by Benjamin F. Galbraith
Masters of Science in Management
Graduate Management Program
The Center for Creative Change
Antioch University Seattle
Year 2006
________________________ ________________________ ________________ Thesis Advisor Signature Date ________________________ ________________________ ________________ External Reader Signature Date ________________________ ________________________ ________________ Program Director Signature Date
Abstract
“Worker cooperatives” are businesses that are controlled and owned by their workers. Dialogue is conversation in which we suspend judgment, be honest, and build new ideas with others. I used dialogue to help create a worker cooperative as part of this thesis project.
Little has been written on how to start worker cooperatives in the USA. The literature available on dialogue hints that dialogue could help make workplaces more worker controlled. Dialogue does not have to be perfect: conversations can involve varying degrees of dialogue.
Dialogue like conversation helps groups trying to become worker cooperatives succeed by allowing them to have an accurate view of themselves.
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
THIS PAGE (Title, Signatures, Abstract, Table of contents)CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION (Worker Cooperatives in 2006, The Pro Collective, Criteria for Success)
CHAPTER 2: METHODS AND PROCESSES (My Role, Research)
CHAPTER 3: CHANGE PROJECT (Challenges, Progress, Strategy, Dialogue in the Pro Collective)
CHAPTER 4: LITERATURE REVIEW AND THEORY (Literature on Starting Worker Cooperatives, Dialogue based Genesis, Dialogue Details, Different Schools of Dialogue, Concordance)
CHAPTER 5: DISCUSSION (Dialogue Rescues Consensus, Conditions for Dialogue, Personal Conclusions)
REFERENCES (books, articles, etc.)
Chapter 1: Introduction and background
My question has simply been ”how do I start a worker cooperative?” The answer has turned out to be ”to get a ’group of people aspiring to become a worker cooperative’ to engage in what organizational development people call ’dialogue’.” But this then raises the questions about what I mean when I say ”dialogue” and ”worker cooperative.”
First, by ”dialogue” I mean ”dialogue as defined by David Bohm (1996) in the book On dialogue.” Dialogue is a conversation in a group where that group does not have to make any decisions or take any actions. Dialogue is therefore a conversation in which the parties involved voluntarily decide not to defend their respective positions.
“Consensus” is a group of people making a decision by way of “unanimous decision” (rather than by “majority rule.”) In groups where individuals are very empowered, the group whole does not necessarily need to come to consensus on every decision, so much as have conversations deep enough for the individual members to be able to decide for themselves what they need to do in the best interest of the group. This depth of conversation can easily be avoided by the group thinking that it needs to make a decision, since then group members take positions and sides, and the conversation is then spent at that shallow defensive level. Dialog instead moves on to new appropriate possibilities created by participants building on each others ideas.
Second, by ”worker cooperative,” I mean a business that is collectively owned and managed by its workers. An organization must meet the following four requirements in order to be a ”worker cooperative”:
- First and foremost, the organization must be controlled by those who work in that organization, in order to be a worker cooperative. A business owned by its workers but not controlled by those same workers is not a worker cooperative.
- The organization must be owned by those who work in that organization, in order to be a worker cooperative. A business that is managed but not owned by those same workers is not a worker cooperative.
- The organization must be managed only by its workers, and owned only by its workers. A business collectively owned and/or managed by its customers is not a worker cooperative. That would be a consumer cooperative.
- The organization must be a business in order to be a worker cooperative. An organization that is controlled and owned by its workers but is not actually a business is not a worker cooperative.
Worker Cooperatives in 2006:
In the small groups worker cooperatives I work with, individual workers have a very high level of individual autonomy, yet they use consensus when decisions need to be made for the whole group. A worker’s control over his own work life is important to being able to exercise self-governance over his life in general, since he will spend most of his waking hours at work in today’s world. For workers to be truly in control of their workplace, they must own that workplace. If the work place is owned by anyone besides the workers, then worker control of that workplace is but a temporary whim that can change with the mood of the ownership.
For the purposes of this thesis I am interested in starting worker cooperatives. Also I am specifically addressing starting these worker cooperatives inside the United States of America. (Some of the challenges we face here are not universal.) This means that since most business start as small businesses, I am primarily interested in starting worker cooperatives that are small businesses. This thesis is not about how to manage worker cooperatives after they are started, nor is this about growing these organizations, nor is it about worker buyouts of large businesses. Certainly dialogue could possibly be used in these other endeavors, but only the starting of worker cooperatives is within the scope of this thesis.
Because Internet businesses can be started with relatively little capital compared to starting other kinds of small businesses (less need for inventory and office space,) my focus is really on starting small e-biz worker cooperatives. For reasons beyond the scope of this thesis, I have found that people working with ”open source” software to be the population most interested in starting worker cooperatives in my area anyhow (Seattle, Washington.) The Pro Collective:
The organization I have done my change project with is called ”The Pro Collective.” The Pro Collective was formed from two small dot-coms which are still functioning independently as the Pro Collective launches financially:
- [One of these business's name and web page URL was listed here.]
- [The other business's name and web page URL was listed here.]
- What the Pro Collective does is design websites for nonprofits and small businesses.
I did not know about the Pro Collective (or rather those who would eventually become the Pro Collective) until after they first contacted me. Another student was doing a case study with one of the companies involved in the Pro Collective (Raging Web.) He found out that Raging Web and Salmon Berry Designs were looking to merge together to form a Cooperative, and he mentioned to Raging Web that I happened to be studying Worker Cooperatives here at Antioch University Seattle. Raging Web and Salmon Berry Designs invited me to meet with them to give them advice on how to become a Worker Cooperative. I was starting to meet with them regularly by the end of Summer Quarter, 2005. By November 1st of 2005 they were officially my ”change project,” with the goal of actually becoming a worker cooperative (as opposed to simply being a group that ”just talked” about becoming a worker cooperative.)
Criteria for Success:
Because I was interested in starting worker cooperatives, I have gauged the success of my change project by how well the Pro Collective has adopted the features of a worker cooperative. To the extent that the Pro Collective developed the four previously mentioned properties of being a worker cooperative, this change project has been a success.
One final criterion has been used to gauge the success of my project, and that is to what extent the group has been able to engage in dialogue-like conversations. These dialogue-like conversations help the worker cooperative members communicate effectively and reflect together as a group, resulting in better-informed decision-making within the group. The increased frequency of dialogue-like conversations over the time I have worked with the Pro Collective has been very encouraging, and it has indeed adopted all four features of a worker cooperative to some extent. Over all, this change project has been very successful.
Chapter 2: Methods and Processes
My Role:
I was invited to help the forming Pro Collective because I understood the specific subject of “worker cooperatives” well enough to serve as an adviser. I was invited on the premise that I would disseminate information when called upon. The role of outside-expert was a good position for me to be an observer, because I was able to be in meetings, and even involved in meetings, without having to be officially viewed as a group member or be directly involved in the group’s decision-making process.
My role of being an observer was extremely influential. Because the Pro Collective was being observed, they had meetings more often. Not wanting to ”let me down” as a student who was studying them was a reason sometimes cited for having a meeting sooner rather than later. Regardless of what direction they were going to take, they wanted me to have some kind of behavior to observe, which led to more frequent meetings than would have otherwise taken place. The increased frequency of meetings definitely contributed to the intensity of the organizational development that was taking place as I studied the group.
As the change project matured, I focused on honoring the intentions of the forming Pro Collective. If they asked me to do something, I did my best to fulfill their requests. I had the outside technology of Worker Cooperative structure, but I was letting them decide how to use it.
One request was to help them figure out what questions they needed to talk about with themselves as they were becoming a Worker Cooperative. They all came up with their own lists of questions, and sent them to me to be compiled. They asked me to add questions they may have missed, but there weren’t any they had covered all the basics themselves.
Another request they made of me was to find someone with business-planning expertise. I brought in such an expert. Instead of helping them write a business plan, this business-planning expert questioned how committed they were to creating a Worker Cooperative. He also planted in their minds that they needed to have an all-day-long conversation about each individual’s expectations for this new venture. This became a very popular idea with the forming Pro Collective, and they requested he and I to help them plan this ”All-Day Meeting,” which we did using the list of questions I had helped them compile earlier. (The All-Day Meeting was very successful, and the climax of my change project.)
The biggest intervention I made outside of ”fulfilling requests made of me” was that before the All-Day Meeting was fully planned, when I had noticed that the business-planning expert had turned these meetings away from conversations and into lectures, I made the suggestion to the group that they exclude the business-planning expert until we were ready to actually write a business plan. They took this advice, noticing the change-to-lecture for themselves once I had mentioned it, and planned to invite him again once they got serious about financial planning. The meetings instantly returned to the dialogue-like conversation that the group needed.
I have done a few interviews to gather information and insight from the individual members about their experience over the last several months. I specifically avoided the All Day Meeting, so interviews were particularly important for understanding what had taken place at that meeting.
Research:
Continuous, ongoing learning as-a-student was very much an intentional method I used while I was participating in the change project and composing this thesis. I was only half done with my course work for my master’s degree when I began the change project. I fully intended to continue to literally be encountering new material from new classes as I proceeded with my change project. Here is what I learned before, during, and after the change project:
- Before the change project began, I had a strong understanding of worker cooperatives. I had already studied various groups governed by unanimous decision, including a worker cooperative. I understood the virtues of client-driven decisions and worker control of the workplace, so that I expected the Pro Collective to be inventing most of its own solutions. I also had some formal training in strategic planning and nonprofit management, as well as exposure to “adaptive vs. technical challenges.”
- During the change project my main learning focus was on dialogue. (I was heavily into William Isaacs before the change project was half over.) Dialogue was new learning for me in a few different classes, which lined up well with what seemed to be going on in the change project. The relevant materials I found through coursework are covered in the literature review, though most of the literature review I discovered outside of that coursework while struggling to learn about dialogue in the change project.
- After the change project while completing the literature review, I discovered “concordance” theory, with the help of my outside reader for this thesis. This helped explain “why dialogue helps a group of people decide on a course of action together?” This was a very tricky question since we are not trying to make decisions in dialogue.
As far as the rest of literature review is concerned, most of the peer reviewed literature on worker cooperatives debates the virtues of worker cooperatives, instead of publishing ”how to start” instructions. I had little choice but to briefly cover what little material does exist on “how to start a worker cooperative,” and then search for relevant clues in the much more abundant literature on dialogue. However, the literature review was very fruitful in spite of its limitations, because it helped me see very clearly how dialogue helped my change project make the progress that it did.
Chapter 3: Change Project
Challenges:
Ron Heifetz (1994) explains that an ”adaptive challenge” is a problem for which there is no solution, so that an organization facing that problem must grow (or adapt) in order to resolve that problem. A ”technical fix” on the other hand is a problem for which there is a solution, and therefore the organization facing the problem does not have to grow or adapt to face that challenge adequately. There were two major adaptive challenges I faced in this project.
First it is very hard for today’s Americans to understand the idea of a “worker cooperative.” There simply is no official ”worker cooperative” formally-recognized structure in the USA, contrary to popular belief. Yes there are managers who encourage workers to “manage themselves,” and yes there are worker-owned business structures. But worker managed workplaces and worker-ownership are not married to each other in any way the IRS/Federal Government could possibly recognize in the USA. The closest thing is the “Subchapter T” nonprofit corporation, which has to do with obscure details of how agricultural products are distributed, and is almost unrelated to the worker cooperative movement of this century.
A worker managed workplace is alien to today’s American culture. With a few obvious exceptions, we have been working for large companies for so long, that we as a whole have taken for granted that we do not even own the means of our own livelihood. The last major attempt at worker-control of the workplace in the USA was the Labor movement, which though influential over the last century, has recently run almost completely out of steam. Let’s be very clear here: there is no universal ”technical fix” for becoming a Worker Cooperative in this country.
My second adaptive challenge was a need to help this group reflect. They were resistant to dialogue because they felt that they had already been ”just talking” long enough, and needed to ”act now.” Because there was no technical fix for becoming a Worker Cooperative, the group needed to reflect heavily in order to adapt sufficiently to become a Worker Cooperative.
Progress:
Before November 1st, 2005, the forming Pro Collective had no identity. All they were was a group of friends from two local dot-coms that wanted to get together and talk about some day becoming a worker cooperative. The two companies did collaborate on projects together and referenced new customers to each other, but they had no formal shared structure or resources.
In general terms, I would assess positive change as how effectively the Pro Collective became a Worker Cooperative since November 1st, 2005. A key part of being a worker cooperative in a country where the government does not officially recognize Worker Cooperatives, is that a Worker Cooperative needs to be able to reflect in order to thrive. For this and other reasons a lack of a technical fix for their organizational structure requires a Worker Cooperative in the USA to be very adaptive. Being highly adaptive will also help with the many problems that could arise from customers, members, and associates not having any idea what a “worker cooperative” actually is.
Besides being adaptive and/or reflective, a group trying to become a worker cooperative should actually take on the characteristics of being a worker cooperative if the group’s efforts are to be considered successful. A worker cooperative has specific characteristics:
- It must be managed and controlled by the workers and only the workers.
- It must be collectively owned by the workers and only the workers.
- It must recognize itself as some kind of business.
Since November 1st, 2005, the Pro Collective has progressed from meeting none of my criteria, to meeting all of my criteria:
- They developed a group identity, which they now call ”The Pro Collective”
- They have monthly ”structural” reflective-dialogue oriented meetings, where they continue to practice deep reflection.
- They have weekly meetings to manage their work loads collectively, called ”project round tables.”
- They work together for two full weekdays a week, with the meetings on other days.
- They have shared office space for these meetings and work days.
- They have a high-tech “Wiki” system for managing and developing their organizational documentation.
- They have a formal process developed for allowing new members to join The Pro Collective.
- They do not yet have a shared bank account or formal tax structure.
- They have not yet started using their new group identity as a marketing asset.
- They still spend part of their work week working in their former business structures ([two names of small previously-existing web development businesses went here.])
Strategy:
My over all approach as outlined above worked well. The part that worked best was the structure of the All-Day Meeting. This meeting introduced a whole new level of dialogue into the Pro Collective’s ongoing conversations. The All-Day Meeting was in two parts:
- Before lunch, each person who was to be in the Pro Collective gave a presentation on their vision and expectations of what they thought the Pro Collective would be. During each presentation, each nonpresenter was only allowed to ask questions, and was not allowed to make comments. Notice that this format made it impossible for people to “defend” their positions, because no critique of those positions were allowed.
- After lunch, open ended conversation began discussion on surprises that arose from the before-lunch part of the meeting. Notice that this was a mutual exploration about “us and our differences” and not about ”what is special about my ideas.” This allowed them to identify differences they had about their expectations. These differences were non-crippling, and they eventually moved out of reflective dialogue, into generative dialogue, which led to the structure described in ”Description of Change” and ”Change Assessment” above.
Dialogue worked well for this group. The more they were able to have in one sitting, the more effective it was. Dialogue was less effective when done in shorter meetings. The group got better at having dialogue from month to month, in spite of the usual briefness of their meetings. All of the ”little meetings” before the All-Day Meeting built the habits they needed for the All-Day Meeting’s success. Now that they openly recognize the value of what I call “dialogue” because of the All-Day Meeting, they have an organizational culture that is more likely to result in frequent dialogue-like conversations in the future.
Bringing in the business-planning expert was very risky. Though he helped accelerate this group’s development, he was overpowering medicine for the group. He almost totally derailed these efforts, and if I had it to do over again, I would have suggested the group have the All-Day Meeting before involving more ”outside experts.” (Of course that would have been impossible in this case since the business planning expert was the one who came up with the idea of having the All-Day Meeting.)
However, I do not regret bringing in the outside expert, because I was honoring the intent of the group, fulfilling the requests they made of me. Though in retrospect I could have fulfilled some of those requests differently, it is best that I did fulfill them at all (instead of hesitating and not fulfilling them.) This assured that their needs were being met, as opposed to my perceptions of their needs.
I have noticed that dialogue is helpful for involving outside expertise in the group. Not all experts are used to participating in member-controlled groups with a very flat structure, and like our expert can contribute in a way that stifles the group’s process. However dialogue allows the group process to get back to normal after the expert leaves.
Also, dialogue allows the group to consider controversial perspectives presented by the expert, and even encourages them to build on the new information the expert provides. In the case of the Pro Collective, the expert presented the idea that the members needed to “get on the same page,” which is something they felt they had already done. The members were able to suspend this opinion and even build on the ideas of the business planning expert, resulting in the plan for the All-Day Meeting.
Dialogue in the Pro Collective:
Dialogue was used in the Pro Collective successfully organize into a worker cooperative in two ways. First, it emerged as a natural process of friends meeting together on a regular basis. The more they gathered together to talk about becoming a worker cooperative, they became more honest with each other, as well as able to entertain each other’s perspectives more easily. Their conversations were gradually becoming more like dialogue.
My role in this was simply being present as an outside adviser. This group had good intentions of meeting on a regular basis to discuss becoming a worker cooperative, and in practice they did so a few times a year before I became involved. Once they had someone from the outside counting on them being at the meetings, these meeting happened more regularly so that we were meeting once every month or two on average. This frequency of meeting added to the total number of meetings faster, and accelerated the group’s ability to engage in dialogue.
The second way dialogue was introduced to the conversations of the Pro Collective was through a single intervention. The group decided to have an All-Day Meeting, where they would spend the first half of the day giving individual presentations about their personal expectations and limitations for the forming of the worker cooperative, while the others were only allowed to ask questions. (Therefore, for the first half of the All-Day Meeting, everyone was forced to entertain each other’s ideas, suspending judgment until later in the day.) The second half of the day was spent discussing the surprises that came up from the first half of the day. There weren’t a lot of surprises, but people were able to figure out what their differences were, and decided that they could all go forward in spite of their known differences, now that those differences were known. The very last part of this meeting evolved into designing a kind of meeting that would suit the needs that they had discovered through this intervention.
The new meeting is called a “project round-table.” This meeting takes place once a week. At this meeting the first thing that happens is a project check-in, were each person takes a brief turn explaining how they have been doing personally, and what projects they have been working on. (Check-in allows each person to be heard, without being judged.) Then in the second part of the “project round-table,” they discuss who has the opportunity to help the people who have the most work that needs to be done. (This second part of the meeting allows participants to be totally honest with each other about what they can and cannot do at that particular time.) The format of the “project round-table” meeting is one that the Pro Collective members devised on their own, and which promotes dialogue-like conversations.
My role in developing the “project round-table” meetings was that I literally had almost nothing to do with it. I did however help plan the All-Day Meeting that resulted in the invention of the “project round-table” meetings. I also helped the Pro Collective see that the All-Day Meeting was needed.
This table shows what events took place, and how dialogue played a role. Over all I can see that as time progresses, the group becomes more competent as their ability to dialogue grows. It becomes obvious that the All-Day Meeting jolts them forward in this progression. As the group’s conversations become more like dialogue through whatever means, they are able to follow through with their decision to become a worker cooperative:
When | What | Roles and evidences of dialogue |
| April – July 2005 | “Monthly Meetings” | Resulted as they became aware of a need for more frequent meetings and they began to realize that they actually wanted to become a worker cooperative (instead of just talking about the possibility.) |
| August 2005 | “Asked me to help them compile list of questions to discuss” | They decided that the meetings were not long enough to cover all of the issues that needed to be discussed. The group was beginning to sense that it had “undiscussables,” but was not ready to face them openly. They decided to each “make a list of questions” to be sent to me by e-mail to be reviewed and compiled. Email helped everyone suspend judgment on each others views and helped everyone be more honest. |
| September 2005 | “Discussed list of questions” | Once I compiled and reviewed the list of questions, I sent them back out to the group members. Before the next meeting they reviewed the list, and we discussed individual answers to the questions. This completed the loop that was their first wholegroup attempt at self-reflection. |
| October 2005 | “Request for business-planning expert” | Now they had learned to trust each other enough to admit that they had doubts as to whether they should form a worker cooperative, and wanted someone from outside the group to help them do a business plan so that they could figure out if their dream was realistic. Now they were very seriously looking at their group objectively, considering what an outside perspective might look like. The group was now looking for a “mirror.” |
| November 2005 | “1st meeting with expert” | After the business planning expert talked to them for a half hour, he told them that they had not even reached the “tip of the iceberg” as far as how much they needed to learn about each other before proceeding with the venture. The group was able to suspend its assumption that it had already done this work, and decided to meet independently again to review “the list.” |
| December 2005 | “1st meeting without me since proceeding” | For the first time since they decided to try to become a worker cooperative, they met without me to discuss the “list of questions” in more detail, in order to attempt to understand what their underlying issues were that kept them from proceeding. |
| January 2006 | “2nd meeting with expert” | Expert repeated the same thing he had said before. Again group was able to suspend judgment. They now planned the All-Day Meeting. |
| February 2006 | “All-Day Meeting” | The All-Day Meeting executed as planned, with hours of dialogue resulting. The meeting surpassed expectations, resulting in a new organizational structure based on “project round table” meetings. The issues, what ever they are, have been bypassed through dialogue. |
| March 2006 | “1st month with new structure” | The group now dialogs weekly through meetings, and holds to its structure, and develops the self-identity/name of “[current name of company here].” Starts to function as an actual worker cooperative (a success in change project for me at this point, and I start to withdraw from the project altogether.) |
| April 2006 | “opens its doors to new members” | The Collective continues to hold to its structure, and new people start coming to project round-table meetings. Weekly dialogue-like conversation promotes whole-group reflection at the meetings. |
Chapter 4: Literature Review and Theory
My thesis question is ”how can we start worker cooperatives in the USA?” My experiences with the Pro Collective has led me to believe that dialogue may be a key factor that can help a worker cooperative to organize. In addition to my thesis question, another inquiry I have for this literature review is ”how would dialogue help start worker cooperatives?”There has been two parts to the literature I have covered for the purposes of this thesis. First, there is the part on starting worker cooperatives, none of which has covered the subject of ”dialogue.” Second, there is the part on dialogue, none of which has addressed “starting worker cooperatives” specifically. Had there been a body of material that covered both dialogue and the starting of worker cooperatives, I would have focused on that material. (As far as I know, this thesis is the first work on ”using dialogue to start worker cooperatives in the USA.”) There has been very little work done in recent history on ”how to start worker cooperatives in the United States,” so that most of this kind of literature is about starting worker cooperatives in Europe and Latin America, or starting worker cooperatives in the 1970′s or earlier.
Literature on Starting Worker Cooperatives:
E. G. Nadeau & David Thompson (1996) illustrate for us how the people interested in starting worker cooperatives in the USA in 1990′s differed from those interested in starting worker cooperatives in the USA 1960′s and 1970′s. ”While the 60′s and 70′s worker cooperative organizers were largely white and middle class, organizers of today are largely working class or belonging to ethnic minorities…” (p. 51). One of the implications here is that worker cooperatives are organized by the workers themselves. But also, ”Churches and community organizations within the Black and Hispanic communities also have been giving birth to many worker coops,” and that this seems like an obvious development opportunity for minority-based development corporations (p. 51).
Worker cooperatives are no longer a toy of the educated activist, but a tool of survival for today’s endangered worker. Even the likes of ”Jack Kemp… the former secretary of Housing and Urban Development during the Bush administration” have begun to see worker cooperatives as ”self-help enterprises that can break old cycles of dependency on government assistance” (p. 52). Where unemployment and inequality exist, there is potential for community support for starting worker cooperatives. Conn (1990) goes so far as to suggest that worker cooperatives can bring union-like benefits to an organization, as well as create business opportunities for women specifically, both aspects that could lead local leaders to support the creation of worker cooperatives.
Worker cooperatives are a hot political issue in Argentina today, with their infamously poor economy now having been fertile soil for the largest worker cooperative movement the Americas has ever seen. This bad economy led to the closing of hundreds of factories and thousands of businesses all over that country. However, in the case of about 150 of those factories, the workers have simply occupied their places of work, and carried on business without the approval of power holders, forming massive factory worker cooperatives. Productivity at most of these factories is far greater than traditionally managed competitors, some of the factories having 50% more employees and 300% more productivity than they did under previous ownership. In some cases, local power-holders wish to profit by the selling-off of these factories assets, and in one case a factory has resisted eviction by the Argentine government three times (Backwell 2003, Anonymous 2005, and Sattin, 2003.) Politics and community can both make and break worker cooperatives. Similar dynamics are happening in other parts of Argentina’s industry, specifically in the hotel industry (Freeman, 2005).
The closest thing the USA has to an Argentina-style worker cooperative is an “employee stock-ownership plan” or ”ESOP.” As part of a conversation on why these plans exist, Margaret Blair and Douglass Kruse (1999) explain that:
Employee share ownership has also grown through corporate restructuring in which employees received shares in their companies in exchange for wage and benefit cuts.Occasionally, complete employee-buyouts have been necessary to prevent plant closings. Such transactions, though rare in the economy as a whole, have figured prominently in the trucking, steel, and airline industries, and very recently in the paper industry (p. 25).
ESOPs really are the USA’s equivalent of the worker takeovers currently flourishing in Argentina. In Latin America workers may sit in and occupy a workplace, but workplace take overs in the USA happen in the form of buyouts, and ESOPs are employee buyouts. However ”taking over a workplace” is not starting a new worker-cooperative business from scratch.
Unfortunately, ESOPs only apply to companies with a large minimum size of business, so that it is very hard to start a small business from scratch using an ESOP structure. As part of an overview of the history of the ESOP movement, John Logue and Jacquelyn Yates (2000) notes that:
U.S. legislation provided employee financial rights to capital ownership, not employee involvement in decision making… the U.S. employee-owned sector has become a veritable laboratory, experimenting with various mixes of ownership rights and participation rights. At one extreme are companies that have changed none of their practices despite employee ownership; at the other, there are firms with informed employee participation from the shop floor to the boardroom (p. 244). ESOPs do not guarantee worker control over the business, and are therefore not the answer to ”how do we start worker cooperatives” anyhow. Fortunately there are other ways to create worker cooperatives besides workers “buying out” their employers.A need of a community of people can lead to the creation of a worker cooperative. Diana Christian (2004) documents the rise and fall of a worker cooperative in the Earthaven Ecovillage in North Carolina. The cooperative was set up by community members to provide logging and construction services to the Eco-village, which had very specific needs for sustainable services for logging and construction. However, just as the Eco-village’s specific needs had created the business opportunity to create the worker cooperative, the Eco-village’s practice of sometimes hiring contractors from outside of the community led to the financial downfall of the worker cooperative. The lesson for those starting a worker cooperative is that the worker cooperative will be possible because of a community of customer’s needs, and the support of that community. But once a group of people seeking to become a worker cooperative have identified a need of a community that will make their worker cooperative possible, exactly how do they go about organizing a worker cooperative?
The only discussion of ”how to set up a worker cooperative” I have been able to find published in this decade or last, has been Frank T. Adams and Gary B. Hansen’s Putting democracy to work: A practical guide for starting and managing worker-owned businesses (1992.) Adams recommends first doing a preliminary feasibility assessment, followed by preparing a lengthy business plan. He then discusses possible legal structures and sources of capital for worker cooperatives. He also discusses when to use consultants, and the need to train worker-owners in order for them to be able to participate adequately in the leadership needs of the business.
Much of Adam’s information on capital resources is now outdated, and the book was written for a pre-Internet world. His strategy is not well suited for starting up small Internet businesses that have no capital investment needs, and whose small structural foundations can evolve as the company gets larger. Most importantly, his book is focused mostly on the traditional ”how to set up a business,” rather than focusing on how to empower groups interested in starting worker cooperatives. This unfortunately concludes what has been written on ”how to start worker cooperatives” in recent history.
Howard Van Auken (2005) demonstrates that the traditional business-plan model to raise capital is no longer necessarily the best way to raise capital for a technology startup anyhow. Bootstrapping is ”do it yourself” finance, relying on your own resources to start a business, instead of seeking outside funding like bank loans or venture capital. Bootstrapping is now preferable in many of these tech startups, partially because of the enhanced flexibility of having a source of capital controlled primarily by the entrepreneur himself, and also because some experts believe that bootstrapping requires a business to work out problems much earlier on than with traditional capital structures (p. 95). (Olorundare E. Aworuwa (2004) even suggests a whole-community ”bootstrap model” for developing small businesses in economically challenged areas.) Bootstrapping is the most likely way for the groups I am working with to become worker cooperatives in today’s world, but if we don’t organize through the traditional business planning model, how do we organize ourselves as worker cooperatives? If we are combining our resources to start a business without going to the likes of banks and venture capitalists, just exactly how do we go about combining those resources?
Dialogue-based Genesis:
There are very organic views about how people can form new organizations. Myron Keller-Rogers and Margaret Wheatley (1996) explain that human systems can be as naturally occurring as ecosystems:
In self-organization, structures emerge. They are not imposed. They spring from the process of doing the work. These structures will be useful but temporary. We can expect them to emerge and recede as needed. It is not the design of a specific structure that requires our attention but rather the conditions that will support the emergence of necessary structures… We do know that in healthy human systems people support one another with information and nurture one another with trust. Our wonderful abilities to selforganize are encouraged by openness. With access to our system we, like all life, can anticipate what is required of us, connect with those we need, and respond intelligently (p. 38 39).Theoretically, people can organize from one structure to another (for example from a “group of people seeking to start a worker cooperative” to ”a group of people that is a worker cooperative,”) without necessarily having to go through a long rigid set of business-planning steps. However, what organizational process or tool could help foster the ”openness, sharing, connecting and trust” that will help us have this kind of a self-organized group?
Parker J. Palmer (2004) has been able to have dialogue-based ”Circles of Trust” groups, in which these qualities have been able to be fostered in order to promote personal growth of the membership of those groups (p. 2287). Could dialogue be used to organize a group whose aspirations were not focused primarily on personal growth, such as a group of people seeking to become a worker cooperative?
Some work has been done that shows how dialogue can help a group of people become more self-governed, and empowered to act in ways that are conducive to becoming a worker cooperative. While explaining the impact of dialogue on the dynamics of power and authority in an organization, Gerard (1999) notes that:
…there is a movement towards what we call shared leadership. Shared leadership refers to what happens as those practicing dialogue over time begin to share in the understanding of collectively held goals and purpose together. Alignment builds.Every individual sees more clearly how he or she uniquely shares and contributes to the output and end results. Formal leaders do not need to direct the activities of subordinates as much. Armed with greater understanding of the larger picture, subordinates simply take independent action when they need to without being dependent on feedback from their manager (p. 224).
As an organization gets better at dialogue, they are better able to be self-governed as individuals. (This is extremely helpful for a business that is managed by its own workforce. It is also very helpful for individuals seeking to start a worker cooperative to be empowered in this same way.)
Gerard comments on this much further. While covering the historical and theoretical basis of dialogue, Gerard helps us understand that:
…Dialogue leads to a change in the underlying culture by its mere use. Because it asks participants for greater levels of openness and authenticity, it moves groups who practice it toward cultures that are more collaborative and based on principles of partnership (p. 227).Dialogue naturally changes a group to see its members as partners. (This is very helpful for people who are seeking to become partners in business. A group of people trying to become a worker cooperative should learn to think of its members as business partners.)
Dialogue has a wide variety of uses for a group of people trying to become a worker cooperative. While finishing a summary of the subject of dialogue generally, Gerard concludes:
The practice of Dialogue creates a solid foundation in the skills, principles, and values of collaborative and partnership-based cultures. For organizations ready to move in this direction, Dialogue will help them experience greater levels of authentic communication, greater acceptance and honoring of diversity, the ability to explore and transcend conflict, higher levels of creativity, and deeper understanding of shared goals and organizational values. Dialogue can also be used in shorter-term applications when integrated into activities such as strategic visioning, team building, and working with conflict (p. 231).Considering the many challenges facing a worker-initiated entrepreneurial-effort, dialogue’s many uses are likely to come in handy. (In general dialogue helps a group move in the direction it wants to move in, which is very helpful for a group of people trying to become a worker cooperative.)
Dialogue Details:
Dialogue has a rich academic history, with authors with backgrounds as diverse as Jiddu Krishnamurti, Mary Parker Follet, and Jurgen Habermas explaining the need for what today’s organizational development professionals now call ”dialogue.” However, one author stands out above the others when it comes to having introduced dialogue: Gerard (1999) mentions David Bohm as the father of today’s concept of dialogue in the field of organizational development (p. 218). Almost every book I’ve seen on dialogue mentions David Bohm as someone who created the foundation for further work on dialogue. Bohm (1996) describes exactly what he means when he uses the word ”dialogue”:
…In the dialogue people should talk directly to one another, one to one, across the circle. Then the time would come, if we got to know each other a bit and could trust each other, when you could speak very directly to the whole group, or to anybody in it. …In the dialogue group we are not going to decide what to do about anything. This is crucial. Otherwise we are not free. We must have an empty space where we are not obliged to anything, nor to come to any conclusions, nor to say anything or not say anything. It’s open and free. It’s an empty space… where anything may come in and after we finish, we just empty it…
We see that it is not an arbitrary imposition to state that we have no fixed purpose no absolute purpose, anyway. We may set up relative purposes for investigation, but we are not wedded to a particular purpose, and are not saying that the whole group must conform to that purpose indefinitely (p. 1819).In other words, dialogue is essentially a very open-ended conversation, which does not involve trying to make decisions or come to conclusions.
Bohm is perhaps the most radical in his views that dialogue should not have an agenda. He elaborates on this, stating that:
…people in any group will bring to it assumptions, and as the group continues meeting, those assumptions will come up. What is called for is to suspend those assumptions, so that you neither carry them out nor suppress them. You don’t believe them, nor do you disbelieve them; you don’t judge them as good or bad…(p. 22)
…We are not trying to change anybody’s opinion. When this meeting is over, someone may or may not change his opinion. This is part of what I consider dialogue for people to realize what is on each other’s minds without coming to any conclusions or judgments.(p. 23).
…There’s no point in being persuaded or convinced. That’s not really coherent or rational. If something is right, you don’t need to be persuaded. If somebody has to persuade you, than there is probably some doubt to it (p. 31).By Bohm’s definition, in dialogue the members of the group refuse to pass judgment, suspending and paying attention to their own (and also other members of the group’s) assumptions and opinions as the conversation evolves. This way the group-whole is able to get an accurate reflection of itself, by its members authentically sharing their minds with each other. (This can help a group of people seeking to become a worker cooperative understand where their hidden reservations keeping them from proceeding are in the group, and giving individual group members a realistic enough view of the group to be able to individually make personal decisions that are in line with what the whole group needs.)
Ricardo Semler (2004) mentions that Semco (a light manufacturing company in Brazil) has thrived as one of the world’s most successful worker-managed businesses since he turned control of the company over to that company’s work force two decades ago. Semler demonstrates the similarities between Bohm’s idealistic views on dialogue and how communication actually happens at Semco meetings:
Thus it is at Semco meetings. Sometimes they are like scenes from an overly artsy foreign film, we address the same subject again and again. The angles are quirky and the focus fuzzy. We ask why repeatedly. And nothing ever gets carved in stone… ..we often jot down generic ideas and broad numbers so we can visualize the dimensions of a new product or service. Then we throw those notes away. At the next meeting on the same idea, we’ll start over, without the benefit of the original notes. That way we cannot fall into the trap of ”fixed assumptions” (p. 1718).Semco’s success proves that it can pay to be as wary of fixed assumptions as Bohm is (and in a worker managed company no less.) Bohm believes that dialogue will lead to situations in which ”everybody wins”, resulting in what we commonly call ”win-win” (p. 7). The spirit of dialogue is therefore very similar to what Mary Parker Follett called ”integration” (Graham, 1995.) Follett noted that ”there are three ways of settling differences: by domination, by compromise, or by integration… Integration means finding a third way which will include both what A wishes and what B wishes, a way in which neither side has had to sacrifice anything” (p. 188). The difference between ”integration” and ”dialogue” is that on one hand integration is a principle used in conflict resolution, while dialogue on the other hand has more general applications and is specifically a form of conversation.
Different Schools of Dialogue:
I first encountered the idea of dialogue through the work of William Isaacs (1999). Throughout his book, Isaacs describes his experiences with three major groups. One of the groups, the ”Grand Junction healthcare inquiry” (p. 105) strikes me as similar to organizing a worker cooperative, because the group forms and then learns to share resources through dialogue. Isaacs also goes into a many possible techniques and skill sets that can be used to view and enhance dialogue in a group. He focuses on a four-stage evolutionary-model of a dialogue (p.242290):
- Stage one is ”Shared Monologues,” where group members get used to talking to eachother.
- Stage two is ”Skillful Discussion,” where people are learning the skills of dialogue.
- Stage three is ”Reflective Dialogue,” which is approximately Bohm’s idea of dialogue.
- Stage four is ”Generative Dialogue,” a special ”creative” dialogue Isaacs seeks for his groups.
Shaw’s method is a simpler way of trying to get the same results Bohm is seeking in group communication (because it enables group members to ”suspend assumptions and opinions” without having to get into the extensive skill-building processes and dialogue models Isaacs suggests.) Shaw’s dialogue variation shows that a simpler, less idealistic approach is possible. For her all conversations are on a continuum, a gray scale that ranges from the highest, purest forms of dialogue to the lowest command-and-control conversations. In this sense dialogue is a property a conversation can have more or less of. We don’t have to be Utopians in order to make the conversations in our organizations have more dialogue in them. It is helpful to keep this in mind for those of us trying to implement dialogue in today’s world: there may not actually be any such thing as perfect dialogue per say, but conversations can become more like the perfect dialogue model we envision.
Shaw gets people to appreciate each other’s contributions to the conversation. She instills them with awareness that they need everyone to authentically participate in the group thought. She does not advocate a specific method to do this, but as she suggests in the last chapter of her book, many popular organizational-development processes help participants suspend their own opinions, while also being open and honest themselves, thus helping to make the over all group conversation more like dialogue.
Everett M. Rogers (1995) sheds more light on how conversation in general can be useful to a group of people seeking to become a worker cooperative. Rogers offers a model of “innovation process in organizations” that begins with an ”agenda setting stage” where the organization first recognizes an opportunity to innovate, and ends in a ”routinization stage” where the new innovation has become standard (p. 389404). The stage in which the innovation actually becomes widespread throughout the organization is a later phase called the ”clarifying stage”:
The clarifying stage in the innovation process in an organization consists of social construction. When a new idea is first implemented in an organization, it has little meaning to the organization’s members. The innovation is surrounded by uncertainty… Through a process of the people in an organization talking about the innovation, they gradually gain a common understanding of it. Thus their meaning of the innovation is constructed over time through a social process of human interaction.(p. 399).As a group adopts an innovation, their need to have conversation is increased. Groups seeking to adopt the innovation of having a worker cooperative organizational-structure will thus have a need to ”clarify” frequently, primarily through conversation. Since dialogue helps us construct new meaning together, it can help us ”clarify” as we try to utilize innovations. (For most of us, “starting a worker cooperative” would definitely be trying to utilize an innovation.)
Concordance:
Dialogue can help consensus groups prepare to go into a decision making process. (“Consensus” is the act of making choices by way of unanimous decision, instead of by majority rule. Most of the worker-owned startup attempts I work with use consensus as their formal decision-making tool.) William Schutz (1994) explains that the most effective type of consensus is ”concordance” (p. 199229). Concordance is different from other forms of consensus in that it requires all the group members to be open and honest about why they support (or do not support) various options the group has to choose from (p. 206). This helps the group get past the hidden roadblocks that prevent the group from making progress.
I believe that dialogue prepares groups to use concordance in two ways. First it empowers group members to make the decisions they can on their own, freeing up time in the agenda of any decision making meeting of the organization (time being an essential resource for any consensus decision making meeting.) Second, dialogue gets group members used to being honest and open with each other when communicating, so that when the time does come to make a group decision, the group members can have the communication habits of honesty and openness with each other they need to pull off concordance.
A business venture is a very serious agreement, involving resources, time, and legal liability. Deciding to go into business is often a life altering choice. Going into business with other people is an even bigger decision, because each additional person involved in the partnership represents new risks. Going into business with a new experimental business structure with workers making all of the decisions is a daunting challenge indeed. It is one thing to get together and talk about maybe-someday starting a worker cooperative with a group of friends, and it’s an entirely different thing to proceed to actually do it. Even once the group of friends decides they want to become a worker cooperative, they are sometimes not able to bring themselves to action. A decision of this magnitude can only be acted upon if the group of friends has come to a very strong consensus on what to do.
As anyone who has tried before knows, consensus is a lot of work: it’s no easy task to get everyone to agree to one course of action. But even once we do agree on one course of action, often people who had not voiced concerns during the decision making process interfere with the course of action decided. When this happens, all the work that went into the original consensus is wasted – because consensus was not reached after all, or has been breached after the fact. The more people involved in carrying out the course of action, the less likely our agreed upon plans of action will take place.
Concordance is a very specific kind of consensus. In concordance, instead of everyone agreeing about a course of action, each person explains why they agree to a specific course of action. Look at what some of these reasons might actually be:
- “It was Ben’s idea, and I like him, so I didn’t want to go against it.”
- “It was Ben’s idea, and I am afraid of him, so I didn’t want to go against it.”
- “It was Ben’s idea, and I think he’s smarter than me, so I didn’t want to go against it.”
- “I genuinely thought it was a good idea, and thought we should do it.”
- “I passionately wanted to execute that specific course of action.”
Chapter 5: Discussion
Dialogue Rescues Consensus:When trying to utilize concordance, dialogue comes to our rescue in two different ways. First it empowers people to make decisions for themselves independently of the group whole. If we have frequent open and honest dialogue-like conversation with each other, we can know from our own personal perspectives what the rest of the group needs: we can be well informed enough to make personal decisions that are in the best interest of the group whole. Dialogue in an organization will empower its members to not have to wait on as many whole group decisions in order to be productive themselves. Dialogue puts the burden of decision making on the well intentioned and well informed individual, instead of placing the bulk of the decisions on the whole-group consensus process.
In the case of the Pro Collective, the office space they now share was not decided upon by way of consensus. A few of the Pro Collective members decided they wanted to share office space, and chose a space that they thought might work for the whole Pro Collective later on should the need arise. These few members were aware of this potential need because of the dialogue they had engaged in already with the whole Pro Collective, and made individual decisions with the needs of the whole group in mind.
The second significant way dialogue helps with concordance is that it gets us into the habit of being open and honest with each other. If we have a lot of open and honest conversations where people are able to suspend their own opinions and hear others ideas out, then in a decision making meeting it will be very natural for us to continue these dialogue based habits. If our mode of decision making is consensus, then in an organization where dialogue-like conversations are the norm, concordance will be automatic.
For example, in the case of the Pro Collective the All-Day Meeting was first time they had reached concordance, but it was not the first time they had attempted dialogue. All of their previous attempts and successes with a long series of dialogue-like conversations had helped them develop the openness with each other they needed in order to have successful concordance result in the All-Day Meeting. By the time they had unanimously agreed to use the “round table” structure, they had also been honest enough with each other for this unanimous decision to be concordance, partially because of the dialogue-habits they had already developed through their history of dialogue-like conversations. The concordance on the “round table” structure has held in place since February.
So what then do a group of friends “just talking about” setting up a worker cooperative need to do in order to move from “just talking” to “actually doing”? The answer is very counterintuitive: they need to engage in dialogue. Dialogue will take this group of friends who is trying to decide on a course of action, and will open up their conversations to where they can understand each other’s minds. Dialogue will give them transparency into what they as a collective group is actually thinking. Dialogue will give them the habits they need in order to make the true concordance level decisions they will need to be able to make in order to take action, and dialogue will reduce how often those kind of time-consuming whole-group decisions have to be made. Dialogue will even allow individual members of the group of friends make personal decisions that are in the best interest of that whole aspiring worker cooperative project.
For example, consider when at first the Pro Collective was just a group of friends (and their businesses) who worked on website projects together, who had been talking about forming a worker cooperative. They talked for a while – and this helped them get familiar with each other. However, as they were able to move into more dialogue-like conversation, they were better able to understand each other’s motivations and hesitations regarding the would be worker cooperative, and reach better understanding where they really were as a group. Individuals felt empowered to make personal decisions that will benefit the group effort. When the time finally did come for consensus, the group was used to entertaining each other’s ideas and having open enough conversations to reach actual concordance without too much trouble. (Concordance happened with the round table structure, at the All-Day Meeting.)
But just how do we move a group of friends from “just talking” to engaging in more dialogue-like conversation? First I must warn that I doubt that there is one sure way to do this. This reminds me of the Taoist saying that “the way called way is not the way.” If I develop a process that works for one group of people, by the time a second group of people adopts this dialogue-injecting process, that process will have been at least partially reinvented for this second group’s specific needs. Further more, going into a group with a specific process in mind actually violates an important principle of dialogue – suspending our own opinions and judgments. If I have a bias towards a specific process, it’s good for me to be transparent about that bias, and that should be the end of my certainty about the role of that process in the group’s dialogue.
Conditions for Dialogue:
I have found some principles that will help us introduce dialogue into our conversations if we are able to keep them in mind. First gradual progress towards dialogue is much better than no dialogue at all. People have to get used to engaging in dialogue-like conversation, and this takes time as we develop new habits (suspending judgment, entertaining other’s ideas, being honest about our feelings, etc.) that will help us be good at dialogue.
For example, when the Pro Collective was a group of web developers wanting to come together to form a worker cooperative, the more they met the more they learned to trust each other as individuals and the more honest and less defensive the conversations became. Because they were a group of friends and not just random web professionals, they naturally engaged in “small talk.” As that “small talk” built on the trust-development over time, it developed quite naturally into dialogue-like conversation.
Second, interventions that single handedly make our organizations conversations more dialoguelike are indeed possible. Though it certainly must help if our organizations are trained and acclimated to dialogue-participation over long periods of time, it is possible to have specific events that open up people’s eyes to the power of dialogue, or that suddenly gets them into a new practice that happens to encourage dialogue.
For example, the All-Day Meeting was an honesty-prone judgment-suspending process. Many of the strategic planning models out there could be used to encourage dialogue in an organization, (since they often encourage judgment-suspension and open communication,) assuming of course that the documents that result from these kind of interventions do not stifle further dialogue after the strategic planning is “over.” Possibilities include “Open Space,” “Future Search,” simple brainstorming, etc.
Here is the main consideration for valuing an intervention: how likely is it that the judgment-suspending and openness of this process is likely to leak out into the other conversations going on in this organization? The more likely, the better the intervention is.
Third, organizations are much more likely to continue using a process they generated themselves because it will be natural for them as the inventors of the new process to modify it over time as their needs change. This is why I recommend a group-generated process over trying to introduce a process from outside of the organization. The way called way (“the best process out there for building dialogue into an organization’s conversations,”) is not the way (because the organization could invent a new process for themselves so that they will continue using it and modifying it as needed, perpetually building their dialogue-habits and capabilities.)
For example, when the Pro Collective was a group of friends who were web developers seeking to become a worker cooperative, after several meetings it was very natural for them to realize that “something is holding us back from actually becoming a worker cooperative.” This led them to plan a certain day on which they would all present their complete feelings and expectations of the project, one person at a time, while everyone else only listened as each person honestly explained his true feelings and position. This All-Day Meeting led them to plan more future meetings like it, and led them to devise other more work related meetings that followed the same principles.
As the Pro Collective started having weekly “project sharing” meetings (as a result of their self-invented dialogue-interjection intervention,) where first people presented the projects they were working on (suspending all judgments in the first part of the meeting,) and then secondly discuss who might be able to help each other (being totally honest about their options and motivations in the second part of their meeting,) this group actually started to take the form a worker cooperative. Soon they developed a group identity, actually calling themselves the “Pro Collective,” and taking on projects as a whole group. Through a natural dialogue process, they have begun to function as a business that is managed and owned only by its workforce.
Fourth, I seriously doubt that if I were to go into a “project round table meeting” and ask for a definition of dialogue, that I would hear my definition of dialogue come out of the Pro Collective members’ mouths. Still, they have managed to utilize dialogue-like conversation, and some of that dialogue-like conversation has resulted in even more dialogue-like conversation (as with the All-Day
Meeting resulting in the round table structure.) “Pure” dialogue as I have defined involves a discarding of our biases. (Thinking that “dialogue is what we need to do” is a bias.) “Pure” dialogue is therefore a fairly difficult state of conversation to achieve. What helps the most in my opinion is to drop the “purity.” “Dialogue like conversation” is going to have to do.
Fifth, if I come in as an outside expert, I should make the most of my early interactions with the group by actually helping them understand dialogue. The concept is simple enough (don’t try to make decisions, suspend our own opinions, be totally honest, and build on each other’s ideas. In other words, it’s a balance of honesty and open mindedness, two espoused virtues of American culture.) Though I was not able to do this with my change project, me personally learning about the concept of dialogue transformed my ability to participate, and my participation helped to transform the group.
Finally, dialogue helps the outside expert deliver his message. Dialogue helps the group members keep an open mind, and listen to the new ideas the outside expert is trying deliver. In the case of an outside expert trying to deliver a message about dialogue, dialogue should beget dialogue. Furthermore, should the outside expert hinder dialogue, habits of dialogue will help the group members recover their dialogue-like conversation after an encounter with this kind of a dialogue-unfriendly authority.
For example, when the Pro Collective had their encounter with the business planning expert who hindered dialogue, they were able to take his ideas seriously even though they found those ideas hard to swallow. Beyond this, dialogue allowed them to get back into an open minded decision-making process, even though they had temporarily become dependent on the commands of the business-planning expert.
Personal Conclusions:
I have learned that an aspiring Worker Cooperative will probably know what will work best for them. My job is to help them utilize this knowledge. My best resource for helping an “aspiring worker cooperative” organize is that group-of-people itself. I take requests from those groups of very seriously, as I did with bringing in the business-planning expert against my better judgment. What these aspiring Worker Cooperatives need to organize is a mirror (dialogue,) so that they can behold for themselves the wisdom they contain. The more the group is able to reflect, the better it will understand itself, and the more empowered it will be.
Dialogue works for starting worker cooperatives essentially because it is a group mirror. As the members engage in dialogue with each other, they develop a realistic view of where the whole group is at. Once everyone has a realistic view of where the whole group is at, both individual decisions and whole group consensus become better informed and therefore more effective, resulting in the establishment of the worker cooperative they wanted to form.
This is in fact the primary message of this thesis: for a group to become a worker cooperative, it will help immensely if they can learn to reflect on their condition and actions as a whole-group. Dialogue provides a way to achieve whole-group reflection. Dialogue-like conversations are therefore my instrument of choice when it comes to helping a group to become a worker cooperative.
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