Community agreements that hold under pressure

Community agreements are the rules a team builds together about how it will work. They hold under pressure when they are written down and revisited.

Most teams have unwritten agreements — about how late is too late to text, about what "urgent" really means, about whether the meeting starts at the start time or five minutes after. Unwritten agreements work until the project gets stressful. Then everyone defaults to their own assumption and somebody gets hurt.

A real community agreement document is short. It covers communication norms (what platforms, what hours, what counts as urgent), decision-making norms (when we vote, when the Owner decides, when we go to consensus), conflict norms (how we name a disagreement, who facilitates if it gets stuck), and identity norms (how we show up across language, ability, parenting, faith). Eight to fifteen bullets, total.

Build the agreements at the start of the project, in a working session with the whole team. Do not pre-write them and ask for buy-in — that is a fake consensus. Use a digital whiteboard or a sticky-note exercise (we cover the tools in Module 5). The artifact matters less than the conversation that produced it.

Revisit the agreements at every retro. Ask: "Are these still serving us? Anything we want to add or change?" Agreements that never change usually mean nobody is reading them. Agreements that grow show a team that is paying attention.