First, remember that, like anything people do, there will be lots of variations, so it's not possible to give a lot of detail. Also, it's a moving target; the first sustainable societies that I would label Mature will not look all that different from the preceding Young soul societies, while the last ones before the transition to an Old soul society will not only look very, very different, they could very well be incomprehensible to people today.

What I'm going to say in this chapter is primarily from my memory of channeled tapes made in J.P. van Hulle's Advanced Class around 20 years ago, extrapolations of the basic Michael Teachings, and other pieces that I'll introduce as I go along.

In a recent channeling, Michael Toth compared our current society to a symphony. Not in the sense that it sounded good, but in the sense that there were many different instruments playing a composition with many different themes. Currently, the themes that resonate for Mature Souls are just beginning to be heard. Over time, they will inevitably swell until they become the dominant themes, but they will never entirely drown out other themes that resonate for other soul ages and other purposes.

Over the years, I've used a different comparison. Most of us are familiar with transition scenes, where little blocks of the new scene replace corresponding blocks of the old scene. At some point, the new scene suddenly snaps in, and we recognize it as a scene while there are still pieces of the old one present. Exactly when the new scene "snaps in" depends more on what you're expecting than anything that's inherent in the actual scene -- some people will see the new pattern earlier, some later.

Both of these metaphors illustrate one basic fact: our society is a mosaic of bits and pieces which support different soul ages, different roles, goals and all of the other pieces of the Michael Teaching. In a lot of cases, there are options: the opulent areas that support Young Souls flaunting their Achievements contrast strongly with the urban jungles and slums that give late Infant Souls necessary lessons in day to day survival in an advanced society. The United States, for example, has been channeled as having an excess of Artisans and Warriors, and a dearth of Servers. Correspondingly, it's not at all surprising that we tend to specialize in labor saving devices, and that we attract "illegal" immigrants that do server type work for us that we're not willing to do for ourselves.

There are several central facts of a Mature Soul society that distinguish it from a Young Soul society. One is that it is based on equality, rather than hierarchy. The second is that it is based on people conforming to established social norms rather than rugged individualism.

These two look like they're in conflict. Well, they aren't. Quite. The trick is that, in a Mature Soul society, the social norms are a matter of agreement, not something that was inherited via tradition or handed down from On High. The social norms are changeable, however the principle of equality means that the changes have to be acceptable to everyone before they're implemented.

A Mature Soul society is similar to a Baby Soul society in one significant way: there are norms, and people are expected to conform to the norms. People who deviate can be in serious trouble.

It differs from a Baby Soul society in another very fundamental way, however. The members of the society consult with each other and make changes to it on a fairly continuous basis. The discussions tend to play out with the full force of Mature Soul drama and angst.

Decision making is by consensus (for a not unreasonable meaning of the term.) According to the channeling, while a lot of different things are being discussed at any time, one will rise to the forefront and then people will realize that they are in agreement. When they realize that they've agreed on a direction, then they make it happen. The trappings of mechanism to implement that decision are unimportant; different Mature Soul societies will have different ways of executing.

What one won't see are the trappings of a Young soul society. For example, decisions are not made by voting. Majority rule inherently disenfranchises the minority. Likewise, there is no interest in winning or losing at all costs, a point that's very easy to miss in the drama of the discussion. That doesn't mean that there are no sports teams or such like. There will still be Young souls whose needs have to be handled, and young men will still compete for the attentions of young women. People are, after all, still people!

Another point to consider it that a realistic Mature Soul society, rather than a textbook example, has provisions for Baby, Young and Old soul ages. It doesn't include provision for Infant souls simply because most Mature Souls won't put up with the conditions that Infant Souls find growthful. They find hunter-gatherer tribes and "urban jungles" or slum areas to be offensive, and a Mature Soul society would clean them up.

Baby Souls are accommodated by having full, frank and pubic discussions of what people want to change, and taking due care that the implementation isn't so rapid as to cause whiplash. One implication of this is that changes are made relatively slowly. Another piece to understand with Baby Souls is that they'll naturally align with the Mature Soul segment of society rather than the Young Soul segment, once that gets established as "the way."

Young souls are accommodated by having lots of opportunity and recognition for personal achievement, with clear and enforced boundaries of what is out of bounds.

Old Souls are accommodated by having lots of breathing room for personal style, and also a respect for reasoned, rather than impassioned, discourse as well as reasoned analysis of what's being discussed.

There have been numerous experiments in living and working together as equals over the years. Most of them have been relatively small, and done with dedicated and quite above average people. Most of them have failed to scale or have not worked well with other than their originators. While the people who created these experiments have been far from ordinary, they have worked with very large organizations and with ordinary people.

A year or two later they reopened it as a joint venture with Toyota. It had a sexy new name (NUMMI), and it assembled GM vehicles but with Toyota management. They rehired most of the original workers, including the troublemakers from the former era. Within a year, quality went way up (defects per unit down by around 70%), morale was up, union grievances were so rare as to be almost non-existent.

What was the difference? Part of it was Japanese business culture, but only part. Japanese business culture was built on the teachings of J. Edwards Deming, an American management consultant who got his start as one of the central team behind the productivity explosion that supplied the WW II war effort. He was then part of the team that helped to reorganize Japanese business culture -- they appreciated the industrial effort that went into the U.S. war effort.

The rest of it was, however, Toyota's specific organizational culture. Toyota had learned a lot of lessons that are almost the opposite of standard management practice. Those came from Toyota's specific history, which goes back to Toyoda Spinning and Weaving. Toyoda Spinning and Weaving made power looms -- gigantic pieces of machinery with thousands of moving parts. The mechanics who assembled and serviced them had to have years of experience before they could become really productive. There was literally no way you could hire someone off the street and have them become productive in three weeks.

This contrasts with Ford Motor Company, which did exactly that: hired its workers and expected them to become productive in three weeks or less. What's not always appreciated about Ford in that era is that it existed in a time of high immigration: it was a social good to be able to take immigrants right off the boat and get them a good paying job. It's said that one could walk through the Rouge River plant and hear 50 languages spoken, and that there were workgroups where no two people spoke the same language, including the foreman.

Ford's error was not in serving the particular needs of its place and time, it was that it set the expectations of how things should be organized for much of the rest of the century.

The lesson that Toyota learned, and that Ford didn't, was that the most important person was the one actually doing the work: workers were highly skilled, needed years of experience, and were not replaceable. Management's job was to organize, train and facilitate.

The secret sauce is Respect for People, and the secret ingredient is Toyota's attitude toward what that actually means in everyday, operational terms.

The reason that it's a secret ingredient isn't that Toyota won't talk about it. They talk about it incessantly. It's a secret because it's practically invisible to people who are steeped in Young Soul philosophy.

It's a hard lesson for conventional executives to learn that management's job isn't command and control; it's long range planning, training and facilitating getting the work done to the customer's satisfaction.

Another major point that frequently comes under the radar is that the best person to know how to do a job is the person who does the job successfully. That sounds like a platitude until you realize that it means that managers are not the best people to tell workers how to do their jobs. Neither are staff departments, etc. These people are not the ones that are on the assembly line putting parts together into widgets day after day.

It means that work units are responsible for the procedures they use -- not their managers, not some corporate policy department, not the design engineers, not some external auditor who's trying to avert regulatory risk. It also means that two different work units doing the same job might have different procedures, a notion that is so radical that it's not even anathema to conventional thinking -- it simply can't be right, can it?

It also means that deviations from Standard Work aren't tolerated. Standard Work is whatever the current procedures are, neither more nor less. The current procedures are, of course, open to change, but the changes have to be discussed with the rest of the workgroup and agreed to. There may have to be measurements, and there may also need to be buyin from other workgroups that have shared responsibility.

This isn't a prescription for stagnation. One of Taichi Ohno's more famous pronouncements is: "If you haven't changed your procedures in the last month, you're wasting the company's money!" (Taichi Ohno is the person behind the Toyota Production System.)

Sociocracy was invented in the Netherlands by Gerard Endenburg, partly as a result of his experience as a student at Kees Boeke's school, which in turn was an implementation of the Quaker principle of the Sense of the Meeting, and which gave everyone, including the students, an equal voice in running the organization. This experience gave him as deep a distrust of democracy as he had of autocracy. He researched a great many experiments, and was dissatisfied with all of them.

As an engineer with his own company, Endenburg Electric, he worked out how to make strict equality work in an organization of 10,000 people. It took from the early 70s through the 80s.

Unlike Lean, which started out in large companies and is still seen as primarily a business organizational tool, Sociocracy can be applied to anything where two or more people need to cooperate to achieve a common aim. In the Netherlands, Sociocracy has been applied to everything from families, fairly large businesses (Endenburg Electric has about 10,000 employees) including the Dutch units of several multi-nationals, all the way through community development. This includes organizations that everyone regards as necessarily authoritarian, such as police departments.

Also unlike Lean, Sociocracy very explicitly institutionalizes giving everyone an equal voice, while still managing to get the job done and avoiding the problems of consensus decision making. It explicitly rejects both authoritarian rulership and majority rule (suppression of the minority) in favor of consent. It avoids some of the problems with naive application of consensus by explicitly delegating the ability to make operational decisions; only policy has to be agreed on by the full circle.

Consent isn't that easy to understand the first time one comes across it. The definition of consent from "We the People" is: "Consent is granted by an individual to a proposed action when all their argued and paramount objections have been satisfied. Consent is assumed if there are no objections remaining." Also: "It does not imply agreement or solidarity, but only that a proposed decision is the best one that can be achieved under the circumstances."

This contrasts with consensus, where the objective is to get agreement, and where there tend to be long drawn out discussions, arguments and other maneuvers by highly motivated and vocal people to try to get everyone else to agree with their preconceived solution. Many applications of "consensus" seem to be more exercises in endurance, and eventually evolve into avoiding stepping on other people's hot buttons.

Consent, on the other hand, is driven by objections to a formally presented proposal. Objections are worked through, modifying the original proposal as necessary, until either the proposal is withdrawn or there are no more objections. Once there are no objections, the proposal will succeed, because there is no longer any reason to withhold consent.

A circle is an operational unit where everyone has a common aim. A circle makes its own policy decisions based on consent rather than consensus. This doesn't look like a major difference, but it has profound implications. Consent means that a proposal is going to pass unless someone has either a reasoned (facts, data, etc) or paramount (I simply can't do this) objection. It specifically elicits objections from everyone and works them through until all of them have been dealt with or the proposal has been abandoned.

Circles should be limited to around 40 people.

Larger organizations link hierarchically using a principle called double linking. The circle manager actually works for the next higher circle in the organization. Her consent is required in both circles to any policy changes. Likewise, the lower circle elects two representatives to the higher circle; they fully participate in both circles and their consent to policy changes is required in both circles. This last principle needs to be understood: it means that there is no way of implementing a policy that everyone in the organization doesn't agree to.

This principle saved Endenburg Electric when the Dutch shipbuilding industry collapsed due to Japanese competition in 1976. That industry represented about 50% of Endenburg Electric's business, so the Governing Circle (the equivalent of a Board of Directors) decided that they'd have to lay off a lot of people.

The principle of double linking meant that they couldn't just do it - the proposal to lay off people had to be agreed to by all the circles in the company. What actually happened was that someone in one of the lower circles made a proposal, and his circle elected him as a representative to the next higher circle to present it. Repeat all the way up to the Board. His proposal was accepted. They used part of their emergency reserve to give a lot of the guys who would have been laid off sales training and then sent them out to drum up more work. They succeeded in getting enough new business that most of the layoffs were averted and their customer base became much more diverse -- which was also a good thing.

One reason why it's interesting is that some of us have at least a nodding acquaintance with it, since it's one of the threads existing at Twin Oaks, although it's not the way Twin Oaks was being run (or so I hear).

Do they work?

Well, sorta. They're like the little girl with the curl in the middle of her forehead. When she was good, she was very, very good, and when she was bad, well, she wasn't very good.

Lean is very good at executing, it's not all that good at setting direction. In fact, it's pretty much about optimizing operations, and Concern for People is somewhat of a side issue. Sociocracy should be much better at setting strategic direction because the double linking principle should result in people with wider vision being elected to represent their circle.

Another major issue is that they're in a Young Soul matrix. Both the GM and Toyota examples show that a new CEO can destroy the good work by simply not understanding the real roots of what makes things work. Toyota's current problem, for example, is that the CEO who replaced the founder when he retired decided to go after worldwide market share at all costs (a typically Young Soul goal) and neglected the emphasis on quality at all points in the process.

Endenburg Electric won't have that problem. The founder, Gerard Endenburg, turned ownership back to the company some years ago -- it's now an employee owned company. Further, it's generated its own external support infrastructure: there is a network of other companies doing the same thing, trainers and lots more in the Netherlands.

The principles are simple. The execution is complicated. Eventually, it all makes sense, but it takes a while and it takes training and practice.

The take home here is that it's not sufficient to sit back and wait for the Millennium. People have to get out there and do this stuff for long enough to learn it and internalize why it works on a gut instinct level. That's the only way it gets incorporated into reincarnational memory so it's available the next time around.

First and foremost, they based their entire philosophy on Enlightenment idealism: somehow the "state of nature" was a state of perfection that people had fallen from. If you threw the rascals out, people would somehow magically do better. This has very seldom worked: there are very few military revolutions in history where the end result was better than the previous state, at least until a fairly long time had passed. The American Revolution worked because the revolutionaries weren't attempting to either make major social changes, or get rid of the layer of society that was actually managing things.

The second one they violated was that the means has to be consistent with the ends: a totalitarian dictatorship cannot create a state of perfect equality. Equality has to come from the ground up, not the top down. This is one of the lessons that Jesus probably taught, that Mohammed tried to teach, and that Gandhi actually did teach.

Part of their rush to industrialize was because of the Marxist ideology that said that Communism required an industrial society to function.

Once people get familiar with how the consent process works, then they're going to want to migrate the organizations they work with to that structure. That's a cascading process that will move through community organizations as much as it will move through businesses.