From: jimruttshow8596

This article explores the “small group practice,” a governance model developed by Forrest Landry to address the challenges of collective decision-making and action, particularly for groups of up to 16 people [00:01:57]. While optimized for smaller groups, the discussion extends to the fundamental challenges of scaling governance to larger collectives [00:02:49].

The Importance of New Governance Theories

Current governance models and processes are often inadequate for solving large-scale, complex problems that span multiple generations and cultures, involve numerous actors, and operate in intricate domains like ecosystems [00:03:15]. Issues such as ecological crises, global warming, pollution, and long-term sustainability require a level of human coordination and capacity that is not currently implemented or available [00:03:47].

Attempting to address new challenges within old organizational structures is often a “prescription for failure” [00:04:46]. Existing structures were designed for specific purposes and may not be suitable for innovative approaches [00:05:20]. Therefore, a fresh approach to governance design is critical for current and future well-being [00:04:35].

Three Archetypal Decision-Making Models

Forrest Landry identifies three fundamental archetypes that span the total space of human governance and coordination of choices [00:06:29]:

Consensus

Consensus operates on the principle of equality, where everyone communicates as peers in a horizontal process [00:06:44].

  • Description: People communicate to reach a common understanding of a problem and a uniform agreement on its solution [00:07:31]. Everybody is involved in every choice [00:08:42].
  • Strengths: Makes very high-quality choices [00:09:18]. It’s ideal for defining internal group aspects like values, purpose, and membership, ensuring high coherence [00:19:47]. Consensus decisions on values, for example, ensure that everyone in the community agrees, unlike democratic votes that might leave a minority feeling like “losers” [00:20:51].
  • Weaknesses: Requires very high communicative bandwidth [00:09:20]. If the group is too large, there may not be enough time to make decisions, especially when many choices are needed quickly [00:09:25].

Meritocracy (Hierarchical / Executive)

Meritocracy represents an unequal, vertically oriented structure [00:06:56].

  • Description: A conventional top-down structure where a single person (or a defined set of individuals) is elected or delegated to lead, implement roles, and make decisions based on defined bylaws or delegated authority [00:07:42]. The total span of choices is distributed among people in a role-specific manner [00:08:23]. A for-profit corporation with a CEO and a hierarchy is a classic example [00:08:11].
  • Strengths: Can respond very quickly to a large number of choices, is relatively simple, and robust for emergency situations [00:09:39]. It allows for efficient external communication by centralizing contact points [00:41:17].
  • Weaknesses: Highly vulnerable to corruption, where individuals make choices for private interests (e.g., self, family, friends) rather than the group [00:09:51]. This is often referred to as “agency risk” or the “principal-agent problem” in economic literature [00:10:04].

Democracy

Democracy is seen as a midpoint between consensus and meritocracy, involving subgroups where equality might exist internally but hierarchical structures or inequality might exist between subgroups [00:07:02].

  • Description: Involves the reification of choices, often followed by debate and a vote, where people make choices in a distributed way about a smaller, simpler set of options [00:08:49].
  • Strengths: Often perceived as a “good thing” in Western societies [00:12:22].
  • Weaknesses:
    • Hidden Power & Corruption: Susceptible to “hidden and covert forms of power” regarding how choices are framed, what appears on a ballot, or who decides wording [00:11:02].
    • Divisiveness: Voting efficiently divides a group into two nearly equally sized subgroups, limiting the effectiveness and resilience of the community by promoting political polarization [00:11:27].
    • Weakens Groups: Results in weaker groups less resilient to external change [00:11:55].
    • Institutional Bias: The institutional form of democracy inherently implies a hierarchical structure, making it susceptible to the same corruption issues as meritocracy, often in occult (hidden) ways [00:13:07].

Forrest Landry’s Integrated Small Group Practice

Landry’s novel approach combines all three archetypal governance models by using each as a check and balance against the others [00:16:14]. The core tension addressed is the human propensity for inequality and hierarchical structures [00:16:37]. The small group practice is designed for groups roughly six to sixteen people [00:52:47].

The model proposes a bimodal process distinguishing between internal and external group functions [00:17:22]:

  1. Internal Process (Consensus Mode):

    • The group focuses inward, using consensus to manage its internal organization and self-definition [00:17:48].
    • This mode is used for fundamental decisions such as membership, group identity, core values, and the meaningfulness of the group itself [00:19:25].
    • The goal is high coherence and ensuring the group is conscious of its basis of choice [00:19:58].
  2. External Process (Meritocratic Mode):

    • When the group needs to act externally, it transitions from consensus to a meritocratic structure [00:18:10].
    • The consensus process decides the scope of authority and who will lead a specific external function (e.g., surveying land for crops) [00:23:42]. This ensures the choice is grounded in the group’s values and expertise [00:24:09].
    • The meritocratic leader (or team) then manages the task, potentially delegating further roles [00:27:11].
    • The meritocratic structure is “scope-limited,” meaning its authority applies only to the defined task [00:30:27].
  3. The Role of Democracy (The “Red Button”):

    • Democracy’s primary, narrow function is to enable a “vote of no confidence” [00:28:28]. If the group feels there’s a misrepresentation or a problem with the meritocratic function’s scope or process, a vote can “collapse that particular meritocratic structure” back to consensus [00:27:41]. This means starting from scratch for that role [00:30:51].
    • This is a high-stakes action, making it unlikely to be used frivolously, as the group itself becomes responsible for the function again [00:34:03].
    • Even those who “lose” the vote to collapse the meritocracy still have substantial input into what comes next because the process reverts to consensus, where every member must agree [00:33:03].
    • The consensus process can also define the “fallback mechanism” in advance, preparing the group for potential collapses [00:32:32].
    • A group can have multiple, distinct meritocracies, each with its own “red button” for collapse [00:29:37].
    • Secondary Role of Democracy: Democracy can also temporarily suspend the consensus process on a specific issue, typically through a majority vote of the whole membership [00:34:44]. This acts as a “relief valve” when internal discussions become too heated or unstable, allowing the group to pause and cool off [00:36:17]. Parameters for this suspension (e.g., time limits) can be set by consensus [00:38:18].

This tripartite system leverages the strengths of each methodology to compensate for its disadvantages [00:49:02].

Scaling Beyond Small Groups

While the small group practice is effective for up to 16 people, scaling this model directly to larger groups (e.g., 150 members in a proto-b community) presents significant challenges [00:56:16].

Limitations of Direct Scaling

  • Dunbar’s Number: Beyond a certain size (around 150-200, known as Dunbar’s number), the complexity of interpersonal relationships and communication paths becomes unmanageable for traditional consensus-based models [00:53:52]. The number of communication paths increases in an n-squared fashion, making it harder to track relationships and prevent individual traumas or emotional dynamics from derailing conversations [00:53:26].
  • Evolutionary Biases: Human evolution has instilled a strong propensity for hierarchically organized structures, which poses a significant challenge to maintaining the horizontal communication necessary for consensus at scale [00:57:22].
  • “Uncanny Valley”: Landry posits an “uncanny valley” or “no-man’s land” between the small group size (up to 16) and very large groups (200+) where existing institutional forms (businesses, schools, governments) have inherent disadvantages [01:02:08]. The direct “accretion” of smaller groups to form larger ones creates instability due to overwhelming evolutionary pressures, particularly the exponential power of recombinatoric effects (like mate selection) over additive (mutation) or multiplicative (survival selection) ones [00:59:58].

The Need for New Architectures

Solving large-scale problems like existential risks or global resource allocation requires a fundamentally different approach than incremental improvements to existing systems (e.g., voting, financial instruments, or narrative control) [01:05:51].

  • Holographic Communication: A new architecture must enable “holographic communication” to achieve the necessary bandwidth for collective wisdom and intelligence in large groups [01:07:11].
  • Beyond Representation: It cannot be a representative model, to avoid the principal-agent problem [01:09:45]. The goal is to involve the entire community in decision-making without overloading individuals with information [01:10:03].
  • Culture First: Rather than starting with strategy, the new approach must prioritize “culture first” [01:11:14]. This means getting human dynamics right, focusing on health and trauma resolution, allowing cultures to become aware of their values, articulate a vision, and then implement strategy from that community-driven basis [01:11:21].
  • Balancing Sustainability and Evolution: The architecture must mediate between “change and changelessness” to achieve “conscious sustainable evolution” [01:08:09]. This involves:
    • Sustainability: Maintaining what remains the same, ensuring long-term well-being and resource balance [01:07:58].
    • Evolution: The ability to recognize new solutions and adapt to change [01:07:28].
  • Systemic Awareness: Solutions must address the meta-systemic problem, recognizing that culture is built on ecology, infrastructure on culture, and economic systems on infrastructure [01:16:16].
  • Addressing Human Bias: Understanding the underlying drivers of human behavior, particularly our biological heritage’s preference for hierarchy, is crucial for designing governance that addresses causes rather than symptoms [01:17:48].

Ultimately, this involves creating a form of group consciousness and conscientiousness that possesses the wisdom to balance technology and evolution, ensuring long-term well-being for the species and the planet [01:22:58]. The goal is to establish a level of wisdom and communicative capacity that fosters trust in collective choices, ensuring resources are wisely invested for the benefit of the whole [01:23:55]. This is considered “the most difficult engineering or philosophical problem that has ever been possible to the species” [01:37:02].