Cohousing-L Mailing List: RE: Something faster and easier than consensus?

[Rob Sandelin (floriferous]

There are lots of ways to make decisions faster and easier than consensus,
and they work as long as you don't care about the minority and how they
feel. Roberts rules of order is a very fast and easy system to use, it has
clearly prescribed rules and is widely used all over. It is rarely used by
communities because it leaves relationships in a state of disconnect, and
the point of community is to connect.

There are many interesting variations of decision making. My own learning
from my experience of 13 years  living in a community is that there are
situations where certain methods work better than others. Here is a brief
recap of a long subject which, as many people know, I can go on for days
about.

1. A single person is authorized to make decisions in a defined realm. For
example, I am the Sharingwood Forest Steward and I am authorized to make
certain decisions on site in the moment. We have others in similar roles,
based on their expertise and trust level.

2. Groups of people make decisions in a defined realm. For example, the
commonhouse team in my community decides what kind of tools and changes made
regarding the commonhouse. They have a budget to buy things which they
control. This works best when there is a high level of communication, e.g.,
posted agendas, distributed  minutes. There may also be situations which can
be defined to set limits on what teams should decide, for example, the
permanent changing of the use of a common area.

3. A subset of interested people form a temporary task force to decide or
implement something. For example we used a task force to decide about
improving our children's play equipment. This is a group that dissolves once
their defined task goes away. Decision boards work the same way.

4. An outside entity makes the decision. For example, we placed our
greenbelt into a open space agreement which gives the County certain
decisions regarding the use of that space.

5. The whole group makes the decision. This is common for big picture
things, budgets, visions, things which teams punt. Big groups are best used
as  brain sources for  coming up with ideas, resources, etc. This does not
have to happen at a meeting, for example a survey can give lots of ideas, or
the group can be polled by email or telephone. When the group is larger than
15, this method is not very useful for detailed decisions, such as what to
plant in the garden, or what color of towels to buy for the bathroom.

Any of these methods can be combined in a variety of ways and can use voting
or consensus, or some other structure.

One recent experience. In order to speed up the implementation of the
placement of play equipment, a task force held a community wide vote,
including children. The outcome of the vote was clear, but a  large number
of people did not like the process. This resulted in a two hour sharing
circle, and a three hour board meeting last night, lots of angst and
unhappiness. Five hours of meeting so far, with more yet to come. In my
opinion, had we done this using our typical meeting consensus process, we
would have been resolved this in a 2 hour meeting (or less), and people
would have probably been much more satisfied and happy with the outcome.

We have a large crop of new people from last year, who are going through the
learning curve. It is painful to watch them go through what many of us know:
that inclusion up front, good communication, solid clear proposals make
complex things much easier to work through.

Rob Sandelin
South Snohomish County at the headwaters of Ricci Creek
Sky Valley Environments  <http://www.nonprofitpages.com/nica/SVE.htm>
Field skills training for student naturalists
Floriferous [at] msn.com


-----Original Message-----
From: cohousing-l-admin [at] cohousing.org
[mailto:cohousing-l-admin [at] cohousing.org]On Behalf Of Dahako [at] aol.com
Sent: Tuesday, August 05, 2003 12:44 PM
To: cohousing-l [at] cohousing.org
Subject: Re: [C-L]_Something faster and easier than consensus?



Hi -

IMHO, virtually anything is faster and easier than consensus. Saving time in
the present isn't the reason to do consensus - community building and saving
time in the implementation stage is.  Again, IMHO.

An effective but time-taking exercise to help people feel heard is to do a
round robin in which the first person speaks (briefly ;>) ) on the topic at
hand, then the next person mirrors what was said, to the satisfaction of the
original speaker.  Then the next person speaks, and the pattern repeats
around the circle - twice.

It's important in doing this exercise to not let the people whose turn it is
to mirror go on to express their own viewpoint immediately after doing the
mirroring.  Go all the way around the circle twice and let each person do
(and think about) one thing at a time.  In groups I've done this with, the
repeating stops pretty quickly as people learn to listen and to trust that
their neighbors are listening.

Takes a while though.

-Jessie Handforth Kome
Eastern Village Cohousing
"Where we're trying to figure out what play equipment to put on the green
roof - jungle gym, sand box, hot tub. . ."
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