Because increasing numbers of members over the last several years have been dissatisfied with our consensus decision-making method, in October 2012 Earthaven agreed to modify its consensus process. For 18 years we used consensus-with-unanimity, which requires 100% agreement (not counting stand-asides) to pass a proposal. We also had no recourse if someone blocked — no criteria for what constituted a valid block, against which blocks could be tested, nor a requirement that blockers meet with proposal advocates to draft a new proposal.
“Blocking potentially gives tremendous power to one or a few individuals, and the only way for that to function successfully is with a check and balance,” advises consensus trainer Tree Bressen (Communities magazine, Summer 2012). “In my experience, every successful consensus system . . . restricts blocking power in order to guard against tyranny of the minority,” she adds (Fall 2012 issue).
Here’s how Earthaven’s new “check and balance” method works:
- To choose officers in our annual meeting, we adapted a technique from Sociocracy: a series of “go rounds” to nominate and choose people for these roles. We used this method successfully in annual officer elections in our November 25th and December 9th Council meetings.
- To approve incoming new members we retained our previous consensus method.
- For all other proposals we added criteria for a valid block and a way to test blocks against that criteria (i.e., a block is declared invalid if 85% of Council members present say it’s invalid).
For any remaining blocks that have been declared valid, we use an adaptation of the N St. Consensus Method, in which blockers and several proposal advocates participate in up to three solution-oriented meetings to co-create a new proposal that addresses the same issues as the first proposal. If they cannot, the original proposal comes back to the next Council for a decision using consensus-minus-one (meaning it takes two blocks, not one, to stop the proposal).
About Diana
Consensus means each person and all the people function as a single person. Once you have a minority that acts frivolously you no longer have a free society. Tyrannical people are to be shunned. Tyranny of the majority or minority is wrong. Each person is important. If Earthhaven is growing to large for consensus then Earthhaven needs to divide into smaller units. Why the minority disagrees should be a point of concern. If one person disagrees that one person is important. If (s)he is truely acting “frivolously” then maybe the person is not part of the community after all!
Maybe I am too knee jerk doctrinaire. However, if each person is to be happy, consensus must be reached. If you truly own your property and share it you must agree on how it is managed.
Please respond I never lived in community but would like to be part of an ecovillage like Earthhaven. Your way seems complicated I have to admit and I would appreciate your explanation on why you changed after all these years!
Response to Cindi’s comments. Thank you for reading our Earthaven Newsletter and blog, and for your interest in communities, Cindi.
My background is, I’ve been doing consensus decision-making for 18 years and for six years was a consensus trainer, training people who lived in intentional communities in consensus. I’ve also been an informal researcher of, writer about, and consultant to ecovillages and other kinds of intentional communities for the last 16 years.
I believe that when you read the newsletter article or blog post you may have missed the fact that Earthaven still uses consensus decision-making for all proposals except the election of annual officers (and that method, based on Sociocracy, requires the consent of everyone in the meeting to pass proposals). We _modified_ our consensus process to make it work better for ourselves, but have not stopped using it.
Also please keep in mind a big, big point — we _used_ the consensus decision-making method when passing the proposal to modify it.
I’ll respond to your comments separately.
You wrote: “consensus means . . all the people function as a single person,” I’m sorry, that’s not accurate. The consensus decision-making method does not require people to think as one person, or to have a unified belief or opinion to pass a proposal. Rather each person must be able to live with the proposal and allow it to go forward.
You wrote: “Tyrannical people are to be shunned. Tyranny of the majority or minority is wrong.” I believe shunning is hurtful and cruel, and I don’t recommend that community members shun, that is ignore — pretend they don’t exist — anyone who practices “tyranny of the minority” by consistently blocking proposals that most other people want — which is the definition of tyranny of the minority. I agree that it’s wrong; or rather, that it’s an incorrect practice of the consensus process. People who block frivolously, too frequently, or because of their personal values or lifestyle choices (rather than the _group’s _agreed-upon shared values and lifestyle choices) are violating the consensus decision-making method. That is, they are practicing it incorrectly. The solution is not to punish them or make them wrong, but give them more accurate information. But, if that is tried and it doesn’t work, then the group may want to either ask the person to step out of the decision-making process for awhile, or, the group may want to change their decision-making process so this cannot happen again — which is what Earthaven did when it changed its process.
You wrote: “If Earthhaven is growing to large for consensus then Earthhaven needs to divide into smaller units.” No, the problem was not that Earthaven grew too large; it’s that we have had chronic blockers who inadvertently “ruled” Earthaven because they could stop anything anytime for any reason. While it was not their intention to hurt Earthaven, this resulted in most people feeling discouraged and often, demoralized. Many people quit going to meetings and dropped out of our self-governance process.
Community-based consensus trainers advise people to block proposals only 4 to 6 times in their lifetime. One of our members blocked 8 times in their first 3 years here, and just blocked again. Twenty different Earthaven members talked with this member and tried to explain about too-frequent blocking, and we had a whole-community “heartshare” about this with this member too, several years ago. But nothing changed. So there was an increasing amount of interest in changing our decision-making method, to improve community morale and induce people to get involved in our governance again. This is the reason we recently changed our decision-making method.
You wrote: “If one person disagrees that one person is important. If (s)he is truely acting “frivolously” then maybe the person is not part of the community after all!” Our member was not acting frivolously (or the other 2 members who often block with them). Rather, these members were protecting the community from harm. However — big however — the values and community purpose they were protecting seems to be different than what many others living here believe they are. Two different paradigms of community reality,, two different versions of our values and purpose. So naturally they blocked proposals that violated their own beliefs about what we’re doing here. To them, it was a decision from the heart to protect the community they loved. To others, it was, once again, an egregious example of stopping what most people wanted without — note, without — proposing something different and better that addresses the same issues as the blocked proposal. I call this “hit and run” blocking. It hurt morale here terribly. The most-frequent (8 times) blocker, and the two other blockers, didn’t seem to understand or believe this. Rather, they seemed glad to stop the “bad” people making “bad” proposals. Catch-22.
You wrote: ” However, if each person is to be happy, consensus must be reached.”
I strongly disagree. First of all, living in community does not guarantee that someone will be happy. Sometimes unhappy, troubled people join communities and they’re still unhappy when they live there. So nothing in community — its decision-making method included — can create happiness if it isn’t there already.
Second, you’re not distinguishing between the general noun “consensus,” meaning everyone agrees, and the specific decision-making method known as “consensus decision-making.” If you mean that when the group passes a proposal most of them feel satisfaction, I think that’s true. And when they can’t pass a proposal, if they can find a way to modify the proposal so that everyone can support it, and they do, this can create a sense of satisfaction. But community life is filled with people having different opinions about things and not agreeing. Ideally, they know they’re just “agreeing to disagree” and it’s no big deal. But please don’t expect a community to ‘reach consensus” — whichever way you meant that phrase — to create happiness. And therefore, if they don’t use the consensus process, they’re not happy. This just isn’t true.
I hope this explanation helps you understand why we modified our consensus process. Again, thanks for reading our newsletter and blog, Cindi.
Diana Leafe Christian
I notice that Earthhaven has adopted a few aspects of Sociocracy but has stopped far short of adopting the complete version. Could you explain why Earthhave chose the pieces that it did? What pieces did they choose and why? What did they reject and why?
Why didn’t Earthhaven adopting the whole, especially since you indicated that to be successful it was important to adopt the entire system due to the interactions between the parts?
I recall (if I am not mistaken) that you indicated that individual pieces, without the interaction with other parts, were not to be encouraged and could even be dangerous..
What is your prognosis for the near future, given the current state of governance at Earthhaven?
Dear Richart,
Thanks for reading our Earthaven blog.
To answer your questions (and sorry this is long), first, Earthaven didn’t reject Sociocracy or reject other parts of it other than the Sociocracy Election process (which it renamed “our new election process”) because Earthaven never had a proposal about it to reject. That is, there was never any proposal to replace our consensus process with Sociocracy, all or in part, so it didn’t get considered, discussed, or decided on.
Rather, members of our Agenda Planning committee proposed that we use a modification of the Sociocracy Election process as a one-year experiment, for electing our annual officers, to replace the consensus way we had been electing them for the last 17 years before. In the consensus process used for officer elections, people could say why they didn’t want someone to be in a role because they didn’t like them personally, didn’t trust them, had different ideas about how to protect and serve the community than the candidate did. The facilitator would stand by passively, not requiring the blocker to show that their reason was reasonable or based on facts. Anyone’s whim about, fear of, or projection onto the candidate was honored as a legitimate blocking reason. (Not having any criteria for what constitutes a _valid_ block violates what community-based consensus trainers like Laird and Ma’ikwe teach, but members attending these meetings either didn’t know this or didn’t believe it.)
So the block stayed, the proposal didn’t pass, and the nominated person had just been treated badly in public, with no way — with how Earthaven used consensus — that anyone could say “Hey, wait a minute, that isn’t true.” So the invective, the character assassination would just hang there in the room, poisoning the atmosphere. It was awful. As I mentioned in the talk last Monday, people were _dreading_ going to another annual meeting to elect officers.
And this year, as I noted in the talk, people got to hear member after member in the go-rounds extolling the virtues of each nominated candidate (including those who’d been character-assassinated the year before by one or two others). The vibes were so high and good nobody could say mean things about someone else – they had to, by the rules of Sociocracy Elections – say how someone was or wasn’t qualified for the role, based on their actual qualifications, and how their characteristics did or didn’t match the desired characteristics for the role. (And for all candidates, they did match.)
So, Richart, the only thing Earthaven members ever have had to decide so far about Sociocracy was whether or not to try the Earthaven-version of the Sociocracy elections process for a year, and they approved that proposal.
What is _not_ a proposal to the community is whether or not the set of “Air” committees (Promotions/newsletter/this blog/website, Visitors’ Committee, campground, Work Exchangers, Membership, Office functions/Administration) might use all or some parts of Sociocracy this year and see if they like it. Some of the leaders in the air committees want to do this so they probably will. They don’t need to get Earthaven’s permission. They only need to decide this themselves.
I imagine that they will, they’ll love it, and the “meme” of Sociocracy will slowly pass through Earthaven and influence us. And sooner or later someone will propose that all of Earthaven adopt it and use it, and . . . I’m guessing that by then we will have enough experience with it to say Yes! (However, you’re right; I think it’s much better to just leap in and try the whole thing, because I think there could be more good will, Taoist Leadership / “We did it!”, and delight far sooner. )
You ask Earthaven members to let you know whether things had been as bad as I described in my talk to Pioneer Valley Cohousing last Monday. Richart, they were actually worse. You can read about it here:
http://www.ecovillagenewsletter.org/wiki/index.php/Busting_the_Myth_that_Consensus-with-Unanimity_is_Good_for_Communities,_Part_I
This article in my newsletter first appeared last June in Communities magazine. Part II appeared in September; part III will appear in March. Let me know if you’d like to read them; I’ll email them to you.
Also, you asked why, if I recommend that a community use all of Sociocracy, not just parts, why I think it’s good Earthaven uses the new Sociocracy-derived elections process.
It’s because some of the parts can be lifted out and used, and they’ll give a taste. But other parts need to go with their “mate” so to speak. So, Sociocracy Elections needs to go with another Sociocracy process I call “Role Improvement Feedback.” Some Earthaven people said, “We’re not doing that!!!” Well, at least two of the people elected in the Sociocracy Elections process we just did plan to voluntarily arrange an evening or Role Improvement Feedback, so we can learn/teach/learn even more about Sociocracy at Earthaven.
Also, when one uses Sociocracy’s Consent Decision-Making process, it works well to “also_ build into each proposal the criteria with which the implemented proposal will later be evaluated, and the specific upcoming meeting dates when this will occur. If not, the phrases, “Good enough for now” and “Safe enough to try,” don’t mean anything, because the implemented proposal will just stay in existence, and “for now” becomes “forever.” So, some parts need to be adopted together, and others can be “tried on for size” for awhile, in my opinion.
Thanks again for your questions.
Diana