šŸ¤Ŗ Shall we explain it to them?

Hey there
I was surprised, yet not surprised to see this article list the following disadvantages of Sociocracy. (It reads like they borrowed from Sociocracy 3.0 but they donā€™t say.)

Disadvantages of Sociocracy

  • Sociocracy decision-making can be harmful when there is a long-term plan ahead.
  • Because there are small round groups in sociocratic meetings, the decision-making process is shorter, leading the team to make insufficient solutions.
  • In sociocracy circles, team harmony is unnecessary as long as objections are resolved. Thatā€™s why team cohesion is mostly ignored in this kind of group.

I was tempted to respond but it felt a bit daunting because I didnā€™t even know where to start; thereā€™s just so much superficial stuff and misunderstandings there.

Whatā€™s your reaction?

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I looked at the article and gave up after reading, ā€œMisunderstandings are resolved, and the proposal is comprehended thoroughly by everyone. Then comes the second step. Here, all participantsā€™ questions are listened to and answered one by one.ā€ It just doesnā€™t seem worth entering into a logical debate with someone who suggests you ask the questions after you thoroughly comprehend it.

Unfortunately, by posting a link to that article, and then quoting it, we may actually end up improving their SEO and increasing how many people get that link in google search resultsā€¦ Maybe we should write some controversial stuff to get people to do the same for us XD

Hahaha, thatā€™s a good point.
Iā€™m with you that itā€™s too full of misconceptions to even get started on correcting it. I find that happens a lot with sociocracy; I wonder why that is :man_shrugging:

Reminds me of other badly malformed and mis-informed articles about sociocracy posted on Medium recently by an author with a very strange name, strange English, and odd manner of ā€˜interactingā€™ (on the groups.io sociocracy list), who some of us suspect might be an AI bot, or just a non-native English hired hack.

The English in this piece is also not from a native speaker. The Huudle company is allegedly located in Wilmington, DE, USA, at an address in a large condo building. The link in the Medium post goes to some kind of app product aggregator site, producthunt.com. A search for Huudle finds huudle.io, AND the first time I went there I was redirected to a completely non-relevant and obviously fake ā€œAmazonā€ branded phishing page.

One possibility is this: as the word ā€˜sociocracyā€™ is starting to get more used and more common in domains concerned with decision making, organizational governance, and related areas, companies with some stake in that domain (such as Huudle) are putting out content with as many instances of the word as possible, regardless of veracity, correctness, knowledge, understanding, coherence, or any other integrity of the piece.
Because, in the big picture of marketing insanity we live in, it will ultimately add to their SEO outcomes.

I am going to put a comment on the Medium piece simply indicating it is an incoherent and often incorrect hack job by someone who clearly is not familiar with sociocracy and is probably just trying to get SEO boosts.
If you look at other blog posts on the huudle.io site, they are similarly fractured English, but full of words that may enhance SEO towards something like a decision-making app. Probably written by bots (I have seen more spam trying to sell me copywriting bots lately) or non-native-English speaking keyboard farms.

Ha, you helped me reinterpret it from being annoyed to ā€œyeah, thatā€™s just what happens when sociocracy becomes more mainstreamā€ :sunglasses:
Thanks @john.schinnerer

Yeah, thatā€™s one way to look at itā€¦and, this is something to be concerned about. The creation and propagation of essentially ā€œjunkā€ content for SEO purposes by ignorant people or bots. Thereā€™s harm to the veracity and visibility of ā€œrealā€ content. Not that anything can be done, in a lot of cases, other than to flag it as such in whatever way is possible. Where the content violates a platformā€™s TOS then it can be reported as such.

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There was one disadvantage I was puzzled over: ā€¦ When doing long term planningā€¦ When would you do long term planning in a VUCA world?

Donā€™t insult the future with a plan :slightly_smiling_face:

Haha, yes. But even if we did long-term planning, I donā€™t see how that wouldnā€™t work in sociocracy? I simply really donā€™t get what theyā€™re pointing to. Maybe they donā€™t know that you can have higher-level decisions if you choose to?

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It seems that in the meantime the post has been deleted and the page has become unavailable ā€¦ :globe_with_meridians: