Have you read the latest version of your organization’s founding documents? Your state’s constitution? The bylaws of your school? While these legal documents may seem as tedious as the software terms and conditions you never read, their implications are profound. You might find out how board members (and CEOs) are elected or removed. You might discover how the charter can be rewritten. And you might stumble upon the control mechanisms authorities can use and how. It’s popular (and cliché) to talk about knowing the US Constitution back to front. But there are other constitutions which may have even more significant impacts on your day-to-day life.
“I’m watching Succession and all those power games are repugnant” you might say. But rather like death and sex, it’s the repression of governance topics that manufactures repugnance not their realities. If you’re a mutual insurance company customer, you have voting and other rights that you probably aren’t exercising. If you own a home, your city and neighborhood association are influencing and making policy choices that will affect your property. It’s a two-fold problem: people aren’t reading or participating and the people who are would like it to stay that way.
By shunting governance to the shadows of society, only the interested (i.e. the ambitious, powerful, and privileged) have influence over some of the most important mechanisms in society. “The average person” is not as lazy or disinterested or unintelligent some of the lawyers and leaders will have you believe. Making governance accessible and democratic means developing organizations with simpler and more available charters that actually have the members at heart. What we have today is convolution, sophisticated self-interest, and the tepid commitment to “focus on additional stakeholders” by the people who control the constitutions that impact you. The “disinterested masses” are not as disinterested as some would like you to think. Now it’s time to create charters (and institutional mechanisms & processes) that channel that interest into effective participation in governance processes, rather than vague rage at the “people in charge”.