I get asked a lot why I know these rules as well as I do -- or more importantly, why I like and believe in them. The historical answer is that they work to keep discussions on track and on time. They and their variations, adapted for the special needs of organizations such as Parliament, try to ensure that all people get a chance to speak; they work against the tendency of unregulated meetings to become places where the loudest voices carry the day. No set of Rules of Order will create decisions that everyone agrees with, but in my experience so far, Robert's Rules does go a long way to helping a group come to a decision that everyone can live with even if it’s one they didn't support.
These outcomes are the result of certain qualities in Robert's Rules that, once you get a feel for them, can make understanding them -- and predicting the decisions that they will guide you to -- easier. I'm not sure that I'm completely aware of what those qualities are, but after practicing Robert’s Rules for over thirty years, here's what I think they are.
One: Robert's Rules are rules in favour of the shyest person in the room. I don't know what kind of a person Major, later General Robert was, but he made it far in the US Army in the late 1800s – soon after the Civil War -- so I'd expect he was pretty clear, forthright, and demanding in his decision making. I expect he expected to be obeyed and for most of his active military life, he was.
It was his church group that gave him pause. Not being organized along military lines, their meetings frustrated him. I like that story, and I like imagining a group of men and women without rank stopping an army officer in his tracks. But I like to think, too, that Robert’s frustration points to something about the nature of his church community: everyone in it was equal before their God. So the question is, how should equals decide on a direction?
Robert was a student of the procedures used in Congress, and that provided him with the answer in a system of discussion that gives everyone their turn and no more than their turn. It appoints a temporary leader (we would say "facilitator", Robert's Rules now uses the word "chair") trusted by the group to make decisions according to the rules but whose power is also checked by the group as a whole (I'll talk about that in my section on "Loopholes and Challenges"), and right from the get-go, the first motion, a seconder is required; so anyone seeking to guide the direction of the group already has one person in it who’ll stand with them in that suggestion.
Two: Robert's Rules recognize that there are two kinds of votes. Again, I'll speak to this in detail later, but Robert realized that some decisions require more of what we would now call "buy-in" than others. In some cases, a simple majority (half those who vote plus one) is enough to assure the group that the decision in question is supported enough to warrant their support and not so impactful that it breaks the group up, or unreasonably binds the hands of those who follow. Things for us like whether we support the Rooftops initiative or what the Housing Charge will be are such decisions. Not that they're not important; clearly they are, and we desire more than just the half of the voters plus one that we need to support the motions that establish these actions, but such motions are limited in scope, and they need to be decided on in an ongoing way that can't be held up by objectors who lack the support of the majority.
But there are matters -- like bylaws and constitutions -- that do have effects on the way things are done that can outlast the participatory lives of the people who make decisions about them. For those decisions, Robert's Rules argues, a simple majority (who may be swayed by the conditions of the moment or opposed by a sizeable minority) aren't enough to cause such a change. For those changes, motions require a 2/3 majority vote, and that extra 1/6 portion of the group represents the best answer we have to the difference between the decisions we as a group have to make for ourselves alone and the ones we have to make for those who will come after us.
Three: Robert's Rules are only rules. They're not laws, and they don't try to be. Admittedly, any group has its moments where the will of the majority, either expressly by vote or by extension through people voted into positions of authority, is imposed on everyone. In democratic institutions, there are corrections in place for such moments, of course, and protections against abuse of power, but both of these systems can take time to work themselves out, and don't usually change the power structures themselves.
But Robert's Rules are constantly in front of us while we are in a meeting. In a sense, they are the procedures for free decision-making, which, to my mind, is decision-making that can explain itself. They do allow for variations on themselves with consent of the meeting -- things like allowing the maker of a motion to answer a question during the discussion, or the raising of "Points of Information" and "Points of Order" that both break the flow of a discussion when they are invoked and reconnect it when they're done.
And they allow us to tailor things to our own needs and best judgment. Even simple things like when we call the question, or move to adjourn, or suspend the rules a bit for an open discussion (one not guided by a motion), or vote by raising our hands. All these are variations on the Rules that the Rules allow to make things fit with the culture of the community that's using them to make decisions and deal with conversations that can be difficult to have. More and more I have become interested in working on a mutually agreeable and ongoing basis -- the way an ecosystem works – rather than in the top-down law-guided way that I see in a lot of institutions. To me, Robert’s Rules is the balance between what we have to do to make a decision and what we need to be free to do to make that decision truly ours.
