Occupy consensus making, and why I cannot stand it

[docorion]

hrafn wrote a very thoughtful post about the Occupy movement, their consensus decision making process, and how she has been handling her contribution.  and as I read it, I thought about the consensus based decision processes I've either witnessed, or been part of first hand, and all I can say is: go you, but O HALE no, not for me.

I've seen a lot of what

Comments

[bitty]

Oh so so so totally. I've never seen consensus do anything other than grind decisionmaking to a halt. Or holding hostage to one person's whim, over and over, because someone wanted to be a de facto president and the only way to do that was to threaten to block consensus on all ideas not her own

[hrafn]

"Consensus" at the General Assemblies is more like a 75% consensus, and no blocks, or (at the Wall St group), 90% with no blocks. Er. I think. It's something like that (they explain it when the time comes). And people aren't agreeing that they think the proposal is 100% perfect, they are agreeing that they can live with the proposal.

(I don't think your workplace should be held up as an example of anything, except how to do things wrong.)

[bitty]

My workplace makes no pretense at running by anything other than hierarchy. Well, okay, one or two people like to think it's a participatory democracy, but they know it's not really.

The consensus issues come from various orgs when I was in DC.

[onemintjulep]

Like. ad infinitum

[mzrowan]

If you want to hear horror stories about this sometime, ask me about organizing a convention with a twelve-person committee and no chair.

Completely off-topic: I've now heard from two people stories of their doctors saying that they had to take a test for illegal drugs before getting certain prescriptions, and justifying it by claiming that it's MA state law ( one of them). As someone who is actually a doctor in MA, do you have any idea if this law exists?

[docorion]

Absolutely: there is no such law. And telling patients this under color of law is reprehensible. I'm fine if you want to have a practice policy which says you have to get drug tested to get some things-it's a policy,and people can use that to decide whether they like your practice or not. But telling people it's a law is crapalicious. I recommend a complaint to the

[skreeky]

My main thought is "Wow, talk about things that DON'T SCALE."

If it's working for them it's because they really aren't doing anything but sitting around all day anyhow, so they may as well talk while they do it. Now, I don't actually mean that as a derogatory thing. Them sitting around all day has been quite effective, as protests go. I have lauded their efforts in various media, I have been day tripping to Occupy Boston to assist in the "standing around with signs" effort, and I have given material support. But it would be unreasonable to try and apply this consensus process to any society where people have other things to get done.

[meihua]

A lot of consensus is done very badly, and that needs to be recognised more. I don't know whether I'd prefer bad consensus or hierarchy. I'd prefer good consensus more than both of those things, and that generally means that more people need to be good at consensus (not just facilitators, either - everyone in the group can stand to improve). When consensus is done well, it can be incredible.

[docorion]

I don't think I've ever seen it done well. But there's another problem: I don't really think consensus can scale past a certain number. I think that it really requires a group with a common goal, and once you get above a certain number, what you've got is a group with a common purpose, which isn't the same thing. And I suspect it resists outlier psychology very poorly; if you, or a small group, conspire to obstruct the process, it gets stuck very quickly and very painfully,often without unmasking the culprits (other systems manage this better because they can assign malice much earlier, so to speak).

In any event, I will say that if it can be made to work well, and quickly, it has promise in some areas. But as skreeky notes, I personally doubt it will scale well.

[meihua]

It's not designed to scale well to meetings of 200, or whatever. There are other non-hierarchial methods designed to handle that size of decision-making body, including delegate and focus-group models.

With respect, if you haven't seen it done well, you're not best-placed to make an absolute judgement on the method. You can just say, "I see it done badly a lot. Let's acknowledge that."

[hrafn]

I'd really like to learn more about methods used with larger groups, since that's been one of my concerns. And I admit that what I've read so far about the spokescouncil proposed for Zuccotti Park I didn't understand well. :/ (Feel free to message me directly.)