As for Sesame Street, even as a kid I always suspected that the show was devised by a committee. That story serves as adult confirmation #1,786.

Back in 2000 I chaired the planning committee for a yearly event commemorating the anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. I was a relative newbie — I had been in San Diego for only four years, while everyone else on the committee had been doing local disability rights activism since the 1970s. I quickly discovered that they were the most dysfunctional group of people I’ve ever worked with. They claimed that they did everything by consensus, but really it was more like a form of democratic centralism in which everyone thought he or she was Lenin: Meetings went on for hours, committee members interrupted each other constantly, discussions would be re-opened on issues that had seemingly been resolved several meetings before, people would assent to a decision and then undercut the consensus between meetings. I managed to impose a little order on the chaos — mostly by introducing written agendas and meeting minutes and insisting on a no-interruptions rule — but at the cost of being labeled an “Alpha male” and probably a fascist, too. The event itself came off with fewer glitches than in previous years.

(I’m not sure what my story adds to this thread. I mostly just felt the need to get it off my chest.)

In my experience, Quakerism is not a necessary basis for endless debate about debate.

Yes also to the problem of consensus veto being genuinely difficult. I think that one of the virtues of consensus is that it does make any decision that produces thin majorities into a decision that needs to be revisited. But it can also make a decision that virtually everyone agrees with become unduly difficult to reach because a small, highly aggrieved minority poses or acts like they represent a much larger constituency. It can be really difficult, especially within the kind of politesse that holds in both academic and spiritual institutions, to “call out” such a minority view as marginal or egregiously self-interested when it wraps itself around a claim about consensus or “the Quaker way”.

For example, when I was chairing a committee to revise my college’s T&P procedures, I used a pretty simple three-question process: what are the issues we need to address? what are our options for each issue? which is the best option? At several points in the first meeting, as the group got into a heated discussion that I thought was unproductive, I said something like, “We don’t need to come to an agreement today. Unless there are any other options we can think of, let’s come back to this at the next meeting.” My colleagues were joking at the end of the meeting about my phrase, “We can always come back to this later,” but after 90 minutes we had listed all the issues, had options for 2/3rds of them, and come to agreement on about half. The next meeting was shorter, and we finished with solid agreement on the direction of the procedures. I thought my colleagues worked hard to change our T&P process in only two meetings, but the structure of the conversation helped and would be perfectly consistent with consensus.

The other, more difficult problem is the potential for Quaker respect for dissent to allow individuals to veto a consensus. I’ve seen such manipulation both as crank behavior (typically those not raised as a Friend) and also a more sophisticated variant by middle-aged Quakers who blocked consensus through constant demurrals. Where there is a significant minority who disagrees with the majority view, then you’re fairly far from consensus, and the spirit (not Spirit) of consensual processes is that moving ahead with a slim majority isn’t wise in any case on an issue of values. With a very small number of individuals in opposition, that’s a tougher call. You can always adjourn and come back to the issue in a later meeting, hoping that time away from the meeting will cool egos and that peer pressure outside the meeting can shift minds. And, of course, if that doesn’t “work” (to achieve consensus), then whether you find the ability to block consensus valuable at that point is entirely a matter of how you look at dissent.

But at the very least, there are certainly ways to improve consensual processes, especially at institutions that adhere to them but without a critical mass raised as Quakers