
Rethinking Robert's Rules of Order - HR01
https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/profits-order/
======
crazygringo
I'll be brutal here: Robert's Rules of Order are a severely outdated method
that creates divisiveness and polarization through majoritarian voting -- the
same types of problems we see in politics today. It made sense as a big
improvement in the 1800's -- it doesn't in 2019. Key quote:

"Its arcane rituals of parliamentary procedure and majority rule usually
produce a victorious majority and a very dissatisfied minority that expects to
raise its concerns, again, at the next possible meeting."

Anyone considering Robert's Rules should read this first: "Breaking Robert's
Rules: The New Way to Run Your Meeting, Build Consensus, and Get Results" [1]
by Lawrence Susskind -- an MIT and Harvard professor. [2]

That book is a "popular" condensed version of the ideas behind practical
consensus-building. If you want to implement it in your organization, see his
full-length "The Consensus Building Handbook". [3] It's textbook-priced
unfortunately (for organizations to purchase, not curious individuals), but
many academic institutions will have direct access to it online. [4]

[1]
[https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0195308360](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0195308360)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Susskind](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Susskind)

[3] [https://www.amazon.com/Consensus-Building-Handbook-
Comprehen...](https://www.amazon.com/Consensus-Building-Handbook-
Comprehensive-Agreement-dp-0761908447/dp/0761908447)

[4] [http://sk.sagepub.com/reference/the-consensus-building-
handb...](http://sk.sagepub.com/reference/the-consensus-building-handbook)

~~~
dev_tty01
I don't disagree that many groups could get closer to consensus with better
meeting management, but in practice building consensus is often an illusion.
I've been in organizations where building consensus meant continuing to meet
and rehash until the minority group got sick of meeting and stopped arguing.
Then we voted and the majority ruled, but there was still no consensus.
Massive waste of time. Make your case succinctly, vote, and move on. You win
some and you lose some.

Problems arise when the minority opinion members can't recognize the
possibility that they were perhaps wrong or perhaps not seeing the complete
picture. No truly productive debate can ever occur unless both sides are
willing to recognize the very real possibility that they are wrong or at least
that there are often multiple reasonable ways to solve a problem.

~~~
bluGill
Why is it only the minority that needs to recognize they might be wrong?
Sometimes the majority is wrong.

~~~
tengbretson
Because the majority opinion is set to actually be implemented, so it will be
obvious to everyone whether or not it is wrong.

------
impendia
I'm a university professor, and I served on the Faculty Senate for several
years. Our meetings were conducted by Robert's Rules.

I share the negative views expressed here by others. Following the rules
amounted to a form of bikeshedding. For example:

"The Committee on Curriculum on Courses presents a list of 83 proposed changes
to the Undergraduate Course Schedule. ... Is there a motion?"

And so we go through an elaborate procedure, to make sure that everything is
discussed and voted on "correctly". In reality, usually nobody read any of the
documents that were provided in advance, and there is neither any discussion
nor any dissent. At most, someone from Department X will object to some
proposal that their own department has "requested", and ask that it be
stricken.

Occasionally the meetings get heated, in which case I agree that some sort of
formal procedure is a good thing. But "following the rules" allows everyone in
the room to believe that we've done our jobs. And when we've endured
mysterious and unexplained budget cuts, at a time when tuition and enrollment
are both at record highs, I'm not convinced we have.

~~~
Animats
You have the option to move to split the motion, so that that items 21 and 45
are voted on separately and all the noncontroversial items can be passed.

The rules are for a body that has the power to make binding decisions. That's
sometimes time-consuming, but that's the nature of democracy.

~~~
WorldMaker
The rules themselves on the subject:

> General Consent or Unanimous Vote. By general, or unanimous, or silent,
> consent the assembly can do business with little regard for the rules of
> procedure, as they are made for the protection of the minority, and when
> there is no minority to protect, there is little use for the restraint of
> the rules, except such as protect the rights of absent members, or the right
> to a secret vote. [1915 edition]

Don't forget that key that if there isn't a minority to protect, you don't
need all the rules. Split the things that people actually need to discuss out
of the stuff that is unanimous, move that the unanimous stuff be won by
acclimation, and move on to the stuff that actually needs to be discussed.
Even Robert's Rules says to do it. People like processes, and following
processes to their logical extremes, but at the end of the day the process
exists for a goal ("give minorities a voice", in this case), and outside of
that goal/need becomes silly and overbearing, and it knows it which is why it
has always had escape valves.

------
Taniwha
We hacked RRO recursively for a political campaign:

A wine company was importing wine from apartheid South Africa - under NZ law
at the time any 100 shareholders could call a SGM every 6 weeks, we had 100
small shareholders ... we started with the AGM where the accounts had to be
accepted by the shareholders for the company to continue to trade.

Simply the script went like this:

1) Someone moves a motion of no-confidence in the chair (under the "aged and
infirm incompetence act 1897" which does not exist, he turns bright red in
anger but is required to step down while the motion is dealt with)

2) a vote must be taken, someone demands a written ballot which is their right

3) the chair proposes scrutineers

4) someone challenges the scrutineers and proposes their own up their own

5) so we have to vote .... at this point you recurse back to step 2, if they
ever agree to your scrutineers you have someone in the wings ready to
challenge with their own slate of scrutineers ....

(it's important to keep track of how deep you are in recursion because the
chair is bound to forget ....)

Of course in practice eventually someone breaks and declares the whole thing
silly, restores the real chair and continues the meeting, adopts the accounts
etc .... then you go to court because the chair wasn't valid and therefore the
accounts weren't really adopted and the company can't trade ... (we never got
that far, after one round of this ALL the other wine companies capitulated)

~~~
garmaine
Why are you proud of this?

~~~
Frondo
It sounds like he was trying to stop that company from doing business with
South Africa during Apartheid, which is a morally praiseworthy stance.

~~~
garmaine
The ends don’t justify the means.

~~~
klyrs
On the balance... these means appear to be quite harmless

------
jshaqaw
The intentions behind the rules are noble but any organization I have been a
part of which runs on them ends up being some group who have mastered the
rules using them to torture some other subset who are there just trying to get
something substantive achieved.

~~~
RodgerTheGreat
There is a certain personality type which seems attracted to Robert's Rules as
a sort of diceless pen-and-paper roleplaying game. Bureaucracy and ritual
become their own ends. If you get too many of this sort of person in a
meeting, it is virtually impossible to accomplish anything.

------
teilo
I fully expected this article to discover/declare that Robert was a Bad Person
and therefore we must abandon RRoO. My knee-jerk conclusion wasn't far off.
Not Robert, but his heirs are the Bad People.

The premise of this article is the problem, not Roberts Rules themselves,
regardless of edition: That if person A invented thing B, then no matter how
useful thing B may or may not be, it is the character of person A, not the
utility of thing B, that determines whether we can use it.

Enough of this crap. Enough of outrage farming. Enough of guilt-by-association
ad absurdum. RRoO, like any other invention or discovery, stands or falls on
its own merits.

I've seen RRoO used tyrannically to suppress debate, and I've seen them used
wisely. No set of rules is going to perfectly fix contentious interactions or
political underhandedness. Even consensus-based alternatives can be and are
manipulated.

~~~
pkd
I don't think there's any guilt by association being assigned to anything. The
article in my head amounted to the realization that the corporation behind
Robert's Rules does not itself adhere to the book's teachings and has had
problematic elements in the past. So instead they recommend other resources,
one explicitly still about Robert's Rules itself.

>> I’m ready to advocate on my campus against all post-1915 editions (with
apologies to Cleary) in part because of her politics and in part because there
are plenty of alternatives. My new favorites are Nancy Sylvester’s The
Complete Idiot’s Guide to Robert’s Rules, and Alice Sturgis’s The Standard
Code of Parliamentary Procedure

The only outrage I felt came from your comment.

------
lazulicurio
I'm not a certified parliamentarian, but I do have a decent amount of
experience with Robert's Rules from extracurriculars in university, so I just
wanted to make two points.

1) This quote ("Under Robert’s Rules, silence equals consent") is incredibly
untrue, and makes it hard for me to take the rest of the article seriously.
Abstention does not mean that you agree with a motion, and there are
protections (e.g. quorum) to prevent abuse by a small cadre of disingenuous
voters.

2) In my experience, very few organizations actually take the time to
understand and follow Robert's Rules. Most just rely on whatever rules some
motivated members happened to cherry pick from the text, plus a smorgasbord of
bylaws and policies drafted by the organization (see edit). There is an
argument to be made that maybe Robert's Rules is too complex to be useful, but
most organization members only need a passing understanding; as long as you
have a chair or parliamentarian who is familiar with the ins and outs, they
should be able to keep meetings running smoothly and shut down most attempts
to lawyer the system.

Edit: For example: "the December 1964 late-evening vote by leaders of Students
for a Democratic Society to focus on the Vietnam War and the December 1966
late evening SNCC vote to expel all white members (19-18, with 24
abstentions)". But Robert's Rules typically requires a 2/3 vote for
disciplinary actions (such as the expulsion of a member). I don't have a copy
of the 1951 edition to confirm, but I would be surprised if it allowed
expulsion with a simple majority vote.

~~~
WorldMaker
I had some similar thoughts.

Out of curiosity, the original 1876 edition [1] doesn't include membership
votes as requiring 2/3rds, but also doesn't directly address membership votes
of that sort (and leaves that to a body's rules).

It also uses the word "abstain" twice, but does not yet formalize abstentions.

The 1915 edition, however definitely includes Vote to Expel Members as
requiring a 2/3rds vote [2]. (It also doesn't seem to codify abstentions,
other than generally allow for them [blank ballots in a balloted vote].)

I'm also wondering if that "24 abstentions", which seems wildly high, if
accurate. That's a lot of people not to care which way the vote went. Keep in
mind that absentee ballots, and absent members, are very different from
abstentions (and absent members do not count as abstentions, because they were
not even present for the vote).

[1]
[http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/9097/pg9097-images.html](http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/9097/pg9097-images.html)

[2]
[https://www.bartleby.com/176/48.html](https://www.bartleby.com/176/48.html)

~~~
thyrsus
I speculate that many, if not most, of the abstentions were whites who were
there to help, but in light of the organization's goal of increasing black
power, wanted on this occasion to cede power to black members. I highly doubt
that they "didn't care".

~~~
WorldMaker
An abstention intentionally says that either outcome pass/fail is fine,
whichever the remaining majority decides. While "didn't care" may be harsh
descriptor for that, it's also not factually inaccurate. But you are correct
that it _can_ also represent "I'm not capable of making this choice" or "I
should not be culpable in making this choice", which often is far from "didn't
care" in emotional intent, even if the recorded vote was "did not lend
explicit support to either outcome".

------
lazzlazzlazz
Why hasn't anyone re-written Robert's Rules in a manner that minimizes the
rule exploitation/manipulation, but builds-in consensus-seeking activities?

Now that we've had 100+ years of game film on Robert's rules, you'd think we
could find ways to rework the incentive structures, rules, and game
theoretical elements so they're less likely to result in gridlock and
procedural exploits.

~~~
journalctl
Because any system that lets you modify the rules is inherently broken.
There’s some apocrypha involving Kurt Gödel and a loophole in the US
Constitution that gets at this point [1]. But it’s really not the system’s
fault, it’s the users’ fault. Any rule-making system worth writing home about
is exploitable, because that’s the only way it’s useful.

[1]
[https://jeffreykegler.github.io/personal/morgenstern.html](https://jeffreykegler.github.io/personal/morgenstern.html)

------
hirundo
I think Robert's Rules should be treated like our dev team treats Batsov's
Ruby Style guide (1): Use them as a starting point but forked and modified as
appropriate for our use case. And then maybe another teams likes ours better,
and uses it as a starting point and forks it to make changes. Recurse as
needed.

Too bad it wasn't published initially on github in 1876. What were they
thinking.

(1) [https://github.com/rubocop-hq/ruby-style-
guide](https://github.com/rubocop-hq/ruby-style-guide)

~~~
NickNaraghi
I'd be a Patreon supporter of someone who maintained an open-source version of
RONR on github!

------
ryanmarsh
I love that I can walk into any caucus and know the parliamentary protocol and
act effectively within it. Sometimes I wish “all hands” were conducted in this
manner.

~~~
journalctl
95% of what all hands meetings need are: a clear agenda, time limits, and
someone to actually enforce time limits. Come to think of it, all meetings
need that. What kind of business are you conducting at your all hands meetings
such that RRoR would be helpful? Even Robert’s Rules itself says that the
rules shouldn’t just be used for their own sake, because it’s all too possible
for rule-making and procedure to get in the way of actually being productive.

