Updated: August 21st, 2024; Owner/contact: @Suzanne Smulders , Role: Holacracy facilitator

The Sonder Collective governance set-up

The Sonder Collective is a network made up of designers, researchers, and strategists all over the world. We govern our Collective through Holacracy - a method of decentralised management and organisational governance.

Not everyone connected to Sonder needs to be involved with its internal governance; those people working on our client projects have the autonomy to organise the way they see fit, as long as they are aligned with Sonder values, ethics, and compliance. Those who do want to be more involved with the internal governance of the Collective can do so in various ways, which will be touched upon later.

Our Collective structure is based on three different types or levels of involvement:

• Sonder Board Members are responsible for protecting the cooperative's legal, financial and strategic interests.
• The Board is elected by the Sonder Members, who own and govern the co-operative. They are committed to evolving Sonder, bringing in new business opportunities, upholding the Sonder values and ethics, and making sure everything delivers the Sonder purpose. The Members vote in the annual general meeting with the Board.
• Aside from Board Members and Members, the Sonder Collective contains Collaborators. They are involved in client projects, but usually don’t attend governance-related meetings, unless they hold an organisational role, or are otherwise involved in an internal project to further develop the Collective.

Governing with Holacracy principles

In this section, the most important Holacracy principles will be introduced. You can click on them or on the links at the bottom of this page to go to the pages that will explain them in more detail.

Though there are three separate degrees of involvement at Sonder Collective, we aim to build and sustain a mostly flat governance structure. To achieve this, we have adopted many principles and practices from Holacracy, to help with decentralising decision-making.

We have structured the Collective into self-organising teams called Circles, which are focused on similar or interdependent work. A Circle has a defined purpose that contributes to the larger Sonder purpose and creates alignment. From these Circles, a representative is sent to regularly scheduled Alignment & Governance meetings, where the Circle representatives get together to discuss tensions and proposals that are relevant for all Circles. There are two types of Alignment & Governance meetings, though often there is space for both to happen in a Alignment & Governance meeting:

• A Tactical meeting is where Circle representatives discuss operational progress, by sharing any relevant **tensions** or internal project updates from their Circle. In these meetings, we work towards next actions, new internal projects or proposals to raise in the next Governance meeting.
• A **Governance meeting** is where Circle representatives discuss proposals regarding ongoing Sonder governance expectations and other ideas to further develop the Sonder Collective. In these meetings, we work towards making agreements (roles, policies) in order to resolve tensions on an ongoing basis.
  • It’s also possible to run the Governance proposal process via Slack.

Regardless of the type of meeting, we strive to make decisions on a consent basis; we do not aim for consensus.

Our Holacracy-inspired governance model helps us avoid information bottlenecks and diminishes confusion around responsibilities. This is done by using roles instead of individual job descriptions. A role is something anyone at the Sonder Collective can take on and describes a purpose and a list of accountabilities that that person holding the role is then responsible for. People can hold several roles and represent them in different contexts instead of having a traditional, fixed position. The combination of the roles with the Circles and general meetings helps us balance individual role autonomy with collective purpose-led alignment.