Five ways to decide
Formal steps are kept for the choices that matter, so the small ones stay quick.
| Tool | What it means | Use it for | The guardrail |
|---|---|---|---|
| Conversation | The group talks it through and asks whether anyone sees a serious concern. | Routine meeting decisions, small wording choices, ordinary coordination. | Never for money, contracts, legal commitments, or anything that affects how a shop runs. |
| Consent | A proposal goes ahead when nobody has a reasoned objection that it is unsafe, unworkable or harmful to the purpose. | Most circle decisions: pilot designs, role assignments, review dates, ordinary shared work. | An objection names a specific risk and helps improve the proposal. |
| Lazy majority | Each person approves, stands aside or objects. Blocking needs a clear reason and help revising the proposal. | When consent is taking too long and the decision is not big enough to need everyone's agreement. | The objections, and why the group went ahead or revised, are written down. |
| Unanimous consent | Everyone with a say in the decision agrees. | Forming a legal entity, bylaws, equity or profit-sharing rules, major debt or contracts, welcoming a new Member, or closing the cooperative. | Used sparingly, so it does not become a bottleneck. |
| Shop consent | A shop agrees explicitly before a decision applies to it. | Anything touching a shop's staff, space, brand, data, money, suppliers, operations, customers or legal exposure. | It protects the shop concerned. It is not a veto over other shops choosing to take part. |
What consent means
Consent is not the same as everyone agreeing. Consensus asks whether everybody likes a proposal; consent asks whether anybody has a reason it should not go ahead. A proposal does not need to be perfect, only good enough to try for a set time without creating a risk the group cannot accept. The draft calls that "safe to try".
Every proposal in a Common Grounds meeting comes down to one question:
Can everyone live with this as a safe-to-try next step until the review date?
What counts as an objection
An objection is not a dislike or a preference. It is a specific concern that the proposal may be unsafe, unworkable, harmful to the cooperative's purpose, or unfair to someone taking part. Whoever raises one is expected to help improve the proposal, not only to stop it.
That expectation changes how meetings feel. Disagreement is how a proposal gets better, so a person who sees a risk is asked to say it plainly, and the group's job is to find the version of the proposal that answers it.
Urgent decisions
Sometimes waiting for the next meeting would cause a problem. A circle lead, a person in an approved role, or the representative of an affected shop may act within an approved scope when the decision is low-risk, and reports it at the next meeting. Urgency is never a way around consent for contracts, spending, legal obligations or commitments that bind a shop.
Review dates
Every charter and every pilot has a date on which the circle decides whether to continue, revise, scale, pause or stop, and a pilot that works can become a permanent program. Review dates are what let the cooperative say yes to something imperfect: a decision that will be looked at again in eight weeks does not have to be right forever. The governance draft carries one too, and the Members will review it after the first pilot.
For the circles these decisions belong to, see circles and roles.
Published October 5, 2026.