Decision tiers
Sorting decisions by what they cost to get wrong, and giving each class its own method and timeline.
A method is only real when its numbers are written down beside it — what share passes, how many must take part, who may object and on what grounds. Ask a community which method it used for its last three decisions. If the answer is the same for all three, either the community is very small or the method is aspirational.
Decision tiers are the practice of sorting decisions into classes by how much they cost to get wrong, and giving each class its own method, threshold and timeline. It is the answer to the question every community eventually asks: why does agreeing on the bathroom tiles take as long as agreeing on who may join.
The RCOS Standard names three, and the naming is worth keeping because it travels:
- Operational — day-to-day business inside rules the group has already agreed. The rota, the repair, the order. Reversible, low stakes, and the cost of deciding slowly is higher than the cost of occasionally deciding wrongly.
- Strategic — direction and significant resource. Taking on debt, adding a building, changing what the community does with its land. Hard to undo, and worth real care.
- Constitutional — the community’s own purpose, its agreements, its membership rules, and how it decides. Changes to the machinery itself.
The rule that makes the scheme usable is what to do with the ambiguous case: a decision that cannot be clearly classified defaults to the higher tier. Without it, every borderline matter drifts downward, because the lower tier is always the easier meeting.
Why one method for everything fails
Both directions fail, and they fail differently.
A group that runs everything through consensus spends its evenings on tile colours, and the people with jobs and children stop coming. Within two years the careful method is being applied by whoever is left, which is the opposite of what it was for.
A group that votes on everything by majority carries constitutional changes on a margin of one, and manufactures a permanent losing minority in decisions about the community’s identity. That minority does not stay.
What has to be written
Three things, or the tiers are decoration: which decisions fall in which tier, what method and threshold each tier uses, and who classifies a proposal — because that person quietly decides how hard a thing will be to pass. In practice the classification is best fixed in advance by subject rather than judged case by case, with the escalation rule catching what the list missed.
Sources & further reading
- 1 RCOS Core — Layer 2: Governance & Decision Logic — §4.1 defines the three decision types and the escalation default
- 2 Buchanan, J. & Tullock, G. — The Calculus of Consent (1962) — why the best decision rule differs by class of decision
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
Related terms
A pass threshold above half, usually two-thirds, used where a bare majority is too thin a basis.
The minimum number of members who must take part before a result counts at all.
A decision method requiring the agreement of all participants. Powerful for trust, slow under scale and fatigue.