Consensus is a mercurial concept.
In polarising times, it’s something we strive for, a scarce resource that is easily romanticised.
Its original meaning – of ‘seeing or perceiving the world together’ – is laudable, in an abstract sort of way, but too often we elide the importance of the process by which consensus is achieved. It’s no linguistic accident that you often ‘reach’ a consensus – emphasising the stretch, the strain, the effort that arriving at a collective opinion can take.
But as Adele, Alex and Josh each highlight, when consensus is partial, misguided or illusory, bad things can happen. We make assumptions that ‘we’ are all like ‘me’. That the thing we’re working on is so novel, the problem that it solves will come along eventually. And that the mistakes that I make are mine, to bear the burden of and to bury, alone.
So, take some time to reach past what everyone else thinks they think: dissensus, disagreement, divergence. To adapt an aphorism (charitably) attributed to JFK, ‘too often we enjoy the comfort of consensus without the discomfort of collision’.
That’s what we’re here to do.