How We Work
Purpose
Reground has always been unusual. We started as a project to bring together college student theatre makers from universities throughout Boston for a one-night showcase. That project was run by students, for students. Now we’re building Reground into an organization that puts students and artists first.
We’re here to train a diverse group of artists and give them practical experience creating, making, and playing in their chosen forms. We’re also here to teach those artists how to create art that is intentional, accessible, and responsible. Unfortunately, we don’t believe we can achieve that goal using the traditional hierarchical model by which most companies are run. With that in mind, we’re using a different one.
Why We Ask for Consent
Too many organizations, whether in the arts industry or any other, function under a strict hierarchy. An Artistic Director, CEO, or other head honcho makes huge decisions with however much input they deem necessary, so long as the board is cool with it. This authoritarian style, though, doesn’t always produce the best decisions. When one person makes all the decisions, it’s entirely too easy to ignore everyone else’s input. We don’t believe this is a great way to run a company.
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We value transparency, communication, personal autonomy, and collective, consent-based decision making. We’re all creating this company together, and we believe that all of us should share equally in all of it, successes and failures included. We’ve opted instead to run Reground as a collective, where decisions are made together by everyone affected by them.
How We Operate
To avoid the pitfalls of traditional hierarchies and embrace our organizational values, we’ve built a sociocratic model into Reground’s governing structure. Sociocracy is a decision-making structure which removes the hierarchy used in traditional organizations and places power in the hands of the people affected by the decision. While traditional organizations make decisions by executive fiat, sociocratic organizations make decisions by unanimous consent.
Reground is made up of Department Circles, seven of them at current count, which each focus on specialized areas of our work. Each circle functions as a team, made up of members with distinct positions and responsibilities who work together. Each staff member is accountable to their team, and teams are designed to support each staff member.
Department Circles are responsible for making their own decisions about their work. Our Marketing Circle decides what our website looks like, for example. Our Production Circle makes decisions about our programming. There’s no Artistic Director, no one person in charge. Circles make decisions in meetings run according to a set structure, and the members of each circle choose who leads their meetings. No decision is made or action taken if a member of the circle doesn’t give their consent.
Each Department Circle selects members to represent it in the General Circle, which is how Reground’s departments communicate with each other and make decisions which affect the whole organization. Each department receives the same representation, and each staff member directly consents to each of their representatives. If anyone loses confidence in a representative at any time, a new representative is selected.
this is an overview of how we operate under sociocracy, but we can scarcely scratch the surface on this short webpage. For more information on how Sociocracy works as a governance model or a method for making decisions, check out the resources available from SOCIOCRACY FOR ALL.