I was working with a client this weekend, the board of a quasi-professional association, and we were discussing ways to build better support for decisions. I introduced them to the consensus decision making model I use, something which is adopted from the work of Sam Kaner. They liked it and I agreed to write it into the report I was doing for them. Thought I’d share it with you readers as well…
Voting certainly has its place, but if you are looking for sustainable decisions, where unity and long term support for a decision are important, a consensus decision making model can often work better.
For consensus decision making to work it helps to have an issue with the following characteristics:
- Passion or real or potential conflict, meaning that the issue is truly important
- A diversity of opinions and people involved, meaning that you can draw on creative resources for getting to consensus.
- Complexity, meaning that the issue has to be bigger than a yes/no decision.
- Other time pressures that make resolution important. Even though consensus can take more time, having a pressing need for a decision helps clarify what’s important and makes everyone a stakeholder in the outcome.
Consensus means that there is broad support for the decision. It essentially means that the decision of the group will have the support of the group to varying degrees. It also means that if there are key areas of disagreement, the groups commits itself to finding alternative ways to turn EITHER/OR questions into BOTH/AND solutions.
It is important that you make an agreement regarding what can happen should the group fail to come to consensus. My preferred alternative is to state that the group will use consensus until they reach an absolute impasse, at which time the group will decide the issue by a method chosen by consensus. So, if the group is stuck and everyone agrees to using voting to solve it, you may do so. This commitment keeps the group focused on meeting the needs of all participants, valuing everyone’s input and opinions on the subject at hand.
Consensus works bets when participants can indicate their support for a proposal with a range of opinion. Using a scale of 1-5 is the simplest way to do this. You may think of the scale this way:
1 = Absolute support, no reservations
2 = Solid support with some reservations
3 = Satisfied enough to move forward and support the decision
4 = Substantial issues remain to be discussed
5 = Significant issues remain, and support for the decision is absent.
The process works like this:
- Issues that come up for decision should be phrased as an open ended proposal. The process is not served if people come to the conversation with hard and fast positions. Openness is the first order.
- The issue can be discussed either in a round table format or another method but it is important that every participant gets a chance to ask questions and make statements about the proposal.
- When people feel the need to poll the group on support, ask the question.
- Begin counting with the ones and go down to the fives.
- For those that are four and five, the question becomes “What would it take for you to become a 2-3 on this issue?” The discussion can proceed then towards resolving specific issues.
This is a straightforward process, but leads to very sophisticated decisions, with time spent focusing on the most important issues that need resolution for everything to move forward.
Salt Spring Island
Victoria, BC
I’m back in Victoria for the community portion of the Victoria Agreement Aboriginal engagement process. I’ll write more on our gatherings later this week, but in the meantime, enjoy this photo essay on the floatplane trip I took today to get here from Vancouver.
So on Saturday, i stumble across a nice piece of music about Vanuatu and I write a little post about it and mention my old friend John Salong, with whom I lived in 1988.
Not five minutes ago I just got off a Skype call with him. That’s less than four days from the Parking Lot to Google To John and back over Skype.
Turns out that someone who was working with him Googled him, found my posting and John called to say hi and to catch up. We’re both fathers of 8-9 year kids, we’re both working in the same field – facilitation and community development – and we were both equally gobsmacked at the amazing ability of Skype and the web to bring us back together.
It’s times like this when I feel like Skype will save the world.
By way of Harrison Owen, I was referred to Steve Hirsch of the Center for Reducing Rural Violence in Minnesota.
This is one reason why I love America…stuff like this exists down there.
I’m looking forward to a conversation with him on violence in First Nations communities.
Thinking about the practice of holding, the most well known of the Practices of Open Space. Many writers have written about what it means to hold space in group work, but few have elucidated some of the traps inherent in this practice as Pema Chodron. In this excerpt from her recent teachings on shenpa she gets at some of the hooks that traps us in space closing:
“Here is an everyday example of shenpa. Somebody says a mean word to you and then something in you tightens� that’s the shenpa. Then it starts to spiral into low self-esteem, or blaming them, or anger at them, denigrating yourself. And maybe if you have strong addictions, you just go right for your addiction to cover over the bad feeling that arose when that person said that mean word to you. This is a mean word that gets you, hooks you. Another mean word may not affect you but we’re talking about where it touches that sore place� that’s a shenpa. Someone criticizes you�they criticize your work, they criticize your appearance, they criticize your child� and, shenpa: almost co-arising.
At Gampo Abbey it’s a small community. We’re thirty monks and nuns there. You have a pretty intimate relationship there, living in community. People were finding that in the dining room, someone would come and sit down next to them and they could feel the shenpa just because this person sat down next to them, because they had some kind of thing going about this person. Then they feel this closing down and they’re hooked.
If you catch it at that level, it’s very workable. And you have the possibility, you have this enormous curiosity about sitting still right there at the table with this urge to do the habitual thing, to strengthen the habituation, you can feel it, and it’s never new. It always has a familiar taste in the mouth. It has a familiar smell. When you begin to get the hang of it, you feel like this has been happening forever.
Generally speaking, however, we don’t catch it at that level of just open space closing down. You’re open-hearted, open-minded, and then… erkk. Right along with the hooked quality, or the tension, or the shutting down, whatever… I experience it, at the most subtle level, as a sort of tensing. Then you can feel yourself sort of withdrawing and actually not wanting to be in that place.