OUR SYSTEM

Decentralised, distributed responsibility (decision-making) and open information systems, lower the cost of conceiving, implementing and distributing ideas, and liberate individual fulfilment. Recording individual decisions in open information systems distributes knowledge, informs future decision-making and ensures accountability. Ideas (better ways of doing things or human potential) and implementing them (realising potential) are most effective and inexpensive when they are conceived and implemented by those whom they effect. At this level ideas are only adopted if they make a real improvement to our work, making it more efficient or more effective, that is, reducing the amount of work required or improving the result from the same amount of work. At the level where an idea is applicable we often do not ask (or receive) extra money for the development and implementation of our ideas, but we still develop and implement them because they make our job easier and because contributing re...

Our economy would have to adjust to a shared base income and assured human rights (even in organisations). With our system encouraging a different incentive – fulfilment over financial – we would produce differently. The new incentive would mean we would contribute effort to automate tasks that weren’t fulfilling and that our lives would become whole, with every person having complete control over how they contributed, where they contributed and when they contributed. All this entails and encourages greater trust, greater cooperation and greater responsibility. Can we trust ourselves enough to give us all greater freedom to contribute as each of us would wish? I believe we can and should and there are workable ways to do this.

Managers aren’t responsible for what staff do. Staff are responsible for what staff do. If people aren’t responsible for what they do, then they don’t do what they do responsibly. The idea that managers are responsible for staff actions is an attribute of organisations where staff are controlled, where there is a system of control. When staff know their job and do it their way they are also responsible for their job. It is when managers that are controllers intervene to control the way staff do their job that the responsibility of staff for their job, and the ability of staff to do their job, is compromised. Manager-controllers have full responsibility for that mistake.