesting. Whatâs going on there? Why is the system telling me this?â It doesnât mean that everybody who gives you feedback is right. But how can you be interested in whatâs come up for them and why itâs come up?
Yeah, a lot of how and why questions instead of what.
Iâm curious what you make of this⊠I believe that working with governance within the organisations that support movements⊠Be it charities like Transition Network or even funders⊠I believe that this is actually a leverage point or something that can have and can propagate impact in the various different areas social movements are struggling. Be it climate change, social justice, peace building, you name it. Governance is almost like a thread that ties all of these groups together. Because itâs always a matter of organising. Itâs always a matter of how we show up togetherâŠ
I wonder if you share this hypothesis that working on governance, or at least hosting conversations on governance and going through this process like you did â at the level of funders, at the level of charities, at the level of formal organisations â can actually propagate to civil society, can actually then propagate to providing other models of how conflict is addressed in communities? Eventually to the scale of how conflict between larger communities and even nations are addressed. Or is it just my utopia?
⊠So for me, governance is about how we work together, how we make decisions, how we distribute power and resources at every level of scale. So from within my family to within a group, within a network, an organisation, as you say, at regional, national, international level. For me⊠lots of us at lots of different levels of scale are currently doing that in ways that seem to me to be deeply flawed. Unhealthy, destructive, disconnecting. Disconnecting where the power is held from where the impacts are felt. And for me, thatâs a fundamental flaw⊠youâre not bringing together accountability, responsibility. Where is the risk? Where is the impact? If the right voices arenât involved in decisions and shaping of what weâre doing together as human beings, then youâll come up with deeply flawed solutions. You wonât see the solutions that could really be transformative. They wonât even be visible. And there will be all sorts of reasons why people will feel unable to shiftâŠ
The systems that we've got at the moment don't support us to shift. They support us to hold onto what we've got and to protect it... So for me, organisations who are working in this way, it's not just "is it helpful?" I think I'd put it even more strongly that it's necessary⊠Until we're looking at how we work there's a fundamental fault in what we're doing. That will keep showing up in what we put out in the world, it will just keep showing up and we won't have a way to notice that and adjust, which is what we need. -
Itâs not about getting it right⊠For me, itâs about finding a way to take a step forward, whether itâs me as a person or the organization that Iâm part of. How do we take a step forward and hear the feedback and then see what needs to be adjusted? So that I have agency. I can be creative, but also⊠recognising that Iâm part of a bigger system, that I canât possibly know how what Iâm doing is going to land or make a difference. I can only know that by listening to the feedback.
⊠Iâm working with a collaboration in the UK at the moment where weâre talking about transformational governance because governance, in a way, is a neutral term. You know, thereâs lots of different ways we can do governanceâŠ
Transformational governance... is explicitly designed to disrupt the way that power operates in the dominant system, that it's explicitly designed to support healthy collaboration across difference, and distance, and to bring about justice and resilient outcomes... -
Unless weâre creating governance thatâs explicitly designed to do that, I fear that weâre often working in ways that hamper us⊠that actually make that more difficult to achieve.
So can I propose a new evolution for Transition Network.. that we start talking about Transition governance?
Because one of the things I like about the word âtransitionâ is that itâs the process of going from one place to another. And maybe what youâre talking about is a form of governance which is transitional. As we move from one, I would say, medieval form of organising into something which is actually more suitable for the 21st century. For a 21st century world and challenges and interconnected world that we live in.
I really like that. And I think, yes â whatâs the governance that supports us to make that shift?⊠feels really interesting to me. And actually, I should just say that⊠one of the joys of my life at the moment is working with the wider network of Hubs on this form of governance. So not just doing it within our organisation, but as part of this wider system where Hubs have created their own circle to sense whatâs needed in the system and to support things to happen. And for me, I think youâre right that itâs one of the strengths of the Transition movement, and itâs not always recognised â even by us. I think weâre doing it and we need to understand that itâs quite unusual. Itâs not unique to us, but itâs quite unusual. And weâre really learning about how to do that well across a network⊠where people are in very different contexts⊠I meet up with others from this network every three weeks and we hold a circle meeting. And I really get the sense of that richness of itâs not one point in the system directing whatâs happening⊠Weâre coming together and sharing our different perspectives of whatâs important and whatâs needed and finding a next step together. And that is really inspirational.
Yeah. It sounds like you found a very⊠well, you didnât find it by accident, it was hard work⊠but you did find a good recipe. At least for this starting iteration, as Iâm sure there will be mutations along in the next couple of years as also the Transition movement evolves and as the world heads to wherever itâs heading. Itâs anyoneâs guess right now. But yeah, it looks like you found something very, very precious.
Yes, it feels precious, and it absolutely doesnât feel perfect. And I donât want to pretend that everything then becomes easy once youâre working in this way. If anything, I think, one of the things Iâve learnt about this form of governance is it actually exposes the problems⊠problems that have been under the surface often then come up to the surface. But thatâs part of the joy of it. Suddenly theyâre visible and suddenly we can start talking about them and trying to find a way together to resolve them. Rather than pushing them down and out of the way⊠but itâs certainly not perfect.
https://soundcloud.com/pedro-portela-168791914/sarah-mcadam-transition-network
Joining me today from the UK is Sarah McAdam from Transition Network. Transition Network is a charity established in the UK which works to inspire, encourage, connect, support and train communities worldwide as they self-organise around the Transition model.
Letâs start off by talking a little bit about Transition Network and how you became involved with it. And what the organisation, and this Transition model, is all about.
What Transition Network is, as you mentioned, itâs a small charity registered in the UK. Currently, thereâs 13 members of staff and 7 trustees, which is a requirement by law in the UK. And I first came to it actually even before 2013. Initially I was a trustee, which I did almost as a sort of part time contribution. I thought the organisation sounded interesting and I was agreeing to go to a board meeting maybe four or five times a year to give them a bit of a strategic steer. And since then, weâve really shifted the way we work. I joined the staff team, but we also completely shifted the way that we do our governance. So that role of a trustee is very different now.
And what is Transition all about for those three people in the world who havenât heard about Transition?
Oh no, Iâm sure itâs much, much more than three. So the Transition model is a model of, I would say, community resilience. Itâs â how does a community, how do people get together with their neighbors, to work out what they want to shift in their community and feel that they have the energy and the power to do it? So thatâs what the model is about. Started very much with a focus on the concept of peak oil and reducing our use of energy. But I would say itâs become more sophisticated and adapted as itâs spread around the world. And in each place, in each country, in each community, people are exploring for themselves â what are the key things that need to change to make the place where they live happier, healthier, more resilient, more sustainable? And that does look, of course, very different in very different places. But I think some of the values and principles apply across the whole movement.
The Transition movement or the Transition network, not the charity, but the actual global network â is an incredible story of how something that started off as an idea in a small town in the U.K. became very quickly a trans-local international network with Hubs all around the world and in many cities in many countries. I was personally involved in a couple of initiatives here in Portugal.
Yeah, it was something that spread, I would say, virally, according to where people went, where people saw the films, where they got access to the resources. And for me, thatâs one of the joys of the movement â to see how itâs spread, but then also been adapted in different places. And we have a number of Hubs, as you mentioned. So groups of people in a particular territory that support Transition in that country, or maybe for the people who speak that language. And one of the areas where weâre really exploring different forms of governance is across that network of Hubs. Because itâs very important to us that those Hubs are not controlled from one place. Theyâre self-managing, theyâre self-organising. But how do they come together to collaborate? Thatâs one of the questions for us.
Letâs talk about that. So when did your organisation, Transition Network the charity, which has this fundamental role of providing the scaffolding and support for the whole movement around the world. When did you decide to invest in governance? And Iâm using the word invest purposefully. So itâs not only financial investment, but also time commitment of the people involved â sitting together and saying, âWeâre going to think differently on how weâre going to work togetherâ. Can you tell us the story of that?
Yes, I would say that the small charity, the organisation and the bigger movement was interested right from the start about how people, how groups work together. I mean, itâs pretty fundamental when youâre thinking about how to get together with your neighbors. Itâs fundamental to the movement to find good ways of working together. And for me, thatâs what governance is ultimately about. Itâs â how do we come together in a group, agree on a shared endeavor, some common purpose that weâre trying to achieve together, and then find good ways to make decisions, to allocate resources, to be with each other, to resolve conflict or respond to conflict.
So I would say that weâve been interested in that right from the start. And then as the international network of Hubs developed, I would say that there was quite an interesting challenge that arose from there. An interesting and useful challenge. This is just my perception. Iâm sure different people would have different ways of telling the story, but I would say at the beginning Transition Network the little organisation, the charity, was maybe a bit careless about how we worked with those Hubs. I think we absolutely recognised that they needed to be self-managing and making their own decisions. But I think we were maybe a little unconscious in the way that we were using our power, the power that we were wielding because we were an organisation with some resources, because we were seen, you know, we were quite a visible part of the movement. So often the way we told the story had extra weight. And I think we became aware of that and people rightly questioned, challenged us a bit about that. And we started experimenting in the Hubs group with consent decision making, which draws from sociocracy. And I would say that initially it was that response of â âwe want to be working in a different way that makes power more visible and then supports it to flow and to be distributed across the systemâ.
And then at the same time, Transition Network, the little organisation was, I would say, struggling with how we should work. We had a sort of technically hierarchical structure. We werenât very hierarchical in the way we operated. But we had a board of trustees who, in the legal system that we work in, were in charge of our strategy and the staff were just there to carry out the strategy. And we knew that wasnât real in terms of how we worked. So we experimented with various things. We struggled. And I think this relates to what you were just saying about investment. I would say up until 2016, we tried to deal with that a little bit on the margins of the work we were trying to do in the world. You know, we were trying to organise ourselves, but we didnât have enough time to pay attention to it. And in 2016, we realised that this wasnât good enough. It wasnât helping us to do the work we needed to do. And at that point we decided to invest properly, and we were very lucky that we found a funder who was also interested in our experiment and was prepared to give us, not huge funding, but a bit of support to help us invest time, and to find people who could help us explore how we wanted our governance to change.
You mentioned that in the beginning you were a little bit careless with the Hubs. And you mentioned even there was the question of the power that your organisation was wielding unconsciously. Just because it started there, youâve mobilised the resources and I guess the money for some initiatives. Could we spend five minutes talking about that phase? Because I think thatâs an issue that interests both funders and grantees. People who are in a position to fund some of these movements, but also people who are on the receiving end of these funds. Understanding how these power dynamics or this friction eventually between funders and recipients of funds could be interesting⊠and how this leads them to the governance conversation.
Yes. I would say it was in the early days. We werenât particularly operating as a channel for funding, and that probably in itself brought some friction. We were managing to secure some funding for our organisation. And of course, partly that was because of what we were doing as an organisation. But probably just as much it was about the excitement of the movement. You know, that was partly, of course, what funders were responding to and interested in was whatâs happening in these different communities around the world. So I think there was a piece there where maybe we were a little complacent about the fact that actually some of these resources were coming to us almost on the backs of the work that was being done in a distributed grassroots network.
I mean I say complacent⊠I think we thought about it quite a lot. I think one of the enemies of all of this, you know, trying to do work in a way that is healthy and thoughtful is the busyness, isnât it? So we were a busy, small team desperately trying to respond to all these different needs and potential and demands.
And I think that's the moment where it's so good to just pause and think. Where are resources coming from? Who's impacted by this? Who's getting a say in the decision making? Which voices are being heard? Which are not part of the process yet? And what can we do about that? -
And I think for a while, sort of inevitably I guess, I think we made a lot of assumptions and we didnât even realise we were making assumptions.
And Iâm really conscious that coming from the UK with our whole history of colonialism â there we are yet again making those sort of assumptions that how we see the world is how everybody else is experiencing the world. Itâs so dangerous and itâs so easy to do. So I think for me, that was one of the things that we had to come to a realisation about. We were helped in that by some really constructive challenge from other people in other parts of the system.
Yeah, when it comes to governance I like to think of how quickly we fall back to the usual archetypes of ways of organising. Itâs a very innocent process, a very unconscious process, probably part of the collective unconscious of Jung. And how quickly we fall back to the traditional models of governance and decision making, which are part of our unconscious. But that in our case, weâre both in Europe, so we were both brought up in this culture and how much this is informing everything we do in terms of decision making and sense making and meaning making, right?
Yes.
So then, OK, flash forward â what happened then in 2016? What was the process? Walk us through this adventure that you started.
Well, we knew that we were interested in sociocracy in particular because weâd experienced a bit of consent decision making. And I donât know about you but for me, the moment I experienced that I felt a sort of tingling in my body of âthereâs something different hereâ. This is a different way of a group coming to a decision that feels like for once weâre properly listening to the collective intelligence. Weâre properly creating a space for us to find something that will work well enough for all of us. So we already had that excitement and that interest.
We found a team to help us, and they were a team from France called UniversitĂ© du Nous. So âUniversity of Usâ. And they had a lot of experience of sociocracy and holacracy, which is a different model, but some similarities. And they also had lots of other tools at their disposal and a lot of experienceâŠWe did a sort of action learning process â they gave us a little menu of different ways that you can organize⊠They talked to us about the concept of a safety framework.
These are the sorts of things that a group needs to know about itself to know how its governance works. Some basic things that unless you know, then actually you keep falling into the same traps. Such as, how do people join this group? How do people leave this group? What expectations do we have about how we work together? How do we make decisions? What are the roles that people are playing?... How does this work in your organization now? And what would you like to change about it?... -
We tried little experiments in various project groups trying out working in a sociocratic circle, trying out some of the things that they were offering us. We also did some sessions altogether as a team⊠We have trustees who have legal responsibility for the organisation, and it was very important for us that they were part of the process. We didnât want this to be a situation where the staff team were finding a whole new culture and a new way of working. And then we still had trustees above us who had a different culture. That was a recipe for disaster. So we did all sorts of little two-day sessions, three day sessions with this team over a couple of years. It was quite a long process, including, I would say, some things that might surprise people. We did quite a lot of movement exercises, as a group, learning how to move almost like birds flocking. You know, when you have the murmuration of swallows or starlings. That movement where sometimes youâre in a leadership role, youâre moving the group forward, sometimes youâre following others and the leadership flows around the group. So getting that sense of how leadership could be something really different from what weâd experienced traditionally. We did music sessions⊠improvising music together as another way of building that sense of âhow do I listen to this group and respond to the group, but also feel that I can bring my own creativity into what weâre doing together?â
That makes a lot of sense. And itâs, of course, completely aligned with the values around Transition and the values of â mind and body and heart. I wonder, how did the people in the organisation respond to these hints or suggestions that there are other ways of knowing and other ways of perceiving that are not necessarily mental, rational? That are embodied or somatic.
Well, as you say, thatâs always been quite a strong belief within the Transition movement. So it was something that was already part of our culture. And I think that helped us a lot that we werenât starting from zero. Weâd already done quite a lot of work on a culture that was trying to balance being and doing, balance relationships with output. So I would say that people were very receptive to it.
I think all of us, at different points, had moments where we struggled. I mean, Iâm not going to pretend it was a process where it all flowed smoothly and we ended up agreeing easily on how we were going to change our governance model. So there were moments, I would say, for all of us where we felt frustrated â this was taking a long time. Guilty, you know, we needed to be out there in the world doing things. Was it OK for us to be spending time looking inwardly at how we work? We had to process that a bit. And sometimes we had to accept that this was a time where we had something to deliver. We needed to prioritise that for a bit. But we needed to commit to coming back to this piece that was about âhow do we work?â. Not letting that go. Because I think we did have a strong sense that there was a potential for it to unlock something very important for us.
Did you have an endgame in sight? Meaning when you were in the difficult parts of this process â did you know that⊠this will come to an end eventually, and we know what that end is.
Yes, weâd given ourselves two years to experiment, and then to design a new governance model, and to move to that new governance model⊠I mean, we werenât dogmatic about it. We thought, âWell, if it really doesnât work, weâll have to go backwardsâ. But our idea was, we want to find a way to work in a way that isnât hierarchical. So we want to create a new model thatâs a flat structure. But also one that will give us more of an ability as an organisation to respond to whatâs happening in the wider movement, in the wider world â to be more responsive. So not so rigid.
And also we knew that one of the things we were doing as an organisation before this was we were spending endless time in meetings. All of the whole team, because all of our work, everything that any of us did related to what everybody else was doing. You know, of course it did, nothing was really standalone.
We didn't want to have a completely dictatorial structure where we followed the instructions of one person or a group of managers. So the only way we knew how to cope with that was to constantly have meetings where everybody came. And we'd talk about it and we'd go around in circles and we'd keep finding that the interrelationship of everything was too complex and we didn't know which bit to start with. So we knew we needed to do something about that. -
We felt that we werenât being⊠I always wonder about the word efficient because I think it has a sort of connotation of⊠an efficient corporate body. But we knew we werenât being efficient in terms of our time. We wanted to know that the time that we were spending was actually delivering some impact in the world, not going round and round in circles within the organisation. So that was one of the key things that we were saying. We need to find a model that gives us more clarity about who will be making decisions about what sort of stuff. And it doesnât have to be, everybody will make all the decisions about everything.
And did you find that model? The million dollar question.
Of course we didnât find the perfect model because that will never happen, I donât think. But by 2017 we were designing a model that we thought would work for us. And in 2018, we made the leap. Because one of the things that we found is that there comes a point where working in two systems just is not good for your health or your sanity. So there came a point where we were experimenting so much we said, now we need to shift. And the whole organisation needs to move into this new model. So we called it shared governance. Thatâs a term that UniversitĂ© du Nous use. And we created a system of circles and roles and clarity about decision making that draws heavily on sociocracy but has elements of our existing culture, and some of the things that feel particularly important about the movement and about our organisation.
So we donât follow exactly the model of sociocracy, but weâre doing some very similar stuff. And key to that is that itâs an evolutionary model.
What we said when we were trying to design it was it doesn't have to be perfect. We don't have to find all the answers. We need something that's good enough for now, safe enough to try - and we'll move into that model. And what we've got to make sure then is that the model's got the capacity to change. -
One of the things that I remember finding really helpful was when Guillame, who was the person who was helping us from UniversitĂ© du Nous,⊠said to me; âas soon as you move into this model you will find things wrong with it. And thatâs exactly what should happen. Then the tensions will come up and then youâll see what needs to change.â So that reassurance you donât need to try and think ahead and predict everything that will be needed because you just need to create a model thatâs got the capacity to shift as needs change.
To evolve, to become alive. Practically speaking now â can you give us some examples of how this shared governance model works right now? And how is it different from what you previously had in terms of flow of power? And what do you think would be the next evolutionary mutation?
So some of the key elements of it⊠One really fundamental piece early on was that we created a single circle. We call it the Primary Circle, which is the circle that takes care of the strategy, the purpose of the organisation, and its governance. And that circle is open to any member of the staff who would like to join it, and most people did. We didnât insist on people joining it, but we made it available to any member of the staff who wanted to join, and to the trustees. So rather than having this fundamental hierarchy in the system â the group that holds equivalent power to decide what needs to shift in terms of our purpose and our governance includes everybody who wants to be part of it, and has got the capacity to be part of it.
So thatâs a pretty big change. Itâs actually not a change that the legal system in the UK is capable of recognising, for a charity. So we still have these trustees whoâve got legal responsibility, but they made a commitment that they would exercise that responsibility through this collective system, that they wouldnât sit outside the system and exercise that power. So thatâs really significant. And then as part of that⊠we really defined âwhatâs our purpose as an organisation?â We spent quite a lot of time thinking about that, feeling about that, exploring that with the wider movement, getting feedback, listening to the feedback. And that has become then the thing that steers us. So in all our decisions, in all our different ways of working â weâre constantly thinking, aligning to âhow does this best serve the purpose of the organisation?â Thatâs our compass. And for me, thereâs something there about how that enables a lot more trust. That because weâve spent time knowing what it is weâre trying to achieve⊠I donât need to know what this personâs doing and what that circle are doing. I can trust that weâre all aligned to this purpose, and I also trust that if a real tension arises between us we have a way of processing it.
We created this idea that there are roles in the system. So rather than having a team where people have fixed jobs where you stay forever. âWe recruited you to be in this role and youâre going to stay in this role.â We created a system of âletâs name all the different roles that people play in our systemâ, knowing that often some of the invisible roles are ones that hold a lot of power⊠Theyâre not official in the structure chart, but itâs actually a role that somebody takes, might use a lot of power, exercise a lot of power, or sometimes will exercise a lot of responsibility, but without any recognition. And that was a really interesting piece to see. Well whoâs spending a lot of time investing in the relationships in the organisation and supporting the health of the organisation? But thatâs not visible on the structure chart. And actually, if thatâs a role, letâs name it as a role and make sure weâve put it somewhere in the system.
And thereâs a much clearer idea now that people will move between roles. This is all part of the evolution of the system. At any given time I might be holding 2, 3, 4 roles in the system. But theyâre not my identity in the organisation. Theyâre the things that Iâm doing at the moment to help serve our purpose. At various points I might be asked to step out of a role because it makes sense for somebody else to go in there. I might be asked to hand over something else. I might be asked to take on something else. And all the time guided by, âwhat best serves our purposeâ, rather than this idea that Iâm fixed in this role and Iâm the only person that can hold it. And seeing the health of roles shifting around the system. And I want to be honest and say, thatâs probably something weâve found quite difficult. You know, I think weâre getting much better at it. But it is very easy for people to just get embedded in a role, and to build up knowledge, and to feel nobody else can do this, and for the team to feel nobody else could do that. But weâre really trying to shift our thinking and recognise that there are some roles that have very specific skills attached, but thereâs an awful lot that can be done in different ways by different people. That actually having that flexibility really supports us to pivot as an organisation, as we see things⊠that the needs are changing, or our priorities are changing.
Yeah, that must have been a very interesting step⊠Identifying the invisible roles and maybe even uncovering that some of these invisible roles are key to how the whole organisation actually works.
It really was⊠It was particularly interesting for me personally because, until we made the shift, I was holding this role of Delivery Director. And that role managed everybody else, all the other members of staff. And what we realised⊠I think I had already been feeling the discomfort of that role, but also the power of that role. That was a role that weâd added lots of different elements to⊠It was the role that had a lot of control over resources, and a lot of control over how peopleâs time was spent⊠I tended to work in a very collaborative way with people. But still, it was me that was the point of connection that would help see what needed to happen, and make it happen across the system. And I think, for me, one of the most exciting things we did was to disentangle all the stuff that weâd put onto that role and see that it could be done by different people in different ways⊠I was doing a lot of coaching and support. But did it make sense for that to be done by the same person who was also making decisions about money? It didnât need to be. That actually we could distribute these leadership responsibilities in a much more transparent way. And you know, the reality was I couldnât have carried on doing that job, it was becoming impossible and a bottleneck in the system. And suddenly by bringing more people in it opened up new energies and new ideas.
Yeah, and itâs usually how people end up burning themselves out⊠by accumulating all of these rolesâŠ
I have a slightly more personal question about this process of picking apart all of these roles that are concentrated around a single node in the network. Because some people might think that this is actually a process of stripping away power from your position. And of course, no matter how much we work on our own personal development and our own capacity to see ourselves, you know, disconnected from the organisation. Thereâs always probably some fear that may come with this process of picking yourself apart and decentralising yourself from the organisation, right?⊠In the process of unbecoming this central node â does it bring up feelings of uncertainty or insecurity?
⊠There were definite moments of insecurity. I think ⊠there were definite moments where I struggled to let go of control⊠We talked about a posture that you need to learn to work in this way. Thereâs a culture as a group that needs to shift, but also for each of us individually thereâs a new posture, a new way of behaving, that we need to learn. And thereâs lots of times where itâs not comfortable because itâs not familiar⊠How I grew up and how I worked in other organisations taught me exactly the opposite of the posture that I think is needed in this sort of system. So for me a key bit was about letting go of control. And there were moments when I could feel the sort of message in my brain of âIâm not sure that this person can do it. I know how to do it. Is it safe to let it go to somebody else?â And also, I guess, a piece about my identity⊠My identity is to be a leader in this organisation. What is it if Iâm part of a circle where I donât have any more of a claim to be a leader than anyone else whoâs sharing in these responsibilities? I have to say for me personally, it was so exciting that that really helped me. And I think also the fact that I could feel how completely unsustainable my old job was, that really helped me as well. That sense of, well Iâm just going to break if I carry on trying to do it this way.
And for me, one of the things that we need to try and support in the world is people holding on to power, supporting them to feel the toll that is taking on them⊠And once you can feel that I think that really helps you connect with the sense of, âI want to distribute this more. I donât want to be holding all of this to myself.â And I remember that there were key moments, really beautiful moments⊠along our journey where I would suddenly find myself in, say, consent decision making or a strategy meeting with a circle where I was no longer holding power. Everybody had a right to object to what we were doing. Everybody had a responsibility to try and find the right answer. And I noticed that we came up with a solution or a way forward that I would never have thought of.. That was never going to come into my brain. And even if I had been facilitating the meeting, in the old way I think I would have been facilitating to get to the solution that I thought I could see⊠we wouldnât have got to this actually much better solutionâŠ.
Yeah. Itâs interesting you mentioned something that is this burden of power⊠the issue of people holding onto power. I see it sometimes in two ways, like on one hand it could be Iâm holding onto power because Iâm addicted to it or I really like the feeling of being powerful. But thereâs also the other alternative, the more positive alternative, which is Iâm holding onto power because I care deeply about where this thing goes. And I think I know exactly where this thing needs to go. And a process, like you mentioned, of experiencing the moment when the organisation as a whole comes up with a path forward that is beyond your wildest dreams. And that is actually the right one⊠is liberating. In liberating I mean, from the perspective of someone who needs to hold power because he or she doesnât trust that the organisation can find a way forward. So this is really powerful.
I agree, and I also think this is relevant to the point you raised earlier about funders. Because I see with funders this huge and completely understandable sense of responsibility. You know, âweâve got access to these resources. And somehow, weâve got to make decisions that mean that these resources have the most possible impact⊠we can see the huge need.â Itâs a huge responsibility⊠Iâve rarely met a funder who doesnât care. Thatâs not the issue. Itâs that they care hugely about what to do with these resources. But I also see how difficult it is to let go of control. And for me personally, itâs what needs to happen⊠When the system starts to find the best use of the resources you get to transformational solutions. But⊠I really recognise how hard that is for funders.
Do you think itâs a leap of faith?
⊠Iâm very interested in working with funders because I feel their interest in working differently and I feel what pulls them back. So there is something about how do you give people a real taste of whatâs possible in a way that feels safe enough?⊠How can they trial this and then start to gain confidence, start to see whatâs possible. But I do think⊠with any piece that theyâre going to experiment with, there is this moment where they have to let go of control. And if they havenât properly done that, then the power that theyâre exercising, even if itâs not explicit, will distort the process and it will mean they probably wonât get the sort of outcome that theyâre looking for and that weâve just been talking about. So until youâve genuinely let go, even if youâre saying all the right things⊠it wonât genuinely make that shift a transformative change.
⊠Formally, itâs possible to let go of that control. But is it possible to completely isolate yourself from the perception of power or the perception of expectations that receivers might have from you?
Thatâs impossible. So when Iâm saying let go of control I donât mean let go of all power, because thereâs rank, thereâs all sorts of things that will still be operating in the system, whether youâre explicitly changing the way decisions are made or notâŠ
... for me when you're thinking about governance - culture and individual posture is as important as the structures and processes. Because for me the thing that makes it possible to shift to healthy power, it's not about saying power doesn't exist, but it's about how do we name it? How do we make it visible? How do we name what's going on? You know where we see, "I think I might be having an influence here that is probably not a healthy influence? How do I talk about that? How do I invite feedback? How do I encourage people to trust that they can give me feedback and they won't be punished for it? And how do I really train myself to listen to the feedback?â -
âŠOne of the big things that we always say is a key part of doing shared governance well is having curiosity. So when something comes up, whether itâs an unexpected tension in the system, whether itâs an objection to a decision that you thought was going to be a really straightforward decision⊠Whether itâs feedback that feels a bit uncomfortable. The piece about âhow do I cultivate a sense of instead of defending myself, and proving that itâs wrong, and overcoming it. How do I cultivate this sense of, Oh, thatâs interesting. Whatâs going on there? Why is the system telling me this?â It doesnât mean that everybody who gives you feedback is right. But how can you be interested in whatâs come up for them and why itâs come up?
Yeah, a lot of how and why questions instead of what.
Iâm curious what you make of this⊠I believe that working with governance within the organisations that support movements⊠Be it charities like Transition Network or even funders⊠I believe that this is actually a leverage point or something that can have and can propagate impact in the various different areas social movements are struggling. Be it climate change, social justice, peace building, you name it. Governance is almost like a thread that ties all of these groups together. Because itâs always a matter of organising. Itâs always a matter of how we show up togetherâŠ
I wonder if you share this hypothesis that working on governance, or at least hosting conversations on governance and going through this process like you did â at the level of funders, at the level of charities, at the level of formal organisations â can actually propagate to civil society, can actually then propagate to providing other models of how conflict is addressed in communities? Eventually to the scale of how conflict between larger communities and even nations are addressed. Or is it just my utopia?
⊠So for me, governance is about how we work together, how we make decisions, how we distribute power and resources at every level of scale. So from within my family to within a group, within a network, an organisation, as you say, at regional, national, international level. For me⊠lots of us at lots of different levels of scale are currently doing that in ways that seem to me to be deeply flawed. Unhealthy, destructive, disconnecting. Disconnecting where the power is held from where the impacts are felt. And for me, thatâs a fundamental flaw⊠youâre not bringing together accountability, responsibility. Where is the risk? Where is the impact? If the right voices arenât involved in decisions and shaping of what weâre doing together as human beings, then youâll come up with deeply flawed solutions. You wonât see the solutions that could really be transformative. They wonât even be visible. And there will be all sorts of reasons why people will feel unable to shiftâŠ
The systems that we've got at the moment don't support us to shift. They support us to hold onto what we've got and to protect it... So for me, organisations who are working in this way, it's not just "is it helpful?" I think I'd put it even more strongly that it's necessary⊠Until we're looking at how we work there's a fundamental fault in what we're doing. That will keep showing up in what we put out in the world, it will just keep showing up and we won't have a way to notice that and adjust, which is what we need. -
Itâs not about getting it right⊠For me, itâs about finding a way to take a step forward, whether itâs me as a person or the organization that Iâm part of. How do we take a step forward and hear the feedback and then see what needs to be adjusted? So that I have agency. I can be creative, but also⊠recognising that Iâm part of a bigger system, that I canât possibly know how what Iâm doing is going to land or make a difference. I can only know that by listening to the feedback.
⊠Iâm working with a collaboration in the UK at the moment where weâre talking about transformational governance because governance, in a way, is a neutral term. You know, thereâs lots of different ways we can do governanceâŠ
Transformational governance... is explicitly designed to disrupt the way that power operates in the dominant system, that it's explicitly designed to support healthy collaboration across difference, and distance, and to bring about justice and resilient outcomes... -
Unless weâre creating governance thatâs explicitly designed to do that, I fear that weâre often working in ways that hamper us⊠that actually make that more difficult to achieve.
So can I propose a new evolution for Transition Network.. that we start talking about Transition governance?
Because one of the things I like about the word âtransitionâ is that itâs the process of going from one place to another. And maybe what youâre talking about is a form of governance which is transitional. As we move from one, I would say, medieval form of organising into something which is actually more suitable for the 21st century. For a 21st century world and challenges and interconnected world that we live in.
I really like that. And I think, yes â whatâs the governance that supports us to make that shift?⊠feels really interesting to me. And actually, I should just say that⊠one of the joys of my life at the moment is working with the wider network of Hubs on this form of governance. So not just doing it within our organisation, but as part of this wider system where Hubs have created their own circle to sense whatâs needed in the system and to support things to happen. And for me, I think youâre right that itâs one of the strengths of the Transition movement, and itâs not always recognised â even by us. I think weâre doing it and we need to understand that itâs quite unusual. Itâs not unique to us, but itâs quite unusual. And weâre really learning about how to do that well across a network⊠where people are in very different contexts⊠I meet up with others from this network every three weeks and we hold a circle meeting. And I really get the sense of that richness of itâs not one point in the system directing whatâs happening⊠Weâre coming together and sharing our different perspectives of whatâs important and whatâs needed and finding a next step together. And that is really inspirational.
Yeah. It sounds like you found a very⊠well, you didnât find it by accident, it was hard work⊠but you did find a good recipe. At least for this starting iteration, as Iâm sure there will be mutations along in the next couple of years as also the Transition movement evolves and as the world heads to wherever itâs heading. Itâs anyoneâs guess right now. But yeah, it looks like you found something very, very precious.
Yes, it feels precious, and it absolutely doesnât feel perfect. And I donât want to pretend that everything then becomes easy once youâre working in this way. If anything, I think, one of the things Iâve learnt about this form of governance is it actually exposes the problems⊠problems that have been under the surface often then come up to the surface. But thatâs part of the joy of it. Suddenly theyâre visible and suddenly we can start talking about them and trying to find a way together to resolve them. Rather than pushing them down and out of the way⊠but itâs certainly not perfect.
https://soundcloud.com/pedro-portela-168791914/sarah-mcadam-transition-network
Joining me today from the UK is Sarah McAdam from Transition Network. Transition Network is a charity established in the UK which works to inspire, encourage, connect, support and train communities worldwide as they self-organise around the Transition model.
Letâs start off by talking a little bit about Transition Network and how you became involved with it. And what the organisation, and this Transition model, is all about.
What Transition Network is, as you mentioned, itâs a small charity registered in the UK. Currently, thereâs 13 members of staff and 7 trustees, which is a requirement by law in the UK. And I first came to it actually even before 2013. Initially I was a trustee, which I did almost as a sort of part time contribution. I thought the organisation sounded interesting and I was agreeing to go to a board meeting maybe four or five times a year to give them a bit of a strategic steer. And since then, weâve really shifted the way we work. I joined the staff team, but we also completely shifted the way that we do our governance. So that role of a trustee is very different now.
And what is Transition all about for those three people in the world who havenât heard about Transition?
Oh no, Iâm sure itâs much, much more than three. So the Transition model is a model of, I would say, community resilience. Itâs â how does a community, how do people get together with their neighbors, to work out what they want to shift in their community and feel that they have the energy and the power to do it? So thatâs what the model is about. Started very much with a focus on the concept of peak oil and reducing our use of energy. But I would say itâs become more sophisticated and adapted as itâs spread around the world. And in each place, in each country, in each community, people are exploring for themselves â what are the key things that need to change to make the place where they live happier, healthier, more resilient, more sustainable? And that does look, of course, very different in very different places. But I think some of the values and principles apply across the whole movement.
The Transition movement or the Transition network, not the charity, but the actual global network â is an incredible story of how something that started off as an idea in a small town in the U.K. became very quickly a trans-local international network with Hubs all around the world and in many cities in many countries. I was personally involved in a couple of initiatives here in Portugal.
Yeah, it was something that spread, I would say, virally, according to where people went, where people saw the films, where they got access to the resources. And for me, thatâs one of the joys of the movement â to see how itâs spread, but then also been adapted in different places. And we have a number of Hubs, as you mentioned. So groups of people in a particular territory that support Transition in that country, or maybe for the people who speak that language. And one of the areas where weâre really exploring different forms of governance is across that network of Hubs. Because itâs very important to us that those Hubs are not controlled from one place. Theyâre self-managing, theyâre self-organising. But how do they come together to collaborate? Thatâs one of the questions for us.
Letâs talk about that. So when did your organisation, Transition Network the charity, which has this fundamental role of providing the scaffolding and support for the whole movement around the world. When did you decide to invest in governance? And Iâm using the word invest purposefully. So itâs not only financial investment, but also time commitment of the people involved â sitting together and saying, âWeâre going to think differently on how weâre going to work togetherâ. Can you tell us the story of that?
Yes, I would say that the small charity, the organisation and the bigger movement was interested right from the start about how people, how groups work together. I mean, itâs pretty fundamental when youâre thinking about how to get together with your neighbors. Itâs fundamental to the movement to find good ways of working together. And for me, thatâs what governance is ultimately about. Itâs â how do we come together in a group, agree on a shared endeavor, some common purpose that weâre trying to achieve together, and then find good ways to make decisions, to allocate resources, to be with each other, to resolve conflict or respond to conflict.
So I would say that weâve been interested in that right from the start. And then as the international network of Hubs developed, I would say that there was quite an interesting challenge that arose from there. An interesting and useful challenge. This is just my perception. Iâm sure different people would have different ways of telling the story, but I would say at the beginning Transition Network the little organisation, the charity, was maybe a bit careless about how we worked with those Hubs. I think we absolutely recognised that they needed to be self-managing and making their own decisions. But I think we were maybe a little unconscious in the way that we were using our power, the power that we were wielding because we were an organisation with some resources, because we were seen, you know, we were quite a visible part of the movement. So often the way we told the story had extra weight. And I think we became aware of that and people rightly questioned, challenged us a bit about that. And we started experimenting in the Hubs group with consent decision making, which draws from sociocracy. And I would say that initially it was that response of â âwe want to be working in a different way that makes power more visible and then supports it to flow and to be distributed across the systemâ.
And then at the same time, Transition Network, the little organisation was, I would say, struggling with how we should work. We had a sort of technically hierarchical structure. We werenât very hierarchical in the way we operated. But we had a board of trustees who, in the legal system that we work in, were in charge of our strategy and the staff were just there to carry out the strategy. And we knew that wasnât real in terms of how we worked. So we experimented with various things. We struggled. And I think this relates to what you were just saying about investment. I would say up until 2016, we tried to deal with that a little bit on the margins of the work we were trying to do in the world. You know, we were trying to organise ourselves, but we didnât have enough time to pay attention to it. And in 2016, we realised that this wasnât good enough. It wasnât helping us to do the work we needed to do. And at that point we decided to invest properly, and we were very lucky that we found a funder who was also interested in our experiment and was prepared to give us, not huge funding, but a bit of support to help us invest time, and to find people who could help us explore how we wanted our governance to change.
You mentioned that in the beginning you were a little bit careless with the Hubs. And you mentioned even there was the question of the power that your organisation was wielding unconsciously. Just because it started there, youâve mobilised the resources and I guess the money for some initiatives. Could we spend five minutes talking about that phase? Because I think thatâs an issue that interests both funders and grantees. People who are in a position to fund some of these movements, but also people who are on the receiving end of these funds. Understanding how these power dynamics or this friction eventually between funders and recipients of funds could be interesting⊠and how this leads them to the governance conversation.
Yes. I would say it was in the early days. We werenât particularly operating as a channel for funding, and that probably in itself brought some friction. We were managing to secure some funding for our organisation. And of course, partly that was because of what we were doing as an organisation. But probably just as much it was about the excitement of the movement. You know, that was partly, of course, what funders were responding to and interested in was whatâs happening in these different communities around the world. So I think there was a piece there where maybe we were a little complacent about the fact that actually some of these resources were coming to us almost on the backs of the work that was being done in a distributed grassroots network.
I mean I say complacent⊠I think we thought about it quite a lot. I think one of the enemies of all of this, you know, trying to do work in a way that is healthy and thoughtful is the busyness, isnât it? So we were a busy, small team desperately trying to respond to all these different needs and potential and demands.
And I think that's the moment where it's so good to just pause and think. Where are resources coming from? Who's impacted by this? Who's getting a say in the decision making? Which voices are being heard? Which are not part of the process yet? And what can we do about that? -
And I think for a while, sort of inevitably I guess, I think we made a lot of assumptions and we didnât even realise we were making assumptions.
And Iâm really conscious that coming from the UK with our whole history of colonialism â there we are yet again making those sort of assumptions that how we see the world is how everybody else is experiencing the world. Itâs so dangerous and itâs so easy to do. So I think for me, that was one of the things that we had to come to a realisation about. We were helped in that by some really constructive challenge from other people in other parts of the system.
Yeah, when it comes to governance I like to think of how quickly we fall back to the usual archetypes of ways of organising. Itâs a very innocent process, a very unconscious process, probably part of the collective unconscious of Jung. And how quickly we fall back to the traditional models of governance and decision making, which are part of our unconscious. But that in our case, weâre both in Europe, so we were both brought up in this culture and how much this is informing everything we do in terms of decision making and sense making and meaning making, right?
Yes.
So then, OK, flash forward â what happened then in 2016? What was the process? Walk us through this adventure that you started.
Well, we knew that we were interested in sociocracy in particular because weâd experienced a bit of consent decision making. And I donât know about you but for me, the moment I experienced that I felt a sort of tingling in my body of âthereâs something different hereâ. This is a different way of a group coming to a decision that feels like for once weâre properly listening to the collective intelligence. Weâre properly creating a space for us to find something that will work well enough for all of us. So we already had that excitement and that interest.
We found a team to help us, and they were a team from France called UniversitĂ© du Nous. So âUniversity of Usâ. And they had a lot of experience of sociocracy and holacracy, which is a different model, but some similarities. And they also had lots of other tools at their disposal and a lot of experienceâŠWe did a sort of action learning process â they gave us a little menu of different ways that you can organize⊠They talked to us about the concept of a safety framework.
These are the sorts of things that a group needs to know about itself to know how its governance works. Some basic things that unless you know, then actually you keep falling into the same traps. Such as, how do people join this group? How do people leave this group? What expectations do we have about how we work together? How do we make decisions? What are the roles that people are playing?... How does this work in your organization now? And what would you like to change about it?... -
We tried little experiments in various project groups trying out working in a sociocratic circle, trying out some of the things that they were offering us. We also did some sessions altogether as a team⊠We have trustees who have legal responsibility for the organisation, and it was very important for us that they were part of the process. We didnât want this to be a situation where the staff team were finding a whole new culture and a new way of working. And then we still had trustees above us who had a different culture. That was a recipe for disaster. So we did all sorts of little two-day sessions, three day sessions with this team over a couple of years. It was quite a long process, including, I would say, some things that might surprise people. We did quite a lot of movement exercises, as a group, learning how to move almost like birds flocking. You know, when you have the murmuration of swallows or starlings. That movement where sometimes youâre in a leadership role, youâre moving the group forward, sometimes youâre following others and the leadership flows around the group. So getting that sense of how leadership could be something really different from what weâd experienced traditionally. We did music sessions⊠improvising music together as another way of building that sense of âhow do I listen to this group and respond to the group, but also feel that I can bring my own creativity into what weâre doing together?â
That makes a lot of sense. And itâs, of course, completely aligned with the values around Transition and the values of â mind and body and heart. I wonder, how did the people in the organisation respond to these hints or suggestions that there are other ways of knowing and other ways of perceiving that are not necessarily mental, rational? That are embodied or somatic.
Well, as you say, thatâs always been quite a strong belief within the Transition movement. So it was something that was already part of our culture. And I think that helped us a lot that we werenât starting from zero. Weâd already done quite a lot of work on a culture that was trying to balance being and doing, balance relationships with output. So I would say that people were very receptive to it.
I think all of us, at different points, had moments where we struggled. I mean, Iâm not going to pretend it was a process where it all flowed smoothly and we ended up agreeing easily on how we were going to change our governance model. So there were moments, I would say, for all of us where we felt frustrated â this was taking a long time. Guilty, you know, we needed to be out there in the world doing things. Was it OK for us to be spending time looking inwardly at how we work? We had to process that a bit. And sometimes we had to accept that this was a time where we had something to deliver. We needed to prioritise that for a bit. But we needed to commit to coming back to this piece that was about âhow do we work?â. Not letting that go. Because I think we did have a strong sense that there was a potential for it to unlock something very important for us.
Did you have an endgame in sight? Meaning when you were in the difficult parts of this process â did you know that⊠this will come to an end eventually, and we know what that end is.
Yes, weâd given ourselves two years to experiment, and then to design a new governance model, and to move to that new governance model⊠I mean, we werenât dogmatic about it. We thought, âWell, if it really doesnât work, weâll have to go backwardsâ. But our idea was, we want to find a way to work in a way that isnât hierarchical. So we want to create a new model thatâs a flat structure. But also one that will give us more of an ability as an organisation to respond to whatâs happening in the wider movement, in the wider world â to be more responsive. So not so rigid.
And also we knew that one of the things we were doing as an organisation before this was we were spending endless time in meetings. All of the whole team, because all of our work, everything that any of us did related to what everybody else was doing. You know, of course it did, nothing was really standalone.
We didn't want to have a completely dictatorial structure where we followed the instructions of one person or a group of managers. So the only way we knew how to cope with that was to constantly have meetings where everybody came. And we'd talk about it and we'd go around in circles and we'd keep finding that the interrelationship of everything was too complex and we didn't know which bit to start with. So we knew we needed to do something about that. -
We felt that we werenât being⊠I always wonder about the word efficient because I think it has a sort of connotation of⊠an efficient corporate body. But we knew we werenât being efficient in terms of our time. We wanted to know that the time that we were spending was actually delivering some impact in the world, not going round and round in circles within the organisation. So that was one of the key things that we were saying. We need to find a model that gives us more clarity about who will be making decisions about what sort of stuff. And it doesnât have to be, everybody will make all the decisions about everything.
And did you find that model? The million dollar question.
Of course we didnât find the perfect model because that will never happen, I donât think. But by 2017 we were designing a model that we thought would work for us. And in 2018, we made the leap. Because one of the things that we found is that there comes a point where working in two systems just is not good for your health or your sanity. So there came a point where we were experimenting so much we said, now we need to shift. And the whole organisation needs to move into this new model. So we called it shared governance. Thatâs a term that UniversitĂ© du Nous use. And we created a system of circles and roles and clarity about decision making that draws heavily on sociocracy but has elements of our existing culture, and some of the things that feel particularly important about the movement and about our organisation.
So we donât follow exactly the model of sociocracy, but weâre doing some very similar stuff. And key to that is that itâs an evolutionary model.
What we said when we were trying to design it was it doesn't have to be perfect. We don't have to find all the answers. We need something that's good enough for now, safe enough to try - and we'll move into that model. And what we've got to make sure then is that the model's got the capacity to change. -
One of the things that I remember finding really helpful was when Guillame, who was the person who was helping us from UniversitĂ© du Nous,⊠said to me; âas soon as you move into this model you will find things wrong with it. And thatâs exactly what should happen. Then the tensions will come up and then youâll see what needs to change.â So that reassurance you donât need to try and think ahead and predict everything that will be needed because you just need to create a model thatâs got the capacity to shift as needs change.
To evolve, to become alive. Practically speaking now â can you give us some examples of how this shared governance model works right now? And how is it different from what you previously had in terms of flow of power? And what do you think would be the next evolutionary mutation?
So some of the key elements of it⊠One really fundamental piece early on was that we created a single circle. We call it the Primary Circle, which is the circle that takes care of the strategy, the purpose of the organisation, and its governance. And that circle is open to any member of the staff who would like to join it, and most people did. We didnât insist on people joining it, but we made it available to any member of the staff who wanted to join, and to the trustees. So rather than having this fundamental hierarchy in the system â the group that holds equivalent power to decide what needs to shift in terms of our purpose and our governance includes everybody who wants to be part of it, and has got the capacity to be part of it.
So thatâs a pretty big change. Itâs actually not a change that the legal system in the UK is capable of recognising, for a charity. So we still have these trustees whoâve got legal responsibility, but they made a commitment that they would exercise that responsibility through this collective system, that they wouldnât sit outside the system and exercise that power. So thatâs really significant. And then as part of that⊠we really defined âwhatâs our purpose as an organisation?â We spent quite a lot of time thinking about that, feeling about that, exploring that with the wider movement, getting feedback, listening to the feedback. And that has become then the thing that steers us. So in all our decisions, in all our different ways of working â weâre constantly thinking, aligning to âhow does this best serve the purpose of the organisation?â Thatâs our compass. And for me, thereâs something there about how that enables a lot more trust. That because weâve spent time knowing what it is weâre trying to achieve⊠I donât need to know what this personâs doing and what that circle are doing. I can trust that weâre all aligned to this purpose, and I also trust that if a real tension arises between us we have a way of processing it.
We created this idea that there are roles in the system. So rather than having a team where people have fixed jobs where you stay forever. âWe recruited you to be in this role and youâre going to stay in this role.â We created a system of âletâs name all the different roles that people play in our systemâ, knowing that often some of the invisible roles are ones that hold a lot of power⊠Theyâre not official in the structure chart, but itâs actually a role that somebody takes, might use a lot of power, exercise a lot of power, or sometimes will exercise a lot of responsibility, but without any recognition. And that was a really interesting piece to see. Well whoâs spending a lot of time investing in the relationships in the organisation and supporting the health of the organisation? But thatâs not visible on the structure chart. And actually, if thatâs a role, letâs name it as a role and make sure weâve put it somewhere in the system.
And thereâs a much clearer idea now that people will move between roles. This is all part of the evolution of the system. At any given time I might be holding 2, 3, 4 roles in the system. But theyâre not my identity in the organisation. Theyâre the things that Iâm doing at the moment to help serve our purpose. At various points I might be asked to step out of a role because it makes sense for somebody else to go in there. I might be asked to hand over something else. I might be asked to take on something else. And all the time guided by, âwhat best serves our purposeâ, rather than this idea that Iâm fixed in this role and Iâm the only person that can hold it. And seeing the health of roles shifting around the system. And I want to be honest and say, thatâs probably something weâve found quite difficult. You know, I think weâre getting much better at it. But it is very easy for people to just get embedded in a role, and to build up knowledge, and to feel nobody else can do this, and for the team to feel nobody else could do that. But weâre really trying to shift our thinking and recognise that there are some roles that have very specific skills attached, but thereâs an awful lot that can be done in different ways by different people. That actually having that flexibility really supports us to pivot as an organisation, as we see things⊠that the needs are changing, or our priorities are changing.
Yeah, that must have been a very interesting step⊠Identifying the invisible roles and maybe even uncovering that some of these invisible roles are key to how the whole organisation actually works.
It really was⊠It was particularly interesting for me personally because, until we made the shift, I was holding this role of Delivery Director. And that role managed everybody else, all the other members of staff. And what we realised⊠I think I had already been feeling the discomfort of that role, but also the power of that role. That was a role that weâd added lots of different elements to⊠It was the role that had a lot of control over resources, and a lot of control over how peopleâs time was spent⊠I tended to work in a very collaborative way with people. But still, it was me that was the point of connection that would help see what needed to happen, and make it happen across the system. And I think, for me, one of the most exciting things we did was to disentangle all the stuff that weâd put onto that role and see that it could be done by different people in different ways⊠I was doing a lot of coaching and support. But did it make sense for that to be done by the same person who was also making decisions about money? It didnât need to be. That actually we could distribute these leadership responsibilities in a much more transparent way. And you know, the reality was I couldnât have carried on doing that job, it was becoming impossible and a bottleneck in the system. And suddenly by bringing more people in it opened up new energies and new ideas.
Yeah, and itâs usually how people end up burning themselves out⊠by accumulating all of these rolesâŠ
I have a slightly more personal question about this process of picking apart all of these roles that are concentrated around a single node in the network. Because some people might think that this is actually a process of stripping away power from your position. And of course, no matter how much we work on our own personal development and our own capacity to see ourselves, you know, disconnected from the organisation. Thereâs always probably some fear that may come with this process of picking yourself apart and decentralising yourself from the organisation, right?⊠In the process of unbecoming this central node â does it bring up feelings of uncertainty or insecurity?
⊠There were definite moments of insecurity. I think ⊠there were definite moments where I struggled to let go of control⊠We talked about a posture that you need to learn to work in this way. Thereâs a culture as a group that needs to shift, but also for each of us individually thereâs a new posture, a new way of behaving, that we need to learn. And thereâs lots of times where itâs not comfortable because itâs not familiar⊠How I grew up and how I worked in other organisations taught me exactly the opposite of the posture that I think is needed in this sort of system. So for me a key bit was about letting go of control. And there were moments when I could feel the sort of message in my brain of âIâm not sure that this person can do it. I know how to do it. Is it safe to let it go to somebody else?â And also, I guess, a piece about my identity⊠My identity is to be a leader in this organisation. What is it if Iâm part of a circle where I donât have any more of a claim to be a leader than anyone else whoâs sharing in these responsibilities? I have to say for me personally, it was so exciting that that really helped me. And I think also the fact that I could feel how completely unsustainable my old job was, that really helped me as well. That sense of, well Iâm just going to break if I carry on trying to do it this way.
And for me, one of the things that we need to try and support in the world is people holding on to power, supporting them to feel the toll that is taking on them⊠And once you can feel that I think that really helps you connect with the sense of, âI want to distribute this more. I donât want to be holding all of this to myself.â And I remember that there were key moments, really beautiful moments⊠along our journey where I would suddenly find myself in, say, consent decision making or a strategy meeting with a circle where I was no longer holding power. Everybody had a right to object to what we were doing. Everybody had a responsibility to try and find the right answer. And I noticed that we came up with a solution or a way forward that I would never have thought of.. That was never going to come into my brain. And even if I had been facilitating the meeting, in the old way I think I would have been facilitating to get to the solution that I thought I could see⊠we wouldnât have got to this actually much better solutionâŠ.
Yeah. Itâs interesting you mentioned something that is this burden of power⊠the issue of people holding onto power. I see it sometimes in two ways, like on one hand it could be Iâm holding onto power because Iâm addicted to it or I really like the feeling of being powerful. But thereâs also the other alternative, the more positive alternative, which is Iâm holding onto power because I care deeply about where this thing goes. And I think I know exactly where this thing needs to go. And a process, like you mentioned, of experiencing the moment when the organisation as a whole comes up with a path forward that is beyond your wildest dreams. And that is actually the right one⊠is liberating. In liberating I mean, from the perspective of someone who needs to hold power because he or she doesnât trust that the organisation can find a way forward. So this is really powerful.
I agree, and I also think this is relevant to the point you raised earlier about funders. Because I see with funders this huge and completely understandable sense of responsibility. You know, âweâve got access to these resources. And somehow, weâve got to make decisions that mean that these resources have the most possible impact⊠we can see the huge need.â Itâs a huge responsibility⊠Iâve rarely met a funder who doesnât care. Thatâs not the issue. Itâs that they care hugely about what to do with these resources. But I also see how difficult it is to let go of control. And for me personally, itâs what needs to happen⊠When the system starts to find the best use of the resources you get to transformational solutions. But⊠I really recognise how hard that is for funders.
Do you think itâs a leap of faith?
⊠Iâm very interested in working with funders because I feel their interest in working differently and I feel what pulls them back. So there is something about how do you give people a real taste of whatâs possible in a way that feels safe enough?⊠How can they trial this and then start to gain confidence, start to see whatâs possible. But I do think⊠with any piece that theyâre going to experiment with, there is this moment where they have to let go of control. And if they havenât properly done that, then the power that theyâre exercising, even if itâs not explicit, will distort the process and it will mean they probably wonât get the sort of outcome that theyâre looking for and that weâve just been talking about. So until youâve genuinely let go, even if youâre saying all the right things⊠it wonât genuinely make that shift a transformative change.
⊠Formally, itâs possible to let go of that control. But is it possible to completely isolate yourself from the perception of power or the perception of expectations that receivers might have from you?
Thatâs impossible. So when Iâm saying let go of control I donât mean let go of all power, because thereâs rank, thereâs all sorts of things that will still be operating in the system, whether youâre explicitly changing the way decisions are made or notâŠ
... for me when you're thinking about governance - culture and individual posture is as important as the structures and processes. Because for me the thing that makes it possible to shift to healthy power, it's not about saying power doesn't exist, but it's about how do we name it? How do we make it visible? How do we name what's going on? You know where we see, "I think I might be having an influence here that is probably not a healthy influence? How do I talk about that? How do I invite feedback? How do I encourage people to trust that they can give me feedback and they won't be punished for it? And how do I really train myself to listen to the feedback?â -
âŠOne of the big things that we always say is a key part of doing shared governance well is having curiosity. So when something comes up, whether itâs an unexpected tension in the system, whether itâs an objection to a decision that you thought was going to be a really straightforward decision⊠Whether itâs feedback that feels a bit uncomfortable. The piece about âhow do I cultivate a sense of instead of defending myself, and proving that itâs wrong, and overcoming it. How do I cultivate this sense of, Oh, thatâs interesting. Whatâs going on there? Why is the system telling me this?â It doesnât mean that everybody who gives you feedback is right. But how can you be interested in whatâs come up for them and why itâs come up?
Yeah, a lot of how and why questions instead of what.
Iâm curious what you make of this⊠I believe that working with governance within the organisations that support movements⊠Be it charities like Transition Network or even funders⊠I believe that this is actually a leverage point or something that can have and can propagate impact in the various different areas social movements are struggling. Be it climate change, social justice, peace building, you name it. Governance is almost like a thread that ties all of these groups together. Because itâs always a matter of organising. Itâs always a matter of how we show up togetherâŠ
I wonder if you share this hypothesis that working on governance, or at least hosting conversations on governance and going through this process like you did â at the level of funders, at the level of charities, at the level of formal organisations â can actually propagate to civil society, can actually then propagate to providing other models of how conflict is addressed in communities? Eventually to the scale of how conflict between larger communities and even nations are addressed. Or is it just my utopia?
⊠So for me, governance is about how we work together, how we make decisions, how we distribute power and resources at every level of scale. So from within my family to within a group, within a network, an organisation, as you say, at regional, national, international level. For me⊠lots of us at lots of different levels of scale are currently doing that in ways that seem to me to be deeply flawed. Unhealthy, destructive, disconnecting. Disconnecting where the power is held from where the impacts are felt. And for me, thatâs a fundamental flaw⊠youâre not bringing together accountability, responsibility. Where is the risk? Where is the impact? If the right voices arenât involved in decisions and shaping of what weâre doing together as human beings, then youâll come up with deeply flawed solutions. You wonât see the solutions that could really be transformative. They wonât even be visible. And there will be all sorts of reasons why people will feel unable to shiftâŠ
The systems that we've got at the moment don't support us to shift. They support us to hold onto what we've got and to protect it... So for me, organisations who are working in this way, it's not just "is it helpful?" I think I'd put it even more strongly that it's necessary⊠Until we're looking at how we work there's a fundamental fault in what we're doing. That will keep showing up in what we put out in the world, it will just keep showing up and we won't have a way to notice that and adjust, which is what we need. -
Itâs not about getting it right⊠For me, itâs about finding a way to take a step forward, whether itâs me as a person or the organization that Iâm part of. How do we take a step forward and hear the feedback and then see what needs to be adjusted? So that I have agency. I can be creative, but also⊠recognising that Iâm part of a bigger system, that I canât possibly know how what Iâm doing is going to land or make a difference. I can only know that by listening to the feedback.
⊠Iâm working with a collaboration in the UK at the moment where weâre talking about transformational governance because governance, in a way, is a neutral term. You know, thereâs lots of different ways we can do governanceâŠ
Transformational governance... is explicitly designed to disrupt the way that power operates in the dominant system, that it's explicitly designed to support healthy collaboration across difference, and distance, and to bring about justice and resilient outcomes... -
Unless weâre creating governance thatâs explicitly designed to do that, I fear that weâre often working in ways that hamper us⊠that actually make that more difficult to achieve.
So can I propose a new evolution for Transition Network.. that we start talking about Transition governance?
Because one of the things I like about the word âtransitionâ is that itâs the process of going from one place to another. And maybe what youâre talking about is a form of governance which is transitional. As we move from one, I would say, medieval form of organising into something which is actually more suitable for the 21st century. For a 21st century world and challenges and interconnected world that we live in.
I really like that. And I think, yes â whatâs the governance that supports us to make that shift?⊠feels really interesting to me. And actually, I should just say that⊠one of the joys of my life at the moment is working with the wider network of Hubs on this form of governance. So not just doing it within our organisation, but as part of this wider system where Hubs have created their own circle to sense whatâs needed in the system and to support things to happen. And for me, I think youâre right that itâs one of the strengths of the Transition movement, and itâs not always recognised â even by us. I think weâre doing it and we need to understand that itâs quite unusual. Itâs not unique to us, but itâs quite unusual. And weâre really learning about how to do that well across a network⊠where people are in very different contexts⊠I meet up with others from this network every three weeks and we hold a circle meeting. And I really get the sense of that richness of itâs not one point in the system directing whatâs happening⊠Weâre coming together and sharing our different perspectives of whatâs important and whatâs needed and finding a next step together. And that is really inspirational.
Yeah. It sounds like you found a very⊠well, you didnât find it by accident, it was hard work⊠but you did find a good recipe. At least for this starting iteration, as Iâm sure there will be mutations along in the next couple of years as also the Transition movement evolves and as the world heads to wherever itâs heading. Itâs anyoneâs guess right now. But yeah, it looks like you found something very, very precious.
Yes, it feels precious, and it absolutely doesnât feel perfect. And I donât want to pretend that everything then becomes easy once youâre working in this way. If anything, I think, one of the things Iâve learnt about this form of governance is it actually exposes the problems⊠problems that have been under the surface often then come up to the surface. But thatâs part of the joy of it. Suddenly theyâre visible and suddenly we can start talking about them and trying to find a way together to resolve them. Rather than pushing them down and out of the way⊠but itâs certainly not perfect.
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