Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Consensus, Majority Vote, "Blocks" [was Report on Survey of Cohousing Communities 2011. Just released. A must read!

[Wayne Tyson (landrest]

CoHo,

Oh, where is Hayakawa when we need him? 

A concept so crucial to human interaction should have a term unique to its 
meaning, and it is not merely pedantic to continue to explore beyond knowledge 
into understanding. A joining together (integration) in mutual pursuit of 
understanding that none may have sufficiently at command (at hand), but work 
toward it anyway may well be better than some mid-point between prejudices, and 
the term used to describe the quality of any given provisional conclusion along 
the way might be selected from a list and work ok until a better one comes 
along. It doesn't really matter much what the term is as long as it conveys the 
intended meaning. 

The fact that there has been considerable discussion on the topic is revealing. 
What one hopes is that the validity, the strength of a given signpost along the 
way toward understanding is based less on control (rigidity) and more on a 
resilience that accommodates context as a moving target, as it were. That's why 
working things out works so well--it is impossible to think of everything but 
not impossible to think about anything. So all of these terms can serve 
according to the merits of any given case. Willing cooperators have no need for 
casting concepts in concrete, eh?  

WT


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Moz" <list [at] moz.geek.nz>
To: "Cohousing-L" <cohousing-l [at] cohousing.org>
Sent: Tuesday, September 27, 2011 4:56 PM
Subject: Re: [C-L]_ Consensus, Majority Vote, "Blocks" [was Report on Survey of 
Cohousing Communities 2011. Just released. A must read!


> 
> 
> ok, the big list of synonyms:
> 
>>>willingness to compromise
>> Convergence
>> harmonization.
>> reciprocity.
>> reconciliation.
>> accommodation
>> pleasing
> 
> I agree that compromise has become tainted, and that pedants like me
> will just have to give up on it. Hopefully we can converge on a
> harmonious term, yeilding in reciprocal fashion until we reconcile
> to a new accommodation that's pleasing to all.
> 
> 
>>>>> Compromise can produce a result that doesn't make anyone happy.
> 
> Then it's a poor compromise. My feeling is that it doesn't matter what
> we call a bad outcome, it's the underlying bad outcome that matters.
> 
> One attraction to "compromise" is that it's clear from the term that
> everyone involved is giving something to the common good. Too often
> consensus is seen by novices as meaning that everyone gets what they
> want, especially them. So perhaps different terms are more attractive
> to people with different levels of experience of consensus processes?
> 
> Moz