the challenge of democratic co-operative governance

The words ‘co-operative’ and ‘governance’ have rarely been written together in the same sentence, let alone in a headline. But now our democratic organisations are facing scrutiny. Rhizome’s even been asked to help facilitate an open space about it in London on February 8^th 2014.

So what makes co-operative governance different? Of course there are the seven principles underpinning all co-operatives, of which democracy is principle 6, but from our perspective in working with co-ops, collectives and social change organisations it also means that:

• we don’t work for other people who simply profit from our success
• we don’t give work to people because they are our mates, members of our lodge, or attend our church/ synagogue/ mosque; we trade fairly, only prioritising other co-operatives because we know they also trade fairly
• we don’t go on strike, we communicate, we work together, we resolve
• we don’t have a figurehead who is forced to take responsibility for everything, we share the responsibility – and we share the risks
• we don’t steal from ourselves – what would be the point?
• we don’t bolt on an ethical policy, we start with one and develop it further; based on respect, we cherish diversity as it brings us strength, we cherish our communities as we live and work in them; we cherish our world – why doesn’t everyone?
• we don’t declare other interests as an afterthought – they are integral, we have so many; building a movement of radical change means working across borders, making alliances, having interests all over the place
• we don’t all look alike/ talk alike/ dress alike – we are individual, unique. And though we may make mistakes, we may buckle under pressure, we know that we always have others around that we can trust to support us.

So what might be some of the issues for democratic co-operative governance these days? Here’s a selection of some of the issues that Rhizome get asked to help with as facilitators/ mediators/ trainers:

How do we make time to get the processes right when we have to focus so hard on the business/ campaign/ change we are trying to achieve?

Do our high standards make it hard for everyone to keep on meeting them all of the time?

Does having excellent accountability and transparency mean we are vulnerable, we can’t cover up our mistakes?

If having power corrupts, how can we always acknowledge and manage each other’s power?

Does size really matter?

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Participation, prison and parlour games – an interview with Adrian Ashton

We recently asked readers of the blog to become contributors. Not only are we fascinated to find out who you all are, what you do with your time, and why, but we thought you’d enjoy sharing the discovery.

It’s always a risk asking for participation – even from a community who in one way or another practice, research and innovate on participation. What if no-one engages with us?

Trainer, business adviser, associate Co-operative College tutor, and fellow blogger Adrian Ashton has answered the call. I spoke to Adrian a few days ago. Stupidly I tried to fit the call in before I dashed off for a train. Very, very quickly it became obvious that we were just going to skim the surface of what we could have talked about.

I think my first hint of that came when Adrian started talking about a piece of work he was embarking on to embed co-operative values. So much of our time at Rhizome goes into trying to work with groups on the level of shared values rather than simply tools and techniques. So I grabbed that thread and pulled to unravel what Adrian meant. How do you embed cooperative values?

“not by relying on rules and structures. It’s a two-handed thing. On paper everyone goes ‘yes, absolutely’. In practice it gets a bit messy.”

An example?

“Coops and trade unions – two large movements united and divided by a set of common values. They have different cultural attitudes”

Adrian advises us to ask:

“How do we want to manifest those values? Now we need a framework. What are the ways we play the values out in practice – appropriate culture and accepted norms of behaviour… to enable people to feel confident in sticking to their agreements”

He works in a variety of social sector organisations. Sometimes he’ll be working with a small worker coop, sometimes with a large social enterprise. I asked him about the challenges of embedding values in each.

“With worker coop they’re usually much smaller and meet in pubs and backrooms. You’re building relationships and then building a structure around that… with boards the structure’s already there and you have to make relationships work within it”

Do both approaches achieve the same results?

“For larger organisations… structure is vital if you’re going to manage relationships. The question is ‘how are those structures working at the moment?’. If there are points where they’re rubbing, are there relatively simple things we can do in terms of our behaviour?… You have to follow the structure but you can do stuff alongside it.

In a smaller coop structure is a useful touch-point to protect relationships. It can depersonalise disputes and protect the entity of the coop.”

I was curious about fractured relationships within coops and social enterprises and asked how much time he spent advising coops and social enterprises to wind down:

“Not that much interestingly and usually not because of the relationships”

He gave examples of coops where “no-one had thought about future proofing or succession” and as original members left new workers saw no need to join the coop. Other examples were coops that had tried to replicate models of working from the USA without understanding the need for members to “co-shape” the project and the need to attract people who had the aptitude for co-operation.

So how does one get the aptitude for co-operation? I know that Rhizome folk have plenty of experience of people, in coops and out, launching collaborative projects but playing out the values of competition (and then wondering why it’s all so difficult). Adrian replied in terms of education:

“cooperative learning is there at primary level – we work in teams together, learn together, support each others learning – brilliant! But at secondary level we’re into the land of GCSEs and all of a sudden it’s every student for themselves – you‘ve got to get good grades. There’s a schism in the mindset. 10-12 year olds are being taught to cooperate and then told it’s every person for themselves in the exam room”

And the media don’t help as they celebrate the model of the “heroic individual entrepreneur” the “one against the many”. Projects like Make your mark for a tenner don’t include recognition of working together – it’s all individualistic.

“We need to ask ‘what’s the purpose of our role in society as citizens?’. We’re caught up in this huge self-feeding spiral of “economic growth is good”. What’s the reward? It’s not just fiscal!… The rise of the individual is an easy sell, but now social entrepreneurs are struggling and need to be part of the wider ecosystem. There’s a first flush of excitement and media interest and attention and then they’re just dropped. How do we sustain our interest and enthusiasm? Work together in collaborative entrepreneurship.”

Time was ticking on, so I asked Adrian about his most exciting work. “Prisoners” was the one-word answer. I nudged him to elaborate and he told me about various strands of work he was involved in with prisoners and ex-offenders. He cited research that demonstrated that co-operatives were the most “empowering and emboldening method to empower people to bring about change in their lives”.

One example Adrian mentioned is Ex-Cell Solutions in Manchester. According to their website:

‘Cooperating out of Crime’ is central to Ex-Cell’s work – applying the values and principles of the Cooperative Movement to the rehabilitation of offenders. Ex-Cell is a Cooperative Development Body registered with Cooperatives UK and the only CDB in the country working exclusively with offenders and ex-offenders

“The Cooperative Movement historically has had a central interest in eradicating crime and its causes. Robert Owen’s New Lanark experiment was explicitly designed to promote an alternative to the conventional system of law and punishment and to eradicate the causes of crime by promoting cooperation and education. In the same way, William King, from whom the Rochdale Pioneers learnt much, explained in the first edition of his periodical ‘The Co-operator’ (May 1^st 1828) that: The evils which co-operation is intended to combat, are some of the greatest to which men are liable, viz, the great and increasing difficultiesof providing for our families, and the proportionate danger of our falling into pauperism and crime.” Dave Nicholson Ex-Cell Director

Many prisoners are already entrepreneurs and it’s these very businesses, because of their illegality, that has led them into prison. Some of Adrian’s work has been to support the move from prison to legal self-employment by way of supporting the formation of coops on the outside. He modestly describes it as a “participatory learning process, peer led with a bit of facilitation and the odd bit of expert guidance”

His advice to existing and potential co-operators?

“Work out what’s important to you in the sense of what you are adamant about and flexible about. Once you’ve worked those things out it’s much easier to engage with others”

We’ve already gleaned that he likes people to tell stories. He’s also a fan of parlour games as tools to initiate exploration and conversation. Sometimes he used personality profiling, though “Belbin team roles is the most detailed” he uses. He also uses the Ulla zang pictures, not because he sees the personality profiling as highly accurate, but because they “start the conversation where people can talk about themselves away from the {everyday} task”. He laments that most enterprise models are “all about delivering the task not about how we work together on doing the task”. Successful collaboration requires people to “understand each others factory default settings so they can enjoy working together better”

Finally I asked Adrian to suggest something he read, listened to or watched that others in the Rhizome community might find useful and interesting.

“The RSA podcast series….I don’t necessarily agree with all of them but they’re a very useful way of starting to engage and explore different ideas and perspectives. They’re big concepts distilled into commute-sized chunks.”

Secondly he suggests the VSSN(Voluntary Sector Studies Network) quarterly journal which he describes a s a “mix of pure data and good quantitative stuff, comment pieces and reflective pieces.”

As an afterthough Adrian emailed another item for the reading list saying “it’s not so much an ongoing journal or recent publication, but rather a ‘core text’ that I regularly revisit and is perhaps the most useful book any entrepreneur (social , private or co-operative) might read – Dr Seuss’ ‘Oh the places you’ll go’“

Thanks to Adrian for getting the ball rolling. We didn’t have time to talk about either sex coops or tobacco coops, so we’ll pick up the conversation another time.

Matthew

• Adrian’s website
• Follow Adrian on Twitter @AdrianAshton2
• Adrian’s blog

Together we are stronger

I was recently reminded of the Greener Together toolkit I helped
write, whilst wearing my Sostenga hat. This toolkit, written for
Co-operatives UK, is designed to support individuals taking practical actions
that create change, and to guide working with others, taking collective
action.

When all around us society atomises, alienates and encourages
individualism, is it old-fashioned to hope for collective action, to
believe that together we are stronger?  Well, old-fashioned it ain’t – but
how can we adapt ideas that made sense to previous generations, or is it
just a question of packaging?  In the current economic climate, in the
coming climactic changes, we should use the 2012 UN International Year of
the Co-op to remind ourselves of the efficacy of co-operative structures
and timeliness of the co-operative movements ideals and values.

Adam

The challenge of co-operation

Just got off the phone to Richard at Seeds for Change. We had a long and useful conversation that ranged far and wide. Lots to think about.

One theme we kept returning to was the challenge of co-operation. Seeds is a network of 2 co-ops, Rhizome is a co-op. There’s also Tripod and a newly forming London collective. We’re all collectively constituted organisations. We’re all well versed in co-operative skills such as consensus decision-making. And mutual aid between co-ops is one of the seven internationally recognised principles of co-operatives. So surely everything in the garden is very rosy (and very co-operative) indeed?

Well, perhaps not. For example, each co-op is trying to provide right livelihood for at least some of its members. There’s a limited pool of paying work for trainers and facilitators working at the grassroots, and grant funding is getting harder to find (that’s for another post!). The temptation to slide into competitive thinking and practice, to promote and protect our own ‘brand’ is there just because we’re all human (and humans brought up in a fiercely individualistic and competitive society). In many ways that’s the default setting.

So it feels like it’s especially important we all walk our talk and live up to those values of co-operation. We’ll all be in the same room in July when UK trainers meet with George Lakey after the anti-oppression training he’s facilitating in Manchester. A space to reflect and find ways to support that mutual co-operation and sharing?

It was only one phone conversation but talking to Richard was useful.  Whilst it can feel hard enough to maintain communication within a co-op – especially those like Rhizome that are geographically dispersed – it was a reminder that making the time for communication between co-ops is the first step on a very productive journey.

Sharing consensus with co-ops

As our contribution to Co-operatives Fortnight, June 25th to July 9th, we thought we’d share our enthusiasm for consensus decision-making. So we’ve written a short briefing on Consensus in Co-operatives Which you can download for free. We’ll also make a print-ready version available from our resources page. The briefing argues the case for consensus being an ideal way of deepening co-operation in co-ops, highlights a few myths and challenges and offers a few suggested web links for training and support and background reading. We hope it’s useful.