We take a mystery of life for granted, the mystery of conversation. Reflect on how an impression in your consciousness—“the beauty of a San Francisco spring morning with the fog blowing offthe Bay”— is translated into concepts and then into audible speech, involving all the complex muscles of the throat and mouth.Your friend hears these words through the membrane of the ear and understands them, internalizes your thought and then speaks.
When Rudolf Steiner brought together the individuals who would become the teachers of the first Waldorf School, he asked them to work in a new way, not only with the children, but also with one another. He asked them to work together in such as way as to invite the interest and guidance of spiritual beings into their endeavor.
Creating Effective Agendas is an article offered by the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Urban Affairs in Ontario, Canada that is a helpful tool covering all the essentials of good meeting planning.
Tips for Creating Board Agendas is an article specifically focused on some issues that face only boards, including the difference between policy and operations issues.
Working Together as a Group to Improve your Meetings is a chart of insights and helpful tips developed by a group of colleagues years ago when they decided to try to improve their meetings.
This month’s newsletter focuses on the art of decision-making and particularly the practice of consensus decision-making.
The lead article was written in response to three recent conversations we had with various board members. In one, a colleague asked: “As a new board member, I hear consensus referred to but I don’t really understand what it means. None of our board members has much experience or training in consensus. How do we know when we should push through to consensus or when a majority vote is appropriate?”
When a faculty or board needs to make decision of major significance, how does the group assure that the decision is well considered and supported by everyone who needs to be involved?
Shared decision making can be a challenging area for a Waldorf school. It involves building agreement for decisions and creating clarity around decision making authority and processes.
A good decision is the result of both having the organizational culture and structure that supports timely and thorough processes, and assuring that various groups and individuals, who have the authority to make decisions in their respective areas, understand and follow those processes.
Here and in the following articles, we explore just what makes it successful:
Decide before you decide.
Know your tools
Decide who decides
Respect the process.
Often, when groups first begin to use consensus, most if not all decisions are made by the group as a whole. Groups come to understand that this is what it means to function by consensus. Over time, however, most groups begin to look for ways to function more efficiently. Frequently, they turn to the use of committees and mandate groups.
It is important to understand that consensus and the use of mandating are not mutually exclusive. The two can be used together. In fact, a mandate group is simply a specialized type of committee, with its mandate framed in a certain way.
This is an excerpt from “School Renewal, A Spiritual Journey for Change” by Torin Finser.
Understanding the importance of framing issues can lead us to the best ways to reach decisions in a group setting.
A decision is a form of free human action. When a human being actively searches out and grasps a concept or intuition thereby bringing it to full consciousness, a self-sustaining decision can arise.
Individuals, not groups, make decisions.
Where do decisions come from? For me at least they have a mysterious quality. It is hard to determine what is really happening in the moment in which an individual makes a decision.
There were certainly important element of preparation, but the second in which one realizes a decision there’s a magical element at work. There’s an intuitive quality to the act, and intuition is connected to the will, the motivational aspect of our constitution. It is as if we were to dive into the lake of decision and really know what we have come to only a split second after we emerge on the surface.
The following are excellent resources to learn more about the why and how of meeting process and facilitation for consensus decision-making. All of these articles are available in the LeadTogether resource collection.
A Short Guide to Consensus Building
By the Public Disputes Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School
A Checklist for the Consensus Process
Edited by Randy Schutt
Short Guide to Consensus Decision Making
Seeds of Change
Consensus Decision Making
Seeds of Change
Functional Consensus
www.functionconsensus.org
On Conflict and Consensus: A handbook on Formal Consensus decision-making
CT Lawrence Butler and Amy Rothstein
Leadership and Self-Administration--Michael Harslem--Paideia--1998
This article on consensus offers a brief look at some aspects of consensus decision making, definitions of the difference between consensus, facilitation, and mediation, and a look at whats wrong with Robert’s rules of order. -ed A SHORT GUIDE TO CONSENSUS BUILDING by The Public Diputes Program. Part of the Inter-university Program on Negotiation […]