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by Jeanne Bell and Dan Tucker, Co-Founders
Image: JustOrg Design application screenshot
Blog No. 9 - August 2024
We don’t know many leaders of justice-committed organizations who are not rethinking their staff structure right now. Whether in small ways like creating a new senior staff role, or in large ways like reimagining key bodies of work and the teams that will drive them. A central tension in this staff structuring work is trying to clarify what authority and decision rights a single position or team has vs./and how to bring various functions into deeper and more productive collaboration. Because justice strategies are nearly always interdisciplinary, productive collaboration across positions and teams is non-negotiable for justice impacts.
It’s helpful to revisit some definitions from Oxford Languages.
Autonomy: freedom from external control or influence; independence
Power: the capacity or ability to direct or influence the behavior of others or the course of events
In our organizational design work with clients, we often witness leaders focused on who has the autonomy to do what. Truthfully, it can be a frustrating and illusory exercise. Why? Because there is hardly a decision or project of significance in a justice-committed organization that can be effectively handled autonomously. Often a better question is, what perspectives need to be around the table whenever we make this kind of a choice or take this kind of action? Indeed, the strategic misalignment and conflict we witness most often in organizations stems from people thinking they have the autonomy to make a choice that actually would benefit exponentially from pulling the most knowledgeable and impacted people together to align and move forward in concert.
But, collaborative choice-making requires the people involved to be comfortable with power– even over autonomy. Comfortable with, as the definition above suggests, their capacity to influence others and to be influenced. We have a counter-productive, dominant narrative in our sector that staff from different positional levels and teams can’t get comfortable with power and thus can’t make decisions together. The truth is, most organizations have not been designed for cross-functional collaboration, let alone practiced collective decision-making regularly enough to know what people are capable of.
Two passages from Emergent Strategy–from adrienne maree brown and Autumn Brown respectively–offer us insightful guidance here:
Below are three ways to cultivate a healthy and collaborative expression of power in your organizational structure.
1. Center Bodies of Work
Turn away from your org chart for a moment and consider the most-up-to-date way you would describe the bodies of work you want your staff to energize. What we find in justice-committed organizations is that the department structure they have in place rarely matches up with a current articulation of key bodies of work. What would it look like to bring people together around bodies of work–narrative change, resource mobilization, etc.–so that they can do as Adrienne Maree Brown guided: “make sure the people who will be doing the work agree on what is being done, why and how.”
2. Practice Consent Decision-making
Try on consent decision-making (see the resource list below). Our favorite methods allow for gradients of agreement. While many people cling to the claim that it takes too long, we observe groups wasting countless days, months, even years in avoidance loops and simmering conflict over unmade and unimplemented decisions. Consent decision-making introduces a replicable rigor to making important choices; it is walking the talk of transparency, equity, and inclusion; and, it has worked, in various forms, for generations of people and communities. Yes, we can learn it!
3. Elevate Meeting Design
Think of meetings as a core part of your organizational design. They are just as important as positions and teams. Meetings–and very often meetings on Zoom in today’s hybrid world–are how we build understanding and alignment; they are where we influence others and get influenced by them; they are where we practice consent decision-making. Effective meetings are truly essential to the health of an organization.
If we want to bring everyone’s authentic power and voice into the room, we have to design meetings for that outcome. No shortcuts. It will not happen without meeting preparation, agenda design, strong facilitation, and consistent meeting follow-through. Who on your staff will commit to meeting design as a practice, as a core competency? Call on them to design the important collaborative spaces your bodies of work require.
Many leaders have sticky narratives about how conflict-ridden and inefficient it is to share power generally, and decision-making specifically. But often they are not factoring in the levels of conflict and inefficiency that their current organizational designs yield. By focusing on the bodies of work as you actually need them done; by practicing consent-based decision making; and by elevating meeting design, we can invite people to show up to one another and to the work with their most authentic power.
Resources on Consent-based Decision Making
- Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown
See: A Conversation on Consensus with Autumn Meghan Brown, p.169 - 173 and Efficient Consensus Decision Making, p. 230-236
- “Models of Consensus: A Brief Guide” by Autumn Brown
- JustOrg Design’s Consent Decision Making Feature
- “Consensus Decision Making” by Seeds for Change UK
See section called ‘Options for Agreement and Disagreement’
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