Furthermore, there was great confusion over the meaning of abstentions: Can one vote to abstain from voting? Is an abstention a decision not to vote, or in effect a negative vote? Subsequent analysis has shown us that not only are we unclear in our bylaws, but our bylaws themselves are not in conformity with New York state law on cooperatives. The result is that we shall probably have to re-vote on the issue of issuing new shares, or at least on their cost, at another meeting.

By the time of the next meeting, the Board and the Governance Review Council (GRC) will have worked out a clear set of rules on voting. This is being written before the October 21 membership meeting, but I trust that for that meeting and any later ones we will have gotten our act together, and that the voting was and will be unambiguous, legal and decisive.

This confusion raises further questions, however, regarding the whole process of voting at HWFC, and in this column I want to begin a discussion about how the Co-op makes collective decisions. Growing up in American society we have internalized a certain system of decision making — Yes/No, winner take all, Robert’s Rules — and we think of these processes as natural. But they implicitly embody certain values: of antagonism, of conflict, of winning and losing, “positions,” alliances, parties; and we scarcely notice them. They feel perfectly reasonable to us. Only in purely private circumstances — inside the family, perhaps, or when those who make the rules are quite indifferent to the outcome (e.g., Special Olympics where everyone “wins”) — do we think that other systems of decision making ought to apply.

Except, perhaps, at a co-op. A cooperative should embody the principles of equality and fairness rather than winning and losing; collective process rather than wielding power; decisions that all can accept rather than the will of the majority. Many “cooperatives” are egalitarian in name only, at most sharing profits and not administration or decision making. But at Honest Weight we have tried to express cooperative principles in substantive ways, including consensus decision making whenever possible. The Board of Directors, the Collective Management Team and all committees seek to operate by consensus.

“Consensus” does not mean that everyone loves the final outcome, but that it is one that all are willing to live with. Consensus is to be arrived at only after substantial discussion, exploring a range of points of view, in an unhurried manner. Process is important and a quick decision that pre-empts discussion is a violation of the principle, even if no one objects. This is quite a different set of values than are implicit in Robert’s Rules (a recent book by Alice Cochran, Roberta’s Rules of Order, has many good things to say about this difference), and are the rules by which we have tried to live.

Unfortunately, the consensus process is very difficult to use as the size of the group grows, unless one is very experienced with it. (Some European parliamentary bodies operate by consensus, but this is rare.) Although Honest Weight has used voting at membership meetings as long as I remember, in the earlier days when the Co-op was smaller and attendance at meetings was therefore smaller, a rough form of consensus process was often achieved, with lengthy discussion and a general abandonment of the formality of Robert’s Rules. The vote was only a final formality. Now that we are much larger, though, and the room is full of relative “strangers” to each other, many of them without a long history of Co-op membership, it is hard to see this happening “naturally.” So we have a dilemma: How do we embody cooperative principles of decision making now that we are 600 working members and not 60?

I don’t need to remind the reader that making decisions will become especially problematic if or when we begin the process of designing and implementing a new store.

I wish I had a simple, clear, immediately applicable solution to this dilemma that goes beyond the rhetoric of saying “We should all be attentive to each other.” I don’t. I expect that the Board (perhaps through one of its committees or an ad hoc committee) will be thinking hard about the problem in the coming months. I know that the Strategic Planning committee, the group specifically charged with working on the new store, will have to do so. There are, in fact, several models that we might explore — the most common of which, in my experience, uses differently colored cards for voting, rather than “hands.” Red, yellow and green each mean different things and a moderator can immediately sense the tenor of the group by the dominant color. (For an application of this process to something similar to building a store — building a cohousing community — look at www.cohousing.ca/consensus.htm.)
We need to try to find a model for decision making at Honest Weight that gets away from Yes or No, winning and losing, and helps us to achieve a decision we can all like — or at least live with. I’d love to hear from people who have any thoughts on this matter.