Collective Power: Patterns for a Self-Organized Future

Humans form groups, organizations, movements, countries. What are the deeper patterns at work that determine how those entities work?

This book shows the those underlying structures of alignment and autonomy, centralization and decentralization, power-over and power-with in teams, organizations and beyond.

Based on cultural evolution and Ostrom’s work of the successful management of the commons as well as Beer’s Viable Systems Model, this book opens our eyes to an invisible world: the world of governance. Governance rules who decides, how we decide, and who decides who decides what and how. Governance is the key to our collective power and agency - without governance to balance the powers, there is dysfunction, chaos, groupthink, or tyranny.

The book focuses on power-with governance and self-organization based on choice. Power-with governance is possible when every actor fills their power responsibly, with an integration of individual, collective and planetary needs.

All levels have their special emergent strategies: teams need topic management and decision-making, skills around pacing and agreements to move forward together and effectively. Organizations are effective when they let workers decide autonomously while fostering alignment and cohesion on strategy, values, budgeting, and information flow. New forms of power-with government need to consider economic factors, identities, education, legal system and planetary boundaries.