Cohousing-L Mailing List: RE: Difficult decisions

[Rob Sandelin (robsan]

Stuart posted (among other things) about the difficulties of 
transitioning between decision making types, such as between voting and 
consensus.  I offer a couple of ideas:

1.Think proactively.  Put your decision and conflict resolution 
processes in place before you get to the hairy scary thing.  This way, 
everyone has already agreed what to do when you get to the hairy scary 
thing and you just do it.

2. Make voting more like a game.  In the example of colors for 
instance, Make a color sample chart with all the potential choices, 
give everyone 3 adhesive sticky dots and have them place the dots on 
their favorite choices.  This is voting but doesn't feel like it.  The 
colors which get the least amounts of "votes" get dropped and the 
process is continued until either a clear "winner" emerges, or a 
dichotomy occurs between two equal choices.  If a dichotomy occurs, 
start over - from the very beginning.  If you get the same two choices 
on the second try I would be very surprised.

3. Make an allowance for passion.  Some people care tremendously about 
a thing which others are totally disinterested in.  At Sharingwood our 
voting process has a "passion" number.  One the first round of voting 
you place a number which indicates how much you care about the issue 
and this is used to determine the outcome of a close vote.  For example 
we use 3/4 majority.  If the majority is almost but not quite 3/4ths, 
we look at the "passion" numbers and see on which side they lay.  If 
the majority side shows a high passion index and the minority side 
shows a low passion index then the decision will slide to the majority 
and the reverse is also true.

4.  This relates to number 1, make a list of the criteria, in advance 
of the conditions and guidelines of where voting vs. consensus is used.

I would happy to post our full voting process (its written down and 
agreed to already) if anyone would be interested in seeing a sample.  
It has yet to be used much as we are moving towards punting more 
decisions to small groups, especially design details.

Rob Sandelin
Sharingwood