This is a quick note on “The Empowerment Manual”, a book by Starhawk that I found very inspiring when working on the first version of The Reef’s Governance Document.
The book is about how to foster shared power, responsibility, trust and accountability in collaborative groups. Every chapter starts with a fictional story about a cohousing that struggles with all sorts of conflicts and tensions. After that the author provides some theory about what went wrong and how this could have been avoided.
What I found interesting about the book is that the author shares about her own experiences and offers a lot of food for thought. She cautions against the pitfalls of power (formal and informal) and leadership, but at the same time she also warns about a phenomenon of wanting to be equals at all cost and as a consequence not taking care of the individuals who are sticking their neck out.
What I found missing is some more concrete tools to apply her advice. Starhawk insists a lot for example on putting in place “accountability mechanisms” to hold people in leadership positions accountable, but she never specifies how to do this. Fortunately I found a lot of the answers to this kind of questions in the sociocracy manual “Many voices one song” by Ted Rau and Jerry Koch-Gonzalez.
Overall I found it a very interesting book. I have a paper copy that I am happy to lend out. Maybe somebody in @reef-community or @reef-governance would be willing to read it (and make a summary)?
@ChrisM, have you read The Manual of Empowerment yet? I will, starting today.
With chapters on finding a group vision, balancing power & responsibility, functional and dysfunctional communication, different types of leadership & how to be an empowering leader, embracing conflict, etc. the table of contents seems hyper relevant. Both to our conflict management team, as well as the entire group, especially at this point in time.
@reeflings , if you’ve read (parts of) this book or will soon, I’d be very interested to exchange thoughts on how it has or hasn’t helped you make sense of/navigate our own group dynamics. This could be very helpful input for team conflict management.
