Konsent

Consent

Tool for bringing about decisions where not everything has to be perfect in the first place.

Are you familiar with decision rounds where basically everyone has to explicitly agree with a proposal? Most of the time, all the people involved agree on the direction, but still want to add their points in further rounds of voting. In this case, we speak of consensus: all persons involved must explicitly agree and say “yes”. In this context, people usually strive for the one perfect decision. However, this approach is rarely efficient nowadays. In contrast, we therefore use consensus in digital transformation for decisions in which the people involved do not explicitly say “no.”

Digital transformation addresses complex challenges. Perfect decisions cannot be predicted, nor do companies have enough time for endless rounds of coordination. Rather, the goal is to bring about decisions quickly and efficiently with consensus.

Consent requires a proposal that is presented to the people involved. Discussion panels support bringing out different perspectives. Finally, the consensus is reached with the help of different gradations. Only an explicit, serious objection from at least one person is sufficient to stop the decision. Otherwise, the decision in favor of the proposal became effective, even if, for example, abstentions, mild or even severe concerns were expressed. However, they are not holding up the decision as they can accept the proposal at this stage for now.

This form of decision-making is extremely valuable for digital transformation. However, it only becomes successful when it is linked with downstream methods. The success of a proposal must be iteratively monitored in the follow-up to a consensus decision so that it can be determined quickly and early in the process whether it was a good decision or whether adjustments are necessary. An additional advantage of the method is that the proposer obtains a very comprehensive opinion through the different levels of consensus indicated by a show of hands. This allows the person to decide for themselves whether the consensus is sufficient for them to move on to the next phase for now, or whether they would like to specifically have further discussions.

Consent originated in sociocracy and has since been further developed, modified and supplemented. We present here an implementation that has proven itself in our practice.

Registered users will find a detailed description of how to use the method in a meeting or workshop context in the next section. Registration is free of charge.

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