A group required 100% unanimity for decisions and deadlocked for two years before dissolving. The speaker proposes a workable definition: consensus means 80% agreement, with the rest able to live with it. Write this into your constitution or watch your organization grind to a halt.
Years ago, I was asked about consensus decision-making. I was working with a group who had written into their constitution that all decisions had to be made by consensus. And that sounds great on the surface, I know. There's one problem. The problem is they didn't define consensus. What is consensus? And so they went to the dictionary definition of consensus, which is broadly that 100% of people have to agree. Now, that sounds great, doesn't it? But the reality is, it's rare that you can get 100% of people to agree. So it led me to work on and build a working definition of consensus decision-making. And it's a very simple definition, and I've been using it for over 25 years with groups of all types, and it works well. The definition is simply this: consensus is when a minimum of 80% of the people agree and the rest can live with it. A minimum of 80% of the people can agree and the rest can live with it. Now, you can vary that Percentage a little. I'd go down rather than up. 75% maybe agree, but the rest need to be able to live with it. That's the spirit of consensus, that people are willing to live with it. So consensus decision-making is an important type of decision-making, but it needs a definition. And that definition needs to be, in my view, in your rules or your constitution, because you will get people who quite reasonably argue that no consensus is 100%. I worked with that particular group that I mentioned for some time, and the reason that they called me in was for 2 years they had been locked into not doing anything because one or 2 people disagreed with whatever was being decided, but they had to have consensus, and consensus was 100% in their view. It meant that the whole organization just could go nowhere. And eventually that organisation did die, and a new one sprang up with consensus as their decision-making model, but using the definition in their constitution. They then moved forward.
