Is Pure Consensus Right for Your Group?

How can the most number of people get the most of what they want, most of the time?

I’m intrigued by how the members of N Street Cohousing in Davis, California practice consensus. They seem to get the best of this decision-making method without any of the exhausting and demoralizing aspects that sometimes plague other communities. This is important to me because, ideally, the most number of people in community would get the most of what they want in community proposals and policies, most of the time.

Consensus Decision-Making — a Double-Edged Sword

Every cohousing community I know in North America (and almost every non-cohousing intentional community too), uses pure consensus as their decision-making method. This means, of course, that if someone blocks a proposal it doesn’t pass.

However, a group can be stopped and stymied by people blocking inappropriately or too often, especially when one member consistently blocks proposals that everyone else wants.

Or the group can experience what I call the “Dreaded P.P.D.” (“Premature Proposal Death”), where someone simply intimates they would block an idea, and it is never drafted as a proposal, never gets proposed on an agenda, and is killed before it is even born.

These unhealthy ways of blocking consensus can leave everyone feeling weary and disempowered. Attendance at meetings can drop to a trickle.

Or new people aren’t trained in consensus before they have the power to block, and can unfortunately wield that power like a chainsaw.

N Street Cohousing

But this doesn’t happen at N Street Cohousing. I learned a lot more about their method in August, when cofounder Kevin Wolf gave me a tour. At N Street Cohousing 50 adults and 15 children live in 20 different houses and rental units on one city block in a tree-lined neighborhood in Davis. Community members own or lease almost the whole block, including one house that serves as the common house. They took down all the backyard fences and have a mega-backyard for everyone, with a path meandering around the perimeter. It’s a lovely place.

Small Solution-Seeking Meetings

Here’s how N Street Cohousing practices consensus. At one of their monthly meetings, when the facilitator calls for consensus on a proposal and no one blocks, the proposal passes.

If someone blocks, the person blocking is obligated to meet with small groups of other members, usually two to four people, to think through the issues and mutually agree on a new proposal that addresses the same problem. They present the new proposal at the next monthly meeting. The small groups are required to meet up to six times every two weeks.

The people who supported the proposal can send representatives to these meetings, but they don’t have to attend all of the meetings like the blocking person does.

The person blocking is responsible for organizing the meetings, and the meetings must take place. If the person blocking doesn’t do this, the group assumes he or she doesn’t care about the proposal enough to have made a responsible block. The block is considered dropped and the original proposal is put back on the agenda of the next monthly meeting to finalize. This takes some record-keeping and tracking on the part of the community, of course.

If a new, mutually agreed upon proposal is created in one of the meetings, it goes back to the whole group and is taken up as a new proposal.

But what if the person blocking and the other community members cannot come up with a mutually agreed-on new proposal during the series of small-group meetings? If this happens, the original proposal goes back to the next monthly meeting, where it can be passed by a 75 percent super-majority vote of the members present.

The same process applies if two or three people block. (If more than a few people block a proposal though, of course the proposal doesn’t pass because clearly, it doesn’t have enough support, and the group does not invoke this process.)

The six-meeting process makes anyone who wants to block take more responsibility for the effect of their block on the group. “If you’ve blocked,” Kevin says, “you’ve got to be part of the solution. Anyone who wants to block has to ask themselves, ‘Do I not support this proposal enough to go through all this?’”

One time a new N Street member blocked a decision before he’d been briefed on the procedure. Then facilitator told him about the meetings. “If I had known that, I wouldn’t have blocked,” he said (and withdrew the block).

At N Street, people don’t have to attend every meeting. Within the two-week period after the meeting, anyone who didn’t attend can stand aside from or block a proposal on email, as long as they state their reasons for doing so, just as if they’d been in the meeting.

This does not result in “hit and run” email blocking, as some communities experience, because the same rules apply.

Not requiring everyone to attend meetings, Kevin says, “means fewer people attend each time, and with only the people who really want to be at any given meeting, the meetings are more productive and enjoyable.”

Deterrence

While N Street’s method could seem like a lot of work and bureaucracy, I think it’s effective not only because it works well, but simply because it exists. It’s a deterrent to frivolous, personal blocking. In the 20 years since N Street was founded, Kevin estimates there have probably been about 12 blocked issues total. Of these, only two have invoked the six-meeting process. Both only reached a second small-group meeting before the participants mutually crafted a new proposal. Four small-group meetings over 20 years to deal with blocks is not bad!

The other 10 blocked proposals were resolved informally, by the person(s) blocking and those who supported the proposal discussing it informally outside the meetings.

Respect

I also think N Street’s method is effective because it respects both the person blocking and those who support the proposal.

It honors the person blocking because it offers up to three months of informal opportunities — and up to six formal opportunities — to share his or her views with others in a more intimate setting, mutually create a new proposal, or persuade at least 26 percent of the people that the proposal should not be passed.

And it honors the people who support the proposal because, if the small groups cannot reach agreement, the later 75 percent super-majority vote will ensure that the most number of people will get the most of what they most want. There’s no “tyranny of the minority” at N Street Cohousing.

A longer version of this article also appeared in the September/October 2008 issue of Diana's online newsletter: “Ecovillages.” http://www.EcovillageNews.org