Sortition in organisations

Almost all the attention on sortition goes to the state — citizens’ assemblies, a possible people’s branch. But, as the sortition advocate Ben Redhead argues, the most underexplored place for it is everywhere else: any organisation with a community of people — a workplace, a university, a union, a cooperative, even a sports club’s supporters.

Why it travels

The case is the same as for public assemblies — random, stratified selection brings cognitive diversity, removes self-selection, and lends legitimacy — with a bonus: inside an organisation you have a captive audience, which quietly solves the dropout, response-rate, and recruitment problems that dog public sortition. Redhead frames it through systems change: the more ordinary it becomes to say “I’ve been randomly selected onto a committee at work,” the more the mental model that elections pick the best leaders loosens its grip.

Three things it can do

• Engage the public — a public-facing organisation can replace tick-box consultation with a deliberative one. Eight Texas utilities did this in the 1990s; UK water and electricity bodies have done it since.
• Increase representation in a community — Democracy In Practice runs randomly-selected student governments in Bolivian schools, turning a popularity contest into something genuinely representative; the LSE Students’ Union ran a sortition-based democracy summit.
• Govern by lot — Democracy Without Elections selects its own board by sortition; the French High Council of the Military has used it since 1968 to avoid internal politicking; historically the University of Basel chose professors and Venice its Doge this way.

Inside the organisation

The most developed internal method is the Wisdom Council (created by the US consultant Jim Rough), in which a randomly-selected dozen work through an issue via Dynamic Facilitation to surface proposals with deep resonance. It became the Vorarlberg Bürgerrat (“citizens’ council”) in Austria — now a recognised public process — and has been run inside companies such as Swisscom. A Sodexo branch in Oslo ran what it billed as the world’s first employee panel; Meta ran a 6,000-person internal deliberation across 32 countries on the metaverse, and committed to a similar process for generative AI.

What’s notable is how few examples exist, given the appetite — participants almost always ask for more. Redhead’s pitch is to ride the trends organisations already chase (cognitive diversity, Agile, design thinking, the “human-centred organisation”) and offer sortition as the concrete way to deliver them — sold, always, as the solution to a real problem, not a gimmick. This extends the same logic as investor assemblies and democratising finance into the everyday institutions people actually spend their lives in.

Sources

• Ben Redhead, “The Role of Sortition in Organizations” — International Network of Sortition Advocates (INSA), 2024: youtube.com/watch?v=cd0eJqV_XPk
• David Van Reybrouck, Against Elections: The Case for Democracy (2016) — the book that launched many of these journeys.