The gift of clarity
Clarifying aims and domains in Sociocracy
I am teaching a growing social impact firm to create role descriptions for their staff. With growth comes the need to have clarity about who does what and a role description is where you capture a bunch of logically grouped accountabilities. Besides just listing accountabilities, I ask that the purpose and decision rights of a role also be defined.
In Sociocracy these are called ‘aims and domains’ and are used to clarify the mandate of teams and roles. Whether it is a team in an organization, a class in a school, or a housing association, groups by whatever name need to know what they will do together (their Aim) and what is the area that they can fully decide about (their Domain).
Aims — focused mandate
An organization will often define its vision, mission and its strategy (i.e. ‘where to play’ and ‘how to win’). Some may go on to list outcomes and impact measures. Vision, purpose, mission, outcomes are expressed by means of statements about what an organization is going to achieve. Most long-term strategic discussions stop at the outcome level and rarely drill down to specifying what they are going to do as an organization, department or units.
In Sociocracy, these mandates are called ‘aims’ which clarify what an organization and its units are going to do to fulfill its mission. Aims break down an organization’s mission into strategic and operational elements. A clearly defined aim stimulates focused action and aids decision-making. Aims are defined for the whole organization as well as for its units and roles and start with a verb expressed in ‘–ing’ form. Others words that I have heard being used to refer to aims are ‘focused mandate’, ‘tangible vision’ or ‘functional requirements’.
Once aims are clear, i.e. ‘what will we be doing’, then the team can evaluate choices for how they intend to implement their aims. This could be through a role, a unit, a process or policy. But this is for another discussion.
Aims as your north star
In Sociocracy each unit has one or more aims that link back to organizational aims and mission. Clarifying aims or a tangible vision for a unit is of no value if it isn’t used to make decisions. That’s why aims serve as the backdrop for every policy decision. Aims get you to ask questions like these:
- Does this decision enable us to fulfill our aims?
- Which activities align with our aims?
- Which activities need to be hived off to another unit?
- Which units do we need to interface with?
- Are aims aligned to each other or are they clashing with each other? Etc. etc.
Simple examples of aims
- Educating schools about Sociocratic governance models
- Baking sourdough bread
- Researching climate mitigation models for the agriculture sector
- Selling vegan food products online
- Training the social impact sector in non-violent communication
Each of these could be overall aims for an organization or the aim of one team within a larger organization. Aims will also change over time as the organization’s mission and business strategy evolves. Hence aims need to be reviewed and updated regularly.
Clarifying a team’s mandate or aim can be the gift of clarity that can help avoid wastage of time, energy and money on irrelevant tasks or ones that clash with the mission, aims and values of the organization.
Domains — decision rights
A domain is the area over which a team or role has authority and resources to get work done or achieve its aims. In Sociocracy domains are defined for teams and roles.
Some organizations draw up a delegation of authority matrix to clarify decision rights over key organizational decisions. Often this matrix covers important financial, legal and people related decisions. While a decision matrix mostly inform decision rights of the top management, rarely do we define the domains or the area of authority for decisions for teams or individual roles.
Some important aspects of domains to remember
- The department or the leader that a team reports to sets the domain for that team.
- Domains represent the boundaries between teams and roles, so they don’t overlap with another team’s domain.
- In addition, no domain or area of authority is left without an owner.
Some examples of domain areas that need a home/owner are:
- Customer/donor/partner/employee data
- Company website and specific pages on the website for e.g. the careers page or the member/donor page or the resource page
- Key accountabilities for e.g. planning annual events, orientation etc. etc.
- Physical assets if applicable
- Contracts, Financial approvals and so on
I’ve listed most of the big visible domain areas, but there are many others that need to be listed and delegated to avoid conflict between roles or between teams.
Once a domain area has been defined the team or role has full authority to act within their domain area. A team or department can also delegate an area within its domain to its sub-teams, in which case the sub-team has full authority to act within their domain area.
Defining aims and domains is a key feature of Sociocractic governance system
Most governance systems don’t expect aims and domains to be defined like it is in Sociocracy. Projects usually have outputs, outcomes and impact defined because project owners need clarity about the project’s objectives and scope. Defining aims and domains is an early and key feature of doing work in a Sociocratic governance system. While aims may seem like OKRs, I believe OKRs (objectives and key results) define goals and priorities that are time-bound. Aims while also time-bound (nothing lasts forever) are more about defining ongoing work.
Finally the value of defining aims and domains lies in sharing and informing the rest of the organization. As Russell Ackoff says the performance of a system depends on how the parts interact never on how the parts act separately. A simple first step in understanding interacting parts is to define and share aims and domains of each of the organization’s parts. A software like kumu.io that is used for systems and stakeholder mapping is excellent to use for what we call org charts and making aims and domains for the whole organization visible to everyone to see, use and apply to decision making.
If you’d like a presentation on Sociocracy or would like to jump in and implement some or all parts of Sociocracy in your particular community whether a school, an organization or an association please write me at parveen.sherif@gmail.com
