Hold on to your hats. Reading this essay on re-evolutionary industrial organizational theory and practice on Future Positive, the thought, mind-blowing crazy as it is, occurred to me that our present stalemate council is perhaps the perfect incubator for setting the Dr Wilkins plan into action at the municipal level. We're nearly doing it anyway, only in a destructive spirit; formally adopting the Ortegrity method simply saves us the stigma of not doing it the old, broken way:

"We humans are presently conditioned to expect our relationships to be win/lose. We view most situations from that either/or point of view. Either I win or I lose. It has to be one or the other. Synergy science reveals the third alternative. It may be harder to find, but there almost always exists a third way of doing things so no one loses. Or at worst you are assured that the loss has been minimized and equally shared. This distributes the loss so it has the least negative effect on the individual. This is the win-win way --- this is synergy.
When all were in agreement and only then would the plan be implemented. The plan must insure that all members of the group win. Any member can veto a losing plan. Taking the time in decision making to discover the win-win way means that action will be many times more efficient.
In most human organizations today, the boss simply assigns tasks or groups of tasks to each of his selected managers. This is other-directed management --- telling the managers what to do. The Ortegrity operates very differently. No one tells anyone what to do. All other-direction is replaced with self-direction. Once the heterarchy has synergically decided on a plan of action, the system negotiates to form an action hierarchy. This is the structure used in implementation.
[ The Structure of Winning ]

Tim Wilkens' essay is not an easy read, it is not something you can skim over and nit-pick points to swiss-cheese the notion without careful thought. He has precident, there is cool method to his madness. win-win isn't simply a nice thing, says Dr. Tim, it is a precondition for survival -- Nature, Tim explains, is exceedingly fond of this omni-veto heterarchy-heirarchy pulsed organizational strategy, our own bodies have evolved by its heuristic and we have ample evidence of large technology projects (eg Linux) and even world-class economies which have blossomed from the ortegrity approach (eg post-war Japan ... until the US-trained execs took over)

And yes, there is the admitted first reflexive complaint completely acknowledged: Ortegrity methods are slow to reach the initial consensus. This is famously true. But just as famously true, the win-win consensus effects a superior solution in every way, makes fewer gross stupid mistakes, and tends to a long-range sustainable view, but maybe even more important to us in these cost-conscious times, the ortegrity strategy is much faster at executing the action plan.

And then there's us, the little town out in the boonies, where clearly every councillor already considers themselves equal and who knows maybe some town clerks too, and rightly so really because we are: Municipal government is more like a government by a co-operative than the professional wrestling that characterizes other levels of public management. So what if we just accepted that state of affairs and actually embraced it, like it was a Good Thing, and then proceed from there?