During his workshop tour through Europe, governance consultant John Buck visited the Goetheanum and met the Parents’ Council of the Rudolf Steiner School in Basel. Here, Andrea Valdinoci speaks with him about how the idea of “sociocracy” came about and how mutual leadership processes work.
Andrea Valdinoci: It’s great that we can talk today, John! Is it your first time at the Goetheanum?
John Buck: Yes, it’s my first time here, and the eurythmy performance I attended yesterday, in particular, gave me an impression of the work at the Goetheanum: I saw “spirit at work.”
I heard you are involved in something called “sociocracy.” Where did this begin in your working life?
My first job after college was as a technical writer for Boeing. I wrote manuals. At the same time, I started researching how to restructure decision-making processes. I liked my job; I liked my team and my boss. One day, I had gone to vote for the mayor in Seattle and it hit me: “I live in a democracy. I just voted for a mayor, but I can’t vote for my boss. If we live in a democracy, why can’t I vote for my boss? And I would vote for my boss if I could, because I like him. Why aren’t companies run democratically?” I moved from Boeing in Seattle to the Federal Aviation Administration in Washington as a management intern and learned a lot about management, far beyond what’s in a master’s degree. I kept looking for businesses that were organized democratically, but I didn’t find any. The American way is to elect our leaders. The troops in the US Army had elected their own leaders, the captain or the lieutenant who was going to take them into battle, until 1860, when the Civil War broke out. It’s the original American impulse. Then I was invited to the Netherlands to give a lecture. I took my whole family with me on the trip, and we stayed with some Quakers. One evening I had a discussion with our hostess and told her that I couldn’t find any place where you could vote for your boss. She replied: “That’s been solved. You have to meet Gerard Endenburg in Rotterdam.” She introduced us, and I traveled to see him. Within about half an hour, it became very clear to me that he had something totally new that wasn’t in any of the business literature that I’d read.
He introduced you to the idea of sociocracy?
One crucial thing I learned from him was that the idea of sociocracy has a long history. Auguste Comte originally developed the term in the 1850s. He believed that social specialists should run the government. Comte’s writings were taken up by Frank Ward, a professor in the USA, who founded the first sociology organization there. As a result, sociology became a subject and a profession, and he became the first to teach it in the USA. The Dutchman Kees Boeke, a famous peace activist before and after the world wars, took it further. He founded his own school and implemented what they knew at that point about sociocracy. One of his students was Gerard Endenburg.
Gerard went on to study engineering and then worked for Philips. His parents had been radical socialists before World War II but said that the socialism that swept through Europe afterward was not what they had imagined. So they founded their own company and did their own experimentation with its management. In the early 1970s, they wanted to retire and asked Gerard to take over the company and continue the experiments. When he joined the company and looked at its power structure—the board of directors, the CEO, the subordinate managers, and the staff—he thought: “I’m an electrical engineer, and I would never build an energy circuit or a power structure like this. There are no feedback loops to guide it.”
So he put his engineering mind to work and tried to design a better company structure that contained good feedback loops. These became his so-called “kringen” which is Dutch for “rings” or “circles.” The structure had two parts. In day-to-day business, people worked autocratically. Then every few weeks, everyone from a department came together for a circle meeting. At these meetings, people decided which guidelines they wanted to follow on a daily basis. These “circles” were then linked together so that there were representatives going all the way up the organization, up to and including the board of directors. The circles were the feedback loops. But Gerard also wanted to figure out how decisions could be made. He almost gave up because how can you make decisions if everyone has equal rights? But he finally came up with the principle of consent. It’s not a question of either/or but of both/and. As long as there are no overriding objections but only different views, then there is no arguing about which idea is the “right” idea. Rather it’s a matter of looking at how all the different but good ideas can be realised. It’s an incredibly powerful and creative way of making decisions.
How did you continue after you had studied Gerald Endenburg’s ideas and implementation?
I started to incorporate it into my work as a manager. I left my job to work for people doing government work. On one contract with the State Department, we installed computers and trained people all over the world—I had 240 people reporting to me—and I applied a lot of what I had learned from Gerald. I couldn’t put everything into a circular structure because they would have blown up at me. However, I used a lot of the technical organization that I had learned from Gerard, and I used consent decision-making sparingly but successfully. That went on from the 90s until 2006. I could have continued working in management and simply climbed the ladder, but I didn’t because my motivation was really a very spiritual one. I wanted to pass on my knowledge instead. I also immersed myself in the complexities of creating legal documents for companies that want to work sociocratically: finding ways to be completely egalitarian and still keep the shareholders or owners. I co-authored the book We the People – Consenting to a Deeper Democracy.
Do you have an example from your work as a consultant?
One of the first companies I worked with, when Gerard and I were working together, was an automobile parts manufacturer. They’d had a bad labor strike, and many people were still bitter. We convinced them to create a double-linked structure where someone from the floor was elected from within the workforce to sit in on the general circle of managers and the board of directors’ meetings. I remember sitting in the board of directors meeting the first time he was there. They were discussing whether to launch a major advertising campaign to get more orders, but the regular board members thought that they were already working at full capacity and wouldn’t be able to ensure good production. The elected representative objected. He said, “I’m telling you this because you got me up here, and you want me to talk. We have been pretending to be busy for several months now because we were worried that you’d do a layoff and we’d lose our jobs. We’re not busy.” And everybody went, “Huh?” No kidding. This is an example of communication actually happening. Only then did the long-term leadership have the information they needed to make the right decision. This is how the feedback loops work. Every organization I have worked with has benefited greatly from this. And I haven’t just worked with just companies but with every kind of “society” – families, neighborhoods, NGOs, etc.
What do you need to consider in your consulting work to ensure that the process is successful?
Whenever I go into an organization, I try to do what’s called a power analysis because you never know who really controls the power, and the people in that position have to be on board and in favor of sociocracy. They don’t necessarily have to push it, but if they don’t want it, they will stop the process one way or another. So it’s very difficult to start work in the middle of an organization – it’s much better if you’ve got the top involved at the beginning. And you never really know who is pulling which strings. You have to dig deeper and ask specific questions.
But in the end, a sociocratic organization is much more resilient and agile, isn’t it?
Yes. I’ve looked at the research on this—in my own master’s thesis and in the research of others. Three things are evident. Firstly, in sociocratic organizations, commitment is much higher. Secondly, they work much more efficiently than non-sociocratic structures. And thirdly, they cultivate reflective judgment. In North Carolina, I accompanied a school that involved the children in consent processes. It was a particularly strong experience for the children.
You started with the question of how democracy can be brought into companies. But today, there are major doubts about the social functioning of democracy.
Yes, and democracy is very susceptible to the influence of social media, which threatens to destroy it. Democracy means: rule by the people (Greek: demos). The word sociocracy contains socius, which in Latin means: people who know each other. You could, therefore, say that sociocracy is a subset of democracy. In India or the Netherlands, for example, neighborhood parliaments have been formed. This can really upset the traditional government, but if they are linked on both sides, it is very effective. The advantage of having a maximum of 30 families in a parliament is that they can meet without microphones—the richest person can’t just buy a bunch of advertisements to get votes. It is the best thing we know of to fight against the harmful influence of social media because you have people that you know personally and can trust, and then you elect them to the next higher level—from the neighborhood to the larger district and so on.
You mentioned children in sociocratic processes. What is their part in this?
Alphonse Mekolo and I have written a book on this called Governance from Below: Can Children Lead the Way? It’s primarily about mutual leadership—in other words, how children, together with adult “allies,” can help steer things. Alphonse was with the United Nations (UN) for a very long time. We were inspired by Edmund John’s discovery that children learn sociocracy and cooperation in neighborhood parliaments much faster than adults and that if he brought them together, it was tolerated by politicians. This is happening right up to the World Children’s Parliament session at the UN ECOSOC Youth Forum 2024. Children can bring change to leadership right up to the global level.
There are many local stories that show the impact children can have on their communities. My favorite example is from India, where children in a school noticed that some of the children in their class were often late for school and very wet. They realized that these children had to walk to school every day through a small river. With this information, 300 children went to the local government and demanded a bridge, which was then built.
Politicians feel less threatened when children do something like this. And children can take the lead. It looks like they have more influence, or could have more influence than we give them credit for. I always advise children’s organizations: don’t talk about training future leaders—let them lead now! Sociocracy teaches us to lead each other, and that includes children.
Thank you, John, for this rich insight into your work!
World Goetheanum Forum 2025
September 24-28, 2025, in Sekem/Egypt
Re-Think / Re-Feel / Re-Do Sustainable Development
For the first time, the World Goetheanum Forum is traveling to Sekem, a place where sustainable development is lived. Sekem is The United Nations Champion of the Earth 2024! As a Sustainable Native, the organization has almost 50 years of experience in ecological, social, economic, and cultural sustainable development. We invite you to actively participate in the forum’s work on sustainable development with partners worldwide.
Wir laden Sie ein, mit Partnern, Partnerinnen und Tätigen weltweit aktiv in die Forumsarbeit zu einer nachhaltigen Entwicklung zu gehen.
Website worldgoetheanum.org
More Information association@worldgoetheanum.org
Links on this theme
- Sociocracy for All
- Sociocracy – a deeper democracy
- The Sociocracy Group
- John Buck on LinkedIn
- GovernanceAlive
- Soziokratie Zentrum Deutschland
Graphics Fabian Roschka
