Dual Process Paranoia

i have been writing about it, but it has been a pretty stressful week and a half.  i have been going thru two parallel approval processes in the last 10 days.  One was for the position as stand-in planner, which is Twin Oaks highest executive decision making job.  The other has been Twin Oaks’s approval of my dual membership with Acorn.

we dont always know where we are going

we dont always know where we are going

The processes for these two community decisions are quite different.  And slightly curiously, the one which mattered most to me (and had the least impact on the community) had the most selective unpredictable decision process – this was my dual membership status.  For the plannership, the existing planners took a couple of preliminary steps, they asked members of the community for their non-binding input.  This was preceeded by this call for my own Twin Oaks Member clearness and this clarification of why i called a clearness on myself.

Dual membership is approved using the “negative minority centric” decision making model which the membership team uses on visitors who want to be come provisional members.  This means a very small number of well reasoned “no’s” can stop either a visitor from becoming a member or an existing Oaker to become a dual member with anywhere else.  How small?  Probably 5 would do it.  But what if 30 or 40 or even 50 members thought i would be a great dual member, well these dont matter at all. As hard as this is to imagine, the thinking is that (especially for visitors) lots of under informed yes’s should not overrule a small number of well reasoned “no’s”.

And this was the source of my paranoia.  I am a big personality, i try to move gracefully and respectfully, but with some regularity i upset people off.  Generally for reasonable reasons, sometimes it feels a bit frivolous to me.  When i realized the threshold for reject was so low – and no number of positive votes could counteract these negatives, i started to worry about my dual membership process.  4 negative inputs came in during my planner input, and perhaps someone who did not want to hear my rationalizations would just wait until the final input process and pop up and block this important (to me) option.

my paranoia was not so attractive

my paranoia was not so attractive

So the results?  3 yes’s and 3 no’s.  i was granted provisional dual membership status.  I still dont know about my planner results, but that takes 20% of the full membership to block it, which would be something like 16 vetoes.  i am not that paranoid.