Consensus Handbook

This book, the handbook for consensus decision-making published by Seeds for Change, the group who run training workshops about all that jazz, is literally what it says on the tin. I don't really have any substantive thoughts of my own on it - it's just a really helpful book for anyone engaged in community-level organisation or activism, or any group that could potentially benefit from making decisions using consensus (could be interesting for groups of church leaders/elders - whole congregations even maybe). As such, if you're currently involved in a group that makes decisions and you feel that that group's method of making decisions often doesn't take full account of everyone's viewpoints or concerns, and would be open to investigating a super-democratic super-inclusive surprisingly-streamlined method of decision-making that is great for effective solutions and group cohesion (speaking from experience as someone who's been part of a couple of groups that use consensus decision-making for over two years), check consensus out. The whole book is available for free as a .pdf from the link at the head of this post.

   It walks through, in helpful terms and constantly setting its principles in the context of its values, how to do consensus decision-making, how to facilitate meetings using it, techniques and activities that can be helpful in consensus-facilitated meetings, and common troubleshooting problems that may arise when trying to make decisions or run meetings by consensus. (if you've got this far through the paragraph and you don't know what consensus decision-making is, I'm not going to bother to explain it, click here.) There's a fairly thought-provoking chapter at the end too about some of the problems we have in the lack of democratic decision-making in wider society, and how community organisers starting to favour consensus plays a role in slowly changing that.