This is an email message I sent to the fledgling Alliance for Democracy as they tried to decide what decision-making process to use at their founding convention in 1996. --Randy Schutt ============================================================================ Date: Wed, 7 Feb 1996 To: the-alliance@igc.apc.org From: Randy Schutt [my email address at the time] Subject: Hello, Our Mailing List Process, and I Favor Pure Consensus Dear friends, A few words on my background: I grew up in a conservative, Bible-belt city in Texas. I first worked for progressive change in the campaign against South African Apartheid in 1977 while in college. Since then I have worked against nuclear power, for solar power, against nuclear weapons and military spending, and against oppression of men and women. Excuse this long message but I would like to address both the first question concerning the decision-making process of the Alliance and the process of this mail list. First, let me share something I learned from the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). I am not a Quaker, but I have attended Quaker Meeting a few times, and I saw there something quite wonderful. In the Meeting I attended, everyone sits in silence until they are inspired by God to speak (or from a secular perspective, until they are sufficiently motivated). As they speak, everyone else listens carefully. After the speaker has finished and has sat down, there is a period of silence during which everyone considers what the speaker said and its ramifications, why she said what she said, and what in her background would lead her to her perspective. This period of reflection ensures that every person's ideas are carefully considered. After the silent period, the next speaker does not directly address what the last speaker said, but rather speaks appropriately to the new situation (changed somewhat by the last speaker) and addresses the whole group. A "Quaker dialog" is thus very different than a conversation. It is a slow process, but often allows a group to address and resolve quite complicated issues efficiently. I would like to encourage everyone on this mailing list to try to adopt a similar mode: send a note only when you have something that you believe is worth consideration by 150 people. Please reread your message carefully before mailing it out to ensure that it is free from flaming, typos, and excessive verbiage. Try to refrain from directly responding to someone (except by direct mail to them). Instead, write a message that speaks to everyone and moves the group towards truth. Read others' messages carefully and try to discern where they are coming from and what truth they hold. I believe this will keep the quality of the discussion high and the quantity of messages low (allowing me and others to actually read most of them -- I confess I have not read all of the 200 or so messages that have gone out in the last week). From what I have seen so far, this group is mostly already doing this. Let's keep it up! Second, I would like to urge the Alliance to use a good consensus decision-making process at the founding convention (and everywhere) so that good decisions can be made quickly and no particular faction has undue influence. Let me explain this perspective in some detail because most people have a very skewed idea of consensus and mix it up with a unanimous voting procedure (which usually leads to no decisions or to extremely forced decisions). I bring to this discussion my 6 years of experience (1977-1983) working with the Abalone Alliance, an alliance of grassroots groups in California working against nuclear power that used consensus in all decisions, and my study of decision-making since then. In a majority voting process, people express their PREFERENCE for or against a measure. These preferences are then tallied up in some fashion and if more than half of the total number of people voting prefer the measure, it is adopted. In such a procedure, it is extremely important who votes, how many votes each person gets, and in what order the votes are taken. This summing preferences process has many problems. Economist Kenneth Arrow won the Nobel Prize for proving that it was impossible to create a vote-your-preference process that could also simultaneously meet several very reasonable criteria (completeness, fairness, rationality, etc.). Moreover, by its nature, voting does not distinguish between deep, heartfelt preferences and preferences based on craziness or whim. Also, voting sums the preferences of everyone at a meeting, even those police/rightest/crazy infiltrators whose preference may be to make the group fail. And it neglects anyone who is not part of the process. Note that the free enterprise marketplace is a kind of voting process in which people vote with their dollars. Those with more dollars can vote more often. Capitalism is also a voting process in which the number of excess dollars a person has determines their number of votes, and rich people have thousands or millions of times more votes than poor people. In these processes, entities without dollars like children, the environment, animals, future generations, etc. get no votes and their needs are frequently ignored. A good consensus process, in contrast, is a cooperative process in which everyone CONSENTS to a measure because they believe it is the best one for the group. The participants at a meeting work together to solve the problem "what is the best option for this group (including those not here)?". Using this process, people must gather enough information and discuss all the options enough to determine the advantages of each option for the group (and its ramifications for other important entities). Through this process, the group may also need to learn how each person feels about each option and how strongly they feel to see if the option matches the needs and desires of the group. Depending on the decision, though, this may be unnecessary. The final decision may not be anyone's first choice (and it may even be many people's last choice), but everyone recognizes that it is the best choice for the group and CONSENTS to it. Let me repeat: In a good, pure consensus process, people do not express their preferences, but instead agree to consent to the option that they believe is best for the group. The main advantages of a good consensus process is that it encourages cooperation and problem solving and discourages factionalism and ego-attachment. It also ensures that no minority is oppressed or railroaded. I would particularly like to urge the Alliance to use a consensus decision-making process in which many options are proposed and then the group lists the advantages and disadvantages of each option. After thorough discussion, everyone would then mutually choose the option that they feel is best for the group. With this kind of process, everyone can see that all options have some merit and that no proposal is perfect. With such a process, several of the options would probably be clearly inferior and they could be eliminated without objection. One option might stand above the others and the group could easily adopt it. If several options are good but none stands above the others, then the group may have more difficulty choosing. But usually at this point, everyone will see that all these alternatives have some merit, they all match the needs of the group reasonably well, and any one of them can be chosen without regret. If pressed for time, the group could even choose one of these options by lot. If the group cannot consent to an option, then the group may be too diverse and need to split into smaller groups that can consent. Usually a group will decide that it can consent to some measure rather than have to split. A GOOD consensus process usually requires several things: (1) Everyone must understand the process and agree to cooperate with one another to work for what is best for the group, not to work for their pet ideas or for their own glory. People must be willing to look out for those who could not attend the meeting, not just for themselves. At the beginning of each meeting, it helps to explain the process and ask everyone if they agree to these conditions. (2) Everyone must be known and accountable to other people so that those police/rightest/crazy infiltrators do not have undue influence. For the Alliance, this probably means that everyone must be an authorized representative of a local group. Those who arrive at the convention unconnected could form their own temporary local group and choose a representative who would actively participate in the decision-making (all others could contribute somewhat, but would not be part of the final decision except through their representative so their voices would not dominate). (3) At least a few people must have experience with good consensus process and be able to facilitate well. If everyone is experienced, then the group might be able to self-facilitate, but with less-experienced people, it is essential to have a facilitator (or 2 or 3 co-facilitators) who can keep the process on track. It is also useful to have experienced people who can serve as process watchers to point out bad process and suggest good alternatives. Quakers also have "elders" who support and encourage shy people to speak out and gently tell overly-loquacious people to shut up. If emotions run high it is also useful to have experienced emotional counselors who can let people vent their emotions away from the large group. (4) People must be willing to break down into small groups for initial discussion of alternatives. It is impossible for a group of more than about 20 people to really explore ideas and their ramifications and it is very frustrating not to be able to speak in a group. In a small group of 5-10, each person gets a chance to speak and be heard. I have even been in meetings where we first broke into pairs, with one person speaking while the other listened, then switching. This let everyone have a chance to have their say right away. This kind of consensus process worked reasonably well for the Abalone Alliance and its 60 local groups. The times that it didn't work were, I believe, when we did not abide by these four criteria. The largest meeting I ever attended consisted of about 2,000 people trying to decide when to end the three-week-long civil disobedience demonstration at the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant in 1981. The process was complicated because throughout, several hundred people were in jail and could only communicate through our lawyers. Each of the local groups chose a spokesperson that met together in a coordinating council to convey the thinking of their groups. After discussion, they went back to their local group and reported what they had learned about the thinking of the other local groups. Then they met once again in the council and reported the revised thinking of their own local group. This process took a while, but since people were risking their lives, it made everyone feel much better to make a good decision. Note that the consensus process I have described here is quite different from FORMAL CONSENSUS as described in the book by Butler and Rothstein and summarized in Ralph Suter's message. As I understand it, Formal Consensus is more of a cross between voting and consensus. I don't like it as much as the more pure consensus process I have described above since it relies more on voting-your-preferences and so has many of the same problems that voting does. For anyone who is interested: I have written several sets of notes that I use when I facilitate consensus workshops and which explain this process in much more detail. I would be happy to e-mail you a list of these papers with a short description, and I will send you nicely-formatted paper copies of any of them for a small donation to cover my copying and mailing costs. Unfortunately, they are not available in electronic form. [They are now!] --Randy