Back in the day I was involved with an anti-apartheid group, one thing we were doing was targeting local companies importing wine from SA, we'd buy shares and attend their AGMs with the intent of gumming up the works so that they couldn't adopt their annual accounts and in turn file their final yearly taxes (this is something that is normally not in shareholders' interest, but it was in ours).
So one of the problems with Robert's (and the way it played into company law in NZ) is that it doesn't fare well faced with recursion .... our game play was roughly:
- someone makes an initial motion - say "I move a motion of no confidence in the chair under the 1873 Aged and Infirm person's Act" - this enrages the Chair, sowing discord, but they have to have a vote, chair steps aside
- I move we hold a written ballot (required if asked for)
- I'd like to nominate X as scrutineer
- Someone else - I'd like to nominate Y
- I move we hold a written vote on scrutineers (now we're off recursion can kick in)
- I'd like to nominate A as scrutineer ...
- Someone else - I'd like to nominate B ....
.... and so on - you get the idea
Now pretty soon we're into silliness, the pompous board of directors running the meeting who always have enough votes to pass anything at an AGM, certainly more than these raucous hippies have .... but they're useless if you can't actually have a vote ...
Eventually the original chairman loses it, gavels the meeting back under his control declares all of the above a pile of rubbish and continues on with the previously carefully scripted AGM without resolving any of this .... but we have him, the accounts are adopted by a chairman who was not the chair, the rest of the meeting is invalid ... next step is to threaten them in court with an injunction freezing the accounts .... their secretary couldn't keep up with all the motions, we had a recording ....
Better yet, we had 100 individual shareholders, under NZ law at the time we could call a special general meeting every 6 weeks .....
Needless to say as we started buying shares of the second wine importer, all the rest of the companies stopped importing wine from SA ....
Appears related to concept of “vetocracy“; a term I am neither attached to, nor is likely original, but does help identify characteristics of disfunction within a system:
I just had a look, can't find anything about the wine protest - it was 40 years ago, all pre-web, part of a larger anti-apartheid movement in New Zealand - organised by a local group HART who, among other things were targeting NZ imports from SA, people were going into stores and stickering SA products (especially bottles of wine)
The 1981 Springbok was probably the biggest thing that happened - I got arrested for blowing a whistle during a game (seems there's some silly rule that only one person at a rugby game can have a whistle or something, they couldn't find it when I got to the station and I was released without charge)
Are there any prospect of continuing such protests? There are still apartheid states companies do business with, to say nothing of other corporate misdeeds.
To a degree, but each wine exporter has a certain degree of capacity to import wine e.g., warehouses, staff, and trucks. This all can be be scaled up, but only after some time has elapsed and additional capital being placed at risk.
It's reasonable to assume that these folks may have significantly reduced NZ's imports of SA wine for at least a while.
you'd have to do your research - the law that allowed 100 shareholders order up a special general meeting every days was I'm sure only a NZ thing (and I think I remembering the conservative govt of time changing the law to protect their mates from this loophole). In this case we had to buy min 100 shares each which was about ~NZ$100 at the time - so that's about a $10k investment - we all sent proxies to the organisers - that $100 was worth a lot less by the time we were done, I don't think I ever bothered cashing it up
In the US they're likely to adjourn the first meeting, and hold a second one with riot cops present to threaten anyone who attempts to "disrupt" the meeting by doing anything other than the board's exact agenda.
I keep repeating this everywhere I can because it was such a revelation to me.
For literally all my life, I have thought of group debate as a thing where both sides try to convince the other of their stupidity, and the debate is only resolved when one side gives up.
Then in the middle of a paragraph about something completely different in the condensed version of Robert's Rules, the authors write
> Vigorous debate about the merits of a motion is central to the very idea of a deliberative assembly. When the arguments on all sides are fully aired, the group is most likely to come to a wise decision.
This is incredibly profound, and it seems like the authors just take it for granted.
You debate something so that everyone has heard the complications considered important by the group. Then when it goes to a vote, each person is able to consider this important information and form a judgment of their own.
In a group debate, nobody has to (or even should?) change their minds. It’s okay to have different priorities and think different things are best. Debate is not about admitting fault or changing one’s mind – it’s about informing the rest of the group about which arguments one thinks are salient to the judgment.
> When the arguments on all sides are fully aired, the group is most likely to come to a wise decision.
This assumes both sides are acting in good faith and share some common goals. If one side has (say) convinced itself that the the other side is evil and duplicitous then this no longer works because 1) everything the other side says is viewed through the lens of evil and duplicity and 2) this evil and duplicity needs to be combated by any means necessary, up to and including presenting arguments that the first side knows are wrong but which it believes in good faith could allow it to prevail against evil and duplicity.
And then there is the meta problem, which is that as soon as one side falls into this hole it typically drags the other side down with it.
I find this is more likely as the argument gets more abstract. But when two sides are trying to deal with an aspect of reality that is staring them in the face, it's much easier to get practical.
If the "wrong" side seems malicious and it is clear-cut who is right, the "right" side shouldn't need to abuse debate.
They can go meta and debate the goals first, then use logic to reason what they suggest objectively works. If the "wrong" side is unable to provide equivalent reasoning for their points, then it's obvious?
And if the "right" side is unwilling to go about it systematically and wants to engage in warfare, perhaps that speaks for their confidence in themselves.
> In a group debate, nobody has to (or even should?) change their minds. It’s okay to have different priorities and think different things are best. Debate is not about admitting fault or changing one’s mind – it’s about informing the rest of the group about which arguments one thinks are salient to the judgment.
This hits at a key problem in dysfunctional companies ... since there is often no clear "right answer" people will do dysfunctional things like delay decision making until there is a clear, unambiguously best choice (which may never happen) or force through their preference because other, better, choices have trade offs.
Back when I was a product manager, no small part of my job seemed to consist of making a decision--ANY decision--so that things could proceed. Often it fairly obviously didn't matter and, even if it somewhat did, there was often no clear way to inform an optimum answer. (Of course, sometimes there was--but it was probably the minority of the time.)
So, kind of like the efficient markets hypothesis, you have to ask "under what conditions will deliberative debate lead to better decisions?" Because sometimes the group makes the wrong decision.
IMO, American society would benefit from teaching Roberts Rules in high school. Understanding how to have groups come to decisions without forcing consensus a crucial underpinning of society. Side benefit is understanding that when you attack these things, order breaks down.
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.
I don't wholly disagree but there are probably far simpler documents one could put together (and I imagine exist) with various voting/notification/debate arrangements most suitable for the given situation. Whenever I've been involved with creating bylaws for an organization, we've tried to be fairly specific about such things. (One thing I definitely learned was that being very informal about most things was fine--until it wasn't.) In the bylaws, we basically invoked Robert's Rules in the vein of--if we didn't think of some situation, use this.
Agree. I’ll admit that, like Agile, I use portions of it as I see fit, not a strict adherence. The core thing I’m thinking of is respect for opposing viewpoints, techniques for debating with people who disagree, and coming to decisions. Debate teams do this, but I think there’s some value in everyone getting a taste of it.
> IMO, American society would benefit from teaching Roberts Rules in high school. Understanding how to have groups come to decisions without forcing consensus a crucial underpinning of society.
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
As a high school student I was in an organization called Future Business Leaders of America, where I competed as a parliamentarian at state and national events.
I use that bit of my high school education more than most of my actual classes.
Yeah, I think there's opportunity to learn about it in most high schools, usually through extra/co-curricular activities like that.
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.
There are too many subjects ahead of Robert's Rules for me to agree with that statement. Plus there are extra curriculars that do teach it. I mean, it should be taught that parliamentary procedure is literally a thing used by assemblies, but the intricacies of specific rules, outside of use as a broad example, is beyond that scope.
The simplified Roberts rules are pretty simple though.
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).
---------
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.
Roberts Rules has a “bad” side: it’s a family fiefdom run by the Roberts Family.
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.
To offer some dissent: I've seen tiny organizations (like 5 people) try to implement this in their meetings, and it's infuriating.
If you have some giant organization where you must implement stuff like this, then fine. If you have a small organization where you don't have to, then meetings should have a facilitator leading the meeting, and then should flow essentially like a conversation.
Even small organizations can benefit from a manageable set of tools. It's just that Robert's is not manageable.
One alternative I've really liked is Cannon's [0]. It's got all the essential elements and clearly explains how to escape the rules and run meetings largely as conversations.
I was president of the board for a small non-profit organization and somewhat disagree - you probably don't need to enforce all the formality but it's still a good way to make sure things are done in an orderly fashion. Having motions, second and votes is also useful to the board secretary as it's easy to get the important parts in the minutes. I didn't generally hand off the "floor" and I instead let the conversation flow. As a non-profit, some things do require formal votes and tallies.
I'm on the board of a small non-profit and was the chair for a long time. Normally we let discussion flow and there's often consensus at the end or a couple people might mildly disagree about something.
However, we have had situations over the years where it really mattered whether there was quorum, how an emergency meeting could be called, the scope of authority of the executive board, whether phone/write-in/proxy votes counted, etc. Formal procedures often don't matter--but sometimes they do.
IIRC Steven Levy, in his now-dated book 'Hackers', begins with the MIT Tech Model Railroad Club, whose members, he wrote, tended to gravitate to one of two groups: those interested in modeling the trains, structures and environment, and those drawn to the track, its signals and controls. One characteristic of the latter group, he says, was taking delight in bringing chaos to meetings through creative use of Robert's Rules.
This reminds me of Flight of the Conchords where the manager, Murray, holds meetings in his office with the two band members. He even keeps the minutes himself. Hilarious!
Fans of The Wire will of course be reminded of this classic scene where an early 2000s West Baltimore crack gang adopts Rules of Order to lend a professional approach to their meetings:
The Wire also showed the importance of modifying Roberts Rules to meet the needs of a particular organization. In this case, not taking minutes, because they were discussing a criminal conspiracy to buy and sell large quantities of drugs.
An alternative approach which I was taught at an enrichment course at school but which became more relevant as life and career progressed - be the minute-taker.
A lesson also learnable from top civil servant (good grief, I sound like a headline writer) Sir Humphrey in "Yes, Prime Minister" (episode "Man Overboard"): "Ah, Prime Minister... It is characteristic of all committee discussions and decisions that every member has a vivid recollection of them and that every member's recollection of them differs violently from every other member's recollection. Consequently we accept the convention that the official decisions are those and only those which have officially recorded in the minutes by the officials, from which it emerges with an elegant inevitability that any decision which has been officially reached will have been officially recorded in the minutes by the officials and any decision which is not recorded in the minutes has not been officially reached even if one or more members believe they can recollect it, so in this particular case if the decision had been officially reached it would have been officially recorded in the minutes by the officials. And it isn't so it wasn't."
Used this in union meetings and Mason meetings. Definitely worth picking up!
A simplified version, Rusty's Rules of Order[0] is used by the IWW. It's worth checking out if you're unfamiliar to Roberts' Rules or need a quick refresher.
I think you're thinking of Consensus-Based Decision Making where a minority bloc of 20-33% (depending on the rules of the body) can control the body by refusing to assent.
My introduction to it was from watching The Wire. One of "Stringer's" lieutenants was shown reading a book behind him during meetings. I ended up looking up the book after finally catching the title and thought "hey, this is actually powerful stuff..." What an interesting detail for some already interesting character development.
Yeah but you’re going to get kicked out if you do that. The rules can definitely be gamed but there is a metagame too which is that the rules can be bent if someone is not acting in good faith.
Readit News
So one of the problems with Robert's (and the way it played into company law in NZ) is that it doesn't fare well faced with recursion .... our game play was roughly:
- someone makes an initial motion - say "I move a motion of no confidence in the chair under the 1873 Aged and Infirm person's Act" - this enrages the Chair, sowing discord, but they have to have a vote, chair steps aside - I move we hold a written ballot (required if asked for) - I'd like to nominate X as scrutineer - Someone else - I'd like to nominate Y - I move we hold a written vote on scrutineers (now we're off recursion can kick in) - I'd like to nominate A as scrutineer ... - Someone else - I'd like to nominate B .... .... and so on - you get the idea
Now pretty soon we're into silliness, the pompous board of directors running the meeting who always have enough votes to pass anything at an AGM, certainly more than these raucous hippies have .... but they're useless if you can't actually have a vote ...
Eventually the original chairman loses it, gavels the meeting back under his control declares all of the above a pile of rubbish and continues on with the previously carefully scripted AGM without resolving any of this .... but we have him, the accounts are adopted by a chairman who was not the chair, the rest of the meeting is invalid ... next step is to threaten them in court with an injunction freezing the accounts .... their secretary couldn't keep up with all the motions, we had a recording ....
Better yet, we had 100 individual shareholders, under NZ law at the time we could call a special general meeting every 6 weeks .....
Needless to say as we started buying shares of the second wine importer, all the rest of the companies stopped importing wine from SA ....
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vetocracy
Is there a place on the web folks can read more about your time fighting apartheid?
The 1981 Springbok was probably the biggest thing that happened - I got arrested for blowing a whistle during a game (seems there's some silly rule that only one person at a rugby game can have a whistle or something, they couldn't find it when I got to the station and I was released without charge)
https://nzhistory.govt.nz/culture/1981-springbok-tour
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It's reasonable to assume that these folks may have significantly reduced NZ's imports of SA wine for at least a while.
LOL that's genius!
Dead Comment
For literally all my life, I have thought of group debate as a thing where both sides try to convince the other of their stupidity, and the debate is only resolved when one side gives up.
Then in the middle of a paragraph about something completely different in the condensed version of Robert's Rules, the authors write
> Vigorous debate about the merits of a motion is central to the very idea of a deliberative assembly. When the arguments on all sides are fully aired, the group is most likely to come to a wise decision.
This is incredibly profound, and it seems like the authors just take it for granted.
You debate something so that everyone has heard the complications considered important by the group. Then when it goes to a vote, each person is able to consider this important information and form a judgment of their own.
In a group debate, nobody has to (or even should?) change their minds. It’s okay to have different priorities and think different things are best. Debate is not about admitting fault or changing one’s mind – it’s about informing the rest of the group about which arguments one thinks are salient to the judgment.
This assumes both sides are acting in good faith and share some common goals. If one side has (say) convinced itself that the the other side is evil and duplicitous then this no longer works because 1) everything the other side says is viewed through the lens of evil and duplicity and 2) this evil and duplicity needs to be combated by any means necessary, up to and including presenting arguments that the first side knows are wrong but which it believes in good faith could allow it to prevail against evil and duplicity.
And then there is the meta problem, which is that as soon as one side falls into this hole it typically drags the other side down with it.
They can go meta and debate the goals first, then use logic to reason what they suggest objectively works. If the "wrong" side is unable to provide equivalent reasoning for their points, then it's obvious?
And if the "right" side is unwilling to go about it systematically and wants to engage in warfare, perhaps that speaks for their confidence in themselves.
This hits at a key problem in dysfunctional companies ... since there is often no clear "right answer" people will do dysfunctional things like delay decision making until there is a clear, unambiguously best choice (which may never happen) or force through their preference because other, better, choices have trade offs.
there's no need or requirement for consensus for the community to move forward; there's only a need to acknowledge that the community must go one.
So, kind of like the efficient markets hypothesis, you have to ask "under what conditions will deliberative debate lead to better decisions?" Because sometimes the group makes the wrong decision.
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).
---------
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.
If you have some giant organization where you must implement stuff like this, then fine. If you have a small organization where you don't have to, then meetings should have a facilitator leading the meeting, and then should flow essentially like a conversation.
One alternative I've really liked is Cannon's [0]. It's got all the essential elements and clearly explains how to escape the rules and run meetings largely as conversations.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Cannons-Concise-Guide-Rules-Order/dp/...
However, we have had situations over the years where it really mattered whether there was quorum, how an emergency meeting could be called, the scope of authority of the executive board, whether phone/write-in/proxy votes counted, etc. Formal procedures often don't matter--but sometimes they do.
In the presence of good faith, formal rules aren't needed.
Much like methane and "thou which smelt it", I get very cynical whenever anyone calls for formalization.
One speaker at time/don't interrupt people.
Decisions are made only after everyone's had the opportunity to discuss/speak
Proposals need to be specific/defined
Majority rule but minority rights.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic
Robert's Rules of Order (1876) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23688430 - June 2020 (60 comments)
Rethinking Robert's Rules of Order - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21157398 - Oct 2019 (56 comments)
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xO1zxPRRf4g
SHAMROCK: [scribbling on a legal pad] The Roberts Rules say we gotta have minutes for the meeting right? These the minutes.
STRINGER: Is you takin’ notes on a criminal f*** conspiracy?! What the ** is you thinking man?!
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hGo5bxWy21g
Once you master the rules of order, you can declare everybody and anybody else "out of order" to control any formal meeting.
A lesson also learnable from top civil servant (good grief, I sound like a headline writer) Sir Humphrey in "Yes, Prime Minister" (episode "Man Overboard"): "Ah, Prime Minister... It is characteristic of all committee discussions and decisions that every member has a vivid recollection of them and that every member's recollection of them differs violently from every other member's recollection. Consequently we accept the convention that the official decisions are those and only those which have officially recorded in the minutes by the officials, from which it emerges with an elegant inevitability that any decision which has been officially reached will have been officially recorded in the minutes by the officials and any decision which is not recorded in the minutes has not been officially reached even if one or more members believe they can recollect it, so in this particular case if the decision had been officially reached it would have been officially recorded in the minutes by the officials. And it isn't so it wasn't."
A simplified version, Rusty's Rules of Order[0] is used by the IWW. It's worth checking out if you're unfamiliar to Roberts' Rules or need a quick refresher.
[0] https://libcom.org/article/how-hold-good-meeting-rustys-rule...
Dead Comment