October 8, 2003. CONSENSUS AND DISSENT. Many organizations operate by consensus. Somebody makes a suggestion, others discuss changing it; if consent is not going to be unanimous, the suggestion or changes are withdrawn without a formal vote. I have observed that this ordinarily works in a large body to discourage dissent, create confusion, and slow everything down. The Bloomington Faculty Council meeting yesterday was an example.

The BFC is an organization of about fifty members. Formally, we operate by Robert's Rules of Order, but ordinarily we operate by local custom. Local custom is to operate more like a committee. The chairman tells us what is next on the agenda; the item's proposer talks about it; other people talk and make friendly amendments or critical comments; if most of the comments are negative, the item is sent back to committee; otherwise, we vote for it unanimously.

This procedure works fine for some things. It was good for our Iraq Resolution, because that was an "encouraging" resolution whose passage with a split vote would have been worse than no passage at all. Two examples:

Example 1: SAM: "Charlie, the club just passed a resolution wishing you a happy retirement." CHARLIE: "I didn't know you guys would miss me so much, Sam." SAM: "Yeah, Charlie. It only took an hour of discussion, and passed comfortably, 21 to 17!")

Example 2: In his novel, Light and Darkness , C.P. Snow has the same characters as in his classic novel of small-group politics, The Masters. A Cambridge college is deciding whether to elect Roy Calvert as a fellow. Their procedure is first to hold a straw vote, and then a final vote. If nobody is too unhappy, the final vote is unanimous and the candidate doesn't know what a close call he had unless someone gossips to him. In the novel, the straw vote is 7-4-1, but the second vote is 10-2 because two holdouts are unhappy and mean.

Yesterday, though, one of the items was a campus mission statement. A committee had spent a lot of time coming up with a long statement. I don't think much of mission statements, and if we had to have one, I'd have preferred a version that reduced the twenty-five lines to one:

Indiana University Bloomington's mission is to create and disseminate knowledge.

I didn't argue the point, since I knew that probably each person in the room had a separate preference, and that the chief effect of mission statements is to waste people's time discussing them. But if one is going to discuss them, the consensus method is a bad way. Discussion is not going to result in everybody agreeing, and most of the new suggestions are going to be too vague to be useful and so end up just being complaints. A precise new suggestion that the leadership doesn't like, on the other hand, is likely to be criticized by the official or natural leaders of the organization and then dropped, even if a majority of the members actually likes it. If the suggestion is a really wacky one, it will get the same treatment, even if the person suggesting it is literally the only one supporting it.

Parliamentary procedure can work wonders in such a situation. If the members are unused to it, start by saying that for this issue, we are going to ask that anybody suggesting a change write it down and move it as an amendment, which will require a second. Then, if the original motion's proposer accepts it as a friendly amendment, it won't need a vote, but otherwise, after discussion of just that amendment, the amendment will be voted on. And after all discussion and amendments are over, a vote will be taken on the overall mission statement.

If people must write down their suggestions, that will forestall most of them immediately. Most of the time, people will realize that even though they don't like the wording the committee spent hours on, they can't come up with anything better, certainly not in ten minutes. If they do write it down, then everybody else will know precisely what is being suggested. Often, the suggestion will be accepted as a friendly amendment because it is an obvious improvement ("I move that 'student' be changed to 'students' so it matches the plural verb.") If not, then if the amendment is not seconded, it will die quickly, which is fine because it had no chance of passage. If it is seconded, it will get discussion, rather than being shunted aside by members who don't like the idea; and it will get a vote, so even if more people spoke against it than for it, and those include the leadership, the amendment can still pass.

We did have one formal vote on an amendment yesterday, which illustrates these points. Someone wanted science to get equal billing with "liberal arts" in one phrase. She suggested that vaguely, and there was unfocussed discussion, most of it negative, and the suggestion was coming to nothing. Being brave, she then made a formal motion. After very little further discussion, the motion failed by about 30 to 15. Making the motion accomplished three good things:

It got the suggestion made, and precisely, without costing much extra time.
It allowed the suggester and the other 15 people (almost none of whom had commented out loud) a chance to display their view (again, in a way less time-consuming than for each one to make a little speech) and to see that they were outvoted fair and square.
It encouraged future dissent by showing that (a) even if a suggestion gets few speeches in its favor, it might nonetheless have a lot of people in the room supporting it, and (b) it's no disgrace to propose something that gets defeated in a format vote (if we kept this up, it could even become routine).

I should note that this discussion applies to large bodies only. Small committees are different. Some time ago, I realized something that made me much happier when I attend boring committee meetings: the purpose of committees is not just to get things done. Rather, an important purpose of a committee is to give people happiness by letting them make boring speeches with a captive audience. People who like to talk in committees usually don't care whether their speeches have any effect or not; they just want to talk. So the only damage they are doing is to take up the time of the rest of us, and who are we do deny them this small happiness in exchange for their not obstructing the real work that gets done?

[permalink, http://php.indiana.edu/~erasmuse/w/03.10.08a.htm ]

To return to Eric Rasmusen's weblog, click http://php.indiana.edu/~erasmuse/w/0.rasmusen.htm.