...A bridge named consensus Erica Davis Team Dynamics Week 3-05-13 How do most people start their day? Maybe they have a cup of coffee first. Perhaps, they walk the dog and then re turn home to watch the news. Well it’s definitely how I start my day and like clock work a story of a nation in gridlock is broadcasted. Whether, it’s about the nations growing debt, gun control, or climate change, it is clear we are split down the middle on how to handle it all. You wonder if anyone has ever heard of the word “consensus”. Of course the leaders of our nation have, yet most if us are not sure how it works and most importantly, how it’s built. Consensus building is all about collaborating to resolve conflicts. It’s a healthier alternative to problem solving, because it involves all parties and its members to devise plans amicably. Examples of consensus building efforts include the international negotiations over limiting chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) to protect the ozone layer, or negotiations about limiting the emission of greenhouse gasses (University of Colorado, 1998). Once all members of the consensus team shared their ideas the step by step procedure can take place to resolve the matter at hand. Consensus building is not simple, but if it’s coordinated properly consensus decision making can solve dire issues that could change the world. First, consensus building is carried out by a mediator or a facilitator. The mediator or facilitator is usually someone who is...
Words: 1191 - Pages: 5
...Washington Consensus The term was first coined by John Williamson in 1989, an economist from the institute for international economics in Washington, D.C. Williamson used the term to summarize policy advice from Washington based institutions such as the US treasury, the IMF and the World Bank, that were believed to be necessary for the recovery of countries in Latin America from the economic and financial crises in the 1980s. The Washington Consensus is a set of 10 policies that the US treasury, the IMF and the World Bank believed were necessary elements of “first stage policy reform” that all countries should adopt to increase economic growth. At its heart is an emphasis on the importance of macroeconomic stability and integration into the international economy - in other words a neo-liberal view of globalization. The framework included: * Fiscal discipline - strict criteria for limiting budget deficits * Public expenditure priorities - moving them away from subsidies and administration towards previously neglected fields as key pro-growth like primary education, primary health care and infrastructure invest. * Tax reform - broadening the tax base and cutting marginal tax rates * Financial liberalization - interest rates should ideally be market-determined * Exchange rates - should be managed to induce rapid growth in non-traditional exports * Trade liberalization: liberalization of imports, eliminating quantitative restrictions (licensing etc...
Words: 678 - Pages: 3
...Term paper Management by Consensus: A rationale by technique. Submitted By: HasanuzzamanRahib ID: 3-09-17-031 EMBA Program, Summer- 2012 Course title: Advanced Management Department of Management Studies University of Dhaka Dhaka, Bangladesh 2012. Introduction: The working worlds of our businesses and organizations are becoming increasingly more complex. One of the immediate consequences is the acceleration of change processes. Sensible error tolerance, on the one hand, as well as quick and constructive problem solving procedures on the other will thus be indispensable for forward looking management. The old-fashioned autocratic manager who ruled with an iron hand and controlled everything from the top has pretty much vanished from the management scene. There is no doubt that today's enterprises operate far more humanely than did their old school predecessors, at least on the surface. Consensus management is gaining ever more recognition in business as a success factor in dealing with conflicts and creating personal responsibility. Here the selective application of external moderation, individual and group discussions enhances the dialogue, cooperation and structuring capacities of the conflicting partners. The direct recourse to moderated methods makes for surprisingly quick and long term stable agreements and transfer. Consensus Management: Consensus management means that when a decision is reached by the group, there is total commitment to it by all...
Words: 3335 - Pages: 14
...group decision. The story goes that 12 jurors must reach a verdict that could require the death penalty for an 18-year-old defendant charged with stabbing his father to death. The jurors must reach consensus—the verdict must be unanimous. When they begin their deliberations, 11 vote guilty. Only one sees the case differently and is open to considering that there may be reasonable doubt. He raises his concerns about the trial, the evidence, and the performance of the boy’s lawyer, and continues to ask questions for the others to consider. He also takes the extra effort to provide evidence of his own, for example, purchasing the identical knife used in the murder at a local pawn shop (this knife was purported to be unusual and one of a kind) and pacing the distance the witness claimed he crossed in 15 seconds. It actually took 3 times longer. He wasn’t the strongest voice nor the most passionate believer. He simply had a reasonable doubt and he felt he owed it to the boy on trial to ensure there was sufficient discussion to justify their verdict. He did not bully the others to come to his conclusions, but he stood firm against the bullying of others who would shut down the discussion just to be done with it. Collaborative groups use consensus for decision making. To reach consensus, each individual must say that they will support the decision. The decision does not have to be their first choice, but they must agree they can accept it. If anyone does not agree, the group continues...
Words: 867 - Pages: 4
...in 1940-1960 after which there has been a shift from physical to human capital in 1970. But what is more important is the period since 1980 when the heyday of developmental economics brought shift to market liberalism, structural adjustment, institutional economics and the shift towards Washing Consensus. In the years of transition from command economies to market economies in 1990’s in many countries it was a tendency to implement policies supported by the framework of Washington Consensus and starting this millennium what has mostly been happening is the reaction to failures of Washington Consensus and ongoing experimentations that are targeted to find some answers to the everlasting problem of how to reduce poverty and enhance economic growth. Many of these one-fits-all policy prescriptions failed to prove their efficiency or that they are working at all and, moreover, it is not uncommon that they were even the causes of many financial crises or economics slowdowns in different counties. So in my work I want to face the theoretical analysis and empirical observations to shed the light on the importance, efficiency as well as the limitations of the phenomenon of Washington Consensus, which was called to be a triumph of the transition to...
Words: 2853 - Pages: 12
...Re-organization and Layoff: Issue and Problem Identification PHL/320 Re-organization and Layoff: Issue and Problem Identification In Week Two, Team D discussed the article Mismanaged layoffs can go ‘horribly wrong’ (Bouw, 2013.) The initially chosen focus of the group discussion was the potential ramifications of poorly handling the conversation terminating the employee. Reflecting on the article through further group discussion, and realizing the scope of the team’s initial impression is limiting the problem to a small component of the larger issue, Team D asserts the broader issue is that employers often turn to downsizing as the go-to method of cutting costs. Experts in the Bouw article provide evidence that knee-jerk layoffs to appease shareholder are often a mistake and cite why. Through the collaborative process of discussion, the team benefits from gaining confidence in the decision to change the focus of issue exploration from miscommunicating when firing to the drawbacks of layoffs. By clearly defining the problem that was not immediately apparent, Team D can now concentrate on discussing practical solutions for the broader underlying issue of unnecessary downsizing. Problem Identification The first step to successfully tackling any problem is identifying it. According to Dr. Henry Hornstein, downsizing within a company should be the last resort if cost cutting is necessary (Bouw, 2013.) He hypothesizes that it is approximately a 50 percent chance...
Words: 1026 - Pages: 5
...which communication occurs primarily online or, at a distance. Even if you are enrolled in a course that meets weekly, conflicting schedules can make it difficult to arrange outside meetings with your group members. However, with proper planning and clear communications, teams can work effectively and efficiently with little or no face-to-face contact. Achieving good outcomes requires that individuals with different strengths, weaknesses, and perspectives come together to arrive at consensus. Several tools have been created to help your group get started, get organized, and stay on task. With these tools and tips, you will find that working as a team of educated professionals is not only more efficient but more rewarding as well. This professional collaboration is after all, the nature of nursing. Nurses work with others to help others. Working in teams produces the best outcome for patients and the nursing profession. The first step in working effectively as a team is to arrive at consensus. Before the real work begins, the entire group must agree on fundamental aspects of the work to be done. Together, the group must decide: What the outcome or final product should look like? What the objective is and what method should be used to achieve it? Who should be responsible for doing what tasks, given their experience and talents? What approach should be used when attempting to solve a problem or conflict within the group? Collectively, this process is called “group think...
Words: 605 - Pages: 3
...Groupthink is the concept of having many people go along in agreement with a decision essentially because, either someone of authority has spoken and others are afraid to contradict their idea, or because in the silence of a discussion, each individual believes that others agree with the “apparent” consensus and don’t want to demolish the group cohesiveness . For example, have you ever thought about raising an issue or question in a group meeting, but then abstained because you didn’t want to destroy the consensus view the team had spent considerable time forming, or because you didn’t want to appear to be the only unsupportive member of the team? Conversely, have you ever been a manager who has had to force a team through change when clearly the team was hesitant and not expressing their true opinions? or have you ever been in a situation where you have a team school project and all of you just agree with a certain suggestion because you just want the meeting to be done as soon as possible? The answer to these questions is groupthink. Along with this, the only thing that can help managers combat the groupthink effects is staying aware of the number of key indicators, or symptoms that this mentality presents. The four main symptoms of groupthink are: illusion of invulnerability, self censorship, direct pressure and an illusion of unanimity. One of the most dangerous symptoms of groupthink is the illusion of invulnerability, in which the entire group believes to have...
Words: 534 - Pages: 3
...The issue of when women are the leader an organization is becoming a good reason to discuss with. According to (Cohen & Huffman, 2007; Brenner and colleagues, 1989) concluded that today’s female manager expected to treat their colleagues both men and women fairly in promotion, selection and placement decisions. There is no such biased in career. Talent does not discriminate gender. Everyone can be a good manager. But to be a good manager the person need to have several things such as skills, talent and the ability in managerial. Besides, leadership roles that is the trait to lead others shown by women through their leadership style can empower followers, building trust and innovative which suited to business challenges nowadays (Eagly & Carli, 2007). Organization that do not pay a proper attention to this talent- management issue, will suffer because they fail to keep up with others in the movement of the world today, especially to their competitors. Organization need to work even harder to attract, develop and to retain the best candidates to serve as the next generation of leaders. In the history of various cultures, women have always excelled than men. According to the list of Fortune 1000 list of companies publishes by Fortune Magazine, women hold 4.6 percent of Fortune 1000 list of CEO position. Despite of being minority in managerial world, women make a better manager because they are highly motivated, easy to communicate, have the power to convince people and have a capability...
Words: 1793 - Pages: 8
...Failures Paper Charles Persinger University of Phoenix POS/355 Jeff Rugg April 28, 2014 Simply put, distributed computing is allowing computers to work together in groups to solve a single problem too large for any one of them to perform on its own. Distributed computing is not a simple matter of just sticking the computers together. For a distributed computation to work effectively, those systems must cooperate, and must do so without lots of manual intervention by people. This is usually done by splitting problems into smaller pieces, each of which can be tackled more simply than the whole problem. The results of doing each piece are then reassembled into the full solution. As handy as a distributed system can be there are a there are four main issues you could face: Operating system failures, Hardware Failures, Omission Failures and Byzantine Failures. Crash failures are caused across the server of a typical distributed system and if these failures are occurred operations of the server are halt for some time. Operating system failures are the best examples for this case and the corresponding fault tolerant systems are developed with respect to these affects. Hardware failures used to be more common, but with all of the recent innovations in hardware design and manufacturing they tend to be fewer and far between with most of these physical failures tending to be network or drive related. With more hardware the probability goes up that there will...
Words: 747 - Pages: 3
...Humans have constructed dams for a variety of reasons such as water storage, flood prevention, electricity generation, irrigation, navigation, and recreation. Dams have long been thought of as a “green” source of energy because of the way they produce power from water without the use of fossil fuels. However, there is a huge downside to dams that many people fail to consider, and that is the negative impacts these dams can have on local ecosystems. While dams can benefit society, they also cause considerable harm to rivers. Dams have depleted fisheries, degraded river ecosystems, and diminished recreational opportunities on nearly all of the nation’s rivers. How Do Dams Damage Rivers? 1. Dams reduce river levels By diverting water for power, dams remove water needed for healthy in-stream ecosystems. 2. Dams block rivers Dams prevent the flow of plants and nutrients, impede the migration of fish and other wildlife, and block recreational use. 3. Dams alter water temperatures By slowing water flow, most dams increase water temperatures. Fish and other species are sensitive to these temperature irregularities, which often destroy native populations. 4. Dams decrease oxygen levels in reservoir waters When oxygen-deprived water is released from behind the dam, it kills fish downstream. 5. Dams hold back silt, debris, and nutrients By slowing flows, dams allow silt to collect on river bottoms and bury fish spawning habitat. Silt trapped above dams accumulates heavy...
Words: 331 - Pages: 2
...A Short History of the Washington Consensus John Williamson Senior Fellow, Institute for International Economics Paper commissioned by Fundación CIDOB for a conference “From the Washington Consensus towards a new Global Governance,” Barcelona, September 24–25, 2004. The term “Washington Consensus” was coined in 1989. The first written usage was in my background paper for a conference that the Institute for International Economics convened in order to examine the extent to which the old ideas of development economics that had governed Latin American economic policy since the 1950s were being swept aside by the set of ideas that had long been accepted as appropriate within the OECD. In order to try and ensure that the background papers for that conference dealt with a common set of issues, I made a list of ten policies that I thought more or less everyone in Washington would agree were needed more or less everywhere in Latin America, and labeled this the “Washington Consensus.” Little did it occur to me that fifteen years later I would be asked to write about the history of a term that had become the center of fierce ideological controversy. The first section of this paper describes what I recollect about the background to my background paper for the 1989 conference. The second section retraces much more familiar ground, summarizing the ten points that I included in the Washington Consensus. This is followed by an account of the reception given to the term, and the analysis....
Words: 7965 - Pages: 32
...Social Functions of Education Some, such as Robert Bates, suggest that the inability of societies to develop low-cost and effective self-regulating mechanisms for enforcement of social contracts prevents economic development. The social contract. The concept of a social contract is broader than a legal contract. A social contract includes for instance, a willingness to pay taxes and fulfill other public obligations; it may include the willingness to participate in public affairs, maintain cleanliness of one's property, act responsibly, or be a good citizen. In instances where a society's general philosophy, such as racial tolerance for one's fellow citizens, conflicts with one's private opinion, the social contract of racial tolerance is expected to take precedence, particularly in public forums. Countries that lack economic development are often associated with an environment in which contracts are not enforceable by any mechanism, and most certainly are not self-regulating. People are more likely to adhere to social contracts under certain conditions. They are more likely to adhere to contracts when they do not consider each other as cultural "strangers"; that is, when they have more understanding of each other as people, as citizens of the same country or as citizens of a "similar" country where it is believed that the same norms and expectations govern social contracts. People are more likely to adhere to social contracts when they have a greater understanding of the reasons...
Words: 1083 - Pages: 5
...MQC 022010 ICT1 ESSAY 1: PART 1: COMMON TRENDS IN THE USE OF TEAMS ▪ USE OF TEAMS BEYOND FORMAL WORK GROUPS - EMPOWERMENT ▪ CROSS FUNCTIONAL –IMPROVING ORGANISATIONAL INTEGRATION, ADAPTIVE DESIGN, DEALING WITH ORG. AS A SYSTEM ▪ E’ee INVOLVEMENT T. – INCREASE E’ee PARTICIPATION ACROSS ALL AREAS OF ORG, INNOVATION ▪ VIRTUAL T. – IT AS AN ENABLING PROCESS, DEALING WITH COMPLEX ENVIRON’T, DIVERSITY & BROADER RANGE OF TALENT, EFFICIENT ▪ SELF-MANAGED T. – REPORT TO HIGHER MGT, NOT MID/LOW LEVELS, PARTICIPATION, EMPOWERMT, INTERNAL SUPERVISION, FAST & PROCESS COMPLETE, BEST PRACTICES BC INTERNAL CONTROL & DIRECTION, HIGHLY MOTIVATING, CREATIVE PROBLEM SOLVING, UNLIMTED CAPACITY ▪ COMMITTEE – SPECIAL/LIMITED TASK, ONGOING BASIS, NARROW AGENDA, DEALS WITH ISSUES, PROBLEM SOLVING CAPACITY ▪ PROJECT/ TASK FORCE – DIVERSE SKILLS OF MEMBERS, SPECIFIC PURPOSE, MEM’s HAVE EXPERTISE ACROSS RANGE OF AREAS & ABILITIES PART 2: CHALLENGES OF TEAM MANAGERS ▪ DECISION MAKING PROCESS ▪ GROUP THINK ▪ SOCIAL LOAFING ▪ UNEVEN PARTICIPATION ▪ LACK OF COMMITMENT ▪ LACK OF INVOLVEMENT ▪ LACK OF PURPOSE ▪ LACK OF SENSE OF RESPONSIBILITY FOR OWN TASKS OR TEAMS SUCCESS ▪ AGGRESSION ▪ INTERNAL COMPETITION ▪ WITHDRAWAL PART 3: SOLUTIONS TO ABOVE ▪ CLARIFY GOALS & PROVIDE DIRECTION ▪ CLARIFY DESIRED LEVEL OF ACCOMPLISHMENT ▪ DECREASE GROUP NUMBER ▪ SELECT STRONG & COMMITTED T. LEADER ...
Words: 735 - Pages: 3
...Williamson said the Washington Consensus was originally formulated not as a policy prescription for development, but was a lists of policies that were widely held in Washington in 1989 that were desirable for implementation in Latin America. He noted there were other development policies that he thought were useful, but were not included in the Washington Consensus since they did not enjoy widespread support. He suggested the Washington Consensus had three different meanings. First, was his original list of ten specific policy reforms. The second understanding was that the Consensus was a set of economic policies advocated for developing countries in general by official Washington, such as the IMF, Bank and US Treasury Department. These policies augmented the original policies advocated by Williamson, and emphasized institutional reforms. The third meaning was espoused by critics of the IMF and Bank who suggested these were policies imposed on client countries, and were an attempt to minimize the role of the state. Williamson criticized the third view as one not grounded in fact. In retrospect, he added that he was wishful in his thinking about a consensus on the issue exchange rate policies. He was also strongly critical of the IMF’s move to rapidly dismember capital controls in Asia during the financial crisis of the late 1990’s. Williamson then discussed the ten policy reforms of the Consensus. First, was that budget deficits should be small enough be financed without recourse...
Words: 1583 - Pages: 7
