We’ve already talked a little about what consensus is. We used phrases such as: “challenge oppressive behaviour, working for the common good over personal benefit…a pulling together of ideas to build the strongest available decision…a transformational process” All well and good, but let’s look in detail and make it a bit more real: why do […]
Consensus is a phrase that gets thrown around a lot: the United Nations reaches a consensus…. politicians or journalists speak of consensus emerging around some important issue or other. What they are talking about seems to be a significant majority view. What they’re not talking about is consensus decision-making as we at Rhizome understand it. […]
I spent Saturday night and Sunday with a Dorset co-housing community – The Threshold Centre. Their numbers have soared in the last year, from around 8 people to over 20 so they felt it was appropriate to pause and reflect on their group decision-making process. 18 of the community came together for the workshop. The […]
I spent an hour and a half on the phone today to Jeannie and Steph, 2 of the facilitators that attended the Transition Network Dreaming Circle back in December. We were talking about meetings, more specifically trying to shape some meeting training agendas for transition groups. Very quickly the conversation turned to values, and how […]
For weeks (if not months), I’ve been meaning to go back to a post I read on emergence. Today I started the journey, leaping from one stepping stone to another and now have two streams of thought competing for attention – one around strategy and the other around groups and consensus. I’ll stick with this […]
It’s common for people who value consensus to want to make the meetings they have as part of their everyday lives more consensual. So the question of how to use consensus in more traditional, often hierarchical, settings comes up regularly. Saturday’s Transition Leicester group was no exception and it’s spurred me to share a few […]
On Saturday I had the rare experience of having to walk just a few hundred yards from home to deliver a 1 day workshop on consensus decision making to the good folk of Transition Leicester. We met in the Friends Meeting House (well-priced, good access, well equipped kitchen, lovely garden). The group was wide-ranging in […]
13 participants and 4 facilitators, including myself, gathered in Oxford this weekend for Consensus: in at the deep end a full weekend workshop to explore consensus decision-making in more depth than consensus training usually allows. Of course consensus is a widely used word. You hear it everywhere – the Blairs, Browns and Camerons of this […]
