On Consensus

A process of addressing needs

Originally written as an internal proposal, we’re publishing it in edited form to communicate how our organization understands the consensus decision-making process.

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By Robin

OK, Consensus. Let’s start from the thing we’ve been pushed towards, then move to the part we have to move towards.

Voting-as-decision-making is a point-in-time snapshot of majority rule. Rule by committee is minority rule. Both of these lead to situations where people without power are forced to work under the rules of people with power. Also, both modes of decision-making focus on taking a snapshot of the opinions of a subset of a group for decisions.

Consensus moves towards a form of decision-making that tries to broaden that scope, both in terms of people, and in terms of time. This means that it handles minor differences of opinion much more smoothly than top-down decision-making or point-in-time voting. This comes with several costs, and several benefits.

Costs:

• People have to spend more time checking in with more people.
• Consensus must be continually re-affirmed.
• When things change, consensus must be re-evaluated.
• Requires work even outside official meetings.
• Participants must be getting more out of consensus long term than they would by disrupting things short term.
• Requires a substantial shift in conceptualizing what agreement and disagreement mean and what they look like.

Benefits:

• Makes it more difficult to ignore a group’s needs without it being apparent and obvious.
• Helps the group ensure everyone’s needs are actually being met.
• Allows for a level of trust that enhances cooperation outside of meeting spaces.
• Gives a method to solve problems before they become substantial.
• Follows the principle of “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need” much more closely.

Let’s talk examples of the difference between the restrictive specificity of voting-as-decision-making versus consensus, and the kinds of shifts of thought that it requires to swap between them.

With voting-as-decision-making, it’s easy for small groups of people to monopolize the process of proposing things to vote on. Most people have light involvement in any given decision, and so simply have to assess “yes” or “no.” Debate is limited to meeting times and spaces that contain the people who write the proposals, give further incentive for the proposal-writers to dominate group time, and disincentive for everyone without access to them to participate more than just voting. Over time, the voting process becomes less of a poll of people’s opinions, and more a way for proposal-writers to discipline the group. They use expertise gained from centralizing all the group’s decision-making in themselves to justify removing options that they personally don’t think serve the group. All this can happen even while the people making these decisions try genuinely to help the group achieve its goals, but this method is particularly susceptible to lapses in judgment, bad actors, and malfeasance.

These tradeoffs are justified as a way of cutting down on the amount of work that group members have to do in order to participate in the group. If we just follow the rules of the voting process, we can get through meetings faster, and back to doing things! If we just don’t care about the way our actions affect things downstream on a systemic level, we don’t have to spend time figuring out how to actually meet the needs of our group.

Voting-as-decision-making treats the meeting and the vote-taking as the central point of the process, where all the work gets done. It mistakes the visible, attention-grabbing part of the process of consensus building as the entirety of the labor.

The meeting in consensus decision-making is there as part of a continuity of other decision-making tools, which need to be made visible and explicit. It exists to check the work of the group, ensure that people are not being overlooked or ignored, and to create specificity and precision in the ways that the group applies its projects or distributes its labor.

For example, we can imagine a project being laid out by a group: “We want to make a third space for people.” Some of the group is wholly for it, and willing to accept the risk that it might not get off the ground just to try it. Others have material needs that prevent them from committing so wholeheartedly, while still others want to work on a different project first, establishing a clothing swap before winter.

In a voting-as-decision-making model, there is a vote, the no’s have it, and the project is shelved. The opposition of the more precarious faction and the faction that wants to prioritize clothing mean that the gung-ho group doesn’t have the support to make a majority. The group moves on to the next idea. This is simple, direct, easy to understand, and at some point later, another vote might be held on the same issue to see if things have changed.

In a consensus decision-making model, the initial polling of members reveals the same information. However, because the group does not simply move on one way or the other, the attention of the group now turns to the friction points—how can the risks be addressed? How can our precarious members be made stable? Can the group split its attention onto multiple projects? Instead of a clean, sharp, conclusive answer, we now have revealed the friction points that have been preventing progress, and can actually start working to address them. The consensus meeting serves as a point of beginning, rather than a conclusion, where when we learn what work needs to be done, we do not immediately decide what work we will (and will not) do.

The meeting’s work then continues out past the meeting. People figure out how to meet the unmet needs of the group, pursue other projects, and direct their energy into setting up a solid foundation for their third space—a stable group of labor to commit to the project—rather than rushing ahead. Breaking ground happens more slowly, but when it happens, it has defrayed risk and a more socially united group behind it (and maybe a clothing swap on the side). Or perhaps it turns out that the group genuinely could not afford the risk, and the project is renegotiated into something more humble in order to prioritize the safety of its members. Or perhaps the gung-ho faction is fine to start a project on its own, bearing the brunt of the risk and labor—and it turns out that the additional work of bringing the members with less capacity or interest up to speed was something they could handle just through sheer enthusiasm, competence, and chutzpah.

Voting asks “Is this better? Is this worse?” Its goal is to rank options and pick the best—to create a clear, obvious hierarchy of options to be followed. Consensus asks “What work needs to be done? What needs are unmet?” Its goal is to mobilize the community to meet its own needs. In voting, disagreement is the natural consequence of hierarchy. Some ideas are worse, some are better, and we must pick the best one. In consensus, disagreement is the revealing of the conflict rather than the creation of it. When views differ, that is a clear pointer that tension is developing, and that someone will inevitably end up paying a cost—the question is who decides who pays, and what cost. Perhaps you recognize the phrase “[They] prefer the negative peace that is the absence of tension, to the positive peace that is the presence of justice.” (If not, it’s from MLK’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail.”)

The work of resolving disagreement (and then living with that resolution) is always there. Voting obscures that work, shoving it onto the losers of the vote, and leaves it to the discretion of the winners to extend a fig leaf. Consensus means bringing that work out into the open, recognizing that we cannot shortcut it or bypass it, and then distributing it to the people who have the means to actually do it. This ethos is core to the concept of consensus—if we collectively make the decision to approach problems this way, then fine-tuning the rules and processes we use to achieve them will be straightforward, if lengthy, work. But! If we don’t think we can do it—if we think we will be too stressed, isolated, and under-resourced—the question then is, will accomplishing something in the short term, before those problems inevitably resurface and stymie our work, be worth more than taking the time to set up a stable, long-term bedrock for group cohesion? If the answer to that is genuinely and bravely “yes,” then that itself reveals more about the context of our organizing, and how we can fight for a better tomorrow, than never asking that question—because we have revealed now an immediate, genuine roadblock to our liberation, that we can come together to resolve.