b. Designing Organisations

Stefania Strega-Scoz

Saturday 11 June 2005

Summary

Stefania started by saying that designing invisible structures is very difficult, and this is perhaps why (even as permaculture designers) we don´t seem to design our organisations using the permaculture design process that we use for our gardens, or teach on our courses. Our design theory is excellent! and very powerful - we should try to apply it to designing EVERYTHING. When we don´t design consciously, we design unconsciously, and this means we often just do the 'lazy thing' and copy other forms we are familiar with. This can be disastrous for organizations, as there are several well known 'standard' forms, and most of them don´t work terribly well, especially in rapidly changing times. Going through the design process sistematically takes time, and in this case also quite a lot of imagination. But it´s worth the time: the worst that can happen is finding some new interesting ways of looking at familiar things .. the best that could happen is some very well designed organizations. This workshop was proposed in order to try and trace how the design process theory might go for designing an organization, step by step. Started by asking if there was an organization in particular the participants would like to design. No consensus emerged (and the time was quite limited), so we worked through the process without actually designing a new organisation.

Using SADI – we listed and discussed some of the tools available to us within permaculture design.

Survey - observe – how do we do this for people designs?

• Client interviews – people within and outside the organisation, particularly those that may have been excluded and/or at the bottom – they often have a better ‘view’
• Look at the results of the organisation - "actions speak louder than words"
• Emotions of people - not always rational, but always important - how to process them as a design issue
• Gate keepers - aknowledge them and map them - they are there somewhere, best if named
• Decision makers – where does the power lay – visible and invisible power structures
• Who acts? Who are the doers.
• Information flows/communications - map them
  • Look for resources – use the scale of resources (ones which increase with use to ones which pollute with use - see manual) - human resources like enthusiasm & skills available are particularly important here of course (others are time, money, spaces, materials, etc.)
• Inputs/outputs
• Functions - official ones and unofficial ones, which most important? (eg- doing work and socializing)
• Context/boundaries – what’s happening outside
• Protocol and reputation

Analyse - what analysing tools do we use in PC?

• Guilds/constellations (in order to deconstruct them)
• PMI
• Inputs/outputs (explicit and implicit)
• Zones - don't limit this powerful tool to a spacial or geographical thing
• Connections/flows (sectors)
• Emotional responses (recognise them for what they are)
• Characteristics/elements

Design - what design methodologies do we know of?

• Random assembly
• Process of elimination
• Options/decisions
• From pattern to detail (use pattern language)
• Apply principles
• Pragmatics – using what’s there, emergent design, intuitive design
• Wild design (or designing with the fairies)
• Incremental design

Implement - how doable is your design? strict pragmatix needed (start small, etc.)

• Participation – who
• Designed implementation – succession – incremental
• Sustainable - essential! If it´s not sustainable, it ain´t permaculture..
• Must have the resources to implement - good guiding principles to transmit like "don´t volunteer anyone", etc.

Maintenance … didn’t quite get there (one comment at the end was that this workshop should run over 3 days..)

(see http://www.rc.org/ for more information about the issue of designing with human irrationalities and emotional issues)

[Scribe: Anita Aggarwal]

27 Feb 11

It is very interesting to observe the repeating patterns all over, where it comes to trying to 'organise ourselves more effectively', in the alternative movements.

Basically at some point people notice that the Decentralised model doesn't work all that well and so automatically think of moving on to the Centralised model (which is, indeed, a lot more effective, but very clumsy & expensive on a large scale or over large geographical areas .. which is usually the scale and reach the permaculture networks that try to 'conglomerate' into one representative org. are looking at).

In 2006-7 there was a big call in Spain to 'have lots of bioregional permaculture meetings' by a small group of people who had the creation of a national permaculture association on their agenda. Thankfully at most of the meetings their proposal was met with very little interest, so this was not realised. We already had in place this brilliant

But in Italy the national structure (for a permaculture academy) was proposed immediately after the first permaculture courses there and so (with a lot less people to coordinate than in other places where permaculture had already gone viral) it did happen, almost by default (it's the obvious thing to do, right?). And sure enough last year, a few years on, the (usual, tired, repetitively familiar..) conflicts about who can be a member, who makes decisions and how, how much membership to pay.. etc. started surfacing on the email list.

The same old power struggles. Wherever there are attempts to centralise power there will always be power struggles. And rightly so. Because centralised structures, when you can't be in intimate contact with the few people supposedly 'representing your interests' (an issue of scale and geography) very easily become opressive. Of course am not saying that NGOs don't work (Gaia Tasiri, the NGO I founded is doing great work, because is very appropiate for the work it does) or that centralised structures are useless. Just that they have their particular set of circumstances where they are optimal, as an organisational structure. And it does not scale up. Or at least not with big problems...

Ironically, at the same time that I was reading about the - very predictable - powerstruggles in the Italian permaculture national org, ... I got to know about permaculture people in the US trying to form a national (continental!) org. there. And perhaps they were - sadly - inspired by the bright idea presented at IPC9 to set up a continental PC organisation for the whole of Africa. Hm. Very bad idea, in my opinion. And doomed to failure or at the very least to alienating the very bright shoots of innovation, pioneering and 'loose cannon' type initiatives that have usually been the most exciting growing tips of permaculture. Which is the same as failure, in my books, when it comes to permaculture.

Original pioneers and dynamic doers loathe centralised & bureocratic structures, and talkers, coventional-type herd people adore them - as far as I can see (and I might well be biased, of course).

But it is easy to see why that might be - because everywhere bureocracy IS suffocating to spontenaity & creativity (ie. to life), and bureocracy is almost inevitable if a centralised organisation grows beyond a fairly modest scale.

The old adage "power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely" is a simple observation of a human weakness which - I am convinced - we CAN DESIGN OUR WAY OUT OF. It is NOT human nature to be oppressive, as it is just a systemic design truism that nothing can stay healthy in an unhealthy environment: if you design structures that encourage participation, cooperation, engagement, etc. you will get those things. And if you design structures that encourage fear, suspicion, centralising of resources and power, you will get all sorts of diseased expressions of humans trying to twist themselves around structures that do not serve. And we are drowning in them.

What is (for me, as a permaculture designer and teacher) quite painful to witness, is to see more and more frantic attempts at faraonic centralising now in the Permaculture network, whilst we are seeing some of the most amazing and inspiring first experiments in real participatory democracy - mostly expressed by the massive growth of social networks, thanks to internet, which is revolutionising our way of knowing, and of thinking, especially of thinking together. Or could do, if we let it...

So in the (possibly.. if we design with it) bright new era of collective intelligence we are seeing not only permaculture designers not apreciating (at least very much) the significance of the revolution that is happening under our noses, but mostly staying well out of it and almost never actually actively designing with it and infact and even 'going backwards' and proposing we do what the multinationals were doing 20, 30, 50yrs ago ... so they will still leave us behind, as they are now (trying to) go chaordic themselves! A very sad state of affairs, in my opinion.

Centralised IS much more effective than Decentralised, but the Chaordic or Distributed network model (when well designed) is infinately more effective than the Centralised, both in intelligence capabilities, responsiveness and scale.

Which is why internet is so powerful and flexible and why huge & varied ecosystems can work, seamlessly, and apparently as one organism, engaging in zillions of complex interactions simultaneously.. with nobody (but the laws of nature) directing anything.

Despite Walt Disney's attempts at brainwashing us to the contrary, ecosystems do not organise meetings of all the animals, or elect committees or sub-commitees to make decisions, make policies and rules about membership and dues or infact engage in any bureocracy whatsoever. Their individual communities do (as most are, infact, fiercely hierarchical), but the community of communities doesn't. It is astoundingly cooperative & 'flowing'. Or at least it should be astounding to us, if we look at it as designers.

Bureocracy was all invented by humans, and belongs to an important but now passing stage of our evolution which - I believe - the sooner we move out of, the better. And I believe we can only do that BY DESIGN.

Because there are very good design reasons for why and how ecosystems organise themselves chaordically, and we had better study if we are serious about being designers who wanto learn from nature, and who are concerned about resilience and sustainability of our social structures, or just are humans who have noticed that our societies are growing way beyond the scales that can be managed by old means.

And hopefully you're someone (like me, and I believe the majority of people) who is not interested to going back to the caves in order to avoid modern problems, but interested in evolution, and so in figuring out how we can grow and think our way out of the problems without giving up the real advances that came with them. A very interesting challenge.

Because - as in every other stage of quantum leap change in history - if we don't learn a new set of skills, and fast, we're just history.

“The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between the way nature works and the way people think.” Gregory Bateson

This also applies to how we think our brain works...

This is a recent conversation with Robyn Francis, whom I admire enormously, about yet another of the big centralising efforts being attempted.. this time in Australia.

February 2011 in Facebook

Robyn Francis

Just posted the proposed framework presentation for Permaculture Australia i've been working on - a kind of road map for stage one - interested in responses to the proposed structure https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=explorer&chrome=true&srcid=0B0ctd7O8asUWNWVhOGY4NGItNWM5NS00MDMxLThmNTAtYzgwNGQzNGJmZWY4&authkey=CJ-v0rEG&hl=en

Stella Strega Evolution is going in a different direction, I believe: towards chaordic structures and participative democracy. This kind of centralised structures with representative democracy belong to the past, and will only be part of the problem, in the future. We need to design with a lot more imagination and vision, or we'll just reproduce old structures and problems with new names.

http://permacultureinstitute.pbworks.com/ is a design put out in 2005 and thinking in radically new ways (still unfamiliar & therefore uncomfortable to most of us), and was initiated by a spanish node of the permaculture academy (two reasons you might still not have heard of or it, or apreciate it's radical new approach)

Robyn Francis ‎@Stella, there's a strong group wanting a local-state-national representative body (too much like a political party structure for my sensibilities), so have found a middle-ground to accommodate that within an overall framework that also includes individual and special interest groups (domains & guilds), seeking a balance between structure and chaordic engagement. Websites offer loads of opportunity for individual pple and projects to have a voice & be seen, but there's other functions that require a legal entity & membership. Pc in Oz has been held back by lack of a national voice for advocacy and missed too many opportunities to harness funding to support the grassroots. This has been in discussion for 5 years and some great participatory processes at past 2 convergences - i'm trying to weave them together in a workable model that can adapt and flex and allow for ongoing evolution.

Stella Strega I completely understand the problematics.. same here, and I suspect everywhere, at least in the west.

Also been doing & thinking about this for yonks. I notice we tend to confuse 'having a national / bioregional..etc. voice' with creating another (usually centralised & bigger ) org. Does not equate.

The bigger orgs. come with bigger problems & bureocracies also, & don't address the underlying issue - which is our difficulties with cooperating.

We have tons of legal entities already doing great work in PC from decades that can access funds - the problem is cooperating in using (designing with) existing structures.

And creating news ones to pander to our insecurities (our feelings of 'not owning' something existing) simply doesn't address the real problem - so can't be a real solution.

Its simply what I've been observing over the years.

The bottom line is we have to change our minds. & I just doubt we can speed that on with old types of structures.

I deeply apreciate all struggles to do so however. Thanks for your huge & painstaking work.