Cohousing-L Mailing List: A consensus question.

[Stuart Staniford-Chen (stanifor]

This is motivated by a situation in my community, but I use a  
hypothetical example to highlight the particular question I'm interested  
in.

Suppose a group consenses to some policy - let's say that cats are  
banned in the community.  Over a period of years, some community member's  
hearts are softened towards cats, and some cat lovers move in.   
Periodically, people raise the issue of allowing some cats, but there are  
some very committed folks who oppose felinity and who will not or cannot  
consent to having some cats.

In my community, as I think in many others, if the group cannot reach  
consensus then the existing decision stays in force.  Thus in the cat  
example, the community can reach a situation where the group has no  
consensus about cats, yet it does have a community policy about cats.   
This can potentially persist for years.

There seems to be an element of unfairness about this.  The cat haters  
have considerably more power in the situation than the cat lovers.  I'll  
call this the "existing decision bias."

My understanding of consensus is that it is supposed to be about equal  
power for everybody.  I also feel strongly that the *major* advantage of  
consensus is that no subgroup can afford to ignore the views of another  
subgroup.  This discipline forces groups to to be creative in searching  
for a solution that will include everyone, to compromise, to communicate  
really well, to identify the core issues for them and not get hung up on  
surface issues, etc.  This leads to good decisions and happy communities  
(as long as people do acquire the necessary skills).

However, in the cat example, the cat haters do not *have* to compromise  
whereas the cat lovers must.  Of course, we hope that cat haters will be  
reasonable people who care about the mental health of cat lovers and  
hence will be willing to work on the issue. However, this does not take  
away the fact that the process is loaded, in some sense, by the existing  
decision bias.  Even when this aspect of consensus is not invoked  
specifically, it constantly colors the decisions that are made because  
everybody knows that it *could* be invoked and adjusts their positions  
accordingly.

On the other hand, I don't believe my community could function *without*  
the existing decision bias.  At just about every meeting somebody comes  
up with some idea that the group cannot consense to.  Because of the  
existing decision bias, the proposer is just shit out of luck and they  
either have to compromise their proposal substantially, or go away to  
scheme up some other crazy idea.  We have all learned to accept that we  
cannot do things in the group unless there is a good deal of support for  
it.  If we did not have the bias, then any time some strong-willed  
proposer was passionate about their proposal, they could hold the entire  
group to ransom until opponents ran out of energy and gave in to the  
proposal.  I think that would be very unhealthy.

I don't want to give the impression that this issue is a regular problem  
in my group.  The great bulk of the time, we are all flexible and  
careful, there is not too much passion on the issue, and we can agree  
quite quickly on a generally acceptable policy.  However, we are  
currently in a situation where reasonable people disagree strongly on the  
right course of action for the group to take and so we continue with our  
present course - which suits some people and not others.

I wondered how other groups had experienced this situation, and what  
they might have learnt?

Stuart.

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Stuart Staniford-Chen           |        N St Cohousing, Davis, CA
stanifor [at] cohousing.org             |       Cohousing Network Webweaver