8 Doing work together
How is it possible to have cooperative, communal, decision-making of the kind that is needed to deal with decisions in a town, or in a neighborhood, or in a public building?
Each person has an opinion. No one quite knows where to start. They want to express themselves; they want to express their own individual ideas; yet they want to work together. How to curb the bounds of individualism, when to give in, when to insist?
Choice is (in theory) the classic tool of democracy. It is open-ended. It is democratic.
So as we, the thirty of us who want to decide this thing, set out to work together, how can we decide whether A or B is better? Of course we cannot. Inevitably some (paying attention to comfort) will choose A; others (paying attention to shape) choose B.
The answer, the solution to the difficulty, lies in the use of the fundamental process, applied over and again, focusing on very limited, tiny decisions taken one at a time, in sequence. Why is this critical, and why is this different? Because when we lead the group consensus through very small steps, and try to reach decisions about these steps one by one, one at a time, the steps can be made so small and so particular that for each step the thirty of us will find it possible to succeed in deciding among the possibilities, what is best, by checking versions, testing them, trying things out.
Together, we can take this question and reach a conclusion, usually (in my experience), rather fast, especially if the questions are asked in the right sequence of unfolding. We can then answer other limited questions, until in the end we generate a complex whole, communally agreed upon, without ever having to make a big choice between imponderables.
But the end result of these limited agreements will not be a single choice among a half dozen alternatives (inevitable a phony choice). It will be a unique thing which has been generated, truthfully, as a product of twenty or fifty or a hundred true answers to unique questions — thus mathematically, a choice among 2^50 alternatives — but generated by asking questions in a very particular order.
To these questions, asked in the right order, successful group answers could be given because the questions were small enough and reasonable enough, not arbitrary, so that people could discuss them, feel them the same way, settle them, move on to the next, and thus gradually approach consensus on the emergent whole.
#book/The Nature of Order/3 A Vision of a Living World/11 Necessary further dynamics of any neighborhood which comes to life#