Cohousing-L Mailing List: Collaborative group process

[Rob Sandelin (floriferous]

 Formal consensus, sociocracy, informal consensus are all means for groups
to collaborate together.  By imposing titles and structures it makes a
replicatible  process and easier to pick up and work with. And, as all of us
who actually have lived in collaborative groups discover, there is no
perfect process, and thus process glitches fail to always, everytime reach
the highest collaborative potential.  It is all a learning process, both as
a group and as each individual learns about themselves and how to
collaborate with others. As you  travel this learning journey you find
subtleties in yourself and your group responses, and you hopefully improve
your abilities to collaborate. 

There will always be glitches.  Expect them, embrace them, laugh with them,
learn from them. 

My standard advice to collaborative groups is to create a team of
facilitators who can study process, the group, and themselves, and over time
become highly skilled in helping the group define and achieve its goals. It
helps if the facilitators train the group, a little bit at each meeting, how
to become better at collaboration. These small interventions in my
experience tend to work much better than big training weekends. And spend
some time evaluating what you do, thus hopefully improving in the future.

Process is life, it is ongoing, from generation to generation, evolving,
growing, changing. If you expect one set of rules will always work, you will
probably be disappointed.


Rob Sandelin, Former consensus facilitation trainer,
Sharingwood Cohousing, Snohomish County, WA
Floriferous [at] msn.com
Writer, Naturalist  The Environmental Science School
Snohomish County, WA