Comments Elsewhere

“[Consensus is] a highly specialized form of decision making that shows itself to be (again and again) wholly inadequate for effective process and decision making in large complex groups.” – Shawn Ewald Whether this seems like a problem with a consensus process, or one of the best things about a consensus process, probably depends on how invested you are in making sure that collective decisions can get made through large, complex groups. If consensus process is completely unsustainable in large, open-ended, relatively permanently structured organizations, then one way to deal with that is to modify or chuck consensus process; another way is to reconsider whether organizations really need to be so large, open-ended, or relatively permanently structured.