Cohousing-L Mailing List: Changes in Decision Making Processes

[Mac & Sandy Thomson (ganesh]

Patty Nowlin wrote:
>   Have other groups found that their decision making processes changed
> during the construction phase?  What have groups found to be the most
> efficient  way to make decisions during the construction phase?

Our decision making is primarily consensus although we can go to an
alternative super-majority vote (75%) in case of urgency or other
reasons.  That didn't change during construction, but we did tend to use
the alternative super-majority vote more often because we had more
urgent decisions.  (For more info, go to the agreements section of our
website below.)

But the thing that best allowed us to get through the construction phase
was delegation.  We decided by consensus to delegate the vast majority
of design decisions to our Design Review Team (DRT) and delegate many of
the county approval, bank financing, and construction decisions to our
Project Manager (me).  Any was welcome to be on the DRT.  It was a lot
of work to research all those design issues so basically the folks that
did the work got to make decisions. 

I think overall it served the community very well to carefully delegate
certain authorities and thereby avoid inordinate amount of meeting time
and allow folks most interested in certain issues to make the decisions.

We still employ that strategy now that we live in community.  Our
'Teams' agreement specifically details the responsibilities and
authorities of each team.  Some authorities are delegated fully to the
teams and in other cases they only have authority to bring proposals to
the communtiy for a community decision.  The folks that are most
interested in certain areas serve on those teams.  It's our attempt to
balance fully participative governance with not spending our lives in
meetings.  We're a young community (living here since the turn of the
millenium) so we're still learning how it all works.

Good luck to you!

- Mac
-- 
           Mac & Sandy Thomson           Heartwood Cohousing
           ganesh [at] rmi.net                Durango, Colorado
        Web Site:   http://www.heartwoodcohousing.com


"When we remember that we're all mad, the mysteries disolve and life
stands explained."
            - Mark Twain
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