A Consensus Modification: the Four-Choice Method

A few years ago Ecovillage Sieben Linden near Poppau, Germany replaced their consensus process with a new method they developed. It wasn’t because people blocked too much, but because they didn’t! And while Sieben Linden is not cohousing, their method is so interesting I wanted to share it with you.

According to Sieben Linden member Kosha Anja Joubert, too many people were silent when they didn't like a proposal because they didn’t want to stop others from having what they wanted. “Lukewarm” is how she describes their consensus decisions. “We developed a wish for more outspokenness and clarity,” she wrote in Beyond You and Me (Permanent Publications, 2007), the GEN/Gaia Education book on the social aspects of ecovillages.

At Sieben Linden, two-thirds of the members must choose "fully positive” for a proposal to pass.

Community members have four options when a facilitator calls for a decision:

1. Fully positive.

2. Not fully positive, but I’ll support the proposal.

3. I don’t support it, but I’ll stand aside.

4. I’m blocking it.

For a proposal to pass, two-thirds, that is, 66 percent, of the members present must be fully positive.

If two-thirds are not fully positive yet no one blocks, the proposal is set aside.

It may be brought up again in the future.Someone who blocks must organize a series of small-group meetings with proposal proponents.

If someone does block, the proposal is put on hold for two weeks while the blocking person tries to find at least one other person to also support the block. If this happens, the proposal is considered blocked. If not — no one else supports the block — the proposal is considered passed. (Thus, having to find a second person to support the block functions like consensus-minus-one.)

If the proposal is blocked, the two blocking people have until the next whole-group meeting four to six weeks later to meet with others to craft a new proposal that addresses the same issue.

“The person who sees the proposal as enough of a problem to block it must then be part of the solution,” Kosha said.

Sieben Linden uses the four-option/two-thirds voting fallback method only in whole-group meetings, although not in committees, which decide by consensus.

This four-choice method, Kosha says, seems to help those who want to express their lack of full support for the proposal but not block it outright.

I asked Kosha whether this method also helps those who might otherwise have blocked a proposal, but now don’t need to block because they have two other, less extreme options. She said she thinks that this may be so.

Even though this decision-making method helps more Sieben Linden members get more of what they want more of the time, sometimes there are still problems, Kosha says. Because Sieben Linden members have a wide diversity of views and practices, they have quite consciously set up committees with members who are diverse in their values and opinions. In this way their committees function like a representative democracy. Committee members work long and hard to create proposals that will be agreeable to their widely diverse membership, and, as noted, make committee decisions by full consensus. But sometimes a committee’s proposal to the whole-group meeting can be misunderstood, delayed, or stopped.

This happens when people in the whole-group meeting don't fully understand – or trust – what the committees are doing. “Do they read the committee minutes first?” I asked. I was going by what happens at Earthaven Ecovillage in North Carolina, where I live. I assumed that if most Sieben Linden members read committee minutes, they’d know the deep consideration of ideas and hours of research that went into the proposal, and the ideas the committee had already considered and rejected.

But at Sieben Linden many people don't read committee minutes. “How many minutes do you want to read?” asked Kosha. “If people placed more trust in the committees, they wouldn't have to read committee minutes so much. It all boils down to trust.”

This happens at Earthaven too. A few members have expressed distrust for some of our committees, and these tend to be the same people who consistently block decisions.

See 3/26/09 blog posting, “Why We Need to Trust Each Other If We Use Consensus” http://www.cohousing.org/node/2014

Fortunately, the tendency to block proposals with too little information is countered by a natural consequence at Sieben Linden. “If a person blocks often, it takes up a lot of group time in subsequent meetings to create a new proposal,” Kosha told me. Thus the person who blocks frequently pays for it socially, she said, as they lose “social capital” in the community. And that happens at Earthaven too.

Ah, community life.

—Diana Leafe Christian

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