The clique that decides before the meeting

Why it is hard to see

Because a group of friends who happen to be neighbours will always talk, and most of that talking is good. Communities are supposed to have relationships. Insisting every conversation about the community happen in a meeting would be both impossible and unpleasant.

So the line is not did people talk outside the meeting. It is whether the meeting can still change the answer.

That distinction is invisible from inside the clique and obvious from outside it, which is what makes the pattern so durable. The people in the kitchen experience themselves as doing preparatory work — and often they are. The people outside it experience a meeting where their contribution arrives too late to matter, and they cannot point at anything improper, because nothing improper happened.

The tell is not secrecy. It is the shape of the meeting: proposals that arrive fully formed, discussion that adds nothing, and a decision that was going to happen anyway.

What to check

Ask when the last meeting changed a proposal. Not rejected one — changed one. A group whose meetings routinely amend what arrives is deliberating. A group whose meetings ratify is performing.

Watch who has context. In any meeting, notice the moment somebody refers to a consideration nobody has mentioned. Where did that come from, and who else already had it?

Ask the newest member how decisions get made. Someone in their first year will describe the real process, because they are still trying to learn it. Someone in their tenth has forgotten there was anything to learn.

If it is already happening

Move the information, not the friendship. The fix is almost never “stop talking to each other” — that is unenforceable and would make the community worse. It is that whatever the kitchen conversation produced has to arrive in writing, before the meeting, available to everybody.

Publish proposals with a deliberation window. A written proposal circulated three days ahead does more against this pattern than any rule about conduct, because it moves the moment of formation into a space everybody can reach. It also fixes the milder version of the problem, which is not a clique at all but simply people who think faster out loud.

Then check attendance in six months. This pattern’s real cost is not the decisions; it is the members who quietly concluded that showing up does not matter. That recovers slowly, and only after the meetings visibly start changing things.

What prevents it

A stated deliberation phase before voting opens, and a decision record that names the method and the threshold. Both make the meeting the place where the decision is actually formed, rather than the place where it is announced.

Sources & further reading

1. 1 RCOS stress test — Informal Clique Decision Making — the specification this page puts into plain language
2. 2 Freeman, J. — The Tyranny of Structurelessness (1970/1972) — informal structure forms around friendship networks and access to information
3. 3 Proposals & ratification — the deliberation window, and why skipping it is where this pattern lives

Written by EcoHubs members, with AI assistance for drafting and editing, and reviewed by a person before publication. Facts are checked against the sources listed; anything we could not verify is marked. How this is written