The Young Foundation recently held a lunchtime seminar to investigate Consensus Decision Making (CDM), as part of our current Taskforces project. The seminar began with a presentation about CDM, explaining how negotiation can be effective and how the process works, and was then followed by role-play where different members of staff and interns at the Young Foundation assumed particular characters to discuss a contentious issue. This role-play was facilitated by Katrina Forrester, an intern at the organisation, who has extensive experience of facilitating CDM in a variety of contexts.

The role-play involved a number of techniques including a ‘go-around’ (where all attendees were asked for their opinion), a group brainstorming session, a consensus proposal, proposal amendment and a final check for consensus. Despite the relitively short time set aside for the exercise the group was able to reach some degree of concensus on some basic principles and how possible solutions to the issue should be investigated in the future.

The Taskforces project will involve meetings of community stakeholders who will collectively design realistic plans of action to tackle the entrenched neighbourhood problem that they have identified as their main priority. The Young Foundation was interested in exploring CDM as a possible approach to use in facilitating the community stakeholder meetings.

You can read more about community mediation techniques and concensus decision making by downloading the following pdf files:

To download a short paper about community mediation in the UK click here
To download a short paper about group decision-making techniques click here