Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Consesus Training

[Mac Thomson (ganesh]

Our group, San Juan Cohousing, has done quite a bit of work on improving 
our meeting skills.  We think that it's vital for each of us to learn to 
work with consensus since it's not usually a skill that people learn in 
society.  Here are some of the things that we've done:

RESEARCH
Members of our Process and Communication Team have studied "Building 
United Judgment", Butler's Book, the Cohousing Resource Guide, etc.  
Based on that research and our own hands-on experience along the way, 
we've created specific agreements about what we mean by consensus and 
how we run our meetings.

TRAINING
All members are required to complete consensus training before they are 
allowed to "vote" on decisions.  The initial training that we had was 
led by an outsider with extensive corporate organizational training 
experience.  He did an excellent job with communicationa and team 
building issues, but was a little weak on consensus itself.  It was 20 
hours of training and cost us $1500.  For people that missed that 
training and that now want to get the training, we'll probably put 
together something comparable in-house.

As Rob mentioned, we have organized a team of facilitators.  There are 8 
of us who have attended 8 hours of in-house training.  Facilitation 
rotates amongst us 8.  We just finished this training and already it 
looks like it will really help.  Whichever of us 8 facilitators are not 
facilitating for a given meeting critique the meeting facilitator and 
give him/her the feedback within 24 hours.  This also really helps us 
work together to figure out how to better handle sticky situations.  
Additionally, as part of our Book of Agreements, we have a document 
called Facilitator's Guidelines and another called Facilitator's 
Toolbox.  These include lots of information on how to facilitate 
(gleaned from the resources mentioned above).

We also use the Color Cards which we find to be invaluable.

If anyone is interested in any of our agreements, you can find some at 
our website or I may be able to email you others.

Good luck with your process.  We've really enjoyed working on ours and 
slowly, but surely getting better as we go.

-- 
           Mac Thomson                   San Juan Cohousing
           ganesh [at] rmi.net                Durango, Colorado
            Web Site:   http://www.rmi.net/~ganesh

 "In the long run men hit only what they aim at.  Therefore, though they 
should fail immediately, they had better aim at something high."
                          - Henry David Thoreau