Group Conscience and Substantial Unanimity – Concepts Workshop – Part 2 of 3 – Tim M.

So anyway, my name is Tim. I'm an alcoholic. There's a lot of words in that reading. Before we get on to examples what I want to do is present how I understand concept 5 and within that there'll be some examples. So basically, the first point divides into two parts. There's the minority report, which is also referred to as the appeal, and also the filing of a personal grievance. Now, unhelpfully, and this is because it's badly written, the term right of appeal can apply to both. So I think it's easier to talk about minority opinion and personal grievance or petition. So grievance and a minority opinion, then you know what you're talking about. Are you in the minority and you disagree with the majority or are you feeling hard done by? So appeal covers the whole thing. These minority reports, I joined AA in 1993 and I don't think anyone would have known what one of these was. And they're very popular now, these minority reports because it means everyone can have a go. It's very interesting what it says, what it actually says in the essay and the history of this. It's not just the minority disagrees with the majority, it's you think there's a serious mistake which has taken place. Not just my opinion hasn't won out or I appear to think differently than others. No, this is a serious problem which people are overlooking. and the original idea was you do them in writing and you submit this report minority report to the body that made the mistake so it could be an intergroup or a regional or really it was conference that's where it originally originated and it propagates throughout the fellowship quite lightly as a good practice and it can go all the way to conference If you have a problem at the intergroup, then it can't be solved there. It can go down and down and up until you get to the conference. Now, I think it's quite right. I've been in group conscience meetings where someone genuinely feels that a major point has been overlooked, a particular interest has been overlapped in the making of a decision. Very often, however, minority opinion is asked if it wants to have another bite of the cherry after the vote has taken place Now, just a couple of points about democracy here A few years ago in a country in Europe, there was a big decision They asked the country what they thought There was a very slim majority in favour of one view, and the idea was, in a lot of people's minds, well this was a majority decision, 51%, therefore it is right, we shall go with that, very, very good. there's democracy you see democracy this these are the two ideas number one democracy is good number two democracy is the simple majority now if you open a politics and you open it at a chapter on what democracy is in the first two pages it will demolish everything you think you know about what democracy ist but people are very very quick to start pronouncing about democracy, usually based on a position of entire ignorance. Aside from those two ideas, it's good and it's the majority. Before we get to the minority opinion, you have to understand what the democracy is in AA, which is very different than is understood generally in society. What it talks about in concept 12 is substantial unanimity. So you want to make decisions which really bring everyone on board, if possible. so it says discussion, vote and substantial unanimity which often means that the proposal has to go back and forth a number of times until everybody or as near as damn it to everyone can buy the proposal it's not just here as an idea we can squeak it through at 51% and hell with the rest that's not the idea at all. The idea is you try to bring everyone along with you and what this means is radical changes should rarely be made because a radical change is unlikely to garner substantial unanimity, and in concept 9 Bill talks about very interestingly about accepting progress in AA meaning a series of unsatisfactory compromises you've got to edge towards things you don't suddenly leap towards things you make a decision in that way usually a very modest one and then you see how it works out and the experience usually softens the opponent and then you can make more progress you don't have to change everything all at once it's very rare that a decision has to be made the only times you really have to make a decision is when the venue is shutting and if you don t find another venue you re not having a meeting no other decision by and large the other thing is exclusions if you ve got someone that s being a prize jerk and is preventing the meeting from taking place because of their behaviour. That's the other situation where you have to have a decision. Under any other circumstance, you could literally have no format. You could have alcoholics in a room, read something, take turns, drink a cup of tea, go home. You don't need these. These decisions are almost never necessary. And this must be borne in mind that so one shouldn't be making high-stakes decisions and having these very contentious proposals, it's quite unnecessary. Anyway the point is the democracy is the idea of bringing as many people on board as possible. Now I was conference delegate two years. I'm not going to go into the reason why I wasn't there for the third year. I'm going to make it up at some point later again, if they'll have me as well. But what I notice there are 120-130 delegates, however many there are. There are some characters, there are some people who are not there for consensus, there are people who are not here to try to come to a common view, they're there to bang the little drum. So you're never going to get absolute consensus. You've always got some oddballs. But my observation at conference, the decisions are made very carefully. So the topics were chosen very carefully that are hammered out within committee based on the gathered experience of the entire conference, an entire fellowship. The committee presents its findings to the other regions. You present your committee's findings to your region. You get some feedback. That feedback gets fed in to the decisions. Usually they get watered down and tempered and then they get presented to the fellowship. And almost everything passes. Unless you've got a committee where something is very badly written, and that will happen as well. But generally, as long as it's well written, it's been so sounded out it's going to pass and it passes usually with maybe 2, 3, 4 people against that's all that's substantial unanimity in practice what I see practiced in AA and I think this is sensible is to say for administrative decisions so a sort of technical decision we have the break at intergroup halfway through or two-thirds of the way through? You can have 50%. You've got to jump one way or the other. If you've got a jump one while the other, you have to do it 50%. Any substantial decision which involves making a change, first of all, the wording must be in favour of change not in favour of status quo otherwise you default to change. You can't get majority in favour of the status quo. I've seen very, very badly worded motions. Shall we keep the format the same? And that fails and then it defaults to changing the format without a formative one. But anyway, if anything's substantial it's two-thirds but just because you've got two- thirds doesn't mean you've won. Let me just close the door. Just because you got two thirds it doesn't mean you've won. You've still got quite a lot of people there who are against it. Why? I want to know why. If you're in the majority, you should want to know why people are against, particularly if there are lots of abstentions. This is a ridiculous practice. To abstain from a vote, FYI, is not to cast one. You cannot passed an abstention. It's a contradiction in terms. An abstention is a non-vote, you've got duct tape around your mouth or you're not in the room. So you keep your mouth shut and so what is it two-thirds of? It's two- thirds of the people who are eligible to vote in that vote and if you get two-thirds of those... so abstentions basically the number of people who are abstaining count towards the no. Otherwise you end up in the ridiculous position, let's say you've got 20 people in the room and 10 abstain and seven are in favour and three are against so seven for three against ten abstain you end up with a vote being passed with seven out of 20 if you don't count the abstentions as no. If you've got lots of people abstaining, you want to know why. If there is a conflict of interest, the person can legitimately abstain. So if it is about them they should abstain or if they have some kind of personal interest that's fine. Often when you ask the And asking the people who are abstaining Is part of this garnering Of what the minority opinion is If you ask them Often they'll say I don't understand If they don't Understand the question You haven't discussed it properly If after lots of battering They still don't Understand it The question is Well do we need to pause And circulate some written materials For people to really think about this? Or is this person fit for the role? Sometimes people don't understand because they don't have enough information about the fellowship. They just don't understand what is going on. This can happen at Intergroup, for instance, or Region. People are very new to Intergroup or Region. And you can have maybe a grace period of one or two meetings where you can abstain a lot because you just want to sit back. But you're a sort of dead duck in the sea. You're supposed to be representing people but you're unable to understand the material and make decisions and that needs to be dealt with um or people are genuinely undecided if they're genuinely undECIDED it's not time for a vote people need to think about this so there should only be abstentions in incredibly incredibly vanishingly rare situations uh a genuine abstention is when you've got a conflict of interest, or the person is super new and they have a grace period of one session of abstaining from it. Otherwise, you want to find out what's behind the abstention and fix it. Have the situation properly explained, circulate materials, pause and come back later. That's dealing with the abstentions. But dealing with The Nose, again, And it's a very good practice if you've got a complex issue. If a vote, let's say it goes to seven out of 10, so you've Got 10 voters, seven are in favour. The three who are not in favour, the question to the minority after the vote goes through is, is there any point you have to make you have not already made? Is there something you believe that the rest of the room has not taken into account? It's not simply an invitation to reiterate the points the person has been banging on about for 15 minutes during the call to the meeting, just in case they're, you know, by attrition, they'll bully people, bully the majority into caving. That's not what it's for. It's for the minority to bring to the attention of the group something that's been overlooked. uh then if new information emerges um or the gravity of a problem maybe a problem has been presented but its gravity hasn't been understood that's legitimate then you say does anyone who voted in favor or indeed against actually does does anyone want to change their vote If they do, you re-vote and then re-present the minority invitation. Say something about it. A good practice as well I found is to, if we're going to make a big change, make it a pilot change for three months and have the group automatically revert to what it was doing before unless you can get a vote to continue it after three months and this is very good because what it allows groups to do is to trial things that people have misgivings about without fear it will result in a permanent change as it will default back to the status quo ante unless the second vote, which is now based on experience not theory, goes in favour of it. There's not a lot else to say on minority opinion. The grievance thing, these are very, very rare to have a legitimate grievance. The two grievance situations I've seen um in practice i think there have been some at uh in the service struggle paid employees i know there have being grieving situations but i can't speak to those i don't have the full details and i wasn't involved but in the fellowship i've seen it happen in two situations um sometimes people are doing service i say doing service usually the problem is they're not doing they don't show up for the meeting and then the meeting holds the business meeting or a group conference and the person is ousted from the role um and it's usually in accordance with you know a system they haven't noted that there's a system for instance of notifying your absence getting cover or something and the group says enough is enough it's been three times and there's no when they're not there and there's no word from them because people can have legitimate reasons for not turning up that they have work commitments um child care or they're ill or they're on holiday people have trips which is but i've seen situations where there there is a there is an awol absent without leave and the person is not there they're Not there they haven't notified for three weeks. The group ousts them and says, well, this is effectively a resignation. Often the group will have in the procedures, group procedures, if you don't chart for three times and don't send your apologies, this has deemed resignation. And then the person feels very ill used by this and brings grievance to the group. This is frightful behavior. I've heard people say I mean, bullied by the group. Well, now this needs to be dealt with because sometimes there has been miscommunication. The apology hasn't made it all the way through to the GSR or the secretary who's gathering the apologies. There can be there can be misunderstandings when they've got someone to cover, but the covering person didn't cover for them. So you need to hear people out. But sometimes it's sometimes it'S a little bit of a set up. The other situation, and this was a very astonishing one, and it's still reverberating to this day, this particular one, where in an intergroup someone went for a role but didn't show up for the vote at which they were going to be voted in for the role. Someone else has voted in. The apology for why they weren't going to do that or why they wouldn't be there for the voting to vote them in wasn't received until after the beginning of the meeting. And this person felt very grieved. and brought a grievance. And I've never come across a situation so badly handled, frankly. That's saying something. You can handle most things badly without too much damage. It's just incompetent. But when there's a grievrance, the grievance is usually aimed at someone else's decision or behaviour. And if it's not handled properly, what you have is a kangaroo paw. a sort of a trial but not in accordance with any robust procedure just as one of these sort of summary game of thrones style situations and what should happen first of all the committee should field the grievance not immediately bring it through to the whole of the interview but field it in camera, as it were, in the judge's chamber. It should be discussed between the officers and the person who's brought the grievance. Say, look, can we resolve this without having a kind of public hearing? What would you like? Would you do looking for an apology, looking for a revote? What are you looking for? So can we achieve this whilst maintaining the unity of the intergroup, say, and the dignity of the people involved? This didn't happen in this particular case. It went to a sort of courtroom situation. It's unbelievable what happened. So the person presented the grievance, and rather than allowing the person against whom the grievances was brought to respond first and present their situation, they got everyone else in the room to present their view on it first without having heard both sides so they got the jury to give their verdict based solely on the case for the prosecution i mean it beggars belief frankly so and one of the people is indignant to this day and i'm on their side with this i think it's appalling behavior because they had to make a decision in a very difficult situation where the chair hadn't shown up so they stood in and dealt with it they dealt with it very well actually in not allowing not saying no we're not what situation was detail is relevant here the intergroup badly needed a health liaison officer two people go for it one person doesn't show up the other person does show up with their service cv and all the other materials it would not be in the good in the interests of the still suffering alcoholics who live in the intergroup to have the job vacant for two months whilst this other person gets their arting gear to even show up for their own vote that would not benefit the still-suffering alcoholic that's only for the vanity of the individual and the person dealt with it by saying look we need an HLO put them in place and they were absolutely pilloried before they'd had a chance to put their view and that's what happens when this grievance procedure goes wrong so if there is an allegation of wrongdoing of some sort be dealt with quietly if possible and tactfully humanely person to person have a human conversation and see if you can resolve it and only bring it to the full plenary session, as it were, of the intergroup if it's absolutely vital. And it should be used only, both of these, the minority opinion, the grievance procedure should be using only very sparingly because it's very easy for things to get bogged down unnecessarily and a lot of people will not shut up until they've got their own way And the last point, actually, to go back to minority opinion, if I may. I saw a situation at conference and I've seen this situation repeat endlessly. It's happened on the board. It's happen in various situations where there's an ill-informed minority that does not understand the situation. and they get very upset and issue some sort of plaintive plea in favour of a particular view which is not really based on anything shooting from the hip and it frightens everyone in the room and the room gets spooked and the people who are very firm in this decision start to waver because they can't mentally process this manipulation quickly enough so they're all now I'm a bit worried about Ooh, I'm not sure. And very carefully laid plans, work which has gone out to consultations of thousands of people is torpedoed because someone got upset at the last minute and it spooked enough people to bring it below two thirds. so one's got to be very careful with this that it should be that there must be a sense of proportion just because there is a minority opinion doesn't mean it needs to be obeyed or listened to or taken into account by the majority and the content must be listened to very carefully and not the emotion or the personal circumstances of the individual in question um you you watch out for manipulations in minority opinions. I'll give two examples, then I'll shut up. The first one is where people say, but what about the newcomer? And try to give an example of it will kill newcomers. If I'd been facing that in my first meeting, I never would have come back as if to say, if you do this, you're going to kill people. I mean, it's a very unpleasant way of presenting an argument, to go to the absolute. It's like when people make arguments and invoke the Nazis or something. Choose an everyday example. Don't go straight to the most inflammatory event in history and start to invoke that in favour. Because who could possibly, you know, cite your... If you go with this decision, you're just like the Nazis. And it's like that you do this you'll kill newcomers and it's a newcomer surviving crack houses of hackney i'm sure they can deal with a bit of an administration in the home group or or a slightly ambiguous bit of the script or the fact that you know that i don't know what it is but but uh don't bend to that just because someone invokes an emotive argument or or the other thing is when it's something about their own history some plaintive story about unprocessed pain a childhood and you know they would be traumatized if this boat went through um yeah well they may well be there we go um i'm gonna stop there before i make it any worse and i don't know what's gonna happen next so i guess i'll hand it back to you robert