Virtual Consensus

I just received this inquiry from a friend, Mike Graff, whom I first met two years ago in the context of doing facilitation training at his then community, Heathcote (Freeland MD). Since that time he and his family have moved to East Lake Commons, an established cohousing community in Atlanta where I had done some consulting in 2008 and 2010. Mike wrote:

I see you are continuing your work to teach people how to get along. You've had a huge impact at ELC. The meetings are efficient, relatively friendly, and end with a decision on how to proceed. I'm sure you've heard stories from BL [Author's note: it took me a few minutes to puzzle out that that stood for Before Laird]. Suffice it to say, I'm glad I wasn't around in those days.

The reason for my email is to see if you have experience with web-based forum software (organized discussion boards). Are any communities using them successfully? Also, is there any web-based consensus software? I know that there is web-based voting software that looks like it could be functional.

I replied:

Unfortunately, this is not an area I have much exposure to. While I can understand the motivation to develop such tools, I'm concerned that crucial input may be stripped out when attempting consensus electronically (I'm thinking of non-verbal cues, body language, tone, pacing, volume, etc.). Of course, we're also on the cusp of high functioning video conferencing, which will address some of those concerns.

As far as straight-forward discussion goes, there's increasing popularity with Goggle docs as a way to corral all the comments on a certain subject. I'm sure there's more in this realm that I don't know about, but that's what I can give you.

Our dialog continued:

Mike:
There are folks around here—including me—who agree. That said, a tool could be used wisely, couldn't it? Also, not all decisions need such intimate group involvement, and often, it would be a fair trade-off to have more participation, and less intimacy, eh?

Laird:
Certainly some decisions are sufficiently uncomplicated that electronic means will work fine. The trick is knowing both which not to attempt that way, and when to stop trying because it's breaking down.

Mike:
One such tool that I found today is a free forum hosting software which is feature rich. It's called My Bulletin Board.

Keep in mind that the idea is to consolidate information, opinions, links, stats, etc in one thread that anyone can review to come up to speed when they have time. Groups can still talk, but with easy access to the accumulated knowledge. I believe that this would be better for topics than minutes, which usually get accumulated by meeting, rather than by topic.

Would you be interested in working through the technology/humanity barrier and putting together some ground rules on this subject?

Laird:
It's an intriguing project. I have such a monograph about email usage, and much of the principles would be the same.

• • •

I've been thinking about what Mike requested, and while I consider myself to have had minimal exposure to the exploding variety of web-based discussion formats, I still have general thoughts on the topic.

Increasingly, we live in a world dominated by electronic communication. There are many things that are good about that:
o It greatly shortens the time between transmission and receipt of a communication, making it possible to speed things up as fast as people can read (or hear) and reply. When people are in a chat room together, on a conference call, skyping, or instant messaging they're communicating in real time and it's just as quick as being in the same room, but with no travel time.

o The same message can be sent simultaneously to many people, greatly reducing (or eliminating) the tedious labor of photocopying, plus addressing and licking multiple envelopes.

o Once you've invested in the equipment and internet access, the marginal cost of each transmission is zero.

o Physical distance between parties becomes irrelevant, as it's just as simple and inexpensive to send an email from Washington DC to Bethesda MD as it is to send it to Sydney, Australia.

o Transmissions are easily archived for future reference.

o It's harder to regulate and control, which is a democratizing feature—allowing for the rapid dissemination of information and opinions. If you're unsure what I mean by this, just ask deposed Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak, who never got the license plate number on the virtual truck of public protest that ran him over a year ago.

Having said all that, the trend toward more reliance on electronic communication is not altogether an unalloyed good. There are ripples in the Force. Witness:

—I can still recall the amazement I felt (in the summer of 1997) the first time I received an email query from someone who composed and transmitted it while sitting in the same room with me. Huh? Would it have been that hard to have just turned around and asked?

—It has become increasingly difficult to get a response from my son, even though I try both email and phone. His day-to-day communication world revolves around a smart phone and texting, which is technology I haven't embraced. Our exchanges have become limited by the paucity of intersection among our preferred media, rather than because there's been any shift in our caring about each other. Isn't this the tail wagging the dog? I've been uneasy for years about the trend toward responding preferentially to messages by virtue of the mode of transmission, rather than based on the urgency or importance of the content—and now it's hitting pretty close to the bone.

—My nephew Ryan's son, Jaxson, was born Jan 5. Everyone in the extended family knew that this blessed event was imminent, but I waited in vain for the happy email announcement. I only learned about the birth because Ma'ikwe saw pictures of the new baby on Facebook. Seven weeks later, I still haven't received an email communication from Ryan about the birth. Yikes! Facebook has become an alternate universe, and some people don't play in both. This is an enhancement?

—One of my favorite lines from satirist Tom Lehrer is, "If people don't have anything to say, the very least they can do is to shut up." Unfortunately, one byproduct of the Information Age is that it has become depressingly easy for people with little to say to indulge in expressing themselves at length. In the vast ocean of information floating out there on the internet, it has become a mind-numbing task sorting the wheat from the chaff; the signal from the noise. An amazing number of people mistakenly confuse the ability to broadcast to the world with discernment about whether they have anything useful for the world to hear. For centuries, it used to be that the time and cost of publishing hard copy served as a useful brake on such nonsense, now, sadly, we are in full diarrheal flow.

• • •

Having gotten those general observations off my chest, let's move onto the topic of electronic consensus.

At its best, consensus involves working with the whole person. Where the predominant Western model of effective meeting culture depends almost exclusively on thinking, and working with ideation, that's a perversion of who we are as human beings—which includes feelings, intuition, body knowing, and spiritual insight. We are much more than our thoughts, and it's rather a foolish notion that we can do solid work by reducing everything to a single language and then expecting it all to come out well when it's time for implementation and everyone translates the idea captured in the agreement back into their complex realities. Frankly, I'm surprised the wheels don't fall of the wagon more often than they do.

When people are in the same room together, communication is far more complex than the ideas captured in words. As I cautioned Mike above, we rely on a host of clues—many of which are non-verbal—to create the parallax needed to ensure a more accurate reading of what someone is fully intends (mind you, I'm in no way guaranteeing that physical proximity equates with acuity; I'm only saying it predictably helps). When we shift to electronic media, there is danger of misinterpreting meaning because there are far fewer clues to work with. In fact, it's been my observation that people will tend to fill in the blanks when they don't have direct observations to work with, imputing meaning that was never there in an effort to create context for what they're receiving.

Thus, when it comes to email—which is far and away the electronic medium with which I am most familiar—it is relatively common for people to guess that someone is upset by virtue of their word choice (or careless use of capitalization) and completely get it wrong. If both parties were in the same room, it would have been a relatively simple matter for tone, volume, pacing, and facial expressions to have placed the words into a more accurate context (or at the least to have quickly alerted the recipient to a possible misperception in progress). With email it can take days or even weeks before the mistake can be identified, and you can put the car into reverse.

When a group has a deep understanding of consensus, it knows that some of the time it will be working emotionally (or at least energetically), and it is this core aspect of the process that I fear is most at risk when engagement is attempted electronically. Discussion groups are fine for tracking input and creating summaries—which is a real benefit—they are not, however, well suited to identifying and working sensitively with feelings and energy.

Thus, if you are attempting consensus work using electronic media, there are dangers in two respects:
a) Not being in a good position to engage emotionally when that's what's called for.
b) Not even catching that such a moment has come until one or more people are well past the point where such work should have begun while others remain oblivious. This can get really messy.

So how do I feel about virtual consensus? So long as there's clarity about how you're sacrificing data points (reality checks?) for expediency, and you're aware of the dangers of swimming too far from the shore of emotional groundedness, I think it's OK to test the waters. (To be on the safe side, I recommend having the number of a virtual life guard on speed dial in the unhoped for event that mouth-to-mouth is needed.)

In general, I think electronic media work great for logistics, disseminating reports, crafting summaries, and archiving information. It gets a little dicier when you attempt discussion and the resolution of disparate viewpoints. It's dangerous (unless the stakeholders have a preexisting strong bond and a history of working through hard stuff together) to attempt processing emotional distress via electronic media, and it's down right foolish to attempt to use electronic means for expressing upset and distress.

I tell clients that if they ever feel the urge to vent at another person electronically, they'd be well served to unplug their keyboard or go for a walk until the moment passes. If you want to work on an upset (as distinct from dumping on a person you're upset with), my advice is to do whatever you can to get into the same room together, or at least pick up the phone. Virtually being in the same room is not the same as being in the same room.

The Tale of Two Stories

In the last two weeks I’ve been riding an emotional roller coaster as I’ve tried to work through dynamics with a pair of people upset with me. The two don’t know each other and their only point of commonality is that they were in email dialog with me in the last seven days.

Story #1—Mr. Inside

I’m in the midst of a struggle with a co-worker about how we function together, trying to sort out how things became a mess. After a couple months of low-level contact, I asked this person to do a job with me that required traveling out of state and being together for about a week, which was way more contact than we’d had together previously.

In the run-up to departure, this person was showing increasing signs of distress about travel arrangements. Where I thought I was being responsive to whatever was asked, the story I got back was that I wasn’t coming through promptly enough and I was disrespectful.

Once on site after the outbound trip, my co-worker wasn’t feeling well, and was not able to answer the bell for half of the work we’d come to do. We were staying at separate locations and midway through the visit, right as I was dropping my compatriot off at their digs, I was given a handwritten note which laid out some of the distress they were going through.

The next morning I asked to discuss the note and was told that they’d gotten considerable relief just from having written it and didn’t need to discuss it further while we were on the job.

When we started our long drive home I brought the subject up again, and listened to a litany about why the job was being hard and they didn’t feel they had enough available time or energy to undertake the extra effort the job seemed to require.

I accepted that, and conversation petered out. Though this person had told me in the note that one of the motivations for agreeing to the trip was the opportunity to get to know me, I had not experienced their asking me a single question about how I was doing or how I was relating to their struggles with me. Though I wasn’t sure how to interpret this (I was willing to put it down mainly to their health issues), in the absence of any sense of invitation, I left my convalescing partner alone the remainder of the drive.

While the two of us didn’t have a great time together, we were able to accomplish the work that we’d traveled to do. Having witnessed: a) this person’s struggles in relation to my work style; b) their inflexibility around embracing the work needed from their position; and c) their apparent lack of interest in how their choices and mood were affecting others, it seemed best to accept this person’s resignation and try to find a replacement who’d be a better fit. I was ready to move on.

However, I discovered two weeks later that we weren’t done. Through a mutual acquaintance—who was in dialog with this person about a completely different topic—this co-worker complained about me, claiming that they’d tried to initiate conversation with me about our dynamic and couldn’t get anywhere. Their story was that they’d put in the effort and I hadn't responded. When this was passed along to me (with permission), I was flabbergasted.

Now I was pissed. I did not like getting this second-hand, I did not like that their version of reality was completely at odds with mine, and I did not like being so little seen for all I did to try to make things work.

The point of all this preamble is to relate how worked up I got about the story I had about my being mistreated. While I knew intellectually that this other person would have a different story (in which they were justified in their upset with me), I was on vacation and not in a position to do much with this except through email, which wasn’t providing any relief.

Once tensions are running high and trust is running low, email can be a spectacularly ineffective mode of communication, and such was the case here, where the response I got back to the communication in which I first expressed my frustrations was loaded with the assignment of bad intent to what I’d written. At that point, I knew to stop using email and asked instead for a time to get together live to try to work this out. (Finding myself in a hole, I knew to put the shovel down.)

Thankfully—and I want to give full credit here to my erstwhile antagonist—that offer was accepted, and we are now out of the main turbulence electronically and working on logistics for how best to set that up. Immediately upon getting the conciliatory email (which was only a willingness to meet as I'd requested; it was not a mea culpa or an abnegation of her own story), I noticed the emotional release.

What a ride! I’m reading Timothy Wilson’s Strangers to Ourselves right now in which he explores the incredible depth of the unconscious mind, and I’ll be damned if I wasn’t watching it in action right there—both in how amped up I got with the story I’d created, and in how much instant relief I got when I was able to find a graceful exit from the trap I’d set for myself. Shit, who needs drugs or a wide-screen high-def TV? I’m my own self-contained entertainment center.

Story #2—Mr. Outside

Parallel to the track above, I was in another complicated email string that I became enmeshed in by virtue of being a spokesperson for the Fellowship for Intentional Community (FIC). Someone had complained about the conclusions reached by a college student who posted a winter term paper on the topic of why there aren’t more people of color living in intentional communities. FIC provides an online forum for topics relating to intentional community and this one had been up there since 2001.

The respondent was a person of color and found the student's comments stereotypic and offensive. In a classic case of guilt by association, FIC was tarred with the same brush, and the complaint ended with the all-purpose condemnation, “You guys suck.”

Fools Rush In

While it often doesn’t work out that well when a communication starts with a shotgun blast, we nonetheless have an organizational commitment to work with critical feedback—regardless of how raw it’s presented—and I accepted the challenge. I explained that we are committed to providing a forum and that the views of the author do not necessarily represent those of FIC. I further agreed with many of the respondent’s views about the lack of racial diversity among communities and what might be effective strategies for remedying that.

In all, we had four exchanges that took place over the course of five days.

In each of my communications, I made a point to join this person where I could, and point out ways in which we disagreed, both on points of fact (about FIC and about intentional communities) and on points of communication.

Let me give you a specific example of the latter. This person was angry and repeatedly launched into a rant about how white people can’t handle the emotional honesty of people of color. While this is admittedly a gross generalization, I tend to agree that white culture is dominated by damped down emotions and that that is generally not a good thing.

Over the years I’ve learned the importance of being able to work emotionally, and believe it's important to express on-topic feelings, just as it's important to express on-topic thoughts. At the same time however, I distinguish between that and commingling the expression of feelings with aggression. Thus, "I'm really pissed that you published this poorly-reasoned piece on racial diversity" lands quite differently than "You guys suck."

After a number of unsuccessful tries to make this point, I wearied of receiving repeated complaints from the correspondent about how fixated I was on the their having expressed strong feelings, and then continued to interlard their emails with yet more strong feelings, aggressively expressed in the form of taunts and sarcasm. Ufda. These were hard emails ls to work with.

It's exhausting to take these hits, and resist the temptation to respond in kind. Each time I'd need to breathe through the anger I felt at being misunderstood, at the injustice I felt at being racially pigeon-holed (as another stupid white person who hasn't done their homework on racism), at the disrespect of bathing a fellow human being in a steady stream of slurs. This person was obviously intelligent (I agreed with much of their thinking about how racism presents and what it will take to turn it around), and I invited them to post their own thoughts about racism and diversity on our forum. What I got back was more anger, about how they're sick of educating whites and it wasn't their responsibility to handle that. (How did an invitation become an assignment of responsibility?)

In the end, the correspondent simply opted out of the conversation, stating that they were wasting their time responding to a secretary (my FIC title is Executive Secretary). Having found my responses offensive (no matter how hard I tried to be both constructive and non-inflammatory) they took a potshot at how I close most correspondence, "In cooperation," claiming it was disingenuous and admonishing me to "get over it." One satisfying thing I got out of an otherwise wholly unsatisfying series of communication is the chance to compose a reply:

"Actually, I won't. I have an abiding commitment to trying to live cooperatively, and think that nothing less will do.

"I have no illusions about having any control over your responses. And I have no judgment about your being angry. You wrote an angry letter to my organization and I gave you a response that wasn't angry in return. While I'm baffled why you respond with continued provocation and school yard put downs, I've persevered in an effort to engage on the topic of racism in community."

While I didn't get a response to this, it did give me some relief articulating why I hung in there in the attempt.

This exchange ended with no connection and little sense of any progress having been made. Just as with Story #1, I went through the same surge of upset and outrage (different circumstances, same feelings), and can marvel at the unconscious work I do to process the experience. Consciously (if slowly), I get the chance to search for signs about my own patterns of prejudice, and glean a few more clues about the clever ways I contribute to misunderstanding—all the while claiming to be the champion of clarity and compassion. Man, this work is hard!