7 Guidelines for Herding Pagan Cats

Last updated on: April 17, 2017 at 9:47 am by John Halstead

7 Guidelines for Herding Pagan Cats 2017-04-17T09:47:20-05:00 John Halstead

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I don’t know much about organizing people. But I did pick up a few things when facilitating the working group that drafted “A Pagan Community Statement on the Environment“. Here are 7 things I learned:

1. Draw on the skills and knowledge of the people in your group. There are likely people in your group who know answers to questions you didn’t even know to ask or know how to do things you didn’t even know needed to be done. Don’t be afraid of asking questions. It’s not a lack of leadership to draw on the strengths of those in your group. To give just one example, someone in the group had the idea of translating the Statement into other languages. Some people in the group were bilingual or know knew other people who were. And suddenly, the Statement became an international Pagan statement. We have translated the Statement into 16 languages and we have signatures from 78 countries.

2. People will have different levels of energy and interest — and those levels may wax and wane. Make room for this. Don’t use guilt to motivate, but keep inviting people who have been quiet to re-engage. What’s more, people have different skills and knowledge, so some people may be able to contribute more to one part of your project, but less to others. And that’s okay. I know some people felt like they had to apologize that their contribution to the Statement was inconsistent, but every bit helped.

3. While having more eyes on a problem is generally good, having too many cooks in the kitchen is bad. Small groups — like around a half dozen people or less — are the most effective for completing discrete tasks. If you have a more than that, break into subgroups and break your project into subparts. Then have another small group work on integrating the different parts. In our case, we broke the Statement into 6 subparts and broke the group into six subgroups. Each group worked on part of the Statement for a period of time, and then the groups rotated and started with what the group before them had done.

4. Listening to dissent is sometimes more important than achieving agreement. I learned that sometimes it’s more important for people to feel heard and to have their ideas seriously considered, than it is to reach 100% consensus on every detail.

5. Experiment with different decision-making methods. On some issues, we took a poll and went with majority rule. On other issues, we hashed it out until at least a grudging semi-consensus was achieved. And sometimes, a small group made executive decisions. It was fluid. And I think it worked.

6. Deadlines are essential. Be flexible when necessary, but use deadlines to keep the group on track and focused.

7. You can’t make everybody happy. Some people have issues which are legitimate, but which are beyond the scope of your project. There are also people who just like to tear things down, more than they want to build things up. The latter should just be avoided. Fortunately, we actually didn’t have anyone like this in our group. But I still sometimes fell into the trap of engaging with these types in other forums.

7a. You can’t make everybody happy — this includes you yourself. You will have to let go of some things that seem important to you at the time. I felt really strongly about a preposition, and I had to let it go.

7b. But don’t use #7 as an excuse for group think. It take a village to see all the aspects of a big picture. We had between 40 and 50 people working on the Statement at various stages — people with a lot of knowledge and a lot of experience. And still, when we posted the Statement for public comment, we realized that there were some important things that we had missed. Fortunately we had created the period of public comment precisely for this reason, and many revisions were made in the last weeks before final publication.

P.S. If you haven’t signed A Pagan Community Statement on the Environment, you can add your name to the (as of the writing of this) 6,864 people who have already signed it. Just follow this link.

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