Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Consensus decision making

[Racheli Gai (racheli]

We spend a lot of time discussing blocks because that's where people 
get stuck
when they don't use the process the right way.
To me, the hardest part about consensus is that very few of us come to 
cohousing with
good understanding of consensus, or of working cooperatively to reach 
decisions.
Our dominant culture is incredibly competitive, and much of it 
hierarchical.  So, the
change to working by consensus is a major paradigm change, and bound to 
be difficult.
IMO most groups don't get enough training to begin with, so they are 
off to a very rocky
start.  Often the process gets misused, which contributes to erosion in 
levels of trust, and
the creation of a large pool of resentment etc. - All of this makes the 
possibility of using
consensus well even more remote.

The fact that working by consensus is hard doesn't mean, to me, that 
it's not something
worth learning and getting good at.
-------------------
Also, I think that a lot of the discussions on this list are about 
problems: People
don't have the urge to write when things go well...  This doesn't mean 
that everything
in cohousing is problematic, and no good stuff exists.  This is also 
true of the use of
consensus - people don't often write to tell the rest of us how well it 
worked for them
in resolving this or that problem...

Racheli.


On Aug 12, 2008, at 7:13 AM, Sharon Villines wrote:

> On Aug 11, 2008, at 10:35 PM, John Faust wrote:
>
> > The reason for suggesting blocks/objections be grounded in the
> > vision/mission/principles of the community is because these
> > represent the
> > basic agreements on what the community aspires to (vision/mission)
> > and how
> > it should go about it (principles).
>
> A nicely worded presentation of the importance of group agreements.
> One way to phrase the above sentence would be to say that _consent_
> must be grounded in the vision/mission/principles of the community. We
> talk a lot  about what objections must be based on but very little
> about what consent must be based on.
>
> There was a message that flew by yesterday that I lost about a book on
> consensus methods that showed that there were many definitions of
> consensus and thus one person's view was just one person's view.
>
> What I'm attempting to do is not present "one person's view" but to
> question the concept of consensus. What is it? Why do we use it? Why
> is it so sacred in cohousing?
>
> We spend an enormous amount of time discussing "blocks" as if they
> were important but almost none discussing consensus itself, as if we
> all knew what it was and why we use it.
>
> I'm questioning the romantic notions of consensus that end in
> frustration and confusion and exclusion. What fundamentally is
> consensus decision-making? What result is it intended to accomplish?
>
> Sharon
> ----
> Sharon Villines
> Coauthor with John Buck of We the People
> Consenting to a Deeper Democracy
> A Guide to Sociocratic Principles and Methods
> ISBN: 9780979282706
> http://www.sociocracy.info
>
>
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