Individuals can experience trauma from consistently being in environments where they are expected to obey authority without question, such as at home, in school, and in the community. This ingrains a pattern of submission and seeking opportunities to dominate. Shifting away from this dominant mode to a more inclusive, partnership-oriented approach requires unlearning years of conditioning and patterns. Even in cooperative environments, it takes significant time and effort to overcome these deeply ingrained behaviors.
In this episode we speak with Richard Bartlett, co-founder of the tech cooperative Loomio, and The Hum, management consultancy for organizations without managers. In the conversation, we cover his history and experience with patterns of decentralized organizing picked up from the punk scene and Occupy Wellington in the early 2010s, what he learned from those patterns, and how he co-created new organizational structures that put them into play with his co-founders and fellow workers. This episode will be particularly interesting for listeners who want practical advice on how to organize in DAOs, cooperatives, and other organizational forms that seek to work in non-hierarchical ways, but still get meaningful work done.
Here are the show notes: