3DN Management Structure
Management Structure
- In the beginning a CIE will be just those agreements between the people who start it – such as the agreements required for the example used in Economics of Integrated Production. We want to grow the organization into a set of agreements that produces all the food, clothing, shelter, education and health care that residents in our locality choose to obtain through the CIE instead of through the market or government systems. That is a large complex organization and in accordance with modern leadership theory, network theory, and chaordic theory, we want to push decision making out to the edges – consistent with the need to coordinate activities across the organization.
- What is “pushing decision making out to the edges”? It means that the people doing the work at the restaurant/laundry/day care (and every other CIE activity) have the authority and incentive to run each of those activities as efficiently as possible. I conceptualize the process in this way:
- - the community agrees to buy a space for a restaurant/laundry/day care and the necessary equipment
- - the available people best qualified to run the restaurant/laundry/day care get a license to do that
- - the licensees are given authority over the shares needed to run the restaurant/laundry/day care – who is hired, ordering supplies, etc.
- - the shares available to run the restaurant/laundry/day care – over and above “overhead expense” - increase as a function of the shares and cash generated by the operation
- - the licensees are given authority over how the additional shares are divided among the workers
- - procedures on how to run a successful restaurant/laundry/day care are documented
- - the community uses the cash proceeds to buy space and equipment for additional restaurant/laundry/day care operations and issues new licenses.
- Imagine this process for all of the different activities we could include in a CIE – producing food, clothing, shelter, education and health care. Then imagine a person - just lost their job, house foreclosed, car repossessed – do we, as a community, want to wait until the “economy recovers” to get the benefit of that person's knowledge and skill? - or maybe we could license them to contribute to the flow of value while we wait for that?
- There is a early version of this conceptualization at Interviews from a Hopeful Country.
Back to Community Investment Enterprises
Back to Introduction
Back to Table of Contents