Rethinking Robert's Rules of Order
blog.lareviewofbooks.org
blog.lareviewofbooks.org
"Its arcane rituals of parliamentary procedure and majority rule usually produce a victorious majority and a very dissatisfied minority that expects to raise its concerns, again, at the next possible meeting."
Anyone considering Robert's Rules should read this first: "Breaking Robert's Rules: The New Way to Run Your Meeting, Build Consensus, and Get Results" [1] by Lawrence Susskind -- an MIT and Harvard professor. [2]
That book is a "popular" condensed version of the ideas behind practical consensus-building. If you want to implement it in your organization, see his full-length "The Consensus Building Handbook". [3] It's textbook-priced unfortunately (for organizations to purchase, not curious individuals), but many academic institutions will have direct access to it online. [4]
[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0195308360
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Susskind
[3] https://www.amazon.com/Consensus-Building-Handbook-Comprehen...
[4] http://sk.sagepub.com/reference/the-consensus-building-handb...
I've seen RR used extremely effectively in contentious meetings to get to resolution -- because action is more important to the group than the individual's inclusion.
Susskind's methods always seemed like the work you should do outside of the actual meetings. Look at the steps around "fact finding", "assigning responsibilities", etc -- that's exactly what congress does today! (and what you should be doing outside your meetings)
Are there any videos of how a meeting would be run with these rules? If I fly across the country to meet with a board and we need to make decisions that day, how do I accomplish that with consensus building?
There are many possible rules. Roberts is better than most because most people are used to them (because they have been around so long). Even if you have never read the book, you probably have been in a meeting where someone says "I move..." responded by "second", a debate, and then a vote. Just knowing this order exists keeps things moving.
> The groups who find Robert’s Rules most helpful are those who know who they are and generally where they want to go but disagree about how to get there. For these groups, the process of making motions keeps the body in motion but does not fracture it.
> Groups that are deeply divided may find that Robert’s Rules exacerbates differences, giving power to the side that knows the rules best. We’ve all been here too. [examples follow]
Problems arise when the minority opinion members can't recognize the possibility that they were perhaps wrong or perhaps not seeing the complete picture. No truly productive debate can ever occur unless both sides are willing to recognize the very real possibility that they are wrong or at least that there are often multiple reasonable ways to solve a problem.
This blew up pretty badly for me on one job. Among the people who would be materially responsible for a decision, there was unanimous agreement on which solution was right for the job. There were pretty senior folk. Half of them were the people you go to when you can't get anything to work.
The majority of the team did not agree with them. So the people who had no skin in the game were getting to set the agenda. Pretty big morale drop in that subgroup. I left while they were still trying to sort this problem out, but the feeling was somewhere between insubordination and strike, if we couldn't get the rules of engagement adjusted to weigh the opinions of directly affected individuals more highly.
It just takes practice and trust. Robert’s rules definitely takes practice, but not trust.
so may extra words.
"Its procedure produce a majority and a minority that expects to raise its concerns, again, at the next meeting."
if that's not desired, use > than a majority.
"creates divisiveness and polarization through majoritarian voting"
FWIW, we use Approval Voting for our most contentious decisions (endorsements, resolutions). It's been super effective and we now have fewer friendship ending arguments.
Alas, we still have to suspend the rules each time. I'm hopeful that eventually we'll amend our bylaws to make Approval Voting more the norm. Change is hard and bringing everyone along takes. so. much. effort.
With our bylaws and RRO, the order endorsements are considered is critical, and arbitrary. Lots of hurt feelings.
Now we suspend the rules, consider all endorsements en masse (voice vote, tabulated if needed), which stack ranks the order, then resume RRO. Resulting in the endorsements with the greatest support being considered first.
FWIW, I proposed this change based on my workplace voting experiments. Such as using approval voting for triage to expedite determining priority. I'm very excited to read crazygringo's links above, gleen other useful ideas.
Governance is just another technology. Ripe for innovation.
Just so many times when I see people complaining about Robert's Rules it's not about the rules themselves but about organization-specific issues or about people being dicks (which can happen regardless of the parliamentary authority used).
I share the negative views expressed here by others. Following the rules amounted to a form of bikeshedding. For example:
"The Committee on Curriculum on Courses presents a list of 83 proposed changes to the Undergraduate Course Schedule. ... Is there a motion?"
And so we go through an elaborate procedure, to make sure that everything is discussed and voted on "correctly". In reality, usually nobody read any of the documents that were provided in advance, and there is neither any discussion nor any dissent. At most, someone from Department X will object to some proposal that their own department has "requested", and ask that it be stricken.
Occasionally the meetings get heated, in which case I agree that some sort of formal procedure is a good thing. But "following the rules" allows everyone in the room to believe that we've done our jobs. And when we've endured mysterious and unexplained budget cuts, at a time when tuition and enrollment are both at record highs, I'm not convinced we have.
The rules are for a body that has the power to make binding decisions. That's sometimes time-consuming, but that's the nature of democracy.
> General Consent or Unanimous Vote. By general, or unanimous, or silent, consent the assembly can do business with little regard for the rules of procedure, as they are made for the protection of the minority, and when there is no minority to protect, there is little use for the restraint of the rules, except such as protect the rights of absent members, or the right to a secret vote. [1915 edition]
Don't forget that key that if there isn't a minority to protect, you don't need all the rules. Split the things that people actually need to discuss out of the stuff that is unanimous, move that the unanimous stuff be won by acclimation, and move on to the stuff that actually needs to be discussed. Even Robert's Rules says to do it. People like processes, and following processes to their logical extremes, but at the end of the day the process exists for a goal ("give minorities a voice", in this case), and outside of that goal/need becomes silly and overbearing, and it knows it which is why it has always had escape valves.
A wine company was importing wine from apartheid South Africa - under NZ law at the time any 100 shareholders could call a SGM every 6 weeks, we had 100 small shareholders ... we started with the AGM where the accounts had to be accepted by the shareholders for the company to continue to trade.
Simply the script went like this:
1) Someone moves a motion of no-confidence in the chair (under the "aged and infirm incompetence act 1897" which does not exist, he turns bright red in anger but is required to step down while the motion is dealt with)
2) a vote must be taken, someone demands a written ballot which is their right
3) the chair proposes scrutineers
4) someone challenges the scrutineers and proposes their own up their own
5) so we have to vote .... at this point you recurse back to step 2, if they ever agree to your scrutineers you have someone in the wings ready to challenge with their own slate of scrutineers ....
(it's important to keep track of how deep you are in recursion because the chair is bound to forget ....)
Of course in practice eventually someone breaks and declares the whole thing silly, restores the real chair and continues the meeting, adopts the accounts etc .... then you go to court because the chair wasn't valid and therefore the accounts weren't really adopted and the company can't trade ... (we never got that far, after one round of this ALL the other wine companies capitulated)
Much to ponder on this one...
Seems like this is trivially solvable within RRO via a motion to suspend the rules. Assuming your organization ran under one-share-one-vote rules and your small shareholders were a tiny minority, a supermajority should be able to overcome arcane rule-hacking.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspension_of_the_rules#Gordia...
The premise of this article is the problem, not Roberts Rules themselves, regardless of edition: That if person A invented thing B, then no matter how useful thing B may or may not be, it is the character of person A, not the utility of thing B, that determines whether we can use it.
Enough of this crap. Enough of outrage farming. Enough of guilt-by-association ad absurdum. RRoO, like any other invention or discovery, stands or falls on its own merits.
I've seen RRoO used tyrannically to suppress debate, and I've seen them used wisely. No set of rules is going to perfectly fix contentious interactions or political underhandedness. Even consensus-based alternatives can be and are manipulated.
>> I’m ready to advocate on my campus against all post-1915 editions (with apologies to Cleary) in part because of her politics and in part because there are plenty of alternatives. My new favorites are Nancy Sylvester’s The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Robert’s Rules, and Alice Sturgis’s The Standard Code of Parliamentary Procedure
The only outrage I felt came from your comment.
I had the pleasure of dealing with an eccentric co-founder who would do exactly this. It got interesting when I starting using RRoO procedures to attempt to stop him from derailing the conversation. Eventually he would just over-rule anyone he perceived as blocking his path. Lol it was such a cluster fuck at the end.
1) This quote ("Under Robert’s Rules, silence equals consent") is incredibly untrue, and makes it hard for me to take the rest of the article seriously. Abstention does not mean that you agree with a motion, and there are protections (e.g. quorum) to prevent abuse by a small cadre of disingenuous voters.
2) In my experience, very few organizations actually take the time to understand and follow Robert's Rules. Most just rely on whatever rules some motivated members happened to cherry pick from the text, plus a smorgasbord of bylaws and policies drafted by the organization (see edit). There is an argument to be made that maybe Robert's Rules is too complex to be useful, but most organization members only need a passing understanding; as long as you have a chair or parliamentarian who is familiar with the ins and outs, they should be able to keep meetings running smoothly and shut down most attempts to lawyer the system.
Edit: For example: "the December 1964 late-evening vote by leaders of Students for a Democratic Society to focus on the Vietnam War and the December 1966 late evening SNCC vote to expel all white members (19-18, with 24 abstentions)". But Robert's Rules typically requires a 2/3 vote for disciplinary actions (such as the expulsion of a member). I don't have a copy of the 1951 edition to confirm, but I would be surprised if it allowed expulsion with a simple majority vote.
Out of curiosity, the original 1876 edition [1] doesn't include membership votes as requiring 2/3rds, but also doesn't directly address membership votes of that sort (and leaves that to a body's rules).
It also uses the word "abstain" twice, but does not yet formalize abstentions.
The 1915 edition, however definitely includes Vote to Expel Members as requiring a 2/3rds vote [2]. (It also doesn't seem to codify abstentions, other than generally allow for them [blank ballots in a balloted vote].)
I'm also wondering if that "24 abstentions", which seems wildly high, if accurate. That's a lot of people not to care which way the vote went. Keep in mind that absentee ballots, and absent members, are very different from abstentions (and absent members do not count as abstentions, because they were not even present for the vote).
[1] http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/9097/pg9097-images.html
I did wonder about the number of abstentions. Also, the fact that there were only 61 votes total. Which indicates either that the organization wasn't that big, or that this was at a convention. From Wikipedia "white SNCC members were asked to leave the organization in December 1966. The vote, characterized by some as 'expelling' whites and by others as 'asking whites to work against racism in white communities,' was extremely close; 19 Aye, 18 Nay, and 24 abstentions"[1]. I'm not entirely sure what to make of it, but it sounds like there was a lot going on to understand the context of the vote.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student_Nonviolent_Coordinatin...
Now that we've had 100+ years of game film on Robert's rules, you'd think we could find ways to rework the incentive structures, rules, and game theoretical elements so they're less likely to result in gridlock and procedural exploits.
You can require a larger quorum, at the expense of not always being able to get business done.
You can require all motions to be introduced at a previous meeting or anyway published before the meeting at the expense of not being able to complete business quickly. (This is commonly required for local governments in California, at least)
[1] https://jeffreykegler.github.io/personal/morgenstern.html
Too bad it wasn't published initially on github in 1876. What were they thinking.