The consent principle is one of the four basic rules of sociocracy. It states that a decision is made if no one has a "serious and justified objection" to the decision proposal, i.e. no one is against it. (Please do not confuse consent with consensus: Consensus is about everyone voting in favor of a proposal. An approach that is much more time consuming and more likely to lead to "lazy compromises").

The consent principle guarantees that all decision participants have an equal say in the decision; after all, each individual can influence the decision with a serious objection. In order to resolve any objections and reach a decision, there is a clear process, consent moderation, which, with some practice, enables efficient and at the same time jointly supported decisions.

In our personal experience, the consent principle and consent moderation bring a completely new, positive dynamic to meetings.

Recently Miriam Epple, declared sociocracy lover, was at Qudosoft to introduce consent moderation and directly test it out together.

Qudosoft is a software company based in Berlin, Karlsruhe and Hamburg. They have many years of experience with agile work and self-organization and are always actively dealing with their own organization internally. With such a work culture, testing out elements of sociocracy as concrete control instruments is naturally obvious!

Reactions at Qudosoft?
"OMG how relaxed is it when everyone just talks in order and not jumbled!!! You didn't have to worry that you wouldn't get a turn or wouldn't be heard, and no one was embarrassed to get into a war of words or drift off strongly!"

Their Key Learnings?
”The beauty of sociocratic consent (SC) is that you work together on a great proposal. It's not: A proposes and B thinks it sucks, it's about dealing with an issue constructively. It gives a nice sense of community once it gets going.”

“The method stands or falls on good facilitation.”

“The facilitation role is very powerful using SC and has a lot of responsibility.”

“For the next few decisions we want to use the SC for, we should definitely get some more facilitation support.”

“The SC is exhausting because you have to be focused on the task at hand and listen carefully to everyone else.”