Category: governance

Achieving a consensus culture for your virtual organization

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Decision making for your virtual organization needs to optimize the decision process and impact. If your organization relies on a wider community of unpaid volunteers, then you will need to find ways to involve this community in your decision process. Where decisions need to be made on a day-to-day basis, you will want to have paid staff with the authority to make these, and to also be accountable to the executive body of your virtual organization. Involving the wider community usually involves two complementary modes of decision making: election and consensus.  For large organizations these two modes are sometimes used together in a multi-step process of delegation and consensus.

Why is consensus important? What type of consensus is the best? How do I create a culture of consensus? Previously, I outlined the arenas where staff and volunteer decision making occur, here I want to focus on the role of consensus. Consensus is primary important as a decision process where this can positively impact the quality of the decision and/or the efficacy of its outcome. The road a consensus decision opens up the discussion to include every member’s perspective and intuition. This process brings in the full range of the group’s knowledge to bear on the issue. During this discussion, aspects of the problem may be illuminated that were previously obscure. The result can be a decision that is stronger or more astute. Even when the discussion leads to a compromise, that compromise can be based on real-world limitations, and so, might avoid trouble after implementation. Where the implementation of the decision will require the active participation of the larger community (e.g., a decision to support a certain data/metadata format) consensus carries an invaluable mark of community involvement and ownership for the decision.

Just enough of a consensus

Absolute consensus may be unreasonable, given the range and interests of various stakeholder groups in the membership. If this is the case, and it would probably become evident during the start-up of the community, then some sort of “working consensus” (or rough consensus) might be a reasonable alternative. This would be a type of super-majority that would allow for a few opposing views to be not included in the final decision, but to be included in a durable report of the decision process as a minority perspective. The logic is to be able to move ahead, while maintaining the conflict that emerged in the decision process on the surface of the final decision. This type of working consensus would need to have at least a 81% majority: in a group of 20, no more than three people can disagree with the final decision. The goal is always to achieve a total consensus, with the working consensus as a fall-back.

Consensus culture

Consensus decision making requires a consensus-aware culture for interaction within the group. There are some established cultural practice guidelines for consensus organizations. One of my favorites is the Seeds for Change organization in the UK.  The consensus decision process challenges each member to listen fully to the arguments, to state their own position clearly, and to be aware that they have more than just an option to support or block a decision. A member can also abstain, withholding their outright support and refusing to block a decision. It is important in the discussions leading to a decision that the facilitator (often a staff member) is also a process mentor, reminding members of the need for open minds and hearts in the process, and a clear-headed, well-founded motive when a member decides to block a decision.

Consensus decision making does not directly scale beyond a couple-dozen members. In a larger community, each stakeholder subgroup (this requires a fractal subsetting to sub-groups of no more than a couple-dozen members) is granted a representative to an executive council where the consensus discussion is held. At the point of a vote, the representative returns to their subgroup and outlines the issues and the proposed decision. Once a consensus is acquired within the subgroup, this is carried back to the executive group.

The process of arriving at a consensus is at the same time a process of listening to the best ideas and the strongest fears of the community’s stakeholders, and a means to forge a better solution as a final decision. A decision based on consensus carries the trust and the will of the entire community.

Photo Credit: CC licensed on Flickr by Tantek Çelik

Double-loop Organizations build policies from the bottom up: here are 3 ways to make policies that work

bottom up

Your virtual organization will work harder and better when everyone has a say about policies, and not just about procedures. Policy setting happens best in the second loop of a double-loop governed organization. That way the policy can respond directly to the vision of the organization.

A friend, a sysadmin at a major research university, was on his way to DEF CON when I ran into him on the street. He enjoyed hearing about the new security hacks he would be facing, and, as usual, he was not happy about the security measures on his campus. After describing how schools, departments, and centers had managed to grab the right to host their own Internet content—with predictably inconsistent results—he concluded that even his own department could use some new policies.

“Unfortunately, I can’t make policy,” he said, “I can only recommend procedures.” Faculty make policy, he explained. Staff implement this as well as they can. “I can talk all day, but some new PhD who thinks he knows enough will want to run his own server and connect into the department’s databases on my servers.” My friend has far more knowledge about computer security than he can implement, and he sees trouble ahead against which he cannot defend by making and enforcing better policies. When the system fails, when data are stolen or lost, he will be asked to explain and tasked to repair the damage. When the fan and the feces collide, he only hopes the precious work of graduate students is not collateral damage.

I could just recommend that you do not follow the model of a large academic department in a research university when you create your virtual organization. However, I doubt any of you (particularly those of you who have worked in a large academic department) had plans to do so. My point here is that every member of your organization can contribute to its policies and help defend it from failure.

Here are three ways you can make policies more effective for your organization:

1) When you create an executive panel or committee to make policy, be sure that this body is well connected with the larger membership.

2) Use a federated election process to preserve the voices of minority factions and edge groups, and empower contributions from across the membership.

3) Get additional feedback from the membership before you implement a new policy.

As a bonus, you will find that policies that are enacted with these practices are likely to be followed with greater rigor and care than those that simply appear in an email from the top.

Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bobcatnorth/21503266/ Some rights reserved by Bobcatnorth

Lead your virtual organization from behind, and they will drive you forward

The back of the bus

In March, 2013, David Reid at Palantir tweeted a quote: “Drupal’s community is a bus driven by the collective screams of its passengers.” At first glance, this seems really unfortunate. But on reflection, there are some great things going on here. First, it’s a bus, not a limo. Second, it’s filled with passengers. Third, they are passionately engaged in the destination of the bus. And fourth, the bus is responding to them. In short, the Drupal community is doing a lot of things right. 

This tweet took me back to a sunny afternoon in Berkeley at BADCamp. I was in front of Dwinelle Hall (where I first met my wife way back before there was an Internet) talking with Jacob Redding, who, at the time, was the Executive Director of the Drupal Association. I had recently finished Jono Bacon’s book, The Art of Community, taken from his experience helping to lead the community of developers who support the Ubuntu distribution of Linux. I mentioned to Jacob that, compared with Ubuntu, Drupal did not seem to be grounded in a common vision that was written down as a statement somewhere.

Jacob said that the Drupal community doesn’t have a single vision statement but the leaders of the project each may have their own. The Drupal project does have a mission statement (drupal.org/mission). In the project there is a lot of non-visible leadership. The Drupal Association is a good example of that. The Association does not guide or direct the project, but it certainly does watch what is happening with the project and provides the necessary support and services to either sustain momentum on areas in the project or encourage more involvement. “You can say the Drupal Association is leading from behind,” he said.

There are visionaries across the Drupal developer network, dozens of active people who are building new tools and pushing for better code. There are occasions in the year (at big Drupal Camps or at DrupalCon) and moments in the development cycle (sprints and telecons, in discussions on Drupal.org and elsewhere) where these leaders would come forward with their visions, and, at some point, a decision would happen. But the Drupal Association, which runs DrupalCon and hosts Drupal.org, is not out in front breaking trail for these decisions.

I called Jacob last week to get some clarity on this “leading from behind” technique. I might be involved in a grand experiment on governance that the NSF has fostered. It’s called EarthCube, and it proposes to corral all of the geosciences and environmental sciences under a new organization that can manage and promote the multi- and transdisciplinary sharing of data and knowledge. To bootstrap this effort, a seed of governance will be funded. In the first months, this governance kernel will need to get out in front and open up online opportunities for thousands of scientists to step into new leadership positions and get to work. In the subsequent months, the funded governance kernel will need to step back and lead from behind as the community finds its own governance footing. In the final phase, the funds for governance will be passed directly to the community, and kernel will become a front office. But this transition from leading from the front to leading from behind is truly experimental.

“Part of it is allowing chaos to reign,” Jacob told me. The point, I would propose, is to not spend a lot of effort (and time) establishing and then defending a set of top-down decisions. He continued,“a lot of things go wrong when you have a benevolent dictatorship that says ‘this is the way’.” When the community feels the need to make a decision, the lack of a top-down process enables people step up to offer solutions.

Behind the scenes, Jacob noted, the leaders of the Drupal project pay very close attention to all of the blogs and the threads on discussions and comments, and keep track of who was working well with others and who was influencing their peers. It would be vital to have these people in the room for important decisions. This internal eco-system is fostered through support for travel to Drupal events, and through email lists and other back-channel communication. Out in the front channels, the Drupal bus riders are shouting out their visions and their peeves.

The other eco-system to which the Drupal project and Organization pays close attention is the larger CMS world, where big corporations and government agencies are looking to make long-term investments. “This way we can counsel corporate users, and use their feedback to counsel Drupal developers,” Jacob noted. One big part of leading from behind is also watching the road ahead.

You can find Jacob Redding at: http://jredding.info/

Photo Credit: by Guerilla Features | Jason Tester used under CC license on Flickr.

Who says that “agile” is just for software? Architect an agile online community!

If you’ve familiar with object-oriented coding using any agile methods, you understand that the customer is at the center of the software development effort. The customers problems, her needs and goals, laid out in stories that the programmers return to every day: these keep the software from feature creep and UX failure. Delivering working software in small increments helps the customer reveal the moment they don’t need or understand something. The programmers can toss out that new feature and go back to the customer stories again with fresh insight.

They are testing all the code every day and releasing every week. So there’s never a time when the changing the software costs more than the last time. They are free to pivot toward some new capability that just might provoke delight in their customers; something they would never have tried if the cost of change was growing. Finally, they are solving their customers’ problems and building into the software new opportunities that might not have existed anywhere else in this way ever before. OK, so it rarely works out that well. But the philosophy of agile code development is sound and it offers valuable lessons beyond writing code.

Virtual organization community leaders would do well to consider how the Manifesto for Agile Software Development might be tweaked to be a working Manifesto for Agile Community Development:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

Working software (working volunteers) over comprehensive documentation

Customer collaboration (member collaboration) over contract negotiation

Responding to change over following a plan.

from http://agilemanifesto.org/

Let’s look at these one by one. Individuals and interactions are the daily work of the community leader. Staying in touch with members is more important than whatever tool (email, forum, listserve) is picked to accomplish this. Working volunteers build value and direction for the virtual organization. Having a grand, detailed volunteer guide is less important than having a team of members who want to move the organization ahead. Member collaboration means giving the membership as much ownership as possible. Staff are around to take care of day-to-day business, but budgets, planning, and the real work of the VO belong to the members. The staff are the sails, the members are the wind. Responding to change means having a full double-loop governance system and pivoting this to stay ahead of changes surrounding the organization. If you’re only following a plan, you are already lost.

Agile: it’s not just for software anymore!

photo credit: From flickr user magia3e  http://www.flickr.com/photos/magia3e/6236962059/sizes/z/in/photostream/

Imagine your virtual organization (VO) as a street festival

Photo from Flickr. CC by Jesslee Cuizon

I once spent several years studying how communities assembled festival productions in the streets of their towns and cities. This includes almost three years in Kyoto, Japan, and other experiences from South India and the US. The impetus behind this (no, it wasn’t the beer, but that helped) was to see a form of cultural production that was forced to renew itself regularly, and to describe and explain how that cadence of activity could sustain an enormous volunteer effort every year. I was also interested in festivals as they often included activities and behaviors that were not available or advisable on the streets during the rest of the year (aspects of comedy, nudity, violence, politics, joy, and sex: stir together and stand back). The time and space of the festival did not just occur on the street, it transformed the street. Much the same could be said for the impact of the event on the lives of the participants.

I also saw a lot of festivals that failed to transform the street, that had been, somehow, reduced to parades and pageants, to a semblance of their former glory. In these events participation was simply another chore. As such, participants required payment. Volunteerism declined. The vestigial energy of the festival was provided by the music and the movement. But the ability to transform the lives of the participants was lost.

The craft and the logic of a festival event are in many ways similar to that of any virtual organization that hopes to engage its members. The face-to-face meetings or your organization may not achieve actual festivity, but the power of your organization to transform the capabilities and empower the hopes of its members should never be forgotten.

Several years ago I wrote a piece for the Kyoto Journal, “Imagine the festival as a building,” in which I asked readers to imagine their community-based organization (festival or virtual) as a building, a house that is rebuilt from scratch every year. The main messages of this article outlined how the process of designing and constructing the house each year supported the neighborhood in vital ways, and explored how this event would certainly be destroyed when its festival logic is violated, even if an event kept happening.

The essence of a festival logic is honest and free voluntary participation and expression.      A radical form of intimacy emerges. Some scholars tie this back to ancient forms of human physicality (e.g., Cox 1969; Stallybrass and White 1986); however, Anthony Giddens (1992) anchors this form of intimacy also as a hallmark of current modernity. We all want to achieve more moments of intimacy.

Festival logic informs the whole process of design and performance. When you incorporate a similar festival logic into your community-led virtual organization you unleash new levels of member engagement. Street festivals generally focus this energy into artistic forms, while your organization might focus this on product development, creativity, and innovation. If you can imagine your VO as a street festival, you might discover its festival logic. If you cannot, then you might want to ask yourself how to add this logic to your organization.

References

Caron, Bruce. (2011) Imagine the festival as a building… [Internet]. Version 1. lightblueblog. 2011 Dec 25. Available from: http://lightblueblog.wordpress.com/article/imagine-the-festival-as-a-building-2l8t3cliewok9-48/ .  From Caron 2003 http://junana.com/CDP/corpus/COMMENT20.html

Cox, Harvey (1969) The Feast of Fools. Cambridge: Harvard University Press

Giddens, Anthony (1992) The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Stallybrass, Peter and Allon White (1986) The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. London: Methuen & Co.

On becoming an organization

Carl Rogers, congruence and double-loop governance

In 1961, the psychotherapist Carl Rogers compiled three decades of papers into the book On Becoming a Person. While the main frame of the book describes his client-centric approach to psychotherapy, how he arrived at this and what he learned as a practitioner, many of the articles—which read very much as blogs do today (and were unpublishable in the scientific journals for this reason)—link this frame to other human endeavors. In particular, he looks to education and personal relations in organizations.

His main therapeutic process involves the psychoanalyst as a person, developing her own personhood by becoming more congruent (more about this in a minute) and then using this congruence as a communication tool to open up the client to the process of becoming more congruent. The therapist is really only someone further along the same road to becoming a person.

The process of becoming a person, of achieving more and wider congruence, and so having fewer and fewer defenses, brings the client to a better life, with less tension and fear, better communication with everyone, and new opportunities to explore each moment fully.

Congruence happens when one’s real self (the one we all start out with—all infants are congruent) fully resembles one’s ideal self (the one we acquire from interactions with others). The lack of congruence leads to the need to defend the ideal self every time the real self behaves differently, or when people respond to the real self instead of the ideal self. The real self becomes hidden and, indeed, often unknowable; which forms the reason for therapeutic intervention. The therapist’s more advanced facility with congruence allows her to be less threatening and so to tease the client’s real self out from the shadows, to where the client can repossess this and model their ideal self on their real self. Once they do so, they no longer need to be defensive and they also can speak more honestly from their own minute-by-minute experiences. They communicate better and, in their interactions with others, create the same therapeutic situation they had experienced.

For Rogers, building congruence creates a positive feedback that will foster better communication in an organizational setting; communication where honest reactions and unedited information can lead to more reliable outcomes. These outcomes build more trust into the subsequent situations, which also help all involved become more congruent as persons. The opposite is true for incongruent communication, which leads to fixed limits on what can be said, a growth of miscommunication, an increase in emotional stress, and overall dissatisfaction with the interaction environment. Rogers’ “Tentative Formulation of a General Law of Interpersonal Relationships” (Rogers 338-346) reads very much like a Web 2.0 manual for creating a high-trust, flat-management start-up company in 2012. He was 50 years ahead of his time.

Rogers’ general law maps directly onto double-loop governance, with the real organization being the first loop, and the ideal organization being the second loop. Instead of hiding the ideal organization behind the intentions of the founder, or top-down rules and regulations, double-loop governance makes the ideal organization available to every member. Each member has the same view and purview of the rules and roles, the values and the vision of the organization, and also an obligation to make these congruent with the everyday activities of the organization.

The notion that your organization can also be a therapeutic setting where members can learn to become more congruent may seem peculiar. Remember that the interactions are really a series of conversations between two people. Your organization is only setting the circumstances where members can communicate effectively. We all remember meeting people whom we knew were open and honest, trustworthy people. We tend to forget that when and how we met them framed their ability to reveal themselves and so help us learn. You can make your organization a place where each member can become more a person. In return they will make your organization a better place in which to get things done.

References

Rogers, Carl R. (1961) On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Part 2: Immunize your virtual organization from institutional guilt

Image from Flickr. Used under CC license. Photo by USACE http://www.flickr.com/photos/europedistrict/

The 5 ways that double-loop governance can save your organization from itself

Institutional guilt (see Part 1 below) is routinized violation of your organization’s values, vision, rules, or policies. It is symptomatic of dysfunctional communication strategies inside an organization. It leads to distrust of staff and disengagement from the organization’s vision. Staff and volunteer disengagement/disenchantment is a prime reason non-profit organizations fail (Duckles, et al 2005).

Institutional guilt is something that will ruin your virtual organization. It poisons the culture and it drives away volunteers while it demoralizes your staff. Implementing double-loop governance is a good way to build in protection against institutional guilt. You also need to be sure that your employees and volunteer committees do not fall into the trap of violating your own values and policies for some immediate purpose. Double-loop governance opens up learning capabilities and communication channels to help limit and repair occasions where volunteers or staff do stray from your organization’s vision and values.

1. Double-loop governance makes every member a caretaker of the vision and values for the virtual organization. 

Your values are not just a bulleted list on your website nor a poster on the wall. They are the deep logic of why your organization exists. When you create the knowledge loop that includes questioning and reaffirming your values into every decision, then your staff and volunteers can celebrate these values. Membership includes embracing the values, and entering into the ongoing conversation about them that keeps them current and vital.

2. Double-loop governance makes a virtue out of transparent decision making.  

Transparent here means available to all members (not necessarily public). Practically, transparency includes time and place availability. Members are told when and where a decision is being made. For a virtual organization, this might be a set period of time to edit a certain wiki, or a set period in which to vote online. The management of critical-path decisions may (and usually should) devolve to active subgroups charged with delivering the outcomes. These subgroups need to maintain their own transparent decision process. A great example here is Wikipedia, where each entry contains the edited text, a history of edits, and a discussion page about the text and its edits.

3. Double-loop governance brings conflict to the surface. 

Conflict avoidance is a major source of “unusual routines” (Rice and Cooper 2010) in general, including those that create institutional guilt. Conflict can arise in many forms. Personal issues surrounding time commitments, responsibility and authority, and expectation management cannot be avoided through double-loop governance alone, but they can be openly addressed and resolved in a manner that promotes reflective learning among those involved. Evaluation conflict avoidance happens when tests of deliverables are either postponed, curtailed, or done in private. Double-loop governance supports open and thorough testing, and the disclosure of competing interpretations. Conflict is rapidly promoted to the surface of discussions, where voices of dissent become available to all members. Resolution is commonly achieved through a working consensus, not 100% agreement, but something more robust than a simple majority. Conflicts over the underlying assumptions of the organization can result in new values and a new vision: the organization is free to pivot toward a novel direction at any time.

4. Double-loop governance accelerates failure to ensure success.

Remember that double-loop governance supports double-loop learning. Single-loop learning focuses on avoiding failure.  Double-loop learning focuses on using failure to recalibrate the underlying assumptions of the activity, this promotes the act of failing as a learning device, and a logic of rapid iterations of activities with open testing.  In software development efforts, double-loop governance actively supports agile development decisions. In all endeavors, the ability to fail quickly and recover takes the fear out of trying new strategies.  This almost guarantees a better final result.

5. Double-loop governance supports do-ocracy and emergent leadership. 

While not all double-loop governed organizations are strict meritocracies, the best find ways to recognize and reward achievements and contributions. One of the benefits of the network effect is an ability to reach out beyond the founding team and find people who have similar interests and valuable skills. As the network expands, the chances of encountering tomorrow’s leadership improves. When these people become engaged in activities and outcomes, they need to have a clear path to leading subgroups and then larger groups, and ultimately the organization.

Final Thoughts: Double-loop your organization and forget the guilt

Remember that decisions that don’t get made by the people who are supposed to make them get made anyhow by the people who need them. Even the decision not to decide today is made by someone. When decisions are guided by the values and vision of the organization, when the process is transparent, when the conflicts appear on the surface, when failure is just another chance at success, and when leadership opens up in front of those who have proven their worth: that is when institutional guilt has no purchase on the logic of your organization.

References:

Duckles, Beth M., Mark A. Hager, and Joseph Galaskiewicz (2005) “How Nonprofits Close: Using Narratives to Study Organizational Processes.” Pp. 169-203 in Qualitative Organizational Research: Best Papers from the Davis Conference on Qualitative Research, ed. Kimberly D. Elsbach. Greenwich, CT: Information Age Publishing.

Rice, R. E. & Cooper, S. (2010).  Organizations and unusual routines: A systems analysis of dysfunctional feedback processes.  Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Part 1: Don’t let institutional guilt drag down your virtual organization

Making fake wood
I made fake wood out of paper and plastic for a summer

Institutional Guilt: you know it when you see it

You may have experienced institutional guilt directly, and you’ve likely seen this on TV. Remember the cop show where the new recruit, still wet behind the ears, with a new house, a young wife and a family member (usually a child or a parent) who has a horribly expensive medical condition; this new recruit, who has every need for some extra money is standing near his locker when his sergeant claps him on the shoulder and hands him an envelope. “This is your cut,” he says, and walks away, leaving the recruit to either take the money or buck the system. So the rest of the movie all about how the organization is rotten at the core, which is exactly what institutional guilt does.

I experienced institutional guilt when I was working at a chemical factory on the Tacoma waterfront during the summer of 1972. (The above photo, taken in 1971, is like one of the machines I worked for that summer. The fake wood grain on the paper is called “Mediterranean Oak.” I sort of remember the guy in the photo, he was the chemical engineer on staff.  Source: Tacoma Public Library.) One night, during the graveyard shift, I noticed that someone had opened up a pipe into a storm drain, a pipe which was always supposed to be sealed and only emptied into drums labeled appropriately for their toxic content. I mentioned this to the crew chief and he asked me if the inspector was there. Of course not, the inspector went home at 5.

The next time I was on a day shift, I told the plant supervisor that the pipe was left open at night, and all the extremely nasty chemicals were being discharged directly into Commencement Bay. He looked like I had told him I saw him microwave a kitten. This was information he did not want to hear, but he reacted like it was something he already knew. He told me to get back to work, and retreated into his office. I don’t remember ever speaking to him again. Then again, I don’t think I ever worked the day shift again. I never trusted the company after that, and I developed a reputation for not following orders to do certain things that others would do. Plenty of people there had new houses and young spouses and kids with expensive medical bills, and didn’t ask many questions.

I would suggest that other employees didn’t trust the company either. Almost daily they were asked to do tasks that were explicitly prohibited by policies posted on the bulletin board. They could be fired for any of these infractions, or they could make a complaint about their supervisors at any time. There was plenty of guilt to go around. This was a company that paid union wages for manual labor, so there was a steady supply of workers. This was fortunate for the company, as there was a steady turnover of employees.

Institutional guilt happens when values and vision, and policies and processes are routinely broken. The routine creates an alternative policy, a counter-value, which becomes the operational norm for the organization. As this new policy and its values cannot be spoken of, it is almost impervious to change. “Rotten at the core” is a good analogy here. For a virtual organization this situation will lead to almost certain failure; volunteers and staff will flee. Those that remain do so for suspect reasons.

The routines that include institutional guilt are a subset of what Rice and Cooper (2010) call “unusual routines.” These are dysfunctional outcomes of flawed communication practices (and other sources). There is no organizational structure that can prevent these entirely, and there are practices available, however expensive (e.g., firing all the staff and starting over) to repair unusual routines. Double-loop governance and the communication practices that this supports and promotes can preempt institutional guilt in several ways. I will be outlining these in the next blog.

How have you experienced institutional guilt? What is your story?

 Coming next: Part 2: Immunize your virtual organization from institutional guilt

Reference:

Rice, R. E. & Cooper, S. (2010).  Organizations and unusual routines: A systems analysis of dysfunctional feedback processes.  Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Building Double-Loop Organizations for Member Engagement and Innovation

I’m going to explore the idea of “double-loop” governance, with some ideas and some suggestions as to why you might want to consider this form of governance as the heart of the physical or virtual organization (or network, or corporation) you plan to start or hope to change.

Below, you will discover how a double-loop governance scheme brings the values, the vision, and the underlying assumptions of an organization into an open and transparent decision cycle.  This decision process is characterized by distributed (shared) participation and control, free and informed choices, public testing of evaluations, and an ability to manage conflict on the surface of discussion threads.

Members in an organization with double-loop governance have the ability to redirect, refocus, and recommit to the values and the vision of their organization. Double-loop governance creates peers for a peer-to-peer network. Because of this, membership is well-defined, and provided with responsibilities and rewards.

Double-loop organizations tend towards meritocracies and value contributions over clout (or Klout). Because decision-making—to the level of deciding underlying assumptions—is distributed rather than top-down, double-loop organizations depend on double-loop learning (and Model II theories-in-use). Contributions to decisions and work toward goals (software code contributions, etc.) can be used to measure the value of members, and to reward their service.  The vectors for acquiring merit are ideally well-described and collectively fashioned. A great example of this is StackExchange (http://stackexchange.com). Clay Shirky, in a recent talk (available at http://archive.org/details/drupalconchi_day2_keynote_clay_shirky), describes how StackExchange uses double-loop governance to engage its members. Double-loop organizations are better able to discover and reward emergent leadership and harvest the long-tail of community participation.

Much of the added value of a double-loop governed organization comes from the quality of interpersonal interactions, the extra amount of available trust, and the additional flexibility that distributed decision making provides. This value does not arrive without additional costs (which are described below). For ventures that are designed to solve a single problem and then end, these costs may not be appropriate. But for enterprises that hope to grow and flourish in today’s changing IT landscape, these costs are essential to sustaining any organization.

While notions of double-loop governance apply to various organizations, here I want to focus on virtual organizations/internet communities. These have some common features. They are created to solve a problem or problems, often problems of some real consequence. They rely on the voluntary contributions of experts. And they bridge between groups that may have diverse or divergent interests. Examples of these organizations/communities of which I am somewhat familiar (either personally or through other sources) include the W3C, Ubuntu Linux, Stack Exchange, the Open Geospatial Consortium, the Federation of Earth Science Information Partners, the National Science Digital Library, and the Digital Library for Earth System Education.

Some of these organizations are/were more successful in their governance efforts than others. Some of these examples no longer exist, in part because of their governance choices. Other authors have pointed to Apple Computer, the Valve Corporation (entertainment software makers), and Zappos (online shoe store) as good examples of culture-led corporations that use double-loop learning to pivot to new opportunities; and these provide some lessons on how double-loop management/governance can become an integral feature of a for-profit organization. The Valve Corporation Handbook for New Employees, First Edition (2012) welcomes new employees with this statement: “The company is yours to steer—toward opportunities and away from risks. You have the power to green light projects. You have the power to ship products” (p. 4). In full double-loop mode, the Handbook is also editable by employees, new and old: “This book is on the intranet, so you can edit it. Once you’ve read it, help us make it better for other new people. Suggest new sections, or change the existing ones” (p. viii).

The various examples show how spending the time and effort to become a double-loop governed organization is important for innovation, for volunteer engagement, and for sustainability (i.e., the why of double-loop governance). What follows are some thoughts on where the value of double-loop governance is found, and how to boot-strap and support double-loop governance for a new virtual organization.

It could be argued that single loop organizations and management were well suited for a time when the pace of innovation was much slower than today. The single goal of becoming more efficient in, and creating sustaining technologies for, the manufacturing of, say, automobiles or washing machines could carry a corporation for several decades. The pace of innovation within information technology now means that organizations need a new ability. They need to pivot to respond to external (disruptive) innovations, and they need to rethink their underlying assumptions to stay creative and innovative internally. These capabilities belong to the second loop of a double-loop organization.

References

Double-Loop Learning as an outcome of Double-Loop Governance

The concepts of double-loop governance and double-loop learning (Argyris and Shön, 1978) share a common ground in the communicative acts required to support these. Double-loop governance puts into practice what Argyris calls a Model II style of theories-in-use. A Model I “theory-in-use” for Argyris (1982, 8) represents the set of assumptions that a person puts into everyday practice without reflection. A Model I theory-in-use greatly resembles what Pierre Bourdieu calls a individual habitus (1990, 56). What a Model II style adds is a critical reflective moment. A Model II style is characterized by valid information, free and informed choice, and internal commitment (Smith 2001). Model II supports double-loop learning: an ability to question an “organization’s underlying norms, policies and objectives.” (Argyris and Shön, 1978, 2-3; quoted in Smith 2001). This ability—which all nimble online organizations require to keep up with changing codes and capabilities—needs to be established as a cultural goal of the organization. And for this, it needs to be a visible part of the organization’s governance scheme.

This is what separates a double-loop governance effort from a single-loop governance structure linked to a management plan (or tied to a charismatic founder). “Governance is almost entirely based around values,” notes Jono Bacon (Bacon 2009), community manager for the Ubuntu distribution of Linux. “You need to not only understand your values, but celebrate them,” he concludes. In terms of double-loop governance, I would add that an organization needs to reflexively control (c.f., Giddens 1994: 122-123) its values, interrogate them regularly, and celebrate how robust they are. They are robust because there is an active process to reform and renew them as needed.

Single Loop Management

Organizational management provides at least a single loop of internal communication and learning. Goals, strategies and techniques are attempted and their outcomes evaluated. On the basis of this evaluation, new goals, strategies, and techniques are attempted. The desired outcome of the single loop is an improvement in efficiency. This is essential Twentieth Century business management guidance. How business was done.

This is also, in part, why so many Twentieth Century corporations are no longer here. Disruptive innovation and other rapid market changes cannot be addressed through efficiency alone. John Kao (2002) describes it this way, “We all want benchmarks to get the job done more efficiently. But this does not lead to disruptive, game-changing innovation, the stuff of which organizational renewal and competitiveness under conditions of uncertainty are all about.” (Kindle Locations 2686-2689).

Government agencies are also good examples of single-loop governed, problem-focused, service-delivery organizations. They work under externally mandated goals and priorities. Even their single-loop quest for greater efficiency is sometimes constrained by legislative demands and regulatory road-blocks. These constraints provide a motivation for for agencies to partner with double-loop virtual organizations where disruptive innovation capabilities can be built into the working culture and governance framework.

Clayton Christensen (2002) describes how the capability for innovation, and particularly for disruptive innovation, “…lies in the resources-processes-values (RPV) framework…” of an organization. (Kindle Locations 1962-1966). What Christensen found was that single-loop organizations (organizations that cannot reflectively question their underlying assumptions, values, and vision) create incremental, sustaining innovation that increasingly values high-margin results and high-budget customers. These organizations do not have the capability to pivot to take advantage of a disruptive innovation.

Double-loop organizations will have processes that resemble those of the single-loop organization (trial and error, experiment and review, etc.). Efficiency and linear, sustaining innovation for progress to a desired goal: these are not abandoned. But they are embedded in the larger discussion of their relative return on an investment in their outcomes based on a larger vision that includes disruptive innovation opportunities. All of the thousands of PPTs with arrows connecting the end of a process to its evaluation and then back to the start of the process can still be used: with some necessary modification. These must include another loop out to “review assumptions and rethink and reapply values”.

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