opinions-political-democraticCentralism

One thing that a lot of organizations do is require their members to publically agree with them after a decision has been made. I think this is a bad idea. This policy was given a name by Lenin; "democratic centralism". Wikipedia says, "The democratic aspect of this organizational method describes the freedom of members of the political party to discuss and debate matters of policy and direction, but once the decision of the party is made by majority vote, all members are expected to uphold that decision. This latter aspect represents the centralism. As Lenin described it, democratic centralism consisted of "freedom of discussion, unity of action.". This sounds benign, but it seems to me that it justified purges of party members who opposed the leadership. These purges led to all sorts of abuses of power, as well as to bad decision-making by a group of people without sufficient ideological diversity.

I propose instead a weaker policy.

Organizations should permit their members (including directors on their board of directors) to publically disagree, provided that they do all of:

• assist in implementing the decisions made to the full extent of their responsibilities
• make it clear that they don't disagree with the validity of the decision, only that they would have preferred a different one,
• talk publically only about the issues, not the people; don't go on to publically criticize the people who supported or drove the decision that they disagree with, and don't publically complain about the political/procedural tactics that were used to win the decision.