We're back again now. Module 3, Lecture 3. We're going to talk about consensus.

Consensus is a group
decision-making process. We're trying to find some resolution
that's acceptable to all the participants. Why use consensus? Everyone has an equal
stake in this decision. It's collaborative. It's fair. There's no rank in the room.
Everyone is involved equally
in making this decision. And this is one of the key
tools we need to have in place, one of the key rules,
one of the key methods we have to have in place to have
a chance at consensus working. Everybody's equally involved no matter
what their position is outside this group. And power's distributed
throughout the group. Everybody's equal in this group when
we make decisions using consensus. Consensus may not work because
it's not clearly defined. No one really knows what
we mean by consensus. What we mean by consensus is that everyone
can live with and support this decision. It doesn't have to be
everyone's favorite decision. People don't have to just love it,
love it, love it. Most of the group might just love it,
love it, love it, think it's the best
thing we could possibly ever do. I really like it because it's my idea and
so I think it's the best thing
that we could ever possibly do. There's somebody else in the group that
says, I don't think it's the best thing we can do, but it's good enough and
I'm happy to move forward with the group. I can live with and support this
decision. And when we all leave this room nobody
will know what the level of buy-in to this thing was along the way. We all have
100% buy-in now. During the discussion,
nobody will know who really said, yes, I think it's the best decision and
somebody else says, no, not really the best decision but
I'm happy to go along with it. When we leave this room, nobody will know
who those people were because we all buy into this thing and
we all move forward together as a group. Assume that people
understand how to do it. Not always true. Not everybody knows how to do consensus.
No specific method to reach it. Opposition is not voiced. No process for resolving
stalemates. Group members falsely agree. They didn't voice their
opposition in the room. They agreed to things, and then when they leave, then they
voice their opposition to all this. If that's going on,
we don't really have consensus. Consensus, sometimes I've seen one
person who's the last holdout who says, I just can't go along with the group and
do this. And when the group says, well, why not,
the person has to come up with why not. That's part of the process for doing this
is they have to explain,
this is my thinking. And I've seen sometimes one
holdout in a pretty large group be able to sway the entire group
to the way that they're thinking because the rest of the group forgot
to think about some key issue. Do you think about if we do this
the way your saying, it means this and this and this. Remember those consequences
we
were talking about earlier? The consequences would be this. Oh, we didn't realize
that. That's not a very good decision, is it? What are you thinking? And then
sometimes we end
up with consensus being not something that one individual or another individual or
another subgroup or
another subgroup came up with. It's something that we put together with
the best pieces of everybody's ideas. So we've seen sometimes where a whole
group gets turned in a different direction from where they're all going. We're all
going this way. But one last little
holdout that saved them. Seven steps to consensus. Start with agreement. There's
some overlap in all the different
things people are saying, quite often. Where's that overlap? Where's the agreement
we have? Where are the areas of disagreement? Let's clarify those. I disagree here
and here, and here's why
I disagree here, why I disagree here. Another person disagrees over here. Why is
that disagreement there? What is it all about? Let's clarify that. Delineate
alternatives. So here are some of the alternatives we've
laid out, and we have some alternatives that really are not anybody's ideas but
some other alternatives that start to put some ideas together from all
of the things people are saying. Identify the strengths and
weaknesses of the various alternatives. If appropriate, start to try and
merge these alternatives. Build something out of
these alternatives that, together, all these alternatives
give us something really good. A really good solution is what we
have here, a really good decision. Attempt to converge on a solution. So along the
way,
just keep moving toward a solution and moving toward consensus, and once you
get to that point where everybody says, I can live with and
support this solution, stop right there. You don't need to go any further. If you
cannot reach consensus,
you may have to do a couple of things. One thing we could do is decide to just
move on and come back to this thing later. Sometimes, if we just say,
all right, let's just table this. We'll come back and
talk about this at the next meeting, so everybody think through this a little bit,
come back to the next meeting. When our group gets together again and
said, why did we ever disagree? We're all saying exactly the same
thing in different ways, so there really is no disagreement. Sometimes there is
still
some disagreement, so there are three reason
that people may disagree. This is one that we see quite often. They have not heard
and
understood each other. There was one group that was trying to
develop a new policy for young children. It was a health policy, a safety net for
kids between the time they were born
until they turn three years old. This was for
kids who had severe medical needs, mental or
physical health needs of some kind. And if they didn't fit into any
program that would help these kids, there was a program here. This last safety net
that would catch all
those kids that didn't fit anywhere else. Now a group has to come together and
see what that program looks like. This group is made up of physicians,
nurses. It's made up of teachers. It's made up of psychiatrists,
psychologists. It's made up of parents. It's made up of people who
are experts in the health industry, all kinds of people that are experts
in physical and mental health. A bunch of people who
care about little kids. They really wanna work on this thing. But they could not,
when they sat down together, hear and understand what each other was saying,
and at one point they divided into three subgroups that simply would not
even listen to the other groups anymore. This is what we should do, and we're not
even going to listen
to what you have to say. Because of that,
this dragged on for two and a half years without a bunch of little
kids having any kind of safety net at all. And this is a bunch of people who really
want to take care of these little kids. They have these little
kids in their heart. They want to take care
of these little kids. They just got to the point
where they couldn't hear and understand each other, and so
they couldn't move forward. They did finally move forward. They had one meeting
where they finally
actually were forced to sit down and listen to each other. And the process was put
in place so they could actually understand
what the other groups were saying. And they worked through
that really rapidly, and with that and one more meeting
they came up with a wonderful program that was implemented almost
immediately and everything went great. People hold different values and beliefs. We
just come from different backgrounds. Different cultures, different belief
systems, different value systems. This family has a different value
system than this family over here. We all have all of that in our heads. So
sometimes we can't even understand
what the other person's saying because we're having a hard time finding
any common ground, our values and beliefs are so different. So a lot of times that
can get back to
hearing and understanding each other. Why would you look at things and say that?
Oh, I see, I understand it this way and
see it in a completely different light. Oh, maybe we can work
through this somehow. Different values and beliefs. Sometimes disagreement is based
on emotion or past history. If it's reason number three,
if the disagreement is emotion or past history, guess what? We're having a hard
time reaching
consensus, and we can take a break if it's appropriate, just to let
everybody separate for a little bit. Come back together, discuss this again. If we
simply cannot reach consensus, going to a higher authority is probably
the best backup method that we have. We just go to a higher authority and
say, what are we gonna do? Like the engineers that were
trying to paint the cars. They couldn't paint these cars,
couldn't figure how to do this. And they went to higher authority and
said, we don't know which way to go. And the authority said, that way, and
then the whole group went that way. That's how the cars got painted. So we just
need somebody to break
that deadlock once in a while. If you can't refocus the disagreement
because of number three, because of the emotion or the past history, do not attempt
to
reach consensus to resolve the issue. You're gonna have to do
something different. Authority is probably
the best thing to do. You can't go to majority vote, because we already talked
about why you can't use that. Okay, we can't reach a consensus. All right, let's
vote. How many think this? How many think this? All right, well, that group, too
bad,
we're going ahead without you. And that's not what we're
trying to do with our groups. Decisions can be ethical or not ethical. And what are
we talking about with that? A number of different things. One thing, we're talking
about
the ethics of our culture. And we're talking about the ethics of
our subculture in an organization, ethics about our organizational culture
overall, ethics about industry culture, ethics about our regional culture,
our national culture, the world culture. Talking about there are some cultural
ethics that we all understand and accept, and are these decisions within those
ethical boundaries that we have laid out? There are a number of professional
organizations that one of the first things they have is,
here are the ethics of our organization. And here is what we say belongs
in that ethical action and decision sphere that we've put together. These are the
things that
we think are ethical. Ethical decisions involve
all the individuals who are going to be impacted by
the decisions whenever possible. Now we know that sometimes there's
an authority decision with no input that just has to be done in
a kind of a crisis situation. Sometimes somebody just has to say,
okay, this is what we're doing. You do that, you do that, you do that,
because we don't have any more time. We may have a matter of seconds to
make decisions and take actions, and we don't have time to do
anything other than that. But whenever possible,
involving everybody that's going to be affected by this decision is a great
way to make good ethical decisions. With that,
we'll move on to another module.