On Conflict and Consensus

In my experience, a volunteer organization's ability to help others hinges on its organizational structure and culture- its formal leadership, informal leadership, meetings, etc. Most groups really focus on the formal leadership and hierarchical decision making, at the expense of mentorship, consensus building and the input of the least powerful.

Many people claim that mentoring volunteers and getting their input takes too much time. In our Engineers Without Borders chapter, which has a membership of 40+ persons, it seems like that idea only holds up in the short term, if at all. In the mid term, including others and taking the time to build trust with them saves the organization many meetings, headaches and drama. In the long term, it takes less time and produces better results.

Intuitively, the emphasis on formal structures e.g. president, vp etc. running the whole show, and hierarchical decision making makes a lot of sense to many volunteers. It takes most people many volunteer hours to realize that hierarchical decision making is not a very efficient model. It prefers the loudest voices and the people who are most privileged in this world. It causes many organizations to lose the skills and volunteer hours of those who don't have the loudest voices or deepest pockets. Thus using it as the m.o. of an organization that aims to serve poor people in Kenya doesn't make much sense to me.

The problem is that there are not a lot of well-known alternatives to chose from, especially when it comes to running meetings for organizations with a large membership. This summer Quinn and I came across this handbook "On Conflict and Consensus," at a bookstore in Philadelphia. Most of it fits with the lessons about running a volunteer organization that I've learned from volunteering with EWB. We'll see how it goes. We are hoping to be able to try it out in EWB this fall.


http://www.ic.org/pnp/ocac/

wandreilagh.org/consensus.pdf for a free copy in PDF form