Consensus

The Guild holds weekly meetings for all members and all of our decisions are made by consensus. We have no board of directors or other forms of hierarchy. Each meeting has a moderator who facilitates who gets to speak and when; manages the topics of discussion including duration and ensuring we remain on topic; and summarizes what has been said and where we are at if the topic is a long one.
This process is a long one and sometimes it seems tedious, but we're getting better at it. We're getting better at forming committees to handle the minutiae and the detailed projects. We're getting better at keeping on point and listening to each others needs so we can arrive at decisions that leave everyone feeling good. There are times when I've felt like having a specific leader in charge of the group would make things so much simpler; someone who could just make a decision and delegate so that it gets done. I have been involved in dozens of companies and organizations in my life and they have always been that way, I understand that way. But they almost always made me feel small and secretly subversive and almost never like I was truly part of something of which I could be proud. This new method is still a work in progress for our group, yet I have already seen it work in extraordinary ways. It allows for great compromise without feeling compromised. It allows the creation of new ideas and new ways of doing things that everyone can feel good about and that could have only come to light with a coalition of minds working together to achieve a common goal; ideas that could have never come from the perspective of any one individual but only of several perspectives working in congress, genuinely interested in meeting the needs of the entire group not solely the needs of a few. These are new times with new problems and my guess is they require new methods for solving. I'm excited and wonderfully optimistic about this one.
ps
the photo is not what meetings look like so much as what after meetings looks like