Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: group communication and false consensus

[Rob Sandelin (robsan]

 BM.Vornbrock  shared:

        >The group has a collective unconcious similar to the human unconcious.
        >This means that topics that are shared by the group surface,
        >sometimes in twisted ways, when they aren't addressed up front
        >or at least acknowledged and conciously set aside.
        
        
I would agree and I would also point out that when issues aren't 
addressed up front it can often lead to false consensus, where what you 
think just happened was what everyone wanted because, didn't they all 
say it was Ok?

Collective unconcious is also expressed in the assumptions we hold 
about the group and each other.  I good example of this came up the 
other day in our group over recycling.  Nowhere in any written form, or 
actually in any meeting have we ever said that recycling was an 
important value. We just assumed that everyone beleived that and it was 
quite a shock to some of us to find that one of the members doesn't 
recycle!  It led to a lively discussion, still underway about values 
clarification. (again?, didn't we just do that?)

As groups we often make assumptions which are never addressed or 
clarified which cause many surprises, sometimes unpleasant.  This is 
being remedied in our group by having someone look for the assumptions 
which are inherient in our more important decisions, pointing them out, 
and being sure they are all acknowledged.  This turned out to be 
incredibly important in our commonhouse design in that it actually 
freed us from some very limited design thinking.