Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Questioning "Consensus" Decision-Making

[Stuart Staniford-Chen (stanifor]

Personally, I would be unhappy if my own group wanted to drop consensus 
decision making.  Winston Churchill once said, of national decision 
making, "democracy is the worst possible form of government, except for 
all the other forms which have been tried."  (Close paraphrase)  That's 
about how I feel about consensus as a decision making procedure for my 
community - that it's often slow and frustrating, but I can't imagine 
anything else working better.

I see the central problem with voting as arising in the situation where 
there is a strong conflict in the group.  With consensus, nothing gets 
done until the conflict is resolved.  (Maybe nothing ever gets done).  
With voting, a decision will be taken fairly quickly by majority vote.  
The minority has no investment in that decision whatsoever.  That has two 
problems that I see.  
        
        i) People have no incentive to moderate their opinions and try and 
compromise.  They can take extreme, purist positions, safe in the 
knowledge that they will be overruled and not have to live with the 
consequences of their position.  (This happens in national politics a 
lot).

        ii) The outvoted minority is quite likely to try and undermine the 
decision, either overtly (eg by leaving), or subvertly (whoops, careless 
of me to let my Roundup drift over the rose garden I voted against last 
week, but lost on after a bitter fight).

(I'm not talking about where voting is used occasionally as a last resort, 
or for certain relatively unimportant decisions, but rather where it's 
the main decision making model all the time).

My feeling is that *most* people learn to be pretty responsible around the 
power to block consensus after a while.  They learn to use it with extreme 
caution.  After the group has sat through a couple of awful issues that 
can't seem to be resolved for month after month, people get more willing 
to compromise/be creative.

This is not to suggest that my group doesn't sometimes get stuck on issues 
that seem dumb for a long time.  But we are better than we used to be.  
(Eg we rarely get stuck on "wording issues").  Sometimes we get stuck 
because a seemingly trivial issue is really a code for some deeper 
problem.  (Eg we have tend to have a lot of problems whenever we have to 
spend money to buy a new widget (chairs, mowers, washing machines) - often 
those problems really arise out of differing levels of commitment towards, 
or definitions of, sustainability.

I completely agree with Dan about the need for delegation.  Large group 
frames the issues -> small group comes up with a detail scheme -> large 
group rubber stamps it unless it has real problems.  I agree also that 
design issues are the hardest for a consensus process - I'm curious 
actually why his post came from someone living in a several-year-old 
community rather than from a in-process-of-building community. 

Finally, Dan tries to frame the issue this way: voting is proven because 
one long term intentional community that is successful uses it, while he 
does not think there are examples of long term communities using 
consensus.  I'll let someone more knowledgeable about FIC type communities 
address that.  I will point out that when most Danish cohousing 
communities were built using consensus as the main model, and all American 
communities (that I'm aware of) were built that way, the onus of proof is 
on the guy who wants to change the system, rather than the rest of us.

Stuart.


Stuart Staniford-Chen
stanifor [at] cs.ucdavis.edu
http://seclab.cs.ucdavis.edu/~stanifor/cohousing.html