Search results
- Decide if you really need a meeting. The first thing you should do is determine if your meeting is really necessary. Making employees attend a meeting that could have easily been an email isn’t just a waste of their time — it can also cost serious money.
- Plan the meeting with your participants in mind. If you want people to contribute and take part in the discussion, then you need to carefully consider their needs.
- Have a clear outcome in mind for the meeting. Knowing and clearly communicating what you want to get out of your meeting, as well as out of each item on your agenda, will help keep everyone focused on working toward that goal.
- Start off with a warm-up or icebreaker. There’s nothing like a good warmup to get the juices flowing and help break everyone out of their shells. This is especially important when attendees don’t know each other, or when you want a more open-ended and creative discussion.
- Keep the group small when you need to make an important decision. Large groups are much more likely to make biased decisions. For example, research shows that groups with seven or more members are more susceptible to confirmation bias.
- Choose a heterogenous group over a homogenous one (most of the time). Various studies have found that groups consisting of individuals with homogeneous opinions and beliefs have a greater tendency toward biased decision making.
- Appoint a strategic dissenter (or even two). One way to counter undesirable groupthink tendencies in teams is to appoint a “devil’s advocate.” This person is tasked with acting as a counterforce to the group’s consensus.
- Collect opinions independently. The collective knowledge of a group is only an advantage if it’s used properly. To get the most out of your team’s diverse capabilities, we recommend gathering opinions individually before people share their thoughts within the wider group.
5. Provide a safe space to speak up: This can help to encourage open and honest communication. 6. Don’t over-rely on experts: This can help to prevent the influence of authority figures. 7 ...
Explore the issues. Generate solutions. Establish goals. Agree a strategy. Ensure teamwork. Manage progress. The second question however, is probably the more important. We have all experienced the delays and frustration where people are not fully committed (or even clear) on the actions, and this is commonly as a result of lack of engagement ...
- Why Use Consensus?
- The Decision Making Process
- Agreement and Disagreement
- Conditions For Consensus
- Facilitation
- Group Structure
- Key Skills For Consensus
- Consensus in Large Groups
Consensus enables a group to share power- everyone who is fundamentally affected by a decision can work together to find solutions that meet everyone's needs. It’s about working with each other rather than for or against each other. It helps to build a stronger community. Consensus relies on us respecting other people's needs and opinions, and bein...
Each group uses a slightly different process to reach consensus - with different degrees of structure and formality. The key to making it work is for everyone to express their needs and viewpoints clearly, and for the group to use this information to find a solution which builds on the common ground and resolves differences. The diagram below shows...
There are many different reasons why someone might not agree with a proposal. For example you might have fundamental issues with it and want to stop it from going ahead, or you might not have time to implement the decision or the idea just doesn't excite you. Consensus decision-making recognises this – it's not trying to achieve unanimity but looks...
Consensus is much easier when certain conditions are in place in a group. If your group is struggling, this checklist should help identify underlying issues you need to address in order to have a better experience of consensus. While the conditions aren’t met, it can sometimes be better to use a different method to make a decision (e.g. voting). Co...
Facilitation is about supporting a group to have an effective and inclusive meeting. Often, meetings have one or two facilitators. Their role is to help the group make decisions and work together creatively and efficiently. In a small group it can also work to have everyone responsible for making the meeting work, instead of appointing a facilitato...
Consensus decision making isn’t just about what happens in a meeting. It also depends on how the whole group is organised. A key democratic principle is that decisions should be made by people who are fundamentally affected by them. This makes it important that everyone is able to contribute to big decisions which impact on the whole group. For exa...
Active listening
When we actively listen we suspend our own thought processes and give the speaker our full attention. We make a deliberate effort to understand someone’s position and their needs, concerns and emotions. Active listening can include asking questions to get clear about what someone means or to encourage them to say more.
Summarising
A succinct and accurate summary of what’s been said so far can really help a group move towards a decision. Outline the emerging common ground as well as the unresolved differences: “It seems like we’ve almost reached agreement on that bit of the proposal, but we need to explore this part further to address everyone’s concerns.” Check with everyone that you’ve got it right.
Synthesis
Bringing together different ideas and trying to find a proposal that is agreeable to everyone is at the core of consensus. We call this process synthesis: finding connections between seemingly competing ideas and weaving them together to form proposals. It is common for people to enter a discussion with strong views on concrete options they do and don't like. This is particularly the case when the discussion starts with only one option on the table, and people in the group end up taking sides...
It can be more challenging to use consensus in larger groups. It becomes more important to split up responsibilities so you spend less time with everyone in the same meeting. However there will be some issues where you do need make decisions with everyone together. Here are a few extra methods to help everyone participate.
Step 2: Analyze the Problem. During this step a group should analyze the problem and the group’s relationship to the problem. Whereas the first step involved exploring the “what” related to the problem, this step focuses on the “why.”. At this stage, group members can discuss the potential causes of the difficulty.
People also ask
Why is participation important?
How do you design a participatory process?
Why are methods important in participatory work?
Should you encourage participation in meetings?
What are the key factors in participatory working?
What factors influence a group's decision-making process?
Process. The design of the participatory process is about planning how the purpose will be achieved (including which methods should be used and when). The design of the process should always follow agreement on purpose – ‘form follows function’ – and understanding of the context (including how any eventual decisions will be made). The ...
