How to achieve consensus without really trying – Perry Walker
I love a paradox. The two methods below embody one of my favourites: the fact that competition can produce cooperation. Who’d have thought it?
- The Win-Win Workout
The Win-Win Workout separates the ‘what’ from the ‘why’. if you are familiar with the excellent method of Convergent Facilitation, developed by Miki Kashtan, you will also familiar with her notion of the Non-Controversial Essence. The Win-Win Workout approach has some similarities with this notion, but also two differences:
- The explicit contrasting of the ‘why’, the essence, with the ‘what’. That’s because so much of politics is about the ‘what’, and that contributes to polarisation, which the Win-Win Workout aims to tackle.
- We look at the ‘whys’ in two stages. The first is for individuals to identify their ‘why’ – the second is to look for the common ground between them.
The Win-Win Workout comes in different forms. One is ‘gamified’, to reduce the role of facilitation. It is a team game for tackling polarisation. Here is how it works – taking the example of a two-hour event on assisted dying. (See blog here.)
- Beforehand, we used AI to identify three equidistant attitudes to the issue. For example, in relation to legalising assisted dying, these were (A) yes, on the basis of autonomy (B) no – slippery slope risk (C) yes, if – only if there are strict legal and medical frameworks.
- Small mixed attitude groups were formed. This involved some people adopting a role. There was time to read and absorb material about the issue and the three attitudes.
- Each group was challenged to come up with statements that would command agreement across people holding all three attitudes
- All the statements were voted on by everyone, on two bases: 1. Can they live with it? 2. Which do they most actively support? The search for consensus means that the winning group is the one producing the statement with the highest percentage of backing from the lowest scoring attitude group.
- Crowd Wise
Crowd Wise encourages consensus in a different way, using preference voting, where people put options in order of preference. This form of voting encourages dialogue in which options often start to overlap, and sometimes merge.
Several years ago, Transition Town Lewes (TTL) needed to set up a steering group to co-ordinate decision-making across their working groups. At the start of a two-hour meeting, five options were proposed. Through discussion and two preference votes, at start and finish, a consensus emerged.
Rhizome ran five regional events for the Fairtrade Foundation, to find a way to recognise the key role played by campaigners. Again, a consensus emerged, from five initial options. Andy Hawkins, a campaigner who attended the Bristol event, commented afterwards:
What was really positive was that the various options tabled made you actually think through the pros and cons of each option and process in your own mind and to make a decision as to which one you felt most strongly about and why. As the process unfolded it was not only great fun but also quite a robust process which questioned why you held those particular views and if you could communicate them well to other teams in a potentially persuasive way and overcome any objections which were passed back to you.”
Achieving consensus, particularly in a situation of conflict, can feel like hard work…and it can be, but there are tools out there that can often help groups achieve consensus in fun and connecting ways that can even make it feel effortless!
See this blog for more on what we did.