If you read the earlier blog on the British Columbia Citizens Assembly (BCCA), you may recall that that the assembly recommended Single Transferable Vote (STV) rather than Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) as their preferred way of voting to replace First Past the Post. One reason for this is that the members of the assembly gave […]
I’ve recently finished my second stint doing jury service. Jurors are cautioned not to talk about their experience of their time as jurors but trials are held in public so I am allowed to talk about information that’s in the public domain. My first time as a juror was around 35 years ago in the […]
In my last blog, I spelled out some of the plusses and minuses of consensus, as I see them. I ended by saying that none of the minuses that I have come across in my reading quite hit the mark, in relation to my experience with Mandorla Cohousing. In this blog, I’d like to explain […]
Nelson Mandela has been laid to rest. Countless words have been written about his life and his legacy, and with good cause. I’m not going to try to add too many more to that count. What’s clear is that he (and those around him) inspired a nation to act against expectations, against self-interest, for a […]
Over at Organizing Change, Drew Serres is writing about the problems of consensus and how to fix them. It’s good stuff and I’d urge you to read it and join the conversation. He shares some of the problems of contemporary consensus and offers five thoughts on dealing with those problems. Critiques of contemporary consensus are […]
Our friends at Seeds for Change have compiled their excellent briefings on consensus decision-making into one place – a new book on consensus and facilitation: A Consensus Handbook – Co-operative decision-making for activists, co-ops and communities Here’s what they say about it: After decades of facilitating, years of planning, months of hard work and days […]
I sat up late chatting to Nick Osborne last night. Nick’s recently become a certified practitioner in Holacracy and I wanted to get a better sense of the Holacracy model and ethos. According to holacracy.org: “Holacracy is a real-world-tested social technology for purposeful organization. It radically changes how an organization is structured, how decisions are […]
There was a time when I thought nothing of spending far longer travelling to deliver a piece of work than actually delivering it. Nowadays my personal sustainability is a little higher on the agenda so it’s far more of a rarity. Last weekend I made an exception and travelled to Fife to run a consensus […]
The UK Cohousing Network recently teamed up with us at Rhizome to put on a consensus decision-making training in Birmingham. We’ve extended that relationship by starting to write a column for their newsletter offering cohousing groups the opportunity to share their agony (and their ecstasy!) about any aspect of working and meeting in groups, especially […]
Just worked through Dave Pollard’s Links for the Month. TheraminTrees YouTube video (a touch under 10 minutes long) summarising studies on group conformity stood out from some other amazing resources. Probably because I’ve been pondering this stuff of late, including in my recent post on certainty: If you don’t have time to watch, here’s a […]
