Democracy in Organisations

Grape will not be the first to tell you that there has been a fundamental change in the psychological contract between employees and organisations.

Lynda Gratton of London Business School predicts the onset of the 'Democratic' enterprise in her book of the same name (2004). In Grape we have been saying something similar now for about 6years – ever since we started the concept of facilitation training in Finland.

Facilitation is fundamentally about democratising organisations - giving a voice to every person through participative practices. As well as democratising the organisation, facilitation helps the organisation become more cooperative and collaborative - something which most of us now see as essential if organisations are to survive.

Innovation does not take place through individuals. Maybe ideas are created by individuals but ideas become innovations through teams of people working together - and these days that means cooperation between people in very distributed networks. This style of working is very complicated. To be good at this you can't just be your old competitive self - it is imperative that you learn to generate goodwill and trust and what facilitation does is provide methods or tools and then process templates that allow goodwill and trust to develop.

Lynda also believes that great companies are 'cooperation hotspots'. In Grape we believe that these hotspots are aided by good facilitation practices in any form of group working - and hotspots are the result of groups working together efficiently and effectively - something which as we all know does not come naturally.

Facilitation helps develop the relationship processes that Lynda talks about in her hotspots by giving structures and conceptual frameworks for people to cooperate - thereby causing cooperation to become a habit. And as she rightly says 'we have been perfecting processes of competition for hundreds of years -and now we need a language and structure for cooperation - and we think it's called 'facilitation'

Greg

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