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Take a deep breath, you are about to begin constructing something beautiful, that you can forever enjoy and be proud of. You are also about to take a lead managing a multi-million pound construction project; and steer a multitude of households through conflicting priorities and difficult decisions. You can do it: there's thousands of fulfilled residents and neighbours in hundreds of successfully completed cohousing projects around the globe. But, for each group that gets to move in to their community, five fail to realise the dream.

How are you going to be a digger, not a dreamer?

Would you consider opening a restaurant without a thorough analysis and confidence in your partners? What about a community restaurant? Run along anarchist, self managing principles? With adjacent lounging space, kids area and an open door policy? Keep a launderette alongside? Some B&B rooms upstairs? A community garden to manage? And 30 accommodation units to maintain and repair?

These first stages are crucial - commercial projects fail primarily for two reasons:

• not sufficient discussion enabling forsight, shared understanding, and explicit agreements in the pre-planning phase; and
• relationship breakdowns between major players.

The impact? Projects are managed by contract rather than goodwill; costs spiral out of control by 10-20-50-200%; they complete late by months or years; the quality of the deliverable is substandard and below expectations; and the longterm outcomes bring minimal value to their clients.

How can you ensure success?

Yes, you're a bunch of friends, a community. But you're also a commercial developer. You'll need:

• time;
• financial resources; and
• skills and expertise.

You'll need to: register as a limited company; chair project meetings; facilitate group workshops; present at public meetings; push through tough decisions; minute agreements; chase actions; appoint professionals; negotiate contracts and fees; write a business plan; manage a budget; keep accounts; talk to planners; drive a land deal; tender for architects and building contractor; project manage professionals; draft legal documents; arrange a multi-million pound commercial loan; sell 20-30 housing units ....

You'll need a team! And a team that can learn these skills and work ceaselessly together.

Where will you start?

Read the key information available: McCamant and Durrett's Cohousing: A Contemporary Approach to Housing Ourselves and Scott Hanson's The Cohousing Handbook; Consult Diggers and Dreamers: The Guide to Communal Living; Browse the US cohousing site and Intentional Communities; visit the Threshold Centre for a weekend course; Register your group with us on the UK cohousing website; Visit some successful projects; And talk to some failed and forming groups. Don't reinvent the wheel, there's support out there, advice to be given, experience to learn from and hard work already done and paid for that's ready to be copy-and-pasted.

So why do groups fail?

"Cohousing is commonly misconceived or misrepresented as a means to affordable housing. The data suggests it most definitely is not." If a household is unable to privately finance the purchase of a house on the open market place, they will not manage the 20-30-40% down payment required to finance a cohouse. Unfortunately, in the current climate and with the current finance models available, groups need to be realistic about who is able to afford to join. Too many groups form without establishing time and financial commitments from their members which can burden and unravel difficult decisions and make site purchase impossible. Dreamers can put obstacles in the way of diggers and members can abuse the consensual process by vetoing viable group options. Decisions don't get made, opportunities are lost, groups drift, frustrations arise, key people leave and the group declines. Weak consensual processes can leave nobody getting what they want, rather than half the group gaining from a tangible, viable proposition. If you're stalled on making the project affordable to all members, assign the task of securing finance for social housing to a subgroup or individual and let the rest of the team get on with making a project happen.

Groups can form around unrealistic land hopes too: a dream site that's not for sale; the right to purchase land at a bargain rate from a local authority; or planning permission on a site that is unlikely ever to gain it. Groups can fail to move on and compromise on another site: it's location, density, cost or time-scale. Membership declines and the work gets tied up in the niceties of keeping the group afloat while missing project managing the critical activities: site purchase. With no site, there is no project, there is no community!!!

So how can you avoid this?

Form a core team of 1-5 that take responsibility to undertake the project work. Have weekly project business meetings with tight agendas that are effectively chaired and managed (don't hold them around a pint in the local pub!!); minuting and chasing the actions is key. Do enough visioning exercises to understand one another's values to establish a well crafted and shared vision statement. Set out your individual 'non-negotiables' - for this project to happen, it's going to require that all of you stay on board. What would push you to leave? Set these 'non-negotiables' out as part of your core policies. You need enough explicitly stated about your goals and management for people to know whether they want to join you or not, but not so much as to usurp new joiners of any freedom and responsibility later on - it's too easy to set up a totalitarian utopia! And importantly, become friends, celebrate and socialise together, take working weekends away, learn to trust and care for one another.

Put all your vision statements, core policies, procedures, project management documents and intentions in place before recruiting anyone new. Explicitly state that these values will not be revisited until at least 6 months after the last person has moved into their unit. Then phase recruitment, aiming for maybe 5-10 new households to join every 3-4 months. This will give you as a team the opportunity to dedicate some specific time to integrating them properly without a continuous distraction from core tasks by new joiners. Ask them for a substantial financial commitment - the Co-op Bank currently requires a minimum £5k pre-sale "deposit" from each household. Teach them consensual decision making and practice it in monthly day or weekend workshops with them discussing, planning and dreaming the big issues. Assign some roles to these members, perhaps book keeping, membership, social instigator, etc. Spot new skills and perhaps appoint 1-2 to the project team, but keep the rest as a steering group that you manage consensually as full stakeholders. And if some cause you grief, let them walk, don't try and hold on to them by placating them - you'll waste energy and time and they'll leave anyway.

Network! Make friends with councillors, planners, city officials, estate agents, anyone who'll listen who may know someone who may know someone that may help. Contact housing associations, local and regional builders/developers, land agents, anyone who may know of a potential site, or underutilised and undervalued land, eg car repair garage. Consider appointing a professional surveyor that specialises in land acquisition to purchase a site for you. They may charge 1-2% commission, but they'll identify sites you wouldn't, they'll know the market and market values, how to tender or make an offer, what a site's worth and how to negotiate for it. They'll secure you some land, probably at a saving, or advise you that your brief isn't feasible at 10 times the speed you could ever work yourselves. They also provide a great independent agent to relieve some of the tensions a group can have being unable to decide on which site to pursue.

House designs are the first thing you will want and the last thing you will need. Don't waste money on architect fees. Yes it's lovely and tangible and something you can envision, but a good cash flow document will impress the professionals more. And when it does come to designing your house units, standardise!!! Build as few house types as possible and get as much from cost efficiencies as possible. And NEVER individualise a house, not even the smallest feature. If someone wants a different tap, let them change it after they've moved in - the engineering industry know this, and the builders know they can make money off you for it.

Remember that you will be responsible for delivering a multi-million pound project and your decision making needs to be responsive to this. You'll need to make decisions that will balance a set of conflicting variables:

1. Specification of common facilities and space for socialising
2. Environmental design
3. Individuals priorites regarding private units and gardens
4. Project budget (taking into account individuals' financial means)

Yes, it is hard work! Don't give up at the first hurdle. There will be tears, just dry them for one another. The rewards of the process, as well as the outcome, will impact your life as much as a new career, getting married, having children - it's one of those big life decisions that just need a leap of faith!

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