Consent

Consent is a decision-making method and as such, its intention is to make a formal decision that intentionally refines the action map; what is outside of the decision should no longer be considered an option. In that sense, consent induces coherence because it models what kinds of options shouldn’t be an option anymore.

The idea of consent is to align the action map with the overall aim. 

The aim of a group is a model that presents a statement that serves as a definition of what the group does. For example, a group might exist to do marketing – so each new proposal needs to be aligned with marketing activities. 

If the proposal isn’t aligned, someone should point that out by objecting to the proposal. Then the objection gets resolved by changing the proposal or the context accordingly to achieve alignment. This makes consent a weaving practice too. It strengthens coherence between proposal, aim, and context by forcing us to notice misalignments and repair them before moving forward.

Consent as an alignment check is an excellent tool to maintain coherence – if our decisions don’t line up with the rest, we’ll make a mess of things.

An even more context-aware way of defining consent would be to broaden its definition beyond the aim. A person should give their consent when they see no undesirable mismatch between the current context (both model and direct) and the proposal. 

There is a high level of context-stewardship in consent because it’s not majority vote: the proposal only passes when no one in the team has an objection; this ensures that any mismatch between proposal and context is considered, not only one noticed by a majority. 

Consent works the best if people have first-hand knowledge of the context. In a sociocratic context, this is typically handled by giving decision-making power to those who are intimately involved in that area so those who do work in an area also become the ones who decide what is aligned. Without this interlocking practice, consent doesn’t work as well because people aren’t able to discern what actually matches the current context. 

That also gives us a clue to how to let consent play effectively with other practices. Consent works best if people have deep access to all realms of the context, and that means: they need to know the work, know how to read somatic information, have healthy relationships, a good handle on how to optimally work with the possibility and the action map. Consent should not replace attunement – when rules are made instead of dealing with a mismatch directly.

A particular feature worth mentioning here is how objections can be integrated in consent decision making. The classic way I teach it is that we have three options that can be mixed and matched: 

• We can modify the proposal – so the context mismatch doesn’t occur anymore.
• We can keep the original proposal and agree on a timeline on how long it can be tried out. This is often combined with the third strategy:
• Measure the concern. This is when we agree on an early warning system.

An example when someone objects that a new project would be too much work and would drain the team. We could then try out a smaller or shorter part of the project and agree on tracking team energy. But we would move ahead.

The crucial point to get here is that the two latter strategies encourage groups to get out of thinking mode and into doing mode;  the context can only be known in motion and action, not in hypothesizing about it. So it’s a way to let the context speak, not our minds, a very effective method to staying attuned to our context.