The Oneida Nation: Governance and Membership Systems

This is post 15 of 23 in a series on Systems Thinking: Managing Chaos and Complexity by Jamshid Gharajedaghi (ISBN: 978-0-7506-7973-2).

We’re now in Part IV of the book, titled “Systems Practice: The Gutsy Few.” After all that theory in earlier chapters, Gharajedaghi finally shows us what it looks like when you actually apply systems thinking to a real organization. And the first case study he picks is the Oneida Nation.

Background: Why the Oneida Nation?

Gharajedaghi opens Part IV with a personal note. He traces his career from Berkeley to IBM to a long partnership with Russ Ackoff. He’s worked with Indian tribes, corporations in Japan, organizations in South Africa. He picks five case studies for the book, and the Oneida Nation comes first. He clearly has a soft spot for it. He calls it “probably one of the most emotionally satisfying projects I have worked on.”

The design team included Debra Doxtator (chairperson), Kathy Hughes (treasurer), and Artly Skenandore, who brought deep knowledge of the Oneida language and culture. Gharajedaghi credits Skenandore as the critical link between the Oneida’s past and their future. The version in the book is the fifth iteration, and it’s still not final. It keeps evolving.

Desired Specifications: What They Actually Wanted

Before jumping into the design, the team laid out what they wanted the redesigned Nation to look like. This is a crucial step that most organizations skip. You need to know where you’re going before you figure out how to get there.

The specifications are ambitious. The Oneida wanted to learn from their history while embracing modern values. They wanted individuality and collective identity. Equitable distribution across generations. Core competencies that set them apart. Openness to new learning. Self-determination without one-sided dependencies. Equal partnerships with local, state, and federal governments.

And here’s what I find interesting: they wanted to be a preferred neighbor, customer, and supplier in every relationship. Not insular. Outward-facing. The kind of community others actively want to work with.

Systems Architecture: Seven Dimensions

The architecture has seven dimensions: five operating, one governing, one judicial. The seven are: Governance, Membership Systems, Learning Systems, Business Systems, Core Services, External Environment, and Judicial System.

None of the five operating dimensions is more important than the others. But they don’t all use the same performance criteria. Business units are profit centers. Core Services units are performance centers (budgeted as a percentage of total throughput). Over time, everything shifts toward an output orientation. You can’t subordinate membership to business or business to governance. They coexist as equals. That’s what makes it a system instead of just a hierarchy.

Governance: Fixing the Bottleneck

The Oneida Nation’s constitution puts all power (legislative, executive, judicial) with the General Tribal Council, which is basically a meeting of all members. Since you can’t run a government through one big meeting, the GTC delegated everything to an elected Business Committee.

For a while, that worked fine. But as the Nation grew in complexity, the Business Committee became a bottleneck. It was trying to handle legislation, execution, and judicial issues all at once. That’s too much for any single body.

The redesign renamed it the Governing Body and split up the responsibilities. The Governing Body would focus on legislation and policy. Executive duties would shift to operating platforms and a Chief of Staff. Judicial functions would go to an independent judicial system.

Chief of Staff

The Chief of Staff manages interactions between the dimensions internally and between the Oneida Nation and the outside world. They define core ideals, build consensus, run periodic “Mess Formulation” reports (a term from Ackoff), set priorities, and conduct quality audits. Big role, but focused on coordination, not doing everything.

Planning, Learning, and Control System

This is the support structure for the Chief of Staff. It has three branches: Financial Systems, Technical Systems, and Human Systems. Each branch has a director who develops policies, monitors implementation, and serves as an early warning system. Financial watches the money. Technical handles architecture and information systems. Human Systems deals with workforce quality, hiring, and career development. They feed into the same governance structure so the leadership has a complete picture.

Planning, Learning, and Control Board

The PLCB is where it all comes together. Its members include the Governing Body chairperson, the Chief of Staff, the Treasurer, the three system directors, and the five general managers from each operating platform.

The board does three things: defines problems, designs solutions, and recommends policies to the Governing Body. But its main purpose is creating synergy between the five operating dimensions.

Here’s what I find most interesting about this section. Gharajedaghi redefines “control” as “learning” and redefines “authority” from “power over” to “power to.” The board doesn’t control people. It controls the decision process. Everyone develops shared ownership of decision criteria, and learning happens when there’s a gap between what you expected and what actually happened.

Membership Systems: Building a Nation

This is the heart of the redesign. Membership Systems are about nation building. They provide a platform for participation, conflict resolution, shared vision, and empowerment.

Empowerment: Not Sharing, Duplicating

Gharajedaghi makes a distinction that I think is one of the most important in the whole book. Empowerment is not sharing power. Sharing implies a fixed amount, like cutting a pizza. If you give someone a slice, you have less.

Instead, empowerment is duplicating power. When everyone understands the reasons behind decisions, they can all act in harmony. And that actually makes leaders more powerful, not less, because they have genuine support rather than forced compliance.

Leaders can’t leave people behind, and they can’t fall behind the people. Trust doesn’t require conformity. It means members can disagree but still understand the decision criteria and live with the outcome. Building that political maturity is the whole point of the Membership Network.

The Tie That Bonds

What holds a nation together? Not laws or enforcement. It’s a shared image of where you’re going and organizing principles rooted in shared history.

Gharajedaghi puts it well: “You cannot build a great society with belittled people just as you cannot build a great people in a belittled society.” Collectivity without individuality is totalitarianism. Individuality without collectivity is chaos. You need both. Roots and wings.

The Membership Network

The practical structure is a multilevel network of nine-member cells. Each cell works through: understand the context, define the problem, design a solution.

It scales through nesting. Nine primary cells hold 81 members. Each of those 81 forms another nine-member cell: 729 on the second level. A third level reaches 6,561 participants. Keep going until every eligible member is included.

The design document iterates through each level. Design team creates version one. Governing Body refines it. Primary cells get it next. Then the second level. Each round incorporates more voices.

Consensus Building: Getting to Be of the Same Mind

This is where the Oneida’s traditional culture meets modern systems thinking in a really beautiful way.

Gharajedaghi lays out three principles: appreciate context (problems don’t exist in isolation), separate the problem from existing solutions, and redesign rather than reuse what you’ve always done.

The Oneida’s traditional consensus process uses three clan symbols. Each plays a distinct role:

• Wolves are pathfinders. They set direction, define the agenda, and establish context. They also integrate final solutions and keep the fire alive.
• Turtles are the “well of information.” They deliberate, provide context, and define problems. They’re the mess formulators.
• Bears are the problem solvers. They generate alternatives and recommend solutions.

The process flows from wolves to turtles to bears and back. Solutions go from bears back to turtles for a relevance check, then to wolves for integration. It’s a loop, not a line.

This is different from majority rule. Majority rule works when you have public debate and mass communication. But in participative cultures, consensus building is slower and more thorough. Discussions continue until an acceptable solution is reached, not until 51% vote yes. Gharajedaghi argues majority rule here would create alienation. The traditional approach is effective (engages everyone), legitimate (culturally sanctioned), and exciting (uses the past as a vehicle for the future).

My Take

What strikes me most is that Gharajedaghi didn’t impose a Western corporate model. He found systems thinking principles already embedded in Oneida culture and built on them. The wolf/turtle/bear model maps almost perfectly onto his own framework of innovators, problem formulators, and problem solvers. That’s evidence that good organizational thinking shows up across cultures independently.

The Membership Network is ambitious. Getting 6,000+ people into a structured deliberation process is no small thing. But the logic is sound. If you want genuine buy-in, you need genuine participation. Voting isn’t enough.

In the next post, we’ll cover learning systems, business systems, and the Nation’s relationship with the external environment.

Previous: Designing Business Architecture - Processes and Realization

Next: The Oneida Nation - Learning, Business, and External Environment