The HeART of Collective Decision-Making

About this course

Join us for this half-day workshop with Claire Milne (Starter Culture) who will share tangible processes and structures that can help us make good decisions together, alongside practices that can support you and your group/organisation compost a ‘power-over’ culture from the inside-out.

Witnessing and experiencing just how disenfranchised and disempowered our relationships have become vis-a-vis governmental institutions, corporations, technology – and all too often the very groups we are part of, has led to increasingly deep and widespread frustration, conflict and/or simply giving up. Collective decision-making sits at the heart of how we cultivate regenerative relational cultures that genuinely embed compassion and care, and tune into the inherent power and potency of Earth’s Life-death-life cycle. Learning how to make good decisions together, is perhaps one of the most transformational steps we can take in these heart-stretching times. It provides an opportunity to move towards developing ‘power-with’ relationships. We can then come to experience the incredible impact this can have within ourselves, our groups, communities, organisations and movements.

In this workshop we will consider both sociocracy and holocracy models. This will help us understand how it is possible to blend both ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ power and decision-making with the support of clarity and transparency around roles and accountabilities – and see where particular decision-making power lies, and why. We will also discuss the conditions that support power and decision-making, so that it can become more visible, open to examination and distributed. As this is an introductory workshop, it is not intended to directly enable participants to then exercise collective decision-making. Our aim is to offer further workshops that can continue to explore the practice of restoring Earth-centric cultures.

on this course you will

• Learn about dynamic ways of collaborating within which we each feel a sense of freedom to unleash our creative potential and take action.
• Consider how we can become energised and informed by collective intelligence and a diversity of perspectives drawn from across and beyond your collective of humans.
• Create more clarity around; working in circles; inhabiting roles; emergent strategy; holding healthy flexible boundaries; and how radical self-responsibility meets regenerative feedback.
• Explore Earth-centric modes of organisation
• Discuss ways of helping you and your group or collective, operate more effectively and meaningfully in a complex and fast-changing world.

what participants said about this course

‘Claire offers an inspiring insight into how to create an alternative culture to the power-over hierarchies of our current system. A new culture that connects us to ourselves, each other, and our earth. A culture that honours the human need to be seen, heard and valued in all our diversity. Within this she offers skills to create functioning structures for human collaboration that enable decision making that is truly collaborative, engaging and effective.’

‘Claire’s facilitation & teaching style is something magnificent to witness and be part of. Her ability to hold complexity, multiple perspectives, and different roles in one space is quite unique. She can switch between facilitator, her own personal perspective and tapping into the group field with striking fluidity. Her leadership style is one that is emergent and guided by deep listening. Learning about shared governance with Claire was a process far more rewarding that I anticipated.’