Keep everyone involved and decision making efficient: that's why a car-sharing service in the Netherlands, uses the Sociocratic Circle-organization Method (SCM). SCM also prevents potential conflicts between the organization and its shareholders. 

The last step in adopting SCM came five years after the founding of Wheels4all. Last April, this Dutch car-sharing cooperative transformed itself into a company with a legal sociocratic structure: the shares of the company were transferred to a foundation with sociocratic by-laws. The preceding year, a sociocratic circle structure was put into place in the ‘work organization.'

Wheels4all started in 2003 with six cars and forty members. At last count in September, it had more than 120 cars and 1700 members. The organization has won prizes in the field of sustainable development. It is one of the three organizations that offer car sharing in The Netherlands. A Wheels4all subsidiary in Norway, that started last spring, now owns three cars in the southern part of that country.

Neighborhood
Involvement is crucial in the Wheels4all approach in which members organize themselves by neighborhood. This factor is the reason why the company was established as a cooperative: because the members wanted to run it together, says Managing Director, Henry Mentink. With Wheels4all you do not hire a car from a stranger anonymously. The users take the initiative to place a car in their neighborhood and know who is the person in charge. Members decide by consent which type of car they want (from a list drawn up by the management circle) and whether the car should have a child seat or a tow hook. "This control gives people the feeling that it is their own car," Mentink states. "They treat it more carefully and leave it cleaner, and that really reduces costs."

No quorum required
With the aid of SCM, Mentink plans, among other things, to keep increasing the efficiency of decisions and the involvement of the many members. Mentink: "In typical cooperatives, only a small number of members show up for a general meeting, which is why decisions cannot be sustained. The sociocratic approach enables us to make sustained decisions in every circle." A management circle has replaced the general members meeting. It consists of managers plus leaders of, so far, three regional circles, as well as the representatives of these circles. There is also a top circle, more or less the equivalent of the board of directors.

The old general meeting, which involved mass movement of hundreds of members to a single location, is no longer needed. Mentink earlier tried to organize voting by e-mail instead of having a face-to-face meeting, but that strategy did not allow an exchange of arguments. Although, the best solutions often did appear in the options for the electronic vote.

Peculiarities of the general meeting
It is not that he suffered much under the cooperative structure, Mentink says. But presenting plans to a general meeting acting as a board has its peculiarities. "There is a danger that you will either get the members who do not check your plans well enough to make a meaningful vote or you are dealing with obstructionists." Although Mentink experienced neither of these, when two members at a general meeting asked the board to come up with a plan to compensate for CO₂-emissions, the thought occurred to him that "our decision making on this subject would probably have been more structured if we'd taken the sociocratic approach. Then, the plan might have been written even before we came to discuss it here."

Look here for more about the structure of a company plus foundation.