Consensus building
I began engaging in office politics as part of the graduate student association leadership at BYU in 2006. I continued on the computer science graduate student group steering committee for several years at UVA, starting in 2009. But I really hit my stride my second year as a lecturer at UVA in 2014, and continuing unabated thereafter.
For most of that time I either had little formal power or worked on policies and issues that lay outside my formal power. I learned many lessons along the way, mostly by the experience gained through well-intentioned errors. Today I wish to share a few thoughts about building consensus.
I have had the good fortune to work primarily with good people. By good I don’t mean perfect. Rather, I mean that they don’t take pleasure in others pain; and that they discuss the issues at hand with the goal of resolving them, not in an effort to undermine their opponents or prove a point.
But of course, they are still people, human beings with foibles and so on, like you and I. And disagreements arise, both in response to the foibles and because of diversities of perspective and priority. Many errors I perpetrated were by mistaking one or another of these causes of disagreement for something else because I was not even cognizant of the source, so a list of common sources may be in order.
Insecurity prevents consensus. I’m unlikely to let another voice win if I feel unseen or disrespected. I’m likely to oppose anything proposed by those I perceive as my opposition. Majority support for a proposal makes me uncomfortable when I feel marginalized. Proposals from people I don’t know and trust look suspect.
Fear prevents consensus.
Novel things are unexpected. Unexpected things are usually bad. That’s not just an opinion: it’s key to how you brain helps us cope with a very complicated world. Unexpected things in the road are bed when driving, unexpected feels and tastes in the mouth are bad when eating, unexpected sounds are worrying in the night, unexpected behaviors of children require parental investigation, and so on.
Because of this, new ideas, regardless of their virtues, are harder to accept than old ideas. Consensus takes time.
Complicated issues have many different ramifications and which ones we can see depends largely on our prior experiences and outlook. When someone has a position from which they can see an problem with a proposal more clearly than others, this can result in disagreement.
More perspectives, if incorporated and responded to appropriately, lead to better results.
Topics interesting enough to require seeking consensus almost always include some kind of trade-off: less of one desirable feature to make room for another desirable feature. But it is very unlikely that everyone will agree on the correct prioritization of these at-odds features.
One priority disagreement came up so often I came to think of it as universal. Some people want something now even if it’s not ideal, others want it to be polished and refined before it’s implemented.
Priority-based differences are, in my experience, essentially fixed: people have the priorities they have, differ from one another in them, and there is no simple way to change that. Discussing them can sometimes reduce the gap, but rarely remove it. Because of this, consensus generally involves some form of compromise.
A theoretically-avoidable but oft-recurring source of disagreements is miscommunication caused by lack of shared context. Sometimes proposals were thought to say something the proposer didn’t intend; sometimes pros and cons failed to connect because they were incompletely expressed or addressed things outside of others’ experience; sometimes competing proposals were equivalent beneath a thin facade. And I once saw a proposal appear to reach consensus and the misunderstanding only emerge after it was established policy.
Smaller and more homogeneous groups, have less of this, but some of it seems inevitable. Because smaller groups have less, small-group discussions can help relieve it.
What can yo udo to achieve consensus despite these obstacles? The following are some tips I’ve found to be effective.
Progress towards consensus is rarely made in large meetings. When there’s a large audience, some speakers show off and others don’t want to open up. It’s harder to change your mind or admit uncertainty in front of a group. Shared context is harder to find, priorities harder to align, and there are more perspectives than there is time to share them in.
When working on any large consensus project I have found no suitable alternative to visiting each stakeholder individually. Trust can be established one-on-one even when insecurity is present in a group. Novelty loses its sting if you’ve had a chance to hash it out without competing for airtime. Context is easier to establish and perspective is easier to share with fewer people around.
It’s important, in these meetings, to make it clear that the meeting is about them, not about you. Door-to-door sales is counter-productive when it comes to building consensus. Door-to-door listening and input gathering is the goal.
When you have a meeting with consensus-building as a goal it’s important to have and stick to an meeting agenda, meaning and outline of what will be discussed. It’s also important not to have an hidden agenda, meaning a specific unspoken outcome you’re trying to achieve.
Meeting agendas, well written and shared publicly, help people know what is and is not in scope for a meeting. They give permission for tangents to be abandoned. If maintained live and displayed during the meeting, they provide a place to summarize what is being said, retain focus, and illustrate what there is and isn’t consensus on.
Hidden agendas have two harmful forms.
Hidden agendas that manifest in how the meeting is led undermine trust and create insecurity. Few things harm consensus more than listening, then ignoring and pushing forward something unrelated to what was said.
Hidden agendas that do not manifest but instead remain hidden inside you prevent you from hearing the good in the ideas around you. But they’re also hard to avoid as usually we’d not engage in a topic unless we had a strong opinion on it. I bear in mind two adages to help me overcome this. Many years ago Sean Warnick told me leave your ego at home.
A few years ago I added to it my own words, never reject a proposal until you can explain to the proposer’s satisfaction why it is a good idea.
If I want to run a consensus-building meeting I need to focus entirely on the meeting agenda of hearing many voices and ignore, for a time, my own opinions. There will be time enough to be opinionated later.
Always summarize what you hear.
Summaries help those you are summarizing know that you’ve listened.
Summaries help identify miscommunications.
Summaries help point out both similarities and dissimilarities between comments, identifying where there is consensus and where consensus still needs to be built.
Summaries help magnify the voices of those who tend to feel unheard.
Focusing on summarizing helps suppress the natural urge to focus only on what aligns with your own hidden agenda.
Consensus building takes time. Not just the direct time investment needed to visit with people, listen to them, and integrate their views into the proposal, though that is important and can be time consuming. You need to build in delays and repetitions. Time to mull it over. Time to see if it still looks good from another perspective. Time to convince your subconscious that it’s not something unexpected. Time to communicate that it matter more that it’s done by consensus than that it’s done by some deadline.
And, if you’re anything like me, also time to make some mistakes and learn from them.