An octopus does not have a single executive brain, gathering and processing all the sensory information and sending out commands to the eyes and tentacles. Each of the eight tentacles has its own brain, and each tentacle senses, decides, and moves independently. There is a brain in the central head, but there are more neurons in the tentacles than in the central brain.
At a recent Zoom gathering of the management team, we decided that we were more like an octopus than a usual top-down hierarchical organization.* We have several relatively independent teams, and each of these teams busies itself with a portion of the course stewardship. The teams at present are below.
| Tentacle | Role |
|---|---|
| Course Leader Training and Support | Recruit, train, and support the volunteer course leaders |
| Resilience and Acceptance Community Circles (RACCs) | Organize community circles for course graduates, train RACC facilitators, arrange periodic super-RACC meetings with special discussions |
| Technology: Website and Course Registration | Develop website, manage course registrations and registrations for RACCs for course graduates |
| Communication | Advertise courses on social media, communicate with course graduates, manage the blog page |
| Course Maintenance | Manage the course files, update |
| Course Development | Grow, develop new material |
| Evolution Council | Made up of representatives of the different teams. We hear about what each team is doing and have collaborative council meetings to discern our direction as a community. |
Join us! This course has always been a gift, and it takes many hands to keep the gift circulating. And there are powerful, deep connections that you can form with others in the process.
We have a regular flow of course graduates who choose to come help for a while to make the course possible for others. We have small jobs, temporary roles, or something bigger if it fits.
If you have completed a course and want to help the R & A course community with some of your abilities and passion, fill out this form and someone from our team will contact you. We welcome your interest and look forward to speaking with you.
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*We are grateful to John Buck for the octopus metaphor, which he used in his description of sociocracy in a Ted Talk. We do not use the sociocratic model exactly, but are also grateful and encouraged by many sociocratic principles.