Hinkley Point nuclear power station was successfully blockaded on Monday 3rd for an entire day. The Stop New Nuclear organisers had decided in advance on an affinity group model of action, and therefore that communication and decision making would happen by spokescouncil. I joined the fray on the Saturday to help facilitate the spokescouncils both […]
I’ve been pondering spokescouncils this week as I head off tomorrow to join the facilitation team at the Hinkley Blockade. Before writing the short briefing for participants I looked around on the web to see if it already existed. Whilst doing so I stumbled across some reflections by a facilitator on The Change Agency’s website […]
I’ll be at the Stop New Nuclear blockade of Hinkley, site of the first proposed new nuclear power station, this weekend. My main role is as part of the facilitation team facilitating spokescouncil meetings at the camp and on the action itself. For the uninitiated a spokescouncil is a method of making decisions by consensus […]
Over at how to save the world, Dave Pollard has written a thought-provoking piece on consensus entitled When consensus doesn’t work. It comes complete with a ‘will consensus work?’ flowchart that highlights some of the issues we raised in our When not to use consensus post. He touches on some situations in which consensus does […]
We covered a fair bit of ground in the first part of our tour of consensus past and present, but it was never going to be a complete survey of all movements and peoples who use consensus or consensus-like decision-making. So here’s a second installment. In it we look at The Aymara people of Bolivia […]
Here’s the second in a series of posts on near-consensus alternatives. In this post we’re talking to Tim Hartnett, facilitator, mediator and counsellor about Consensus Oriented Decision-Making (CODM, pronounced co-dem). Tim has developed CODM and has outlined the method in his recent book Consensus-Oriented Decision-Making: The CODM Model for Facilitating Groups to Widespread Agreement. Tell […]
As our contribution to Co-operatives Fortnight, June 25th to July 9th, we thought we’d share our enthusiasm for consensus decision-making. So we’ve written a short briefing on Consensus in Co-operatives Which you can download for free. We’ll also make a print-ready version available from our resources page. The briefing argues the case for consensus being […]
In our last post on consensus we talked about near-consensus alternatives. Here’s the first in a series of posts that explore near-consensus alternatives. By near-consensus, I simply mean methods that share some of consensus’ analysis if the problems of traditional majoritarian decision-making and are trying to explore ways to deepen dialogue and produce results that […]
In her book Truth or Dare, Starhawk wrote some oft-quoted and wise words on When not to use consensus. They stand re-quoting, and I’ve had the cheek to add a few thoughts: When there is no group in mind: A group thinking process cannot work effectively unless the group is cohesive enough to generate shared […]
There comes a point in the consensus process where you have to test for consensus, that is actively ask the group whether or not there is agreement for the proposal that’s under discussion. The success of that test is dependent on the foundation you’ve collectively built so far. If the group has worked well together […]
