Guide to consensus decision making

Seeds for Change has a great and brief guide to consensus decision making, useful for anyone who wants to quickly get a group up to speed on best practices. I’ve written before about how consensus is an underused and under-acknowledged method in most organizations, in part because of the myth that it takes too long. But often, top-down decisions only seem faster: because they skip over people’s concerns, they can lead to lots of thrashing and resistance when implementing a decision, ultimately costing more time. One way to look at consensus processes is that they foreground alignment rather than saving it for later. And being explicit about a consensus process also builds clarity when it comes time to communicate about how and why a decision was made—which is a win all around.