Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Handling emergency decisions

[John Gear (catalyst]

>Hello.  My name is Judy Adler and I've recently become an associate 
>member of the Cornerstone cohousing group in the Boston area.  My 
>committee is interested in finding out about what procedures other groups 
>have come up with for making emergency decisions, even down to the level 
>of what constitutes an emergency decision. 

My advice is that you stop thinking of "what constitutes an emergency
decision" as something you get "down to the level of" ... that *is* almost
the whole ball of wax.  Good understanding of what makes an *emergency* is
90% of the battle.  Another 5% is making sure everyone knows *who* is
authorized to make them, when the situations are recognized.  How to make
emergency decisions is only 5% at most.  If your situations are so
predictable that you can map out a process for responding to them, you
*don't* have emergencies, you have contingencies you can plan for.

To make emergency situations capably you need to spend some time
brainstorming all the cases that you would want someone to be able to decide
things for the group and extract from that list the criteria that you can
agree on--like cost avoided, irrevocable decisions not made by city agencies
without your input, etc.  Then you have to make sure that there are
crystal-clear criteria that everyone agrees on for when one person can
commit the whole community to something.

And then decide who's empowered to make those decisions in the absence of
whatever you define as a quorum.  That's a trust issue and you have to deal
with that in your group membership selection process.

Finally, you need to decide clearly the limits of the "emergency" decider's
authority to decide.  A decision commiting $5k vs. one committing $50k might
change your feeling about whether or not it was *really* an emergency or
just very, very inconvenient to involve everyone.

As someone with a fair amount of experience in emergency management I would
suggest that you should limit what you define as an emergency very, very
strictly.  Giving someone the ok to make an emergency decision and then
second guessing them is a good way to have a group fall apart--while still
being stuck with decisions that everyone feels are *terrible* or wildly
expensive to fix.


 We use group concensus to 
>make decisions, but it has occured to us that we may at some point need 
>to make a speedy decision in less time than it takes to convene a general 
>meeting.  One example that came up was the need to make a bid on a site 
>within a very short period of time in order not to lose the property.  
>
>All suggestions are welcome.
>
>jsa [at] laspau.mhs.harvard.edu  
>
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