Losses Along the Way

As a process consultant for 34 years (the entire lifetime of my daughter Jo incidentally), I've accumulated a number of scars, and I lay in bed this morning going over some of those experiences…

While there are occasional times when groups engage me in order to learn how to stay out of the ditch, mostly I get called in because they are in the ditch. To be sure, the severity can vary widely, all the way from two wheels sliding down a grassy gradient, to a broken axle on a shaky bridge over boiling rapids. All of which is to say, I'm often trying to help groups extricate themselves from tough dynamics. It goes with the territory.

It's my job to speak truth to what I see, and that doesn't always go down well. Perhaps because my analysis is faulty, perhaps because I deliver the news clumsily, and some of the time because people simply don't want to hear it.

This morning I was brooding about the last of these. About people who started out being happy to see me, and now want nothing to do with me. In general, this has happened when I tried to hold them accountable for doing or proposing to do something that was harmful to the group and they weren't having any. It was more palatable for them that I was mistaken, and their actions were justified (I was on a crusade and they were a victim of my overzealousness).

To frame this properly, most of the time my observations and interventions go well and are helpful to all concerned. I work hard at calibrating what I ask of folks to what I think they can handle, and I like to think I've gotten better at that over time. But I still lose people, and it doesn't feel good. Even when I reflect on what happened and believe my analysis was correct, it still hurts to lose relationship.

The hardest ones are when I had an established connection with the person and then lost it. Let me describe three (with identities obscured):

Dale

More than 20 years ago I met Dale at an FIC community event, and it started a friendship. While we never lived near each other, our paths crossed a number of times over the years in the context of community, and we had a warm connection.

At a certain point it happened that I was conducting a facilitation training session hosted by a group where Dale was living, and she joined the class for that weekend. All was well and good until the students facilitated a meeting for the community (a regular feature of training weekends) and something came up in the course of the meeting that Dale (acting as a member of the community) voiced an objection to. When the student facilitator was unsure how to handle that moment I stepped in (as the trainer) to ask Dale what her concern was and she demurred—she didn't want to talk about it. I pushed a bit, explaining that her right to object was tied at the hip to a responsibility to explain her objection and to make a good faith effort to explore its resolution. Dale felt bullied by me and refused to speak—she didn't want to be in the spotlight and was determined in her resistance.

Though the moment was awkward, we moved on. Afterwards, in the meeting debrief (also a regular part of the training) I tried to unpack that dynamic. Unfortunately, Dale wanted no part of that either, walked out of the meeting, and sent me a note the next day informing me that she would not be continuing with the class. As an experienced communitarian and someone who considered herself a skilled communicator, she had never been held to the standard of meeting behavior I was insisting on, and didn't like being held accountable. Her response was exit, and I have not heard from her since. I was voted off her island.

Adrian

For a number of years Adrian had been an avid follower of my blog, and was excited by the chance for his community to host a facilitation training weekend. Adrian was a founding member of his community and had been struggling for years with tensions with other members.

Knowing that there were strained dynamics, I arrived for the training early and spent time listening to a number of members about how they saw things. After more than a dozen interviews a picture started to emerge: everyone acknowledged Adrian's dedication and good intent, but it was almost impossible to work anything out with him. He had his views about the "right" way to do things and nothing would dissuade him. Eventually people with differing views would be worn down by Adrian's obstinacy and give up. Almost no one was willing to serve on committees with Adrian any more.

I took this information to Adrian directly (we spent about six hours 1:1 over the course of my visit, as I labored to get him to see how he was inadvertently killing the community by insisting on everything going their way). I tried to make the case that you cannot successfully build community by sacrificing relationships on the altar of your principles.  

Adrian had been hoping that I would support his efforts because he was so well intentioned. While I did like his principles, that wasn't the problem; it was the unyielding way that Adrian pursued them, tolerating no interpretation other than his own. To be clear, Adrian wasn't mean or petty—just adamant. It was Adrian's way or the highway. Some got discouraged and left; others hunkered down to await developments.

Adrian resisted my analysis and advice, but there were few people interested in creating community with someone who never seems to value opinions that differ from their own. In the end I told Adrian that I thought the community was better off without him unless he could start working more respectfully with others' input.

We parted in sadness. Adrian stopped subscribing to my blog and we have had no contact since.

Chris

A number of years ago I was hired to work with a community where there had been a major flare up between one member (Chris) and a number of others. Chris was a passionate woman who expressed in no uncertain terms her displeasure with how she had been treated unfairly by others. As is often the case, there were two parts to the dynamic: a) the incidents themselves; and b) the community's lack of agreement about how to work with strong feelings—or even whether to attempt it.

After taking time to listen to all the key parties to get their version of what had happened and how they were seeing it, the pivotal moment of my work with the group occurred when I was able to get Chris and another member to work with me (in plenary) in a dyad, unpacking a difficult incident. This led to a breakthrough, and everyone was pleased with the outcome, including Chris.

Months later, new tensions arose with Chris, and again I was hired to help. By the time I got on the scene, a couple of members were poised to drop Chris from a team where her participation had been problematic. When I found out about this move, I urged the two to slow down—both because the community had not defined the conditions under which someone might lose their seat on a team, nor had it defined the process by which such a step would be considered. In particular, I thought the group would be better off making clear to Chris what behaviors of hers were problematic, and giving Chris an opportunity to make adjustments before abruptly terminating her team membership.

While the two were congratulating themselves for being decisive: I was worried they were acting precipitously. Meanwhile, Chris was on the warpath when she learned that a coup to oust her from the team was underway and outraged that I didn't immediately put a stop to it (as if I had that power). I tried to explain that I did all that I thought possible given how far things had advanced before I was made aware of them, but Chris would have none of it. Either I joined her in burning the would-be ousters at the stake, or I was also the enemy and couldn't be trusted.

Though I labored with Chris for many hours (in an effort to make clear that burning people at the stake may feel good in the moment but is rarely therapeutic), in the end she wrote me off and I am no longer welcome back at that community.

• • •

When I conduct facilitation trainings I make it a point to tell students that facilitating offers a great opportunity to serve—but if you need to be liked all the time, it's not a great choice.

Tough Topics in Cooperative Groups

Not all topics are created equal. In the context of cooperative culture, some topics are much tougher to get at than others.

Here are half a dozen that I encounter regularly. These are by no means all, but they're representative. If your group consistently handles any two of these well, you're way ahead of the curve. (If not, I'm available for hire.)

I. How Power is Used in Cooperative Groups
Groups need to understand—and be able to talk authentically about—how power (influence) is distributed in the group.

If the group has not done foundational work to define healthy models of leadership, it is fraught with danger for members to admit that they have power or are available to fill leadership roles.

Members of cooperative groups tend to want the power gradient to be a shallow as possible (ostensibly in the hope of getting away from the power abuses all of us have had bad experiences with in mainstream situations, whether it be family, church, school, or workplace), but wishing doesn't make it so. Power is never distributed evenly, and you can't reasonably work constructively with a thing you can't talk about openly.

Groups need to distinguish good uses of power (generally speaking, it's when people use their influence for the good of the whole) from poor uses of power (using influence for the benefit of some and at the expense of others) and to develop the chops to be able navigate the perception that a person did not use their power as cleanly as he or she thought they had. That moment is particularly tricky.

Hint: If your group hasn't yet defined what qualities it wants from leaders, and what constitutes healthy uses of power, have those conversations now! Just bumbling along in the fog is not a strategy; it's a train wreck.

II. Limits of Diversity
No group can be all things to all people.

While all groups have some level of diversity among their membership (surely you weren't expecting clones), and most embrace a common value supporting diversity, it is a nuanced question just how much you can handle of any particular stripe of diversity—which manifests in a bewildering array of sizes and colors.

And it's worse than that. While few groups get around to an in-depth conversation about what they actually want in the way of diversity, I have not yet met the group that's developed a culture robust enough to give voice to the desires of those of how want more of a thing (in the name of diversity), only to encounter others in the group who report feeling stretched to the max. Now what?

You need a strong web of caring relationships to sensitively navigate that conversation.

III. Accountability
In most groups there will be a mix of people who favor low structure and people who favor high structure—with a healthy sprinkling of folks in the middle. Those at the low end prefer minimal rules and a high degree of personal discretion, coupled with personal responsibility. They want the flexibility to make nuanced determinations on a case-by-case basis.

Those on the high structure end favor spelling things out to relieve the anxiety of uncertainty. If the standards are well-articulated than you know at all times where the boundary is and it's easier to relax. You'll know what's expected and when you've done your fair share.

The bad news is: nobody's wrong. People at both ends of this very human spectrum have to figure out how to live together. One of the key tests for this is what happens when Member A has the perception that Member B has broken an agreement or failed to come through on a commitment. (Hint: If you believe this problem would be eliminated by high structure, think again.)

Note that I didn't say that Member B had done anything wrong; I said that Member A thought Member B had done something wrong. In situations like this most groups prefer that Member A discuss this directly (and hopefully cordially) with Member B in a good-faith attempt to resolve this concern as cheaply as possible. But what if Member B isn't interested in hearing feedback from Member A—either because of the content or because of the delivery?

Does your group have in place an explicit agreement that members are expected to provide a channel for receiving critical feedback from other members about their behavior as a member of the group? Few do. Yet you can see how much mischief can result from accumulated grumblings that never get cleared. Yuck.

The next thing you know, there's a call for accountability (we can't let those bastards get away with this; they're ruining the community!). This can polarize the group in a blink.

Whenever there's the sense that someone has neglected a duty, done slipshod work, or acted in their own interest instead of the group's, there needs to be a conversation. You need a group culture strong enough to hold that conversation and to keep its focus on repairing damage to relationship; not on determining who's right and how many lashed should be meted out.

Sanctions come only at the end of the line, when all else has failed.

IV. Standing up to Bullying Behavior 
This is a special case of the previous point, yet one that obtains frequently enough to get its own mention.

Bullying is about intimidation. It's accomplished through size, facial expression, crowding of personal space, belligerent attitude, tone of voice, volume, persistence, and through threats and retaliation. It's pushing others out of their comfort zone to the point where they shut up or leave the field rather than continue to voice concerns or opposition.

It needs to be stood up to and not allowed to control the conversation, yet that often adds up to meeting the bully with behavior that mirrors theirs—which tends to be distinctly uncomfortable in the genteel world of cooperative living. Sadly, many good people would rather exit or tolerate bad behavior than stand up in the face of it.

The challenge is to be both firm and compassionate. It's not about ganging up on the bully (which runs the risk of sliding into vigilante dynamics), and it's not about mud wrestling on the plenary floor; it's about interrupting the behavior as soon as it arises, and changing the focus to what's unacceptable about the process before continuing with the topic that the bully was speaking to. You cannot afford to allow bad process to run unchecked.

V. Being Selective about Members
Many groups shy away from discussing what qualities they want in members—not because they don't have preferences, but because it's unseemly to be viewed as favoring some over others. Mostly, I think, this is a misinterpretation of a core value of anti-discrimination.

It's one thing to be scrupulously fair on matters of race, ethnicity, age, gender, sexual orientation, religious affiliation, etc—all protected classes under fair housing laws—yet it's an all together different matter to be blind about a person's communication skills (when assessing membership potential) or their management skills (when considering them to mange a major construction project). The former makes sense from the standpoint of making strides toward building a more just world; the latter is just plain shooting yourself in the foot.

While you can make the case that almost everyone could benefit from living cooperatively, not everyone has the capacity to do it well and you can only make so many silk purses out of sow's ears. It's hard enough to navigate the intricacies of cooperative living with people who "get it"; why complicate matters by working with random volunteers? Doesn't it make more sense to be deliberate about who joins the group: about who is asked to do certain tasks?

To be clear, I am not saying that groups shouldn't commit to creating opportunities for people to learn the skills needed to take on group roles; I'm only saying it's a poor bargain letting unqualified people fill slots simply to avoid giving them the assessment that others don't think they're ready.

In the case of group membership, it's a frightening risk having little or no discernment about who joins the group, and then trying to get them out later once you've discovered they're a poor fit. In the case of making committee assignments or filling manager slots, the more important it is that the job be done well (or is a high trust position), the more crucial it is that you select well to fill it. The stakes are too high to trust to chance to meet your needs.

What all this adds up to is the importance of developing a culture in which it's OK to be discerning, and it's OK to let others know that you don't think they have what the group agrees is needed. Pretending people have what it takes when they don't is a very dubious foundation on which to build a durable culture.

VI. Working Constructively with Distress
Face it. We come out of a mainstream culture that does not do well with distress (outside of a therapeutic setting), and we bring that inability with us into the cooperative experience. Unfortunately, as human beings, we also bring distress.

Once nontrivial distress is in the room (never mind how it got there; it will come) you really only have two choices: pay now or pay later. Let's look at what happens with each of those options:

—Dealing in the Moment
If you're willing to engage with fulminating distress, then a few things need to be put into place ahead of time: a) you need explicit buy-in from the group that there's permission to go there (seeking permission in the dynamic moment is a nightmare; it has to be done ahead of need); b) you should determine a menu of options that may be used to work with distress, so that folks know what they've signed up for; and c) you need to develop the internal capacity to understand and sensitively employ the modalities on the approved menu.

In my view if you're going to go down this road—which I recommend you do—then you need facilitators who can do two important things:

• Be sensitive to energy shifts so that distress can be recognized and attended to as it occurs. This can mean shifting on a dime, suspending the topic in which the distress erupted, to focus on the reactivity and getting the person (or persons) deescalated to the point that the group can productively return to the original conversation. This is an important criteria in that the skills needed to manage a conversation deftly are almost completely unrelated to the skills needed to work distress well. So asking facilitators to be able to do both can be a tall order.

•  Be able to discern when it's an effective use of group time to work distress, and when that's happened sufficiently that the group can productively return to working the topic that was suspended in order to attend to the distress. This is a sophisticated balancing act that calls for the facilitator to be able to accurately read how upset people are (both the person who was initially in reaction, and those around them) and when the group's attention can productively shift off the persons in distress.

—Setting Distress Aside
When you make this choice you're rolling the dice. The good outcome is that it's possible that the person in distress can work through their feelings on their own and come through the experience OK, with no toxic aftereffects. I'm not saying that's likely, but it's possible.

Unfortunately, the downside is pretty big. All of the following can happen:

• The person in reaction may not be able to manage deescalation on their own. For as long as significant distress continues you have to expect they're experiencing significant distortion. That means they aren't able to hear accurately what's being discussed; they are essentially lost as a functioning participant, perhaps for the remainder of the meeting.

• Often, when one person is enduring unaddressed distress, there is blow by on those around them, who are significantly distracted by it. Thus, the focus of many people can be impaired when one person in distress is not getting help.

• When group members observe others not getting help (when they go into distress), the message is that it's not OK to go into distress. This leads to suppression, which makes it that much harder to know what's happening when quashed feelings start leaking and someone starts behaving weirdly.

• Even after the meeting you can't count on things settling down in a balanced way. Sometimes, upon reflection, hearts get hardened rather than softened and the group gets that much more brittle. Not good.

• Maybe you're thinking that if the group sidesteps working with distress there's that much more time to work the issue in which the distress arose. Yes, but it tends to be a bad bargain if the room is infected with significant distortion. How good can those decisions be? How good will the buy-in be if some people aren't hearing well?

Taken all together, I'm question whether you can afford the compound interest when you defer payments on distress.

Many groups avoid working distress in the moment because they have no agreement in place to do so, or no confidence in the skills of their facilitators to handle it constructively. Don't let that be your group.

Nonprofits, Guilt, Martyrdom, and Accountability

I recently worked with a group that hired me after they had struggled for a year to make a difficult decision. They were looking for assistance with four things:

a) How to finally make the decision (their inability to cross the finish line was eating them up) while at the same time avoid calling for a vote, if possible. Voting was on the books as a backup to consensus yet had never been invoked, and they were leery of how a split vote might harden hearts.

b) Regardless of the decision, the group knew it needed to recover from the relationship damage that had been sustained over the prior year. The community needed to heal and was uncertain how to go about it.

c) Help identifying the lessons from the hard time.

d) What tools could I leave them with that would help them avoid repeating the exhausting experience they had just gone through.

Though I was principally hired to wrangle the group to a consensus decision, they were happy to have me arrive early (Wed night) and stay through Sunday, which allowed me sufficient room to facilitate five hours of plenaries, sit with committees for four hours, and interview individuals for 13 hours.

One of the pivotal moments came Saturday morning when the whole group was gathered and I asked people to respond to the question, "What, if anything, do you want others to know about what has come up for you in the context of this issue and the way the community has been working on it?"

Everyone was given a chance to speak once, and almost everyone did. It took us 80 minutes to get around the room, but I knew this was an essential building block of the healing process, since so many had reported to me in 1:1 sessions that they did not feel heard. There was no cross talk and no discussion; people just listened. 

While most of what was said was not a surprise, there were a handful of revelations—especially with regard to analysis and depth of anguish. Two strong themes that emerged from that sharing were: a) many reported feelings of guilt (either about what they had done, or about what they had not done in connection with the presenting issue); and b) a significant minority described feelings of martyrdom (doing more than they felt comfortable doing, to the point of resentment, even though no one had asked them to do so much).

Because it's so common for people in nonprofits to feel either guilty or overworked (sometimes both!) this is where I want to focus today's essay.

o  Dynamics of Volunteers
There is always much more work to do than paid staff time to accomplish it. This leads to relying on volunteers at all levels: everything from filling Board spots, to filling coffee pots; from taking a few minutes to meet with visitors, to taking minutes at a few meetings; from running to the store to get flip chart paper, to running off hard copies.

People's life circumstances vary widely. Anything from retired in good health with no kids at home, to two rugrats in a household where both parents work full time and can only scrape together 30 minutes of discretionary time once a week (before bed Saturday night) to read a magazine, change the sheets, or make love (pick one).

People's motivation to do more than their fair share varies widely, based how much they identify with the group, how intrinsically interesting they find their work, how they've been raised ("giving back" is a powerful motivator in some households, while "charity begins at home" is cross-stitched over the fireplace in others).

In the land of volunteers, recognition is the coin of the realm, yet all coins are is not valued equally. Some prefer that this be handled quietly, behind the scenes—perhaps via a hand-written note or a privately delivered bouquet of flowers. Others want their name in lights, or engraved for posterity in pavers prominently displayed on the patio flooring of the new building. Nobody is wrong; they're just different.

o  Dynamics of Uncertainty
Not knowing fully what's going on, do you assume the best or suspect the worst? When you encounter a fog (lack of clarity) do you tend to hold back until the fog lifts, to avoid the potential embarrassment of a misstep, or do you step right in figuring it's simpler to secure forgiveness than permission (and you have no qualms about breaking a few eggs en route to an omelet)? Hint: it's not so much that there's a best path in this situation as that there are multiple lenses through which this common circumstance will be viewed, and there needs to be some compassion around the near-certainty that different folks will navigate this differently— without anyone being branded a jerk or cold-hearted.

o  Dynamics of Structure
When structure is high, people who like that find it relaxing and reassuring (you know where you stand and what's expected). If you don't like it, it's a straight jacket that forces one-size-fits-all solutions, eliminating nuance and respect for individual differences (we are people, after all, not automatons).

Alternately, when structure is low, people who favor that will appreciate the extra breathing room, making it possible for creative solutions to bubble up and fill the interstices left by emerging conditions. They accept responsibility for their actions and are glad that their intelligence is not insulted by having it all spelled out. Sometimes they are able to do more; sometimes they need to do less, and they're confident that it will all even out over time. If you don't like low structure, then you experience it as dangerous or needlessly vague—initiative can be viewed as power mongering; inaction can be labeled overly timid, placing undo burdens on those who have to pick up the slack. In short, you can get in trouble either way.

o  Dynamics of Guilt
The old saw is that guilt is the gift that keeps on giving. Left unattended, it breeds in dark corners. In a perfect shit storm we hesitate to voice guilty feelings for a number of reasons:

—It can be excruciating shining a negative spotlight on yourself.

—If you alone sense it, you may be drawing heretofore unfocused critical attention to yourself. Now that you have alerted others to what you feel guilty about, they may join in your negative judgment, heaping ashes on your soul.

—If others don't share your self-judgment, your critical assessment may come across as unbalanced—even paranoid—calling into question your ability to read situations accurately. Left unexamined, this can lead to people sharing less with you in the future (for fear that you'll do something weird with the information) or to being more hesitant to give you assignments that require discernment. In short, your social capital can take a hit.

—While people prefer that co-workers (especially leaders) are relatively self-aware of their weaknesses and foibles, it is also true that they are generally more drawn to people with a positive attitude, who are not obsessed with flaws. After all, nobody's perfect and we have work to do. Let's get on with it. If you are devoting a substantial portion of your bandwidth to self-flagellation, how much remains for problem solving and being an enjoyable compatriot?

Of course, not being forthcoming about one's shortcomings also carries risks. (Did someone say this was easy?) If others think you should be more sensitive to how your words or actions may result in strain for others, you're in danger of coming across as callous, uncaring, or at least naive if you're not the first one out of the blocks with a mea culpa. It doesn't take very many iterations of contemplating the best course of action with respect to self-disclosure before you enter that rarefied how-many-angels-can-dance-on-the-head-of-a-pin territory: where you start to feel guilty about whether or not you've expressed enough guilt. Talk about chasing your tail!

o  Dynamics of Martyrdom
Here's how martyrdom works: First there exists a decided shortfall of work that needs to get done and some people respond by volunteering to do extra, in a good faith effort to close the gap. So far so good. Over time, however, the extra work becomes a burden, and this is where it gets interesting. Instead of cutting back to a more manageable workload, the martyr continues to keep their thumb in the dike yet starts claiming that they're due extra consideration in group decisions by virtue of "credit" they've earned by letting their thumb get all wrinkly—even though the group never agreed to that quid pro quo. At its worst, the martyr resents the group and the group resents the martyr, with each feeling taken advantage of by the other. Yuck!

The baseline in most nonprofits (of which intentional community is a subset) is that they have to depend  both on some degree of volunteerism, and on some portion of the volunteers contributing above and beyond their fair share to the well-being and maintenance of the organization. The trick is making it clear that you do not want people contributing more than they can do freely (no strings attached), because the resentment invariably poisons the well.

So you must rely on uneven contributions, yet embrace them in such a way that it doesn't leak into martyrdom. The good news is that with diligence, clarity of purpose, and good communication this strategy will float. Without those buoyant qualities however, prepare to ship water.

o  Dynamics of Accountability
Many people come into the experience of community living with the best of intentions… and naive ideas about how humans will behave. It can be shocking (a fall from grace) to realize that people don't always do what they say they'll do, and, in fact, will sometimes willfully break agreements. Now what? Some groups are paralyzed by this dynamic. They didn't sign up for holding people's feet to the fire and they resent the miscreants who visit this unthoughtful behavior on the group. Unfortunately, merely occupying the high moral ground and adopting an attitude of dismay and disdain will—along with $4—not get you much more than a good cup of coffee. Unaddressed, the impact of people being allowed to color outside the lines is a steady erosion of trust and a malignant cynicism about group agreements.

You're going to have to talk about it.

In the group I mentioned at the front of this essay, one of the most disturbing elements was how many people told me 1:1 they were disturbed by what they saw others doing yet were unwilling (to date) to approach them directly to discuss it. There were some instances where this had been going on for more than two years. Not good.

While some people automatically associate accountability with consequences, it's rarely that simple. (Yes, there are times when there's an obvious and natural option: when a person repeatedly fails to clean and sharpen the community chain saw after using it, they may lose their designation as an approved operator.) In general, I find it more productive to focus the conversation on the carrot (improved relationships and social capital) rather than on the stick (loss of privileges, fines, and a trip through the spanking machine).

o  Dynamics of Clearing the Air
Once you've screwed up your courage to have that conversation, my strong advice is to set it up well. First, ask for a good time to share some critical feedback (don't assume that what's good for you is good for them). You might give the headline, without giving the feedback ("This about following our agreements about chain saw use") so that the recipient's imagination doesn't veer into overdrive. Sometimes people feel more at ease if there's a third party present. While you shouldn't agree to conditions that don't feel safe to you, the prime objective here is to have a constructive exchange, so I urge you to give as much ground as you can in the set up.

Once the talk begins, keep in mind that yours is not the only truth in play, and that there needs to be a full opportunity for each player to say what they believe happened, what feelings came up for them about that, and what meaning that sequence has for them. It will serve you well to remember that you may have a mistaken perception or you may not be fully aware of the circumstances.

I advise that the goal here should not be so much about punishment and consequences as about eliminating the problem in the future and repairing damage to relationship. You can aim to secure an affirmation of the agreement that the behavior is unacceptable—even though you thought the group already had that agreement. Now you've made sure: a) that others are clear about that as well; and b) that if the objectionable behavior persists that there will be another conversation. If the perpetrator thought it might go unnoticed or be allowed to slide by, you have disabused them of that.

Alternately, the conversation may go in other directions. It could, for example, uncover ambiguity or dissatisfaction with the agreement that needs plenary attention. Further, it is not unusual to learn that a person is breaking an agreement in part because they witnessed someone else break that agreement and not get called on it—thus, the problem may be bigger than you knew.

(While there is occasional need for policy about how to handle a pattern of agreement breaking—where the same person fails repeatedly to keep agreements despite attempts to point it out—this drifts into the territory of involuntary loss of member rights and is beyond the scope of this essay.)

The thing is, guilt, blame, martyrdom, and the desire to punish are all common fauna in our zoo of alternative culture, yet none are helpful. I have written this essay on the theory that we need to thoroughly understand their living conditions and breeding habits if we're to have a chance of expunging them from the many places in our culture where their presence persists. We have to learn to neither feed nor pet the dangerous animals, and it is my hope that this tour guide will be instructive in that effort.

Accountability: Conflating Task Monitors with the Police

One of the most challenging topics for cooperative groups to tackle is accountability. What do you do when someone doesn't deliver on a promise or is perceived to be breaking an agreement?

For the most part cooperative groups simply hope the problem will go away—and fortunately, it largely does. That is, most members will voluntarily be good citizens on their own recognizance. They'll do their chores, help out on Work Days, and mostly follow through on commitments to the group—all without anyone sending out reminders or looking over their shoulder.

However, good intentions are not enough. Some will forget, some will be too busy, some chafe at expectations of any kind, some will purposefully step back from commitments because of a story they have about how they were wronged and it's never been addressed, etc. So the question is not whether it's going to happen, but how you're going to handle it.

The short answer is that you're going to have to learn how to talk about it, because here's the deal—it doesn't go away on its own. In fact, unaddressed it's a cancer on the good will and cohesion of the group. So the stakes are high.

Hint: While there's no doubt that noncompliance and deficient performance are a problem, that does not necessarily mean that the responsibility lies wholly with the person perceived to have broken the rule or failed to have kept an agreement.

Let's look over some of the potential factors in this dynamic, any number of which may be in play:

—Ambiguous Requests
Are you confident that what the accuser believes to be the understanding is the same thing that the accused understands? There's a reason for the adage: there's many a slip twixt the cup and the lip. This potential for unclarity is all the greater if the agreements are oral and not captured in writing. In any event, we may be talking about a misunderstanding or mishearing more than willful negligence or defiance.

—Undefined Flexibility
All groups I know allow for the possibility of extenuating circumstances to allow reasonable relief from commitments when people are overwhelmed by other factors in their life (compromised health, family emergency, loss of job, etc). The problem is that the limits of flexibility or how exceptions are invoked are rarely pinned down and the accuser may be interpreting their appropriate application differently than the accused. Uh oh.

—Shame & Guilt
A good bit of the paralysis that surrounds accountability relates to people's fear of feeling shame or guilt in a public forum. Some can't imagine the embarrassment of being called out; others want no part of subjecting others to something they imagine to be that painful. As such they are unwilling to take even the first steps down that road. Some don't want to impose their personal standards on others, while others can't seem to wait for an opportunity to do so. 

A lot of what's in place here relates to the role of shame and guilt in one's family of origin, and that experience is likely to be all over the map—making it damn hard to know what demons you're letting out of the box once you invoke their energy.

—Fear of Consequences
Another factor is what to do if it's determined that someone is out of account. Is moral suasion enough, or do you need a club in the closet for serious offenders? Some groups are flat out allergic to punishments (fines, say) while others seem altogether willing to go there if someone misses a chore cycle and doesn't make it up. To be sure, the backdrop in which this occurs is that the group (and the members who comprise it) always have recourse to the protection and rights extended to them by civil authorities in instances of lawbreaking and public safety, but that only happens in rare and extreme cases (thank god). 

The main point I want to make here is that you can commit to talking abut accountability without embracing a set of consequences (or, for that matter, deciding that you won't have consequences).

—Police State Anxiety
Amazingly, it is common among cooperative groups to have no one (I prefer a committee) designated to handle task monitoring, which seems weird to me. For the most part, I've come to understand this as: a) a fear of people passing judgment on each other (no one wants the Work Police knocking on their door asking where they were on the afternoon of Nov 12, while everyone else was raking leaves and getting the houses ready for winter); and b) a lack of confidence in the community's willingness to work constructively with upset—which is where they suspect conversations about noncompliance are likely to go.

As no one wants to live in a police state, the topic of accountability becomes anathema.

• • •

While I get that those are real fears, are you liking the alternative any better—where the complaining goes on behind people's backs, and others are left to shoulder more of the work to cover those doing less? Not much of a bargain, is it?

Without advocating for or against consequences, I urge groups to commit to talking about it whenever a member is viewed as being out of account. However, since we want this to be constructive, and minimally disruptive, I advocate that this be distributed among the standing committees, where each is responsible for agreements and tasks in their arena.

Then, whenever someone has a concern about noncompliance, they'd be encouraged to follow a sequence such as this (until the matter is settled):

1. Talk with the person directly.
2. Talk with the person with the help of a mutually acceptable third party (or parties).
3. Ask the relevant committee for help (with the Conflict Resolution Team backing up the committee if it gets hairy).
4. Take it to the plenary.

At each point along the way, a good faith effort should be made to accommodate the preferences of both the accuser and the accused about setting, timing, and who's present in the way of support. While these may be facilitated conversations, participation should be voluntary with no one being coerced to accept another's viewpoints or conclusions.

If it is not clear which committee's bailiwick the matter falls into, then the Conflict Resolution Team will play centerfield, handling all requests that come along until and unless they're handed off to another committee.

A big advantage of expressly giving committees the job of task monitoring in their purview is that it becomes a license to initiate conversations about work or compliance with agreements. Absent the assignment of such authority, the person who shows initiative is susceptible to being labeled a busybody. The point of this is not to embarrass or shame: it's to get information and troubleshoot at the least expensive level. Remember: we're creating cooperative culture; not recapitulating the combative, competitive culture of the mainstream.

While it's possible for a matter to go all the way to plenary (the court of last resort), that will rarely happen if committees are doing their job about compassionately talking with folks who are perceived to not be doing theirs.

The Threads of Accountability

I was in a conversation this week with representatives of an established community wrestling with issues of accountability—which means that they're like almost all other communities I know. It's a good topic because it illuminates a tender spot where most groups are unsure of their footing. While there's no question that there's an issue, there are many questions about how to proceed.

In exploring this juicy topic, I want to start by positing some background universals:

o  In community there are more occasions to get irritated about accountability (than in the mainstream) because you've purposefully chosen a life in which there will be more sharing: everything from tools and resources, to cleaning and child care; from participation in group governance to personal confessions that you're trusting will be kept confidential. That means a lot more chances to run afoul of expectations.

o  No one wants to be the police, nor do communities want to live with police. It's an unpleasant role and not one that people had in mind when they were drawn to community.

o  It's ineffective to rely solely on informal, one-on-one direct conversations to clear up misunderstandings and hurt feelings in connection with accountability. While—thankfully—this works some of the time, there are any number of reasons why this breaks down: a) past attempts at direct communication with that person were unpleasant or ineffective, and you're unwilling to go through that again; b) it's personally too scary to give someone (or that person) critical feedback; c) you're paralyzed by your emotional response; or d) you think it's a bigger issue than just you and the other person, or just this occasion.

o  Groups invariably prefer that members exercise a high degree of personal responsibility, such that there's minimal occasion to worry about accountability. That is, members are not looking for opportunities to be bosses over other members, or to have other members telling them what to do. While there are times when that's appropriate, and some have a knack for it, it's not what people are looking for when they join community.

o  Going the other way, there's resistance to spelling everything out in detail, such that there's often a need to interpret the spirit of agreements (because the letter is fuzzy), allowing for latitude of interpretation—which becomes the devil's playground.

o  While groups try to craft agreements with as much specificity as they can muster (trying to anticipate the situations in which they will be applied), the reality is that extenuating (unanticipated) circumstances are common, such that there's considerable nuance in determining how much leeway should be extended in light of them. In short, life is messy—so please try to minimize how much time you spend lamenting that fact, or pretending otherwise.

With all of that in mind, my sense is that accountability issues tend to clump into four major types:

A. Individuals (or committees) not doing what they said they'd do, or not accomplishing it in a timely manner. Maybe they get partial credit, but they're glossing over or blowing off crucial components. This can take the form of their not putting in the time, or their not being effective when they do (or both).

B. Expiring agreements not being removed from the books when they've been made obsolete by newer agreements, the conditions no longer obtain, or they were never effective and it's time to bring reality into alignment with theory. When the group doesn't clean up its agreements, the dead wood starts to undercut the vibrancy of the live wood. ("Why do I have to follow agreement X when everyone ignores agreement Y?")

C. Members are perceived to be coloring outside the lines of acceptable behavior. This is most acute with explicit norms (for example, yelling and screaming in a nonviolent community), yet also occurs when there is an implied norm (never helping to clear the dishes after a common meal, or seldom lending a hand to bring in the groceries when the food truck arrives).

D. Members are felt to be taking advantage of an allowance for flexibility based on personal circumstances, such that they frequently under-perform relative to general expectations and are perceived to be taking advantage of the system to not do their fair share.

What to Do?
Here are a number of suggestions for ways to get traction with this slippery eel:

o  Establish a Work Committee whose mandate includes being available to help resolve misunderstandings and tensions between members. (This task may be backed up by a Conflict Resolution Team if dynamics get hairy.)

o  Ask further that the Work Committee periodically meet with all residents to stay current on their personal circumstances regarding ability to contribute to the community, helping them find suitable ways to contribute (to the extent possible), and sensitively informing the rest of the community about what's happening when there are exemptions.

o  Every so often conduct a Martyrs & Slackers conversation to clear the air about the sense that contributions may be significantly out of balance.

o  Check to see that the Membership Committee is doing a solid job of making sure that all new residents are aware of agreements and the expectations around participation.

o  Have a conversation ("pre-need," as they say in the mortuary business) about what you think is an appropriate menu of options if someone's determined to have fallen short of meeting expectations, and the process by which that will be considered. (Increase dues to cover hiring people to do the work that was not done? Jawboning? Measured withholding of social benefits? Paddle machine? Tar and feathering?)

Consensus Challenges: Accountability

This is the final installment of a blog series started June 7 in which I'm addressing a number of issues in consensus. Today's topic is Accountability.

I. When do you know enough to act? [posted June 7]
II. Closing the deal [posted June 10]
III. Wordsmithing in plenary [posted June 16]
IV. Redirecting competition [posted June 23]
V. Bridging disparate views [posted July 5]
VI. Harvesting partial product [posted July 20]
VII. When to be formal [posted July 29]
VIII. Harnessing brainstorms [posted Aug 10]
IX. Coping with blocking energy [posted Aug 19]
X. Defining respect [posted Sept 3]
XI. Balancing voices [posted Sept 18 & Sept 30]
XII. Knowing when to accelerate and when to brake [posted Oct 27]
XIII. Knowing when to labor and when to let go [posted Nov 18]
XIV. Accountability

• • •

As I've written about this topic before (see my entry of Oct 17, 2008: Accountability & Punishment), what I'll offer today is intended as complementary—not repetitive.

I concluded my 2008 monograph with the admonition that groups need to get clear about how they view feedback, including both the right members have to dish it out and the responsibility they have to receive it. Although it's been my experience that few groups lay this out, and don't begin to tackle it until they're immersed in a dynamic where the ambiguity bites them in the butt, here are the essential elements that I think need to be in place:

A. That members will make themselves available (with reasonable options) for hearing critical feedback from other members about their behavior as a member of the group. 

Note that there is an important boundary here around what individual behaviors are subject to group comment. It is, for example, most unlikely that the group is expected to have any say in whether a member wears a blue shirt or a red one (unless, of course it's Election Day). That would be considered a private matter and if you didn't like a person's clothing choices they would ordinarily be under no obligation to listen to your complaint about it.

Going the other way, if the group had a core commitment to environmental impact and you observed the manager of the community parking lot using a gas-powered leaf blower to clear the asphalt, you would have a right to register a complaint about it. (I'm not saying the manager couldn't have a good reason for using the leaf blower, or what the outcome of the complaint would be; I'm only saying that the manager would be expected to treat seriously a complaint about whether they were doing work on behalf of the group in a way that was consistent with group values.

Now let's peel this onion one layer deeper. Sometimes private choices can have a demonstrable impact on the group, such that it's sensible to have a forum where the group can discuss this impact, even though everyone acknowledges that it was an appropriately private choice that triggered it. The point of the forum would be to share reactions and attend to relationships, not to censure or celebrate people's private choices. A good example of this might be when people make a change in intimate partners. [For more on this, see my blog of Sept 30, 2010: The Relationship of Relationships to the Group.] 

B. Hearing critical feedback is not a commitment to agreeing with it, or agreeing to change one's behavior. It's an agreement to try to understand the complaint and put forward a reasonable effort to find a mutually satisfactory resolution.

C. Because it's unwise to expect that members will always be able to accomplish this on their own, it's generally a good idea to create a Conflict Resolution Team whose job it is to be a resource in case of need, to support people working through tensions when they feel overwhelmed at the prospect of managing it themselves, when they are ineffective in doing so, or even to hold their feet to the fire when they attempt to ignore it.

• • •

In my 2008 essay I explored how accountability is often associated with punishment. It's potent, I think, to try to shift away from judgment and toward looking at the impact of obligations that have not been met, or are perceived to have not been met well enough.

It's possible that tensions about unmet expectations are exposing vagueness about what was expected. Perhaps the deadlines were not clearly set. Perhaps details about what the job entailed were not laid out well. Perhaps the group is poor with minutes and people's memories diverge about what was agreed to.

But let's suppose that ambiguities have been taken care of and there's no disagreement about the perception that an obligation was not been met. While consequences in the way of fines or loss of rights are a possibility, those options are generally exceptional and offenses need to be egregious to wheel them out. For run-of-the-mill frustrations—even patterned ones—it's important to understand that the main leverage point is damage to relationship.

Connections among members are the glue of the community and the point of why you live together. When someone's efforts are perceived to be coming up short, it lets down the group and it lets down the relationships. Unattended, that damage can seriously erode the cohesion and joy that the group intended by making the choice to live together. With that in mind, I believe that the most fruitful way to think about accountability is to make sure that the person who feels let down has had a decent chance to express that hurt or sadness to the person who didn't meet the obligation, and that the recipient has had a clear opportunity to describe their experience of the same dynamic.

There is also the challenge of how to sensitively incorporate flexibility into the mix. In the name of diversity there tends to be ready acceptance with the concept that people vary and that it's reasonable to adjust expectations based on people's life circumstances and capacities. The delicate question is how much flexibility is appropriate and who gets to decide which expectations should be waived or adjusted? At what point are those that are better off being taken advantage of by those with diminished capacities? These are tricky conversations. Yet they're conversations you need to have if you want to avoid the erosion of trust that ensues from caustic cloak room comments that go unaddressed.

When examining an unmet obligation, or the sense that someone is taking advantage of someone else, you want the main objective to be gaining a better understanding of everyone's experience and repairing damage to relationship, rather than translating frustrations into fines or exacting retribution. In the context of community, relationship is the ultimate coin of the realm and the prime directive is engaging in a way that enhances and preserves that precious commodity, rather than devalues it or squanders it. 

To be sure, not everyone is meant to live together and patterns of unmet obligations may signal a mismatch. However, that should be the conclusion reached only after you've tried to work it out first.

Accountability & Punishment

One of the hardest things for people to handle well is critical feedback about their behavior. No one enjoys finding out that others are having a problem with something you've said or done, and there's an amazing array of things people do to keep feedback at bay—many of which are far more clever then the standard alliterative trio of defensiveness, denial, or deflection.

(Let me tell you of a great scheme I had working for a number of years, until a careful observer busted me on it. Whenever someone criticized me, I'd start beating myself up, often with more vigor than I was approached with. Horrified by how hard I was on myself, people near me learned to be careful about giving me feedback, for fear of triggering my next display of self-flagellation. Most people stopped giving me critical feedback, or at least curtailed it sharply. Then, of course, I couldn't be held responsible for not heeding feedback I'd never been given. Oh, it was plenty clever.)

And yet we need feedback—especially critical feedback—to understand more accurately how our words and deeds are landing. If you're not sure about this, think about how important pain is to maintaining health. If you step on a nail, it's a damn good thing that your foot hurts. I'm not saying it's good that you're in pain; I'm saying that it's good that pain alerts you to look at your foot, so you can take the nail out. There is as analog with behavior. While you'd prefer that people have a positive response to what you do, it's valuable to know when they don't because it's information you'll want to weigh before deciding whether to repeat that behavior. If you don't get the information, it's of no use to you.

While everything I've written so far applies to all human interactions, the stakes are higher in community, where people tend to be in each other's lives much more (which translates into more opportunities for friction). And this brings me to the point I want to write about. For a significant number of people living in community, they have combined a number of things about feedback and come up with a startling blind spot. It works like this:

1. Because their prior experiences with giving or receiving critical feedback have gone poorly (which is undoubtedly the background almost all of us have), they cultivate acceptance and tolerance as an art form (or at least as a coping mechanism). Within that practice, it is considered a loss of control to criticize another. They believe that everyone is doing the best they can, and that forgiveness will go further in building a loving world than holding people accountable for their shortcomings.

2. There is also a tendency to equate oneself with one's actions. Thus, critcism about their behavior is tantamount to critcisim about them as a person. An unwashed dish becomes a dirty soul. There is also a corollary to this, where criticism about a result is translated into an accusation that you meant the bad thing to happen. While I'm not saying that people don't accuse each other of bad intent, mostly this assignment happens without any direct statement about intent having been made. Amazingly, people just assume it, and they can have the missiles out of the silos and primed to launch before pausing to reflect that "I'm upset that you left the kitchen a mess last night," is not the same thing as "You left the kitchen a mess last night knowing that it would upset me."

3. There is considerable emphasis on positive reinforcement in intentional communities, as opposed ot guiding beahvior through limit setting. Thus, people would prefer to encourage and reward good behavior rather than focus on how to curtail and extinguish undesirable behavior.

What this trio of beliefs leads to is a bad reaction when someone attempts to hold that person accountable for their behavior. Because their acuser has spoken up (and therefore chosen to forego tolerance and aceptance), they must be intending to punish (dragging you into the arena of critcial feedback, where the bad things happen). Now, in addition to the behavior itself, you have to deal with the added distress associated with an accusation of intent to punish (which is pretty interesting coming from a person who advocates not judging others at all).

For people with this profile, accountability and punishment are interchangeable terms. Because "good" people don't punish others, asking for accountability is tantamount to an admission that you have it in for someone else. Trying to sort out how the other person got to that conclusion can be like trying to wade through a vat of jello—with just as much visibility.

I think the only way through this mess is to take the conversation all the back to definitions and find out which terms are loaded with what baggage. For he folks I've described above, "accountability" is a trigger word. For others it simply indicates what happens when boundaries are crossed and someone notices. Your group isn't going anywhere (at least not anywhere you'd willingly go) until you've been able to develop concepts and a vocabulary that bridges the various philosophies around feedback.

I wish you luck… or, failing that, the chance to pick the flavor of the jello.

Power and Structure

Wednesday—the last day of meetings discussing the future of PEACH [see my July 4 and July 13 blogs for more about this]—we tackled a tough issue around communication guidelines. There have been problems with the program representatives not always adequately informing their home communities what’s going on or soliciting member input before making program decisions. To what extent should we be attempting to address those concerns by requiring more steps for the representatives and administrators to take before making decisions, and to what extent should the burden of responsibility fall on the communities who have either not been making great selections in their representatives, or not holding them accountable for fully informing the community of what’s going on?

I’m worried that the easier solution is to shackle the administrators (asking for more frequent reports; not allowing decisions to be made unless everyone has voiced an opinion [that is, not allowing silence to be interpreted as assent]; dividing the administrative tasks into more jobs, so no single person is as powerful; pushing for more structure and limiting individual discretion), which is an example of addressing a power disparity by hamstringing those perceived as more powerful, rather than focusing on strengthening the weak spots. I don’t think it's a good approach.

That said, it’s still a real dilemma how to reasonably strengthen the community representatives. Most of the work is clerical, with the occasional need for serious consideration about a tough issue—around which tens of thousands of dollars may hinge. It’s hard to assign your best people to this job because of the low amount of challenging work, and yet it can be highly expensive to not have a heavy hitter in there when a hair ball comes along.

What we're going to try are two things, First, we'll attempt being more diligent about how groups select and evaluate representatives. (This is not now happening and it's tough to get cooperative groups to tackled accountability in a straight forward way. If you raise questions about performance, it tends to be translated into a personal attack and leads to bad feelings. Most groups simply don't try, and the price for this is that eventually some key job will get filled incompetently and the groups then don't have the will or culture to hold that person's feet to the fire.)

Second, we've established the importance of the representatives responding to requests involving decision making in a timely way and crafted a protocol for how we'll proceed when we don't get a response. The key feature of this is that we'll identify a responsible party at each community willing to be a back-up contact in the unhoped for event that the rep is stubbornly silent. Here's the sequence we adopted:

a) Initial email to the rep (we place "RSVP" at the start of the subject line to indicate that a response is required) with a deadline.
b) If no response is received by the deadline, a follow-up email is sent to the rep, with another (shorter) deadline.
c) lf still no response, we try to reach the rep by phone. If the rep is not in, a message will be left which will include a deadline for response.
d) If that fails, then the back-up contact will be phoned. If the back-up is not available a message will be left which will include a deadline for response.
e) If all of the above fail, the group can proceed to make a binding decision without input from the unresponsive community.

We'll see how well this works.

Consensus Under Time Pressure

One of the hallmarks of consensus is taking sufficient time to thoroughly consider everyone's views and then balancing the factors to reach the best conclusion about what action to take. What happens when you don't have enough time?

Last weekend Ma'ikwe and I were working with a forming cohousing community in Brooklyn that was struggling with trying to do everything at once. Started about a year ago, the group has six full members plus many seriously considering it. Altogether, there are about 21-22 households currently in the mix, and the issue of the moment was whether to make an offer on a fabulous, but expensive piece of property. And if they decide to go for it, how much should they put on the table? There's a lot riding on this decision and want to get it right.

As new as the group is, they have virtually no process agreements in place (beyond a baseline commitment to make decisions by consensus, which no one in the group has been trained in). Oh boy. The good news is that they realize they need help, and have asked for it well before they've dug a big hole. The tricky part was trying take enough focus away from their immediate issue (what to do about that property!) to learn how to better work through immediate issues. It was a chicken-and-egg deal.

Stepping back from the particulars of this group, I want to write about how most cohousing groups face something similar: the challenge of needing to navigate a gauntlet of crucial decisions (site selection, design, and construction management) under considerable time pressure—all of which are front-loaded and occur when the community is least prepared to deal with it. Mistakes made in how this is handled can haunt the group for years, so the stakes are high.

Leaving aside the matter of learning the skill of working creatively through non-trivial disagreements (a decidedly interesting topic, but not the subject of this entry), new groups tend to be weak in two crucial areas: understanding what is worthy of plenary consideration, and how to effectively delegate. Groups often fail to develop a) an explicit understanding of what the whole group should be working on; and b) a concomitant iron discipline about not talking about what is not plenary worthy. (Hint: this problem is often a substantial portion of the root cause for complaints about how much time is spent in meetings.)

The second part of this is understanding how to make committees work in concert with plenaries, such that subgroup work is honored (rather than trashed or reworked in plenary) and that they are given clear enough guidance and a wide enough mandate to usefully act on the group's behalf without everything substantive collapsing on the whole.

With these two caveats in mind, I suggest that forming cohousing groups would greatly benefit from the careful empaneling of what I'll style a Development Committee, which would be asked to accomplish the following:

1. Be the liaison between the community and the professionals who are directly involved with developing the property. This will include the architect, the general contractor, the bank, government officials, and the developers—in whatever combination is appropriate to the project. This committee will be charged with bringing forward decisions that need to be made by the whole group, and act on the community's behalf when there is not sufficient time to consult with the whole group. (Note: this last piece is huge, and needs to be developed with great care and high buy-in.)

2. Create and maintain an up-to-date timeline for the project's development, such that the need for plenary decisions can reasonably be anticipated, obviating (or at least minimizing) the need to invoke the committee's powers for streamlined decisions [see #4 below].

3. Field all member questions about development. If the committee does not know the answer to a question, it will undertake to get answers from the professionals, so that all community-based inquiries are coming through the Development Committee (strict adherence to this protocol will greatly simplify life for the professionals).

4. Be authorized to make decisions on behalf of the community, if conditions warrant. (Remember: when faced with a call for cloture that is based on a sense that delay will be too costly, any group can always ask, "What happens if we don't decide today?" Sometimes, the damage to group relationships ensuing from forcing the issue is more expensive than the penalties associated with non-decision. At least you can weigh it.)

I suggest the following criteria be adopted for invoking the power to make a streamlined decision (this would be about something you'd otherwise take to the plenary):
—There is the perception that taking the time to consult with the entire group would cause an unacceptable delay, by which I mean there would be a serious financial or relational consequence (that is, significant cost penalties or damage to working relationships). Note: you may need to define, at least broadly, what people consider "serious" and "substantial."
—The Development Committee needs to be in consensus about invoking this power.
—The committee will be expected to make a prompt report (with 48 hours?) to the community whenever it invokes this power, explaining what conditions justified the invocation, and what action was taken.

Because trust in this group is essential, considerable care should be taken in determining who will serve on this committee. It is important that it be a representative group (by which I mean every member feels there is at least one person on the committee whom they can easily approach with their concerns, and the community collectively feels it is an appropriately balanced group—however the community defines "balanced"; perhaps gender, age, parent/non-parent, risk averse/risk tolerant… that kind thing). Here are qualities I think you'll want members of this committee to have:
—Skill at understanding finances and evaluating contracts.
—Good communication skills and ability to collaborate well with others.
—Availability to do the work.
—Responsiveness on short notice.
—Ability to work under time pressure.
—Good at problem solving.
—Has at least a rudimentary understanding of group dynamics and good group process.

In deciding who will serve, I dis-recommend simply asking for raised hands (volunteer roulette). I suggest something like the following, which is much more deliberate:
o Post the committee job description and desired qualities for the members who serve on it.
o Ask all community members if they are willing to serve and create a written ballot listing all those who agree to be available.
o In plenary, select an ad hoc Ballot Team from among those members who have opted off the ballot. These people will be the only ones seeing the filled-in ballots and must agree to divulge to no one else how people voted.
o Distribute printed ballots to all members, asking them to mark all those whom they find acceptable to serve (people can pick none, all, or anything in between).
o After a set period of time (72 hours?) ballots are due in and the Ballot Team tallies them in private.
o After ranking people by the number of votes received, they privately approach people (starting with the top vote-getter and working their way down the list), asking them one at a time if they are willing to serve. As slots are filled, additional people are asked if they would be willing to serve with others who have already accepted the calling. This process continues until all slots are filled.
o The Ballot Team announces the composition of the team (which does not require cmty ratification), the ballots are destroyed, and the Ballot Team is disbanded.

• • •

My motivation for working on this is that groups often stumble when trying to make a transition from the decision-making style they adopt during the craziness of development (when there's barely enough time to chew your food before swallowing and being asked to open up for another mouthful) and the more leisurely pace of decisions after move-in. If the one doesn't fit with the other, there can be hell to pay in the transition (where the heroes of development—celebrated for their quick-thinking solutions—are trashed as powermongers afterwards, when calls for quick action tend to be met with more suspicion than support).

I'm offering this advice as an attempt to take into account both the real need to act with alacrity during development, and the long-run need for accountability. I'm trying to balance the advantages of quick action with the advantages of inclusivity. The answer, I think, is crisp delegation and prompt disclosure. It can be done.