Quaker Business Meeting Rules

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Rules

  • "we observe silence between individuals' contributions. These silences are crucial, not only for the period of reflection they provide; but also because they enable a meeting to proceed as a gathered body. They act as a brake against one or more individuals seizing control of the meeting through rhetorical display, appeal to emotions or other means.
  • we normally speak once only on a subject unless responding to a direct question or giving factual information. (We may speak on another subject if we want, however.) We speak plainly. We do not speechify, hector or attempt to filibuster. It is appropriate to speak with conviction or with passion, but not with prejudice.
  • we may express contradictory views, but do not argue with one another in meeting. We state what we want to say frankly and briefly without belittling each others' points. The meeting thus should never become a debating club; nor should the situation ever arise where we try to interrupt or shout down another's contribution. Having spoken once to the issue, we must trust that if further valid points occur to us, others will raise them."

(http://www.qis.net/~daruma/business.html)

Discussion

1.

"During early Quaker meetings, “the business activities of their members were scrutinized by their peers, not only for their soundness but also to ensure that the interests of the broader community–not just the Quakers–were protected,” says Hurst, a management consultant based in Oakville, Ontario, who wrote about Quaker business methods in his book Crisis and Renewal: Meeting the Challenge of Organizational Change. The Quaker congregation “would stand behind the activities of members who were in good standing, and if one of them got into trouble, they would supervise the liquidation of the business and make good the deficit.”

“I suppose that on a very small scale, if you are trying to get people who already trust each other somewhat to express real concerns or come up with different ideas, it can help to think about starting a meeting without an agenda and in silence,” Hurst says. “The pressure of silence is immense, so you can’t just spring it on an unsuspecting group. They have to know its coming and what the objective is. A complete change in physical context from the office environment might help too.”

“Huge scale undermines innovation and entrepreneurship and our ability to control our own creations,” he said. “Unless we can make our large, complex organizations a lot smaller, we cannot hope that modern board meetings will ever resemble their Quaker counterparts.” (http://www.forbes.com/2009/10/09/quaker-business-meetings-leadership-society-friends.html)


2.

"Friends do not vote in their business gatherings. Rather, they seek unity - unity with the will of God for the meeting. Friends understand that the majority of a body may be leaning one way while a minority, perhaps even only one person, may be who has discerned God's will. Friends do not rush business, allowing time for all to grasp what God would have the meeting do. When it seems there is a "sense of the meeting" on an item, the clerk (the presiding officer) formulates that sense in words. If the body gathered concurs that the clerk has correctly formulated the matter, it is recorded in the minutes.

One difficult point to grasp is that unity is not identical with unanimity. While no one's sense of God's leading is to be ignored, it is the unity of the body as a whole with the will of God that is critical. Sometimes a person may not be clear on the course of action but feel the meeting is ready to act, and "stand aside" on the issue. An even more difficult situation is one in which the meeting as a whole is clearly united, but someone stands outside that unity without standing aside. To move forward in such a situation must be done with great trepidation, since it involves a conclusion that the person is not being open to the Spirit on the issue, but there are times when it is done." (http://www.quakerinfo.com/quakmfb.shtml)


3.

"The ways in which society generally provides for collective discernment and decision making are ill designed to tap our collective intelligence and do much to explain our collective inability to discern and pursue the common good. The fact that adversarial debate is likely to fail to respect all needs and legitimate interests-and, at best, provides for compromise-is fairly readily grasped. Where not all voices are equally heard, the neglect of some concerns may be acute. And where there is no mutual caring between parts and whole there is pathology, even death.

But even when it is understood that inclusion, equal voice, and non-adversarial discourse is desirable, this understanding by itself proves inadequate to tapping the wisdom of the whole. Of recent years, considerable attention has been paid to the management of meetings and a number of different approaches to collective decision making are now available. These variously emphasize fostering creativity (brainstorming), educing the full range of participants' stories and perspectives, facilitation that captures and builds upon the various contributions, nurturing a culture of respectful, attentive listening, avoidance of negativity and fault finding, structuring a process from brainstorming to analysis to elimination, and so on. Thus, we have "open space," "world café," "appreciative inquiry," "integral public practice," "dialogue," "goldfish bowl," and a host of patented techniques and checklists for running effective meetings. Fetzer's report Centered on the Edge, which explores the essential conditions for tapping into collective wisdom, notably draws little on these. Neither does its conclusions suggest that any of them would be found to meet all necessary conditions in which collective wisdom is arrived at. Indeed, the report could be read to suggest that these conditions still elude us." (http://www.co-intelligence.org/P-QuakerCI.html)