Scaling up

To be really effective as a Transition group, we must be prepared, at the appropriate time, to increase the size of our organisations through bringing in more people or by linking to other groups so we can achieve more. This inevitably adds complexity to the running of the group.

Many of those involved in Transition, perhaps inspired by E. F. Schumacher’s 1973 classic book Small is Beautiful, believe that small is the optimal size for organisations. Advantages to staying small include convenience, humanity and manageability. But, as Schumacher acknowledged, sometimes you also need large organisations. The successful initiatives, he suggested, are able to make one large organisation feel like a group of small ones.

Organising a large group requires different skills from running a small one. For example, a small organisation may be able to rely solely on volunteers, meet in pubs and make decisions quickly. With scale, you may need office space, staff, and to be far more formal and thorough. We shouldn’t be scared of getting bigger, but there are traps for the unwary that can be avoided.

The people issues can be particularly challenging. Sometimes the people who initially led the smaller group cannot run a larger one. This can be uncomfortable for all involved. As a group grows, there’s a tendency for those with the loudest voices to dominate. A hierarchy appears, tending to push power and information upwards and out of the hands of those doing the work, which is where it should be. A more suitable model for a Transition group is a network, which distributes information and power rather than concentrating it.

When developing a structure, start by listing the group’s functions. For example, you might decide that the group must do the following:

• operations (doing the work)
  
• coordination and communication
  
• strategy
  
• dispute resolution

Different individuals or teams can take on these roles. The trick then is to balance them so no individual or team dominates. Developing a structure for a growing organisation is not easy, but nor need it be left to experts. People have been organising themselves into communities for millennia, and we need to rediscover the faith in ourselves to handle these important tasks. We can learn from nature and from organisations that have trodden this route.

One inspiring example of a healthy, large organisation is the Mondragon federation of cooperatives, based in the Basque region of Spain.[i] Started in the 1940s, this now has over 85,000 people. It is the largest business in the region and competes globally in various fields of business. None of the individual cooperatives exceeds 500 people – they grow by adding new cooperatives, not by making existing ones bigger. They have created an ecology of interlinked businesses with their own university and bank but with minimal hierarchy and no external owners.

The Village, a new and growing eco-village in Ireland,[ii] is applying the Viable Systems Model,[iii] a tool for understanding the viability of an organisation, developed by cybernetics guru Stafford Beer. I asked Davie Philip, a founding member of The Village, what lessons the project learned as it scaled up from a small group of enthusiasts to an entity that now has planning permission and 40 houses under construction.

For the Cloughjordan eco-village our biggest challenge in scaling up our ideas was to find a structure that allowed decisions to be made in a coordinated way by the doers and drivers of the project. For an idea that is as large and ambitious as the ecovillage, and which is member-driven, it was important to put in place an organisational structure that would manage the complexity of the project while allowing autonomy and decision-making at every level and within every working group. I think the key to a successful project is the ability for all stakeholders to self-organise, and we are using VSM, the Viable Systems Model, to facilitate this.

Resources

Hock, D. (1999). The Birth of the Chaordic Age. Berrett-Koehler Publishers.
www.sociocracy.info/
Turnbull, S. (2002) A New Way to Govern. Organisations and Society After Enron. new economics foundation pocketbook (available for free download at: http://tinyurl.com/66y5mcl)
Wheatley, M. & Kellner-Rogers, M. (1996) A Simpler Way. Berrett-Koehler Publishers