The purpose that quietly changed
Nobody voted to become something else — enough people arrived wanting something else that it happened anyway.
What it looks like
- 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.
- Nobody can say when the purpose last changed, or whether it did.
Why it is hard to see
Because it happens through admissions, not decisions.
No meeting resolves to change what the community is for. What happens is that each new member is chosen individually, by people applying their own reading of the purpose, and each choice is defensible. Over enough intakes the median understanding moves — and it moves without any moment where somebody could have objected, because there was no proposal to object to.
The second reason: the argument never presents as an argument about purpose. It arrives as a dispute about the barn, the budget, whether to take paying guests, how much noise is acceptable at nine on a Sunday. Both sides argue the practicalities, both are frustrated that the other seems unreasonable about something minor, and neither says the actual sentence — we are no longer here for the same thing.
And the third, which is why it is so hard to raise: saying it out loud is a serious accusation. Suggesting that the place has drifted implies that some current members do not really belong, which is unsayable in a group that likes each other. So it goes unsaid until it is said in anger.
What to check
Ask ten members to write down what the community is for, in one sentence, separately. Not a discussion — separately, on paper. The variance is the diagnosis, and it is a much kinder instrument than a conversation, because nobody has to accuse anybody.
Then sort the answers by how long people have been there. Drift shows up as a gradient. If the sentences cluster by intake year, the purpose has been moving and the admissions process has been moving it.
Look at what gets quoted. A founding vision invoked mainly by people who are losing an argument has already stopped being the shared frame and become a faction’s evidence.
If it is already happening
Do not open with “we have drifted”. That is heard as the newer members are the problem, and it will be resisted for exactly that reason — often correctly, since the newer members did not do anything except be admitted by the existing ones.
Run the sentence exercise and publish the spread. Anonymised, unattributed, all of it. It converts a suspicion into a shared observation, and the group can look at it together rather than at each other.
Then choose deliberately, and accept there are only three options. Reaffirm the original purpose and accept that it now excludes some current members’ hopes. Adopt the changed purpose formally and let the people who came for the original one know. Or state two purposes with an explicit priority between them. All three are survivable. What is not survivable is holding all of them informally, which is the current position.
Fix the intake. Whatever is decided, the admissions process is what produced this and will produce it again. If applicants cannot read the purpose and self-select against it, the next drift is already under way.
What prevents it
A single stated primary purpose that is hard to change, plus an admissions process that shows it to applicants and asks them to agree to it explicitly rather than absorb it. Drift is not prevented by conviction. It is prevented by the purpose being a document that a decision has to amend.
That is also why the purpose has to be separated from the plan. Where one founding statement carries the enduring reason, the picture of the future and the current three-year priorities together, revising the priorities means editing the purpose — a little at a time, reasonably, until it has moved. Vision, purpose and mission sets out the three and which tier may change each.
Sources & further reading
- 1 RCOS stress test — Mission Drift Through Competing Purposes — the specification this page puts into plain language
- 2 RCOS Core — Layer 0: Identity & Scope — exactly one primary purpose, changeable only by constitutional decision
- 3 Resilience & why communities fail — drift as one of the six recurring patterns, and why versioning is what catches it
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
The specification
This page is the plain-language version. RCOS publishes the stress test itself — the failure pattern, what is being tested, and what a compliant community would have in place.
RCOS stress test — membership-boundaries/mission-drift-competing-purposes
Terms used here
- Drift
- The slow failure where nothing breaks. Agreements stop being read, shared habits thin out, and nobody ever decided any of it.
- Agreements
- The written rules a community has consented to. Distinct from values: agreements say what happens, and what follows when it does not.
- Membership agreement
- The document setting out what a member pays, contributes, may decide, and receives on leaving. The eight things a good one covers are checkable.
- Founder transition
- Turning the authority that built a community into something anyone can hold or inherit. Communities that skip it cannot disagree with their founders or continue without them.
These travel together
Failures are rarely alone. If this one is familiar, check the others from the same lesson before concluding you have found the whole problem.
- The 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.
- Removal with no process
Grounds invented during the case they are used on — and every remaining member quietly learns what the rules really are.
- Rules 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.