Recommend consent-seeking as a fall-back from consensus-seeking

[choldgraf]

Description

I really like that the decision-making guide encourages projects to "seek consensus" in its conversations, even though we recognize that this may not be possible, and a vote is often required.

That said, I have found that "seek consensus" is an under-specified process and can be a high bar for more complex decisions. I wonder if it would be helpful to recommend "consent seeking", with links to some materials that describe what this means, as a more explicit and pragmatic approach.

Benefit

I think that framing decisions in terms of consent could have a few benefits:

• It is generally a more pragmatic decision-making approach, by reframing decisions as "do you have any major problems with this?" rather than "is this the decision that you want?" (which is often hard to achieve).
• It provides a framework (e.g., this guide or this guide) for carrying out decisions and discussion in an inclusive manner.

Implementation ideas

It might be enough if we simply referenced these resources in the decision making guide, since "try to seek consensus" is not really an official policy anyway, more like a cultural norm, this could similarly be an informal recommendation.

Edit: Note that I don't believe this is suggesting an official "change" to the decision-making process, this is just for the first section of the decision-making guide, in case it could be a useful approach to use.

[jasongrout]

+1 to the idea of elaborating (even just with links) what consensus-seeking looks like.

[betatim]

What is a concrete problem this is trying to fix? Can you describe a situation in which having this alternative decision making process would be good?

Two thoughts:

1. https://thedecider.app/consent-decision-making defines consent seeking as "absence of objections". If I dislike the current consensus proposal, wouldn't I then object to it in a consent seeking decision process? It seems if the decision making is stuck because of lack of consensus, it would remain stuck.
2. if consent seeking is seen as a way of getting a decision more quickly/with less effort then (that is how I interpret this proposal, maybe incorrectly) then why not use it as the default? The hard thing about consensus is that it takes time and a lot of effort and sometimes ends with "we won't do this because we can't find a solution that people like enough". Except for the last point you could interpret these as "bugs" that are "fixed" by consent seeking. This means you have a way out of having to put in the effort of finding a consensus. Declare the consensus seeking as failed and move to consent seeking. So why wouldn't the first thing I do in the decision making process be to make the consensus seeking fail so we can move to consent seeking?

In Germany there is a joke that at committee meetings of clubs and local organisations you should ask "who objects?" when you call a vote, not "who is in support?". Because all the people not paying full attention will miss that you called for objections and not raise their arm. With that context I think "consent seeking", as formulated in the linked resource, is misleadingly named. It isn't about seeking positive votes, it is about moving forward as long as there are no objections. I think that sets a stage that can easily increase adversarial behaviour.

It sounds like the motivation for introducing this alternative method is to fix the potential slowness of consensus seeking. Because of that I think asking the question "Would you support consent seeking as decision making if it was the only process?" is a good thing to do.

[choldgraf]

Just to be clear, I don't think I'm suggesting a change to "official" policy of any kind, this would just be for "the decision making guide" as a potential tool to use to help move things forward. I'm certainly not trying to suggest we change the voting behavior of the Steering Council

I think main benefit is that it is easier to get to a group to "yes", because the overlap of what everybody is comfortable with is larger than the overlap of what they'd ideally like. Since the decision-making guide just recommends "informal" consensus seeking (AKA this isn't a highly specified strict process). I thought it might be helpful to suggest "consent" including a more specific process (something like this) that people could follow, in the hopes that it could help others have more productive discussions.

FWIW I agree with you that this can be abused (though, I think that "informal consensus seeking" can be abused as well). Any of these processes requires a good-faith effort at getting input in an inclusive manner. I don't think this would solve that.

If folks don't think that this would be a useful addition for the guide, then I'm happy to just close it.