Best of Communities Volume V
Consensus
Digital downloadable compilation PDF
FIC is happy to share with you the fifth volume of our Best of Communities Collection.
“Consensus is by far the most common form of decision making among intentional communities―but that doesn’t mean everyone knows what they’re doing or gets stellar results. Consensus is based on the notion that it’s better to cooperate than compete. But accepting that notion isn’t enough to guarantee that you’ll remember it in the heat of the moment. When someone disagrees strongly with something that matters a great deal to you, will you respond with curiosity or a clenched jaw?”
– Laird Shaub, FIC Executive Secretary
The FIC is pleased to offer a guide to the use of the consensus process as a powerful tool in our communities which can help elevate effective decision-making to a cooperative level.
It is a serious work unlearning competitive conditioning and learning instead the use of other skills to avoid conflict and to find resolution when conflict has arisen.
With this collection of articles, selected from our Communities magazines and Communities Directory, we hope to provide you with a broad overview on this topic. You will find articles about the different phases of a meeting, the importance of the facilitator, false myths around consensus, and how the use of dynamic consensus can empower the individual. You will read when voting and consensus can work together, when and why it can be appropriate to block, and you will read about the dynamics of dissent.
This collection tries to cover consensus from many different angles, starting with a basic introduction and going more deeply into examples, theories, warnings, and into possible obstacles you may encounter.
You can buy this digital downloadable PDF volume of the Best of Communities collection for only $10!
Our Best of Communities volumes are special collections of articles published by the FIC, in which we have distilled what we consider to be the most insightful and helpful articles that have appeared over the last 20 years in Communities magazine and the print book Communities Directory.
We have divided our choices into 15 collections, each one on a topic that you―our readers―have told us you care about most: seeking and visiting communities, agreements, conflict and communication, children in community, communities for elders, cohousing and many others. Each collection contains about 20 articles and they are all available as digital downloadable PDFs.
You can buy this volume of The Best of Communities collection for only $10!
All 15 issues of this collection can be found here, sold individually or in a bargain-priced bundle.
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