The documented ways communities break
Not a list of things that sound plausible. Each of these is a pattern somebody has written down, with the conditions that produce it and the structure that prevents it. Each page starts with what it looks like from inside, because that is the part you can check.
They are grouped by the lesson that introduces them, and they are grouped that way for a reason: these failures are co-morbid. If one is familiar, read its neighbours before deciding you have found the whole problem.
Power nobody voted for
Authority that comes from being compelling
Someone is so persuasive that disagreeing with them feels like a failure of understanding rather than a difference of view.
- Disagreement gets reframed as something the disagreeing person needs to work on.
- Their view is described as insight, and other people's as opinion.
- Newcomers adopt their framing unusually fast, including its vocabulary.
Layer 2 4 minDecisions with no stated type
The same question is routine or constitutional depending on who you ask — so the answer depends on who gets to frame it.
- Arguments about whether something needs the whole group start before the discussion does.
- The same kind of decision has gone two different routes in the last year.
- Somebody can end a debate by saying "that's just operational".
Layer 2 4 minSpeakers who fill the room
Nothing is blocked and nobody is silenced — but only some people's proposals ever get finished, and the group calls it consensus.
- The same two or three people speak first on almost every item.
- Proposals from quieter members arrive under-developed, and are judged for it.
- Meetings run long and the last agenda items are always decided fastest.
Layer 2 4 minThe clique that decides before the meeting
The real conversation happens in the kitchen and the meeting ratifies it — so attendance stops changing anything, and then stops.
- Proposals arrive at the meeting already resolved, and discussion feels ceremonial.
- Some members are surprised by context others clearly had beforehand.
- Attendance is falling among people who have not stopped caring.
Layer 2 3 minThe founder's informal veto
No rule grants it and everyone routes around it anyway — the objection that ends a discussion without ever being tested.
- Proposals get quietly checked with one person before they reach a meeting.
- Their objection ends a discussion, and nobody asks which rule it came under.
- Members describe ideas as "not worth raising", without being able to say why.
Layer 2 3 min
Conflict that never resolves
Conflict that is never named
The group is warm, nothing is confronted, and difficulty gets absorbed quietly — until somebody leaves and everyone privately knew why.
- Difficulties are discussed widely in private and never once in a meeting.
- Departures surprise nobody, and the reasons were never said out loud.
- The conflict process exists and has not been used in years.
Layer 4 4 minPunishment before repair
The group does act — and reaches straight for the consequence, so nobody raises anything small ever again.
- The first available response to a breach is a sanction, with nothing cheaper below it.
- Consequences are decided in the same conversation that hears the complaint.
- Members raise things only once they are already unrecoverable.
Layer 4 4 min
Where the money quietly moves
Contribution that stops being shared
Some members pay their way out of the work — reasonably, one at a time — until the rota is done by whoever cannot afford not to.
- Members may buy out of work hours, and the rate was never really calculated.
- The people doing the physical work and the people with money are becoming different groups.
- Nobody can say whether buying out is a right, a concession, or a habit.
Layer 3 4 minFinances nobody can inspect
Not hidden, exactly — just held by two people, reported in summary, and never actually examined by anyone else.
- The accounts are available in principle and nobody has asked to see them in years.
- Reporting is a headline figure rather than something anybody could check.
- One or two people know the full financial picture, and both are indispensable.
Layer 3 4 minThe commons sold to cover the shortfall
Every sale funds another year, every sale is defensible, and the thing being sold is what made the community possible.
- An operating shortfall has been closed by a sale more than once.
- Nobody can say how many saleable assets are left.
- The agreements say nothing about which resources may not be sold.
Layer 3 4 min
Who belongs, and who decides that
Removal with no process
Grounds invented during the case they are used on — and every remaining member quietly learns what the rules really are.
- The agreements state no grounds for removal, or state them without a process.
- A removal is under discussion and the procedure is being written alongside it.
- Nobody can say what the person could have done to avoid it, or could do to return.
Layer 1 4 minRules that spread into private life
Each new rule was a reasonable answer to a real problem, and together they have opinions about your visitors, your diet and your evenings.
- The community has an agreed position on something it does not own or maintain.
- Nobody can say what is definitively nobody else's business.
- Members ask permission for things that were never anyone's to grant.
Layer 0 4 minThe norm nobody could enforce
A commitment written into the founding vision, and no process behind it — so the first person to break it discovers there was nothing there.
- A value is central to how the community describes itself and appears in no agreement.
- Nobody can say what would happen if somebody simply declined to observe it.
- The question is being discussed everywhere except the meeting.
Layer 0 5 minThe purpose that quietly changed
Nobody voted to become something else — enough people arrived wanting something else that it happened anyway.
- Longer-standing and newer members describe what the place is for in different words.
- Proposals get argued as practical questions that are really about direction.
- The founding vision is quoted mainly by people losing an argument.
Layer 0 4 min
The work that breaks people
Care work nobody counts
The noticing, remembering and smoothing that never reaches a rota — done by the same people, unrecorded, until one of them stops.
- The rota covers physical tasks and nothing else, and everyone knows other work exists.
- The same people follow up after difficult meetings, and it is not anybody's role.
- Somebody is described as good at people, and that is the whole arrangement.
Layer 5 4 minGrowth that outpaces onboarding
New members arrive faster than the community can teach itself to them — so they learn a version, and the version drifts.
- Onboarding is a person being generous with their time rather than a process.
- Recent joiners describe the agreements differently from long-standing members.
- The same questions get answered from scratch for every arrival.
Layer 5 4 minInformation nobody can reach
The accounts, the passwords, the history and the reason the rule exists — held by whoever happened to be there, and reachable only through them.
- Answering an ordinary question requires asking a specific person.
- Nobody can say where decisions from four years ago are recorded, or whether they are.
- Access to accounts, keys or systems has never been written down as a list.
Layer 5 4 minResponsibility that becomes authority
The person who does a thing ends up deciding it — nobody granted that, and nobody can take it back without taking the work back too.
- Decisions in an area are made by whoever handles that area, without anybody deciding they should be.
- Members say one person has too much, and have said so for a long time.
- Nobody could take a task over without a substantial handover that has never been written.
Layer 5 4 minSelf-sufficiency without contribution
Households withdraw into their own lives, one reasonable decision at a time, and the commons is maintained by whoever still minds.
- Attendance at shared work and shared meals has fallen without any decision being made.
- Some households are effectively neighbours who share a driveway, and nobody has said so.
- The people who still turn up are increasingly the same people.
Layer 5 4 min
Changes that cannot be undone
A community that forgot why
The rule survives and the reason does not — so nobody can tell whether it still earns its place, or which version is even in force.
- A rule is followed and nobody present can say what it was for.
- Two versions of a document exist and nobody can say which one is in force.
- Decisions are recorded as outcomes, without who decided them or under what rule.
Layer 6 4 minExperiments with no way back
A trial that quietly became the arrangement — because nobody wrote down when it ended or what would count as it failing.
- Something introduced as a trial is still running, and nobody set a review date.
- Nobody can say what would have counted as the experiment failing.
- Reverting would now cost more than the change did, and that argument is winning.
Layer 6 4 minGovernance with no path to change it
The rules can no longer be changed, so people stop trying — and the community loses its members quietly instead of loudly.
- Nothing significant has been amended in years, and nobody experiences this as stability.
- Attempts to change something die in procedure rather than on the merits.
- Members describe proposals as not worth the effort, and are right.
Layer 6 5 minSub-groups with undefined autonomy
A community grows into parts, and nobody says what the parts may decide — so each one improvises a constitution and discovers later they do not match.
- Sub-groups have formed and no document says what they may decide alone.
- Two parts of the community have different rules on the same question, discovered by accident.
- Nobody can say whether the main agreements bind a sub-group, or how one could differ.
Layer 0 5 minThe emergency measure that stayed
Decided fast because it had to be, never reviewed, and now it is what the community does — with a precedent attached.
- An arrangement adopted during something urgent is still running, and nobody set an end date.
- Precedent is doing the work that a written rule should be doing — we did it last time.
- Nobody can say what would count as the emergency being over.
Layer 6 4 minThe invariant nobody protected
The founding principle everybody assumed was permanent — changeable, it turns out, by an ordinary majority on an ordinary evening.
- The community has principles it calls non-negotiable and no rule saying how they change.
- The same process amends the guest policy and the constitution.
- Members would be shocked by a change that is procedurally available today.
Layer 0 4 min