the Roman Catholic Church, the Freemasons, the Iroquois Confederacy, have histories going back centuries, including vast bodies of precedent and shared culture and knowledge. medical malpractice, union procedures, and for achieving closure regarding them. Some degree of consensus decision making is usually involved in any self-governance system, if only because individual members of the group may choose to violate the criteria for invoking outside authority, break the code of silence, or otherwise cause the group to lose its autonomy.