In April 2018, Transition Network trustees and staff formally decided to adopt a non-hierarchical, shared governance model. We’re very much still experimenting and learning and our governance is designed to evolve over time. On these pages you can find out more about :

  • Shared governance – the structures, processes, and practices we use to guide our activity and make decisions
  • Team culture – how we’re supporting ourselves to collaborate well across our difference
Most of us find at least some of these practices unfamiliar and challenging. However, we are consistently surprised by the benefits we experience when we have the courage to try something new together.
Sarah Mc Adam

Within Transition Network we believe that how we work is as important as what we do. We are seeking to support positive change in the world and, to do that, we want to explore how to collaborate well within our groups, organisations and communities. We look for practical ways to apply Transition principles, experimenting, reflecting and making adjustments as we go along. In these pages, we share our experiences and practices in case they are useful to others. Let’s learn together how to (re)build healthy human culture!

From the early days of our organisation, we have experimented with practices designed to bring more balance and connection into our work. For example, we hold meetings where we share our feelings and explore group dynamics as well as meetings focused on exchanging information and making decisions. And when we’re discussing important and complex issues, we often draw, use role play and movement or spend time in nature to help us connect with other ways of understanding what might be needed.

Transition Network has grown organically in response to changing needs and opportunities. By 2015, we recognised that our decision-making was a slightly chaotic mix of hierarchy, consensus, consent and individual autonomy, that we were spending too much time in unproductive meetings and that we wanted to be more resilient and responsive as a team. With the generous and flexible support of the Tudor Trust, we decided to invest time and attention on exploring and implementing a new shared governance model across our organisation.

We were accompanied throughout our organisational development process by a great team from Université du Nous (UdN) with knowledge and experience of sociocracy, holacracy and other innovative organisational tools and thinking. UdN’s values and approach are closely aligned to Transition and our experience of working with them was very much part of our learning. For example, at the end of each phase of the project, representatives of Transition Network and UdN carried out a ‘wealth exchange’, making a transparent mutual assessment of the value of the support that UdN had provided and using consent decision-making to agree what money or other benefits would be transferred between the two organisations.