3DN Management Structure
Management Structure
- In the beginning a CIE will be just those agreements between the people who start it – such as the agreements required for the example used in Economics of Integrated Production. We want to grow the organization into a set of agreements that produces all the food, clothing, shelter, education and health care that residents in our locality choose to obtain through the CIE instead of through the market or government systems. That is a large complex organization and in accordance with modern leadership theory, network theory, and chaordic theory, we want to push decision making out to the edges – consistent with the need to coordinate activities across the organization.
- What is “pushing decision making out to the edges”? It means that the people doing the work at the restaurant/laundry/day care (and every other CIE activity) have the authority and incentive to run each of those activities as efficiently as possible. I conceptualize the process in this way:
- - the community agrees to buy a space for a restaurant/laundry/day care and the necessary equipment
- - the available people best qualified to run the restaurant/laundry/day care get a license to do that
- - the licensees are given authority over the shares needed to run the restaurant/laundry/day care – who is hired, ordering supplies, etc.
- - the shares available to run the restaurant/laundry/day care – over and above “overhead expense” - increase as a function of the shares and cash generated by the operation
- - the licensees are given authority over how the additional shares are divided among the workers
- - procedures on how to run a successful restaurant/laundry/day care are documented
- - the community uses the cash proceeds to buy space and equipment for additional restaurant/laundry/day care operations and issues new licenses.
- Imagine this process for all of the different activities we could include in a CIE – producing food, clothing, shelter, education and health care. Then imagine a person - just lost their job, house foreclosed, car repossessed – do we, as a community, want to wait until the “economy recovers” to get the benefit of that person's knowledge and skill? - or maybe we could license them to contribute to the flow of value while we wait for that?
- There is a early version of this conceptualization at Interviews from a Hopeful Country.
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David,
Relocalization is an important part of a strategy towards equitable/sustainable quality of life communities. It will take a long time to realize such especially with repect to production. The one area that people seem to be focusing on is food production. In an area like the Eugene-Springfiled, OR/Willamette River Valley such a strategy of "towards self-sufficiency" in food production is more feasible than let's say New York City, in which they would have to define their region/hinterlands much more extensively. (the imperialistic fingers of NYC stretch much more widely than the do fo a place like, let's say Des Moines, IA.
Every region has what Economists call a "Comparative" Advantage. The Central Valley in California is the best agricultural land on the planet. Saudi Arabia and the surrounds has oil. New York City has the knowledge and structural base to dominate the financial system., etc. The Comparative Region plays into how resources are used and/or exploited in an area. I can not an envision an economy where this completely goes away. What we have to do when planning inter-community development is recognize the comparative advantage (or disadvantage) of our neighborhood, and the comparative advantage of our larger bio-region (carving up the world into bio-regions will be problematic, but it makes more sense than the totally arbitrary State). We also have to recognize the comparative advantage of other regions, particularly those closest to us and come up with mutually trading schemes that will optimize both the comparative advantage and relocalization paradigms in an equitable and sustainabe manner . It will need to be a slow, methodical, planned transition. It will take much understanding, much communication, a committment to fair trade, and a committment to cooperation.
Perhaps the biggest obstacle for such beneficial change lies in what Economists call "Competitive" Advantage. Simply put, it's "I own the resources and you don't! There are international, regional, and local financial elites, large business holders and investors, lnadlords, etc. The Plan of an Equity Union is to pull all ownership equity into one large resource and re-allocate it to communities based on needs of sustainable living, equity concerns (especialy for the poor) and to transition to a quality of life paradigm as opposed to one that emphasizes "standard of living" (he with the most and most expensive toys, wins). Inter-community and inter-regional equity is a major goal.
That's good enough to start a discussion.
Please view my web log and get up to date with the dozen or so concise essays that I have written. www.peoplesequityunion.blogspot.com
I hope to hear much from others. We've got a long way to go. But before we can realize eutopia(means good place), we need to recognize the Plan and what the reality is related to such a Plan.
Thank you
Mike Morin
