Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Group Think

[Moz (list]

Sharon said:
> The context of this discussion is decision-making groups. I
> find that teams tend to become filled with people who think
> the same way.

Although some of us are reactionary contrarians with control
issues. We need to be involved in the decision-making, but
we automatically disagree with everything. Am I doing that
now? Whoodathunkit :)

The group-think discussion doesn't resonate for me, and I
think this is the reason. To me, group-think has negative
emotional connotations, in the immediate, visceral sense - I
just need to break out of it. Which gives me the opposite
problem - I have to consciously think about why I want to
object to a proposal, and whether it's actually that I
couldn't live with something, or whether I just think there
are valid objections (but if no-one is bringing them up it
is not my place to speak for them, especially since if
they're not bringing them up they probably don't apply).

And yes, other people do find this hard to deal with, and I
do get blamed for conflict that is actually nothing to do
with me, I was just there when it happened. But people
associate me with conflict, so I am the one people remember
as central to it.

> Rob Sandelin used to say that cohousing communities grew less and less
> diverse over the years, not more diverse.

I can imagine that happening. One constraint is that the
need for capital to buy into the coho selects for people
advantaged in the society that coho exists within, making
diversity partly synonymous with economic diversity. One
approach we're taking is selecting for/recruiting among
people who have experience in anarchist activist groups
(admittedly this is easy since we were in those groups too).

Moz