Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Revisiting Consensus

[Rob Sandelin (floriferous]

I recommend cultivating a community process that encourages people to be
willing to try things out and if they don't work right at first, to change
processes until they work as best as they can.  I have experienced some
cohousing people who seem very inflexible, as if once the  dinner time is
set, it's forever. This inflexibility rarely works out, people change, needs
change, the community changes and so some of your agreements will be
changed. In my experience, once you move in almost all your decisions end up
being very changeable. If it does not work out, change it.  It is my opinion
that spending months trying to make the perfect (pet, gun, dinner, food,
work ....fill in the blank) agreement ends up with a lot of theoretical
stuff. I think it is better to make simple start, add things as they come up
rather than ...what if.....  A surprising number of what ifs that people
bring up never actually happen. 

If you have  a great deal of trouble making a decision about something
highly charged, people will be reluctant to reexamine it, even if it is
obviously not working and  people are not following your agreement.  This
seems to be pretty normal.

In my travels around the community world I recall a few places which held an
annual celebration of their community. As part of this they gave themselves
pats on the back for the amazing good stuff that was working out, and they
did an honest appraisal of things that were not working, brainstorming up
ideas why they might not be working, and also brainstorming up a list of
potential ideas to solve things.  All this brainstorming then was later
fodder for future meeting proposals. I had the great experience of
facilitating this process in a couple of places and it seemed to be very
functional. 

In Summary, most decisions are temporary, revise them as needed.

Rob Sandelin
Going on 17 years at Sharingwood Cohousing