Quaker

A Quaker is a member of the Religious Society of Friends, a Christian movement founded by George Fox in England in the mid-17th century. Quakers believe that every person can communicate directly with God, with no clergy in between, and that each person carries an "inner light", a belief that led them to stand for peace, justice, equality and truth. The same belief shapes how their meetings decide: without a vote, by seeking an agreement the whole group can accept.

How Quakers make decisions

Quakers treat each decision in their business meetings as something the group discerns together. Each person speaks, the others listen, and the discussion continues until what Quakers call the "sense of the meeting" emerges. A clerk then drafts the decision and submits the wording to the meeting for approval. The decision belongs to the whole meeting rather than to a majority. Every voice counts the same, in line with the equality Quakers see in every person.

From Quaker meetings to sociocracy

Kees Boeke, a Dutch Quaker educator, gave sociocracy its modern meaning in 1945. He modelled it on the way Quakers decide without a vote and applied it in his school. Gerard Endenburg, an engineer and former pupil of Boeke, put sociocracy into practice at his family's electrical engineering firm in the 1970s. He swapped full consensus for consent decision making, because consensus stalls as soon as one person digs in. Under consent, a proposal passes when nobody raises a reasoned objection. The group keeps the Quaker attention to every voice and still moves forward.