Decisions 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.
What it looks like
- 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".
- Nobody can say which decisions require a higher bar without checking with a person.
Why it is hard to see
Because it does not look like a power problem. It looks like an unusually procedural argument, and everybody hates it.
A community without stated decision types spends its energy in a strange place: not on what should we do but on who has to be asked. Should the workshop roof go to the whole meeting or to the maintenance circle? Is changing the guest policy a rule change or an operational tweak? Those arguments feel like bureaucracy, so groups short-cut them — and the short-cut is the failure.
The short-cut is that whoever frames the question first usually wins it. Call it operational and it goes to three people this week. Call it constitutional and it goes to everyone, slowly, with a real chance of being refused. Nobody has to act in bad faith for this to matter; framing is genuinely ambiguous, and the person who speaks first is usually the person most invested in the outcome.
There is a second reason it hides. It only produces visible damage in one direction. A constitutional decision waved through as operational is invisible until the consequences arrive — the five-year lease, the changed membership rule, the sold asset. The reverse error, treating something trivial as constitutional, is merely tedious, and tedium gets noticed and complained about. So groups drift steadily toward the lower tier, and the drift is one-way.
What to check
Take the last ten decisions and sort them. Not by importance — by what it would cost to reverse them. A community with no stated types will find pairs that cost roughly the same to undo and went through completely different processes.
Ask who classifies. Not who decides — who decides what kind of decision it is. In most communities the honest answer is “whoever wrote the agenda”, and that is a real power nobody granted.
Look for the missing tier. Groups usually have an implicit operational route and an implicit everyone-decides route. What is almost always absent is the middle one: decisions that commit real money or change direction but are not constitutional. Those get shoved to whichever end is closer, and it is usually the near end.
If it is already happening
Do not try to classify everything. A group that sits down to sort its entire decision history will still be sorting in March.
Write the boundary, not the taxonomy. One number does most of the work: the amount a circle may spend without asking. A domain without a figure is not a domain, and a community that writes one figure has classified more decisions in an evening than one that spent a month on definitions.
Then add the default rule, which is the cheapest safeguard in this whole guide: anything nobody can classify goes to the higher tier. Without it every borderline case drifts to the easier meeting, and the drift is exactly what put the group here.
What prevents it
Stated decision tiers , and a decision matrix that says which route each kind takes. The point is not the categories. It is that **classification stops being a move available to whoever speaks first.**Sources & further reading
- 1 RCOS stress test — Undefined Decision Type — the specification this page puts into plain language
- 2 Decision methods — the three tiers in full, and why no community that lasts uses one method
- 3 Buchanan, J. & Tullock, G. — The Calculus of Consent (1962) — why the best decision rule differs by class of decision — the argument for tiers
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.
Terms used here
- Decision tiers
- Sorting decisions by what they cost to get wrong, and giving each class its own method and timeline.
- Decision matrix
- A table mapping each kind of decision to who may make it, by what method, and within what limits.
- Agreements
- The written rules a community has consented to. Distinct from values: agreements say what happens, and what follows when it does not.
- Motion
- A proposal written precisely enough to be decided — stating what changes, who decides, and by when.
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.
- 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.
- Speakers 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 founder's informal veto
No rule grants it and everyone routes around it anyway — the objection that ends a discussion without ever being tested.
- The 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.