Growth that outpaces onboarding
New members arrive faster than the community can teach itself to them — so they learn a version, and the version drifts.
What it looks like
- 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.
- Nobody can say what a new member is supposed to have read.
Why it is hard to see
Because growth is the thing the community wanted, and it arrives looking like success.
More members means more hands, more money, more life. A group that has spent three years short-handed does not experience a wave of arrivals as a risk. And each individual arrival is handled well — somebody shows them round, answers their questions, and makes them welcome, because communities are good at welcome.
What does not scale is transmission. A community’s actual working knowledge — why the rule exists, what was tried in 2019, which conversations belong in which forum, what the agreements mean in practice — lives mostly in people, and it is transmitted by conversation. Conversation scales linearly with the effort of whoever is doing it and not at all with the number of arrivals.
So past a certain rate, three things happen at once. The transmitters burn out, because welcoming is invisible work and it lands on the same few. New members learn a partial version, assembled from whoever happened to explain what. And because they learn different partial versions, the group’s shared understanding fragments — not into disagreement, which would be visible, but into a set of sincere and slightly different accounts of what this place is.
That fragmentation is the real damage, and it surfaces years later as mission drift or as an argument in which both sides are quoting the community accurately.
What to check
Ask three members from different intakes to describe the same rule. Not the vision — something operational: what the guest policy is, or how spending gets approved. The variance tells you what transmission has been doing.
Ask what a new member is supposed to have read. If there is no list, onboarding is improvisation, however warm it is.
Count who does the welcoming. If it is the same one or two people every time, growth is being funded by their capacity, and their capacity is finite in a way the intake plan probably does not account for.
If it is already happening
Slow the intake before you fix the process. This is the unpopular one and it is usually correct. A community cannot build an onboarding process while running at the rate that broke the old one, and admitting fewer people for two intakes is far cheaper than the alternative.
Write the read-this list. Not a handbook — a list. The agreements, the decision matrix, the last two years of decisions, and the three things that always confuse people. Most communities can assemble this in an afternoon and have never done it.
Move transmission from conversation to document, then use conversation for what it is good at. The facts belong in writing; the welcome, the context and the answering of what-does-this-actually-mean belong in a person. Communities usually have this exactly the wrong way round — a warm person explaining facts that should have been written, and no structured conversation about the things a document cannot convey.
Then check the older members. After a fast intake it is common to find that long-standing members are also carrying an out-of-date version, because the agreements changed and nobody re-taught them.
What prevents it
An onboarding process with a stated content list — what a new member reads, what they are asked to agree to explicitly, and who holds the role of taking them through it. Plus an honest intake rate: how many people the community can actually absorb per year, decided in advance rather than discovered afterwards.
Sources & further reading
- 1 RCOS stress test — Rapid Growth without Onboarding — the specification this page puts into plain language
- 2 RCOS Core — Layer 1: Membership System — explicit onboarding, review of artifacts, and no implicit membership
- 3 Membership & belonging — the four stages, and what each one is actually for
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 — operations-coordination/rapid-growth-without-onboarding
Terms used here
- Agreements
- The written rules a community has consented to. Distinct from values: agreements say what happens, and what follows when it does not.
- Visitor period
- A defined stay during which a prospective member lives roughly as a member does. Where most of the mutual assessment actually happens.
- 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.
- Drift
- The slow failure where nothing breaks. Agreements stop being read, shared habits thin out, and nobody ever decided any of it.
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.
- 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.
- Responsibility 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.
- Self-sufficiency without contribution
Households withdraw into their own lives, one reasonable decision at a time, and the commons is maintained by whoever still minds.
- Information 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.