PF: Working diversely across geographies, topics, and fields can be a bit crazy. On the other hand, if we really believe in collaboration across diverse interests, the only way to do our work is to work across, among, and between these interests. We complete much of our work by leveraging key partners outside our full-time staff, world-wide. From public sector efforts, we learn about consensus building techniques that are highly relevant to less hierarchical corporate structures of the 21st century. Our business-to-business negotiation capacity-building lets us better understand the internal logic of companies when we work with them on multi-stakeholder, public policy projects. Our work across geographies enriches the depth, nuances, and cultural sensitivity of our work. We think we can equally learn from and share our expertise with Fortune 500 companies, small non-profits, and indigenous peoples. 

BR: Is there a project you’ve recently been working on that exemplifies the work you do – both challenges and successes?
 
PF: One of our signatures is to try to bring consensus-building methods to areas where others may fear to tread, so to speak. Our years of investment in trying to secure a settlement between the Israeli government and Bedouin peoples in Israel exemplifies the great hope of bringing peace to diverse peoples, cultures, and legal systems through multi-year commitments, multiple funders, patient work, and in-country partners. And, with those efforts, we subject ourselves to the vastly changing politics and fortunes of government policy makers in a highly volatile part of the world. 
 
BR: What are the most important ingredients for effective, community decision-making? What are the most significant impediments?
 
PF: Important ingredients include elected or appointed officials willing to take risks and let people participate, even if it risks bringing in critics; flexible events, information, technologies, and forums to provide a variety of opportunities for participation; time to discuss, dwell, deliberate, and build relationships; and “rudder” stakeholders who serve as consensus builders and synthesizers across ideas and interests from within the community. The list of impediments is endless: tired populations; too much information; disputes over values masquerading as disputes over issues; entrenched politics that limit options and innovation; too little time; too little money, etc.
 
BR: Despite the best intentions, techniques, and efforts, negotiation processes often end without complete agreement or resolution. Does this mean that consensus building, as a technique, has failed? When it does, how do you recommend groups move forward?
 
PF: In a complex community with multiple interests, different values, and different winners (and sometimes losers), near-unanimity would be ideal. However, I think consensus building, when it is agreement-seeking, should be measured against several standards. To name a few, how much better than simple majority rule did it [the process] do (60% agreement is better than 51%)? How much better are parties able to work on this issue and future ideas? How much did people’s trust in one another, government, and the community increase?

 
BR: CBI and the Foundation are beginning to consider the importance of cognition and psychology in decision-making processes. Why are these fields of interest to you, and what other new directions – fields, techniques, processes, concepts – are you exploring in your work today?
 
PF: We believe there are cognitive barriers to good decision-making that inhabit our minds, perhaps in the very structures of our brains. We hope to bring in the good work in social psychology and post-neoclassical economics, to coin a term, to better understand how these barriers work in land use planning and decision-making, and what kinds of processes and techniques people have used to overcome them. We hope to help people act “more rationally” through these efforts while recognizing, as we have learned from cognitive research, that emotion itself plays an important role in human judgment. 

We’re also looking at how to not merely teach negotiation, but to help organizations build and change capacity to negotiate better structurally. Individual skill-building is simply not enough. We are trying to bring these concepts to new areas, from siting of transmission lines, cell towers, and other energy impacts to ways that coalitions of non-profits can collaborate more effectively, for example.
 
BR: Critics might say that consensus-building, as a decision-making process, has a number of downfalls – it takes a long time, it can be very expensive, it doesn’t work well with large groups, and it often doesn’t actually resolve matters. Are these legitimate concerns, or are they just giving the field a bad rap?
 
PF: It has been said that democracy is a terrible system, but for all the other alternatives. Consensus-building and intensive collaboration is not always the answer, by any means. And it can be all of the things you describe. However, protracted litigation is also very expensive in many ways, from money to time and relationships. Exclusion of minority interests ultimately creates the anger and rejection that motivate those interests to come back and assert their revenge in equal measure. Consensus building isn’t one process or one kind of agreement . . . if tailored and applied appropriately, and avoided when not appropriate, it can and should be part of how we conduct business.

BR: Many communities have used majority-rule votes or public hearings run by decision-making boards and commissions for years. Why should they consider using consensus-building techniques instead of or in addition to more traditional governmental processes?

PF: There are centuries-old traditions of consensus-building, from peacemaking among the Navajos to agreement among the Quakers. So, interspersed and perhaps less-noticed in our majority-rule democracy and highly legalistic, combative nation, are alternative ways of conducting democracy. Though the corporate world and some federal agencies have sometimes moved out of the late 19th century model of formalized, administrative process, many of our local decision-making processes remain wedded to standard practices. Comfort with the familiar; complexity and uncertainty in making change; and an embedded belief in the value of ritualized democracy, as we call standard public hearings, all inhibit change to more nuanced, flexible, tailored, innovative approaches.

If you care about community-building and not just decision-making, if you care about increasing trust among your constituents, if you believe in democracy as deliberation among those with differences, then we would argue that you should try consensus-building techniques, at least some of the time.