Sociocracy 3.0 examples: what a prison, a bank, and an outdoor retailer taught us
Last week around this time we were in Zurich, Switzerland. Three visits to pioneering organizations. A local gathering with over 140 like-minded people. And a lesson that's been rattling around in my head ever since.
Here's what struck me most: in ten years of visiting 200+ pioneering organizations, Sociocracy 3.0 had rarely shown up in our fieldwork.
We knew it existed. We knew people used it. But we had almost never seen it up close, in practice, in the organizations we visited.
Then, within a few Swiss days: twice.
Plus a third organization with a concept that reframes the whole debate about structure versus culture.
We almost never saw sociocracy 3.0 in the wild
Before diving into what we found in Switzerland, let me clarify what I mean by Sociocracy 3.0.
Definition of Sociocracy 3.0
Sociocracy 3.0 is an open-source set of modular principles and methods for organizing work without defaulting to traditional hierarchy. Building on Gerard Endenburg's 1960s sociocracy, it offers practical patterns (circles, double links, consent decision-making, and clear roles) that organizations can adopt piece by piece. The result is a flexible architecture for distributing authority instead of a rigid system to install wholesale.
While hundreds of companies claim to use Sociocracy 3.0, we'd rarely encountered it in our fieldwork. Until Switzerland.
A prison that moves between circles and pyramids
Our first visit was to Massnahmenzentrum Uitikon, a court-mandated treatment centre for young adult offenders.
Not the obvious place to look for progressive organizational thinking. And yet.
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The director, Carmelo Campanello, introduced us to a concept he had developed over the last decade: osmotic hierarchy.
Here's how it works. When the young men in his care are stable, the staff is encouraged to work in circles; distributed, collaborative, self-managing. The organization runs more like what you'd expect from a progressive workplace.
But when emotional volatility spikes among the residents (what Carmelo describes as being "radioactive"), that instability seeps through the institution. It contaminates the relational field between staff members.
At that point, the circle organization isn't enough. The pyramid has to grow and temporarily takes over how staff organizes.
Until calm returns. Then the pyramid shrinks, giving space for the circles to come back.
Two things about this fascinated me.
- First, Carmelo doesn't view self-management as a fixed destination. It's a dynamic position. The real skill is learning to move fluidly between more and less hierarchy depending on what the situation demands.
- Second, most people assume pressure to revert to hierarchy comes from outside (a crisis, a regulator, a shareholder). But at Uitikon, the pressure comes from within. From the volatility of the young men themselves. Their instability becomes the organization's instability.
A bank that uses Sociocracy 3.0 to push back against its regulator
Our second visit was to Alternative Bank Schweiz (ABS), a 190-person bank working without formal middle managers.
They face a different challenge. Their regulator has no mental framework to understand what ABS is doing. It wants a single name, a responsible manager, a hierarchy it recognizes, and an org chart it can audit.
The regulator pushes, constantly, for ABS to look like a normal bank. ABS pushes back and holds its ground.
Where the prison faces pressure from within, the bank faces it from without. The same fundamental dilemma arriving from completely different directions.
Radical decentralization as a dynamic position
What both organizations share in their solution: neither is fundamentally against hierarchy. Both simply want the right to choose when to use it, rather than have that choice made for them.
ABS's practical answer to navigate that pressure is Sociocracy 3.0. Circles. Double links. Roles. Consent decision-making. A whole repertoire of patterns for organizing without defaulting to command and control.
It gives them a language and structure the regulator can at least partially understand. "This role is responsible for this decision" sounds more acceptable than "we all just figure it out together."
An outdoor retailer running Sociocracy 3.0 in retail
The third organization was Transa, a Swiss outdoor retail chain. Selling jackets and hiking boots.
Also working seriously with several Sociocracy 3.0 patterns.
This matters because it shows Sociocracy 3.0 isn't just for tech companies or cooperatives or social enterprises. It works in retail too. In a business where you'd expect traditional hierarchy because "that's how retail works."
Transa proves that assumption wrong.
Why structure alone isn't enough
Here's what came through from all three visits. And it's something we've seen consistently across every organization that has actually made this work over time.
There's a version of organizational progressiveness that focuses almost entirely on structure. Circles, roles, consent decision-making. The hard stuff. The architecture.
Done well, it's genuinely powerful.
But it's not enough on its own.
What the prison, the bank, and the outdoor retailer share is that they invest just as seriously in the soft side. In self-awareness, emotional intelligence, personal leadership.
They focus on developing people's capacity to show up differently. To hold difficulty without reverting to old patterns.
To deliberately choose hierarchy, as Carmelo would put it, rather than silently default to it.
Structure without development produces clever systems that get gamed.
Development without structure produces good intentions that collapse under pressure.
The organizations that actually sustain this over time invest seriously in both. And treat them not as separate programs but as a single integrated commitment.
This explains why we see so many Sociocracy 3.0 implementations fail. Companies adopt the circles and the consent decision-making. They restructure everything. They train people on the mechanics.
But they skip the deeper work. The personal development. The capacity building. The emotional intelligence.
Then when pressure hits—whether from volatile clients like at Uitikon or demanding regulators like at ABS—people revert. Not because the structure failed, but because the people weren't developed enough to use it under stress.
Gerard Endenburg understood this when he first developed sociocracy at his family's engineering firm in the 1960s. He believed organizing more equally required both structural innovation and human development. That all people are different but equal, and the organization must develop both its systems and its people to honor that equality.
The modern derivatives like Sociocracy 3.0 and Holacracy sometimes forget this dual requirement. They package the structural elements beautifully. They create apps and training programs and certification schemes.
But without equal investment in the human side, it's just rearranging deck chairs.
Carmelo's osmotic hierarchy captures this perfectly. It's not enough to have circles or pyramids. You need people developed enough to consciously choose between them based on what the moment requires.
That's the real innovation. Not the structure itself, but the capacity to use structure consciously rather than habitually.
What would it look like if more organizations understood this?
Ready to invest in both sides?
Sociocracy 3.0 gives you the structural patterns. But as Uitikon, ABS, and Transa make clear, structure on its own gets gamed under pressure. The organizations that sustain this invest just as seriously in the human side.
That's exactly what the Corporate Rebels Masterclass is built for. In 6 weeks, you'll work through the proven structures (from Buurtzorg, Haier, Viisi, and NER Group) and the transformation approach that develops the people who have to live inside them.
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