Decisions and decision-making processes are within your purview if you hold a leadership role, whether at work or in the community. It’s wise to get input from the individuals you’re leading whenever possible.
While voting may seem like the most direct approach to a conclusion, it isn’t the most inclusive one. Even worse, voting may stifle debate and discourage original thought.
Participation increases when decisions are made formally by consensus. For over twenty-five years, I have advocated for and taught leaders how to use formal consensus decision-making.
Ethical sphere of influence
Caring for and respecting the individuals in your group grows when you take your time making decisions and listen to them carefully.
At McMaster University, where I teach psychology, neuroscience, and behavior, my students and I do research on how different social categories are perceived.
My class and I have been thinking a lot about what it would take for individuals to broaden their sense of moral responsibility. When individuals act in ways that are harmful to others, it’s possible they don’t count them among the people they care about. Formal consensus decision-making attracts participants because of the emphasis on attentive listening it requires.
Competence among the team
If the problem is complex, if your team has knowledge that might help guide the decision, or if the cost of implementing a solution is high, then it’s probably time to take a more inclusive, thorough approach to selecting a choice.
When a choice is likely to be contentious or when its success is contingent on widespread approval, a tried-and-true consensus decision-making procedure becomes more important.
Formal consensus decision-making is the paradigm I propose; under this framework, no proposal is accepted until all issues have been discussed, understood, and resolved. Food Not Bombs, a nonviolent social change movement, created this model with accompanying charts, responsibilities, and processes.
In his 2010 dissertation, Sean Michael Parsons, a political science researcher, explains how Food Not Bombs came to be. He makes reference to historian Barbara Epstein’s analysis of the ties between the Quakers and the social movements of the 1960s (which influenced Food Not Bombs’ ideologies and practices).
University consensus-building
I’ve been chair of the Department of Psychology, Neuroscience, and Behavior at McMaster University for almost a year now. The division has not had a single vote since then.
In my office, we employ SOPs in place of policies and rely on formal agreement for major decisions. We wanted to do something different from what other departments do with policies, bylaws, and governance papers since making bylaws can be divisive, enforcing them can be even more so, and bylaws can’t account for the unexpected.
As an alternative, we have adopted a live document known simply as “This is how we do it.” No vote was taken to approve this paper. The whole department looked at it and performed a “gap analysis” to see where we were and where we wanted to go.
I’ll tell you how we ratified our “This is how we do it” paper without taking a single vote if you’re ever curious how to get a group to agree to any form of governance document without voting.
Values identification
We started by developing a declaration of our fundamental principles, and now we use it to guide every decision we make. In January, we held four all-hands meetings to establish our institution’s basic principles among the teaching staff, research assistants, graduate students, and undergraduates.
Our facilitator met with representatives from each group and compiled the information they shared, including the values proposed for each topic area.
At last, we assembled a core values working group with a representative from each of the larger groupings. The whole team was asked for their thoughts on this selection. The guiding principles were developed during a conference of delegates.
The next step was a faculty retreat when we created a “This is how we do it” manual. We reviewed how well this paper aligns with our department’s basic principles in both smaller groups and as a whole.
We updated the document based on all of the feedback we received during the retreat and sent it back out for further feedback. We’ve figured out the next step.
Consensus-based major organizations
Some of Canada’s largest corporations are beginning to see the benefits of adopting more democratic methods of making decisions. Nunavut and the Northwest Territories are the two Canadian jurisdictions that use a consensus-based form of governance.
After years of using voting and Robert’s Rules of Order to make decisions, the Canadian Unitarian Council has organized a decision-making research team to identify a new method that is more “inclusive, collaborative, and models informed group decision-making.”
Take into account other viewpoints
Voting may be used to mute dissent. At some time in a meeting, someone probably yelled, “Let’s take a vote!” after a heated debate.
Too frequently, it is used to stifle criticism.
You may attempt to reach agreement with your family, at work, in your religious community, or even in your running group.