What Is an Indaba? Consensus Decision-Making Lessons for Managers

What does indaba mean?

In isiZulu and isiXhosa, an indaba is a matter of importance, and by extension the gathering called to talk it through. You will hear the word used across southern Africa for meetings and conferences of many kinds. At its heart is a simple idea: when something matters to a community, the people concerned come together and talk until they understand the matter and one another well enough to act.

The word reached a global audience through climate diplomacy. The United Nations' InforMEA portal describes the indaba as a negotiation format introduced at the UN climate conference in Durban in 2011 and used extensively in negotiating the Paris Agreement in 2015, drawing on a Zulu tradition of people coming together to resolve pressing social issues.

It sits alongside related traditions elsewhere on the continent. In much of West Africa, the palaver tree, a large shade tree where people gather to talk until a dispute is settled, is a well-known image of public deliberation. In Botswana, the kgotla remains in use; the government describes it as the place for communities to discuss, deliberate and decide on issues that affect them. Among the Basotho of Lesotho, the pitso was a public assembly called on matters of public importance. These are different practices from different peoples, and they should be named as such, not merged into a single 'African way'.

How was the indaba used at the Durban and Paris climate talks?

In Durban the South African presidency of the conference convened an indaba of ministers to work through the political questions the formal negotiating process had not resolved. In Paris, in the final days of December 2015, the French presidency ran what it called an 'indaba of solutions'. According to the Earth Negotiations Bulletin's daily report of 10 December 2015, the presidency asked for interventions directed at compromise rather than general statements, and proposed that on each sticking point a facilitator would meet the interested heads of delegation separately and return with a compromise within thirty to forty minutes, to be presented to the full indaba.

Two features matter for managers. First, the large group was not asked to negotiate the hardest points directly; it framed them and heard every party. Second, the most opposed parties were sent into a smaller circle with a clear task and a short deadline, and their proposal came back to the full group. Large groups are good at hearing; small groups are good at solving.

What can a 19th-century description of the pitso teach modern meetings?

A detailed first-hand description of a Sotho-Tswana public assembly (Casalis calls the wider family Bechuana) appears in The Basutos, the 1861 English translation of a book by the French missionary Eugène Casalis, who lived among the Basotho from 1833. Read with care, and setting aside his missionary judgements, his description of the order of business is striking. A counsellor first explained the matter while keeping his own opinion out of it. Then, Casalis writes: "After these preliminaries, any one is at liberty to speak."

And at the end: "The chiefs generally speak when all the others have finished". The person with the most power spoke after everyone else, so that their view could not shape what others were willing to say. Casalis adds that the assemblies did not vote, yet their view set limits on what the chief could wisely do.

Among the Basotho proverbs Casalis recorded is one a manager could put on the wall: "Reason has no age." A good point is a good point, whoever makes it.

How do you run a round of voices in a team meeting?

The round of voices, which we call the palaver rule, is the daily core of consensus leadership. It adds a few minutes to a meeting and changes who gets heard.

It matters most in hybrid and global teams. People in the room talk to each other; people on a screen wait for a gap that rarely comes, and colleagues working in a second language or late in their evening wait longer still. Starting the round with remote participants, sending the question the night before so people can answer in writing, and reading written answers aloud word for word all cost almost nothing. After an important meeting, spend one minute noting who spoke and roughly for how long. Share the pattern with the team as a team pattern, never as a ranking of individuals.

• Frame the question in two sentences without your answer in it.
• Give one minute of silence to think or write.
• Go round once, in an order you set, starting with the person closest to the work or newest to the team. Call remote people first, by name.
• No replies during the round; questions of clarification only. Write each view where everyone can see it.
• The leader speaks last, and names anything that changed their mind.
• Only then open the debate, starting with what most people agreed on and the two or three real differences.

Who decides? How to set decision rights before you discuss

Consensus fails most often not because people disagree but because nobody knows who decides. The traditions described above separate two circles: a small council close to the leader that works every day, and an assembly that must be heard on matters affecting everyone. Modern teams need the same distinction.

Before any decision bigger than routine, write four lines and say them aloud at the start: who decides, who must be heard first, who will be told afterwards, and the fallback if agreement does not come by the deadline. If you already use a RACI chart, 'decides' is the accountable person and 'must be heard' the consulted list. The point is to say it before the discussion, not after.

How do you run an indaba for a stuck decision?

Use an indaba when a decision matters, has been stuck for weeks, and involves parties who genuinely disagree. Book ninety minutes and choose a facilitator who is not the decision-maker. The format below is Bodhih Training's own team adaptation of the conference indaba; the red lines and bridges step is our method, not part of any tradition.

• Frame (10 minutes): the question, how we got here, what is fixed, what is open, who decides and the fallback.
• Round of voices (15 minutes): each person says what matters most to them here, interests rather than positions.
• Red lines and bridges (20 minutes): each party names no more than three real red lines, with reasons, and at least one bridging idea.
• Small circle (20 minutes): the two or three most opposed people and the facilitator work on one proposal everyone can live with.
• Full circle (15 minutes): the proposal is presented and each person scores it on a 1 to 5 agreement scale.
• Record (10 minutes): what was agreed, the agreement level, concerns, actions, owners and dates, sent the same day.

Does consensus mean everyone agrees?

No, and treating it that way turns consensus into a veto for one person and silence for everyone else. A more workable test is whether everyone can live with the decision and will carry it out. On a 1 to 5 scale (5 full support, 4 support, 3 can live with it, 2 serious concern, 1 block), agreement means nobody is at 1 or 2. A block should name a real red line, such as safety, law, ethics or a value the team shares, not a preference.

Every consensus process also needs an honest fallback. If the deadline arrives without agreement, the named decision-maker decides, explains the reason to anyone with a serious concern, and records it as a decision rather than a consensus. Calling things by their true names keeps trust intact.

How do you use these traditions respectfully at work?

These are living practices that belong first to the communities who use them. Use them as a structure for better meetings, not as exotic decoration. Name the practice and the people precisely: the Zulu and Xhosa indaba, the Basotho pitso, the Batswana kgotla, the West African palaver tree. Do not borrow rituals or sacred practices, do not perform anyone's accent or customs, and do not quote unattributed 'African proverbs' from the internet, which are often invented or misattributed. If colleagues know these traditions well, invite them to add to or correct what you present.

Finally, know the limits. A round of voices or an indaba is the wrong tool for matters of conduct, grievance, harassment, discrimination or safety, which follow your organisation's formal processes. And where indigenous knowledge is protected by law, as under South Africa's Indigenous Knowledge Act of 2019, use only widely published, publicly documented descriptions.

How do you build the habit and measure progress?

Start small: a round of voices in one meeting a day, the leader speaking last, and a one-minute check afterwards of who was not heard. Add decision rights the next week, and an indaba when a decision has been stuck for a month. Track who speaks in your important meetings for a few weeks; the pattern is usually a surprise. If you want a baseline, an assessment such as AssessAll's Meetings That Decide Things can show where your team starts, and Jobulary's guide to the 70-20-10 model explains why most of the learning will come from doing it in real meetings.

Bodhih Training's kit, The Indaba and the Palaver Tree, turns all of this into a twelve-week programme with a meeting planner, decision register, voice tracker, indaba plan, scripts and a 52-card practice deck.