On a small scale, I’ve found using some of these techniques effective for getting engineering groups to consensus and getting parties who disagree with the decision to have felt heard and ok with the direction agreed upon.
https://libcom.org/article/how-hold-good-meeting-rustys-rule...
Agree on the value of teaching Roberts rules. While contributing to a consensus-building technology (https://pol.is), I ended up on a call with a historian of Roberts Rules. He made the really memorable observation that Roberts Rules is essentially a social technology for deliberation at scale, which has the important property of preserving and protecting minority voice in consensus processes. It's notable that we now make a lot of things we call "social tech" whose algorithms do no such thing
I use that bit of my high school education more than most of my actual classes.
Like someone else mentioned in another comment, I experienced Robert's Rules during speech and debate class when we did model UN.
However, I also got a second dose in a place that might surprise some, Ag classes. Future Farmers if America also uses Roberts Rules for their meetings and competitions.
This is a lost art, and so is being able to accept these decisions with out becoming the resistance.
Eventually they browbeat dissent into discontent when they could have had an entire team of "I've been heard and now I support the group"
1. Assume that one person gets to talk at a time. Give them a reasonable time limit to communicate.
2. Different sides take turns in a discussion.
3. Rules for the discussion are under debate, but changing the discussion rules is much more complicated for good reason. Try not to do this unnecessarily, but there are rules for that. There is an arbitrary level of "meta" here, where discussions-about-discussions-about-discussions can arise, and the rules are designed to work under these complex scenarios. But its rare to actually ever need them.
4. Ensure that a quorum has been reached before starting a meeting. If your group is composed of 10 people try to have at least 6 people show up, otherwise its a failed meeting and nothing can possibly get done.
5. After every meeting, send out meeting notes in an email. At the start of every meeting, discuss the previous meetings notes and vote to finalize those notes. Only the written record counts, not people's memories.
6. If an issue is settled / voted upon, do not revisit it until the next meeting (or later).
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Its not Roberts rules themselves that are important. Its:
1. The paradigm of having meta-rules, for how to discuss about the discussion. Any conflict will naturally become meta over time, and knowing how to resolve disputes despite a meta-nature is important. (Or at least, knowing that someone 100+ years ago thought of the problem, and there's a set of 100+ year old traditional rules that seem to avoid that problem).
2. Giving everyone a fair turn during the discussion: meeting quorum, alternating discussion points, time limits.
3. Giving forward progress: settling debates, finalizing discussions, etc. etc.
Every aspect of Roberts rules can be voted upon and changed by a group. IE: its the rules of the group that matter, not the rules as written by Robert 100+ years ago.
They have been good caretakers of the tradition. But many good government types take issue with the fact a private family controls the by-laws of so many organizations.
I got to listen to a city attorney go on and on for an hour about how inappropriate it is that city meetings are legally bound to follow the dictats of a family who doesn’t know the city exists.
But then again, there’s no actual scandal so far.