SOC
Senior Member
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Funny how 'consensus' was supported when used by the experts including those experts who wrote the ICCME of which very little if anything has been heard or talked about; and yet not so many months ago - it was ICCME or nothing - and the CCC was deemed second-best.
I dare say, you all feel, consensus is not so much a 'dirty word' when the experts you support wholeheartedly are thought to have employed it in support of the CCC, and yet perhaps even in this context the experts were making a 'compromise'.
In any forum, even one that seeks votes, it will ever be the greater vote that is deemed the consensus. I wonder who considered consensus in the context of the expert letter - was this term used within the letter or by those advocates who advanced the letter as a 'consensus' view? I forget.
[my bolding]
I think you might misunderstand the meaning of "consensus" in the context of committee-based decision-making. In consensus, everyone on the committee must agree with the published conclusions. It is most definitely not a majority opinion conclusion. The consensus is not what most committee members agree to, it is what all members agree to.
It's a great process when all participants are honestly working to find a common ground and that minimal common ground is an acceptable conclusion.
It fails dismally when
1) an extremist segment refuses to accept any conclusion but their own position
2) a minimalist solution -- one everyone can accept -- is insufficient for the purpose
3) an extremist minority, even one person, refuses to accept the conclusion without their own pet addendum issue included
4) an extremist minority, even one person, refuses to accept a point that everyone except them considers an obvious conclusion
and so on.
Developing a definition for ME/CFS is not a place where consensus has any likelihood of being successful. We don't want a minimalist definition that includes only the overlap between the BPS and the biomedical positions. What would that be? Six months of unexplained fatigue? Do they all agree on anything else?
We don't want the definition of the illness held hostage by those who insist that ME/CFS is a psychiatric condition and who won't allow for a definition that says otherwise. For example, it only takes one person on the committee refusing to allow immune research/data into the definition to keep it out, even if all the other experts agree it's important.
Consensus can work in certain situations. It sounds like our 50 experts reached a consensus -- they all agreed upon the content of the letter they signed. Similarly, the CCC and the ICC were agreed upon by all the committee members who developed the criteria. But in neither case were the committees trying to accommodate the beliefs and wishes of the BPS school.
While in theory, and in certain situations, I think consensus is a great method of decision-making, I've also left a couple of organizations that switched decision-making method from majority-rule to consensus because they became completely crippled and unable to achieve any productive forward motion. Every decision took 10 times longer to make and became so watered-down that it was utterly useless.
Obstructive people who want to maintain the status quo love the consensus method. All they have to do is continue to argue and refuse to cooperate and nothing happens.... or what happens is what they want because everyone else agrees with them just to get the whole damned misery over with. And I, for one, can see the BPS school playing just that game.