Cohousing-L Mailing List: RE: Voting backup

[Rob Sandelin (floriferous]

One point which I think may have been missed is that sometimes people join
cohousing groups who have little or no interest in being cooperative. Also,
occasionally groups get stuck with a  member who has severe
dysfunctionality. These type of people have held groups decision  making
hostage by blocking all decisions. I used to fly around the country trying
to help groups out of these kinds of messes, and saw lots of examples of
this kind of thing. In all the cases, having a back up voting process would
have fixed the problem about being held hostage.

It is great when ALL the members of a group support the best interests of
the group. However, this is sometimes not the case, and in my observation,
cohousing in particular seems to have trouble with this. People come in to
cohousing groups with a wide variety of interest and support in cooperation.
Sometimes this leads to real problems trying to use consensus as a decision
process. People who have little interest in being cooperative don't want to
spend the time it takes.

Here is another scenario that is not uncommon. A person says about a
pre-forming proposal: I would block that.  This statement can be done on
purpose, in order to kill the proposal before it starts, and to intimidate
the proposers. In a group where individuals can stop the group, but not be
held accountable to the group, consensus process no longer functions.

So, if you don't have a voting backup, you should at least have in place a
process that holds the blocker somehow accountable to the group. Otherwise,
blocking becomes a means of getting my way, and if that's all I care about,
then the community  suffers and consensus is out the window.

Rob Sandelin
Sky Valley Environments: Nature is our classroom
www.sharingwood.com
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