The Groan Zone

By now the initial excitement has cooled. The logistics of meeting regularly with other humans — finding a time that works, showing up when you’re tired, doing the thing you agreed to do between meetings — have settled in. And someone has probably disagreed about something. Maybe it was small. Maybe it simmered. Maybe it was said and then dropped because no one knew what to do with it.

That’s where I want to start. Not with the disagreement itself, but with the silence around it.

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Sam Kaner, a facilitator who spent decades studying how groups make decisions, named the space you’re probably in. He called it the groan zone.

The pattern works like this. When a group first forms, agreement comes easy — you’re all excited, you share a purpose, and the early decisions are simple. Where do we meet? When? What tools do we use? Then the decisions get harder. They involve competing preferences, different assumptions, different stakes. The group enters a space between easy agreement and real resolution — where the ideas are diverging but no shared understanding has formed yet. The discomfort of that space is the groan zone.

Most groups die here. Not from the disagreement. From the absence of vocabulary for what’s happening and the absence of a process for moving through it. Without a name for the experience, it feels like failure. Like the group is broken. Like this specific disagreement proves the whole project was a mistake.

It doesn’t. It proves the group is real.

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I want to give you two things: a way to make decisions together, and a set of agreements for handling the harder moments. Both are practical. Both come from traditions that have tested them under real pressure.

A decision-making process. The consensus spectrum, adapted from Seeds for Change, gives you four options instead of two. Most people think decisions are binary — you agree or you don’t. The spectrum adds nuance:

Agree — I support this.

Reservations — I have concerns but I can live with it and won’t stand in the way.

Stand Aside — I disagree and don’t want to participate in this decision, but I won’t block it. The group can proceed.

Block — I believe this decision would violate our purpose, ground rules, or agreements. I’m asking the group to stop and find another way.

A block is rare and it’s serious. It’s not “I don’t like this.” It’s “this would compromise something fundamental.” The Occupy Wall Street General Assembly collapsed partly because blocking became routine — any single person could stall any proposal for any reason, and the process ground to a halt. Your group’s version is different — a block has to be grounded in the shared agreements you’ve already written.

A printable reference card for the consensus spectrum is available in the companion materials — designed to bring to meetings.

Try this at your next meeting. Pick something real that needs deciding — it can be small. When do we meet next week? What local issue do we focus on first? How do we communicate between meetings? Go around and have each person state their position on the spectrum. See what it feels like to hear “I have reservations but I can live with it” instead of silence that might mean consent or might mean suppressed disagreement.

The process matters more than the outcome. You’re building a muscle.

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Now the harder part.

The research on cross-partisan groups shows a counterintuitive risk: when people who think differently spend time together, it can actually make them less likely to act — not more. The exposure to opposing viewpoints, without a shared project to channel the energy, can produce paralysis. People retreat into their positions. The conversation becomes about persuasion instead of action. The group stalls.

If your group includes people with different political views — and it probably does, because groups formed around geographic proximity rather than political agreement tend to be more resilient — this is something you’ll need to navigate.

I’m not going to tell you to avoid politics. That’s not realistic and it’s not honest. What I’ll say is this: the groups that survived, in the organizing traditions I’ve studied, were the ones that kept the work concrete. They weren’t debate clubs. They were people doing something about a specific thing in a specific place.

The United Packinghouse Workers of America organized meatpacking plants across racial, ethnic, and political lines in the 1930s and 1940s. Their constitution explicitly embraced members with “different political opinions.” What held them together wasn’t agreement on national politics. It was the fact that everyone in the plant needed safer conditions, better wages, and basic dignity — and those needs were more immediate than their political differences. Unity was built through shared action, not shared ideology.

Your group isn’t a meatpacking plant. But the principle transfers. You’re not here to change each other’s minds about the presidency or immigration or whatever cable-news territory divides you at Thanksgiving. You’re here because something in your community needs attention and none of you can address it alone. Keep the work concrete. When political conversations surface — and they will — the question to return to is: “How does this connect to what we’re doing here?”

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In the Hunger Games, the rebellion nearly collapsed before it launched — and not because of the Capitol. District 13’s internal fractures almost destroyed the resistance from within. Coin wanted total control: centralized planning, top-down authority, every rebel following orders. Katniss kept breaking the plan — not out of defiance but because she could see things from the ground that Coin’s command structure couldn’t. The tension between them wasn’t about who was right. It was about a coalition that had no process for handling disagreement between its own members. Coin’s response to conflict was to suppress it. Katniss’s response was to act unilaterally. Neither worked. The rebellion succeeded not because it resolved this tension but in spite of it — and the unresolved conflict produced consequences that defined the outcome.

When there’s no process for disagreement, people either suppress it (and resentment builds) or act on it unilaterally (and trust breaks). The groups that survive internal conflict aren’t the ones that avoid it. They’re the ones that build a way to move through it.

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Your group agreements. You have ground rules from your first meeting and security agreements from Chapter 19. What you need now is a set of agreements for how the group handles the hard moments — because you’ve been together long enough to know those moments are coming.

I notice I’m being prescriptive here. This is the one place in the curriculum where I think it’s warranted — because this is the specific place groups fail, and the failure mode is always the same: no process, no vocabulary, no way through.

Write these together. They’re not rules imposed from outside. They’re commitments the group makes to itself, and per Ostrom’s research, agreements the group writes are the ones the group follows.

How do we handle disagreement? You now have the consensus spectrum. Name it as the group’s process. When someone disagrees, they have options beyond silence or confrontation.

What happens when someone is upset? This one matters. There’s a structure from nonviolent communication that works: “I feel… when… because… I need…” Not “you always…” Not “you never…” The shift from “you” statements to “I” statements isn’t a therapy technique — it’s a structural de-escalation. “I feel frustrated when decisions get made between meetings because I need to be part of the process” lands differently than “you two always decide things without me.”

How do we handle political disagreements? Name the agreement explicitly. “We focus on local action. We don’t debate national politics in meetings. When political topics come up, we ask how they connect to what we’re doing.” Write it down. Having it written means no one has to be the person who redirects the conversation — the agreement does it.

What happens when someone breaks a norm? The instinct is to either ignore it or confront it, and both tend to damage groups. Ostrom’s research on commons governance found that successful communities use graduated responses: a gentle reminder first, a private conversation if it continues, a group discussion if the pattern persists. The key is that the first response is always curiosity, not accusation. “What happened?” not “Why did you do that?” People who feel blamed hide. People who feel curious explain.

Add these to your operating document.

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The Women’s March mobilized an estimated four million people on January 21, 2017 — widely considered the largest single-day protest in American history. Within three years, the organization behind it couldn’t sustain itself. Not because the cause wasn’t urgent. Because the internal structure couldn’t handle conflict.

Four co-chairs. No clear governance mechanism. No accountability system that allowed the millions of participants to influence direction. When internal disagreements about leadership and representation surfaced — and they surfaced hard — there was no process for resolution. Sponsors and partner organizations pulled back. Local chapters distanced themselves from the national organization. The coalition that had channeled grief into the largest demonstration in American history fractured because it had no way to disagree and keep working.

The Indivisible network, formed in the same political moment, hit a related problem from the other direction. Local groups had autonomy and thrived. But when the national organization tried to impose top-down priorities, local leaders told researchers: “We don’t get any resources from them. We get demands from them.” The structure worked bottom-up but couldn’t handle the tension between local and national without accountability flowing both ways.

You’re three people, not three million. But the principle scales. Conflict doesn’t break groups. The absence of a process for conflict breaks groups. You’re building the process now, while the stakes are small enough to practice.

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After your next meeting — the one where you practice the consensus spectrum and write your group agreements — ask yourself: Did the group use the process? Did it feel mechanical or useful? Did anyone block? Did anyone stand aside? What was the actual disagreement about, and how did it resolve?

Write it down. This is the kind of reflection that separates groups that learn from groups that repeat.

You now have a purpose statement, ground rules, security agreements, and group agreements. That’s a substantial operating document for three people who met a month ago. It’s also a living document — it should change as the group changes. Revisit it whenever something happens that the existing agreements don’t cover.

The hard middle is where most groups give up. You’re still here.

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