Berlin Masterclass in Decentralised Organising

A full day participatory learning experience, sharing insights and practical actions to solve your organisational challenges.

Our story

If you are trying to organise in a decentralised, collaborative, less-hierarchical team, you are probably asking yourself: How do we include people in decisions without spending so much time in meetings? How do we develop an open, collaborative culture? How do we encourage participation, engagement, and shared responsibility? And if nobody is in charge, where does accountability come from?

You are not the only one. For the last decade, we have been immersed in these challenges, as we co-founded and built Loomio and Enspiral, two pioneering decentralised organisations. (Read more about us here.)

Last year we travelled to 14 countries to share lessons with groups asking the same questions. From the Seoul City Government, to healthcare providers in Brighton, a Dublin food co-op, Berlin tech startups, community organisers from Indianapolis to Buenos Aires... and many more.

Everyone seems to face the same challenges when we try to work without a traditional command-and-control structure. The good news is: you don’t have to reinvent the wheel! Many of us have found solutions, and we are here to guide you along the way.

About the Masterclass

In this Masterclass we will share with you 12 Patterns for Decentralised Organising. These patterns are like lenses for understanding the challenges of working with less hierarchy, and the practical responses that have proven to solve them.

Through this full day of participatory learning, you’ll not only gain new understandings, connections and fresh perspectives. You’ll leave the workshop with practical actions that you can start applying right away, to grow a purpose-driven team environment that feels nourishing, engaging, hugely productive and resilient.

Outcomes

• Learn how to implement new models for collective decision-making, like the advice process and consent-based decisions.
• Visualise the tools and processes in your team, find the gaps, and understand how to introduce new communications tools well.
• Practical interpersonal skills: how to have hard conversations, giving feedback, dealing with conflict, and talking about power differences.
• Understand how to build a culture of deep trust and belonging.
• How to access continuous improvement in your organising systems and in the emotional intelligence of your team.

Who is this for?

In our workshop we bring together a diverse cross-section of people to share experiences and find new insights together. If you identify with any of these, this Masterclass is for you:

• Founder -- you’ve built a startup or launched a new NGO
• Cooperator -- you’re in a co-op, working in Agile teams, or contributing to community projects
• Facilitator -- you host collaborative processes for co-creation and collective intelligence
• Intrapreneur -- you’re leading change within an established organisation
• Community organiser -- you coordinate people for positive social impact
• Networker, consultant, coach -- you’re connecting all the dots in the future of work: Agile, Teal, Holacracy, Sociocracy, Deliberately Developmental Organisations, etc.

Tickets

We’re motivated by social impact rather than just profit, so we aim to make our workshops as accessible as possible while still covering our expenses. There are 3 ticket prices for this event: Discount - for people on low income, the Standard price, and Support - for people with higher income that can help us offer discounts and scholarships. Tickets are limited, please choose according to your circumstances.

If you are not able to afford the Discount price, but you are part of a social group that will highly benefit by the lessons in this event, contact us at contact@thehum.org -- we have a few scholarships available.

Team discount

If you want to bring several people from your team, contact us for a group discount. Or if you want us to work privately with you, get in touch: we will be in town for a few days.

Read more

Here’s a review of one of our half-day workshops.

We publish everything we learn: see stories on our blog.

This event is brought to you with the support of Open State.

Open State is a collective and an idea. We design formats to push forward the resilient future we need. We've come to believe that lasting change can only be achieved by deep experience in uncommon settings, freed from systemic restraints and framed by fresh methods such as open collaboration, sociocracy and agile innovation. All outcomes we produce are open source and shared freely, so blueprints can spread faster in a world that is in radical transition - by design or by disaster.