consensus

My Pivotal Consensus Experience

28 September 2011

In 1972 with a group of parents forming a cooperative school, predominantly young Yale faculty members who had moved to town to join a new college. We were committed to diversity and having a hard time recruiting people of color and from a different socio-economic class. We were having an equally hard time finding appropriate [...]

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Consent & Responsibility

28 September 2011

In dynamic governance there is no option to stand aside — the only options are consent or object. If you don’t have tangible objections, ones that can be teased out and addressed, then you consent. It maybe a passive consent, “I don’t see any reason not to do this”, or an active consent, “I really [...]

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The Love Assumption

12 December 2010

There is a persistent assumption in cohousing and other consensus communities that lack of love is the cause of conflict. That conflict arises when we allow ourselves, our ego, our self-centeredness to isolate us from others, from understanding their needs, from caring. If we confront our isolation and commune with our neighbors, we will “feel [...]

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Are Sociocratic Corporations Illegal or Legal?

2 May 2010

Since there are no legal definitions of “sociocratic,” the answer has to be no. Technically,  Christian and democratic organizations can’t exist either. That doesn’t mean that one can’t function within the law and thus be legal. Laws governing corporations, both for profit and not for profit are generally written to prevent abuses that corporations have [...]

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Consensus, Compromise, or Pay Offs?

28 December 2009

The board of a wildlife federation reaches consensus on a plan to save a threatened wild bird’s habitat by deleting the budget for legal action. A Senate committee unanimously recommends proposed legislation after amending it until all the committee members have something they want but that is only tangentially related. A local bike trail organization [...]

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