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Deep Democracy

Deep Democracy is a psycho-social-political paradigm and methodology developed by Arnold Mindell1 (1992), the founder of Process Work (also known as Process Oriented Psychology).2 Deep Democracy has been further developed into the multi-dimensional process oriented leadership model presented here by Max Schupbach, co-founder of the Deep Democracy Institute,3 the Process Work Institute,4 and founder of MAXFXX,5 an organizational consulting group.

Group difficulties tend to escalate when marginalized signals are not addressed because the underlying roles remain invisible—like ghosts that are felt and effect the group but aren’t directly expressed or spoken to. Groups tend to be more cohesive when disturbing subgroups and individuals are seen as emergent roles and welcomed to interact with the group’s dominant views and individuals.
Some common problems in achieving this are that people are often opposed to certain roles and at times enjoy winning by defeating and silencing others; structural leaders often feel threatened by the emergent, momentary leadership of others; and designated facilitators are sometimes difficult in the sense that they often don’t support the group’s direction as opposed to their own agenda.

Process work’s field theory says that the psychology of the facilitator and the group are organized by the same forces. Facilitators can improve their ability to understand a difficult group’s dynamics, to facilitate more effectively, and to transform disturbances by discovering the roles that exist within the group, exploring the tensions and feelings that exist between various parts within themselves, and helping the group to understand the roles, address ghost roles, and resolve tensions.

Deep Democracy:
Mindell  (2000), originally a physicist and Jungian analyst, has researched and written extensively on how awareness creates reality, how we perceive it on different levels, and how this creates different frameworks of reality. This idea follows discoveries in quantum mechanics, chaos theory, and the symbolic thinking of Jungian psychology and also stems from ancient spiritual traditions such as Taoism and indigenous philosophies.

Process is defined as the constant flow of information (Arnold Mindell, 1989)—which we experience through signals, body symptoms, relationship experiences, and other channels of information flow. In the late eighties Mindell started to formulate his ideas as a political principle that he called Deep Democracy:  

Unlike "classical" democracy, which focuses on majority rule, Deep Democracy suggests that all voices, states of awareness, and frameworks of reality are important. Deep Democracy also suggests that the information carried within these voices, awarenesses, and frameworks are all needed to understand the complete process of the system. Deep Democracy is an attitude that focuses on the awareness of voices that are both central and marginal. (Wikipedia, 2006)

The focus on voices both central and marginal doesn’t refer only to the social theories of the 1960’s. It also refers to the voices of various states of consciousness, subjective body experiences, synchronicities, other subjective experiences such as those associated with rank and roles, and those voices that seem to come from beyond space and time.