Shared Principles, Separate Paths

Your civic monitoring has started surfacing patterns. The public records responses, the meeting observations, the conversations between liaisons about what they’ve noticed — these are producing something more than information. They’re producing questions. Not questions about the data, but questions about the network itself. What are we actually coordinating toward? What holds us together beyond the shared concern that brought our groups into contact? If a new group approached us tomorrow, what would we tell them we stand for?

This chapter is about those questions. Not because they’re philosophical — because they’re structural. A network without shared principles isn’t leaderless. It has leaders. They’re just invisible.

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The most important essay most organizers have never read is Jo Freeman’s “The Tyranny of Structurelessness.” First published in The Second Wave in 1972, drawn from Freeman’s experience in the women’s liberation movement, it identifies a pattern that has since repeated in virtually every decentralized movement the documented record contains. The pattern is this: groups that reject formal structure don’t eliminate hierarchy. They make hierarchy informal, unaccountable, and invisible.

Freeman’s analysis is precise. In groups without explicit structure, friendship networks become unacknowledged power structures. People with more social connections, more free time, and more shared background with other influential members accumulate informal authority. Without formal spokespersons, media selects its own representatives, creating resentment. Without defined roles, the people who do the most work accumulate the most influence — not because they sought it, but because the work requires decisions and decisions require someone to make them.

The essay is freely available online at jofreeman.com. This chapter’s recommendation: read it together at a joint meeting. Discuss it as a network. The conversation matters more than the text, because the text describes a general pattern and the conversation applies it to your specific network.

Three questions for that discussion:

Where do we already see informal hierarchy in our coordination? Not as accusation — as observation. Someone is probably doing more coordinating than others. Someone’s opinion probably carries more weight. Someone’s schedule probably shapes when meetings happen. Name it. Naming is not the problem. Hiding is the problem.

Where is our current structure helping us? The spokes council, the decision domains, the coalition agreement — which of these are actually functioning, and which exist on paper but get bypassed in practice? The structures that are working are worth keeping. The structures that aren’t might be the wrong structures rather than unnecessary ones.

Where is structure constraining us? Is the consent-based process slowing decisions that don’t need it? Are the decision domains too rigid for the situations you’re actually facing? Freeman’s point isn’t that all structure is good. It’s that hidden structure is worse than visible structure, even when the visible structure is imperfect.

Freeman proposed specific solutions: delegate authority to specific individuals for specific tasks, require those delegates to report back, distribute authority as widely as reasonably possible, rotate tasks among qualified members, ensure equal access to information, and provide equal access to resources. These aren’t radical proposals. They’re the structural equivalent of making the invisible visible. Your network has already implemented most of them through the governance frameworks in earlier chapters. The Freeman discussion is a diagnostic tool — a way to check whether what you built is actually functioning the way you designed it.

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Freeman describes what goes wrong. The documented record also shows what holds together — across decades, across continents, without centralized control.

Alcoholics Anonymous has maintained decentralized coherence for more than ninety years across two million participants in over 180 countries. No central authority dictates what individual groups do. Each group is autonomous. What holds AA together are the Twelve Traditions — not rules, but principles that every group references and adapts to its own context.

Three of those traditions are directly relevant to your network. Tradition Two: “For our group purpose there is but one ultimate authority — a loving God as He may express Himself in our group conscience. Our leaders are but trusted servants; they do not govern.” Strip the theological language and the structural principle is clear: authority flows from the collective, not from the leaders. Leaders serve the group’s decisions; they don’t make them. Tradition Four: “Each group should be autonomous except in matters affecting other groups or A.A. as a whole.” Autonomy has limits. Those limits are defined collaboratively, not imposed from above. And Tradition Nine: “A.A., as such, ought never be organized; but we may create service boards or committees directly responsible to those they serve.” Organization is not forbidden — but it exists to serve, not to govern.

The Quaker tradition is older and makes the same structural argument differently. For more than 370 years, the Religious Society of Friends has maintained coherent practice across diverse communities through shared Testimonies — Peace, Equality, Simplicity, Truth, Stewardship — rather than creedal rules. Monthly Meetings operate autonomously but are accountable to Quarterly and Yearly Meetings. Clerks facilitate rather than direct. Decision-making proceeds by “sense of the meeting” rather than majority vote. Positions rotate on roughly three-year terms. And the Books of Discipline that guide each yearly meeting evolve as “living documents” — they’re expected to change as the community’s understanding deepens.

Food Not Bombs has operated since 1980 across roughly a thousand chapters in over sixty countries with three shared principles: the food is always vegan or vegetarian and free to everyone without restriction; each chapter is independent, autonomous, and makes decisions by consensus; and the organization is dedicated to non-violent direct action rather than charity. No central organization. No membership dues. No hierarchy. Anyone can start a chapter. Identity is maintained through shared name, shared principles, and shared practice — not through institutional structure.

The pattern across these organizations: loose alignment on values provides more durable coherence than rigid procedural requirements. Principles guide without commanding. They’re broad enough to hold diverse communities and specific enough to guide real decisions. And critically, they’re chosen by the people who live by them — not imposed from above by a board, a founder, or a curriculum.

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The Sunrise Movement illustrates what the founders themselves recommended as the alternative to what went wrong. You’ve already encountered the case in these pages — in Chapter 30, briefly, alongside the discussion of governance without consent, and at length in Chapter 32, where the hidden hierarchy and its structural costs were the central lesson. Roughly 400 of 500 hubs went inactive. The organization that transformed climate politics couldn’t sustain its own coordination.

What matters for this chapter isn’t the diagnosis — you’ve read that. It’s the prescription. In their Convergence Magazine self-reflection, co-founders William Lawrence and Dyanna Jaye didn’t just name the failure. They described what would have worked: member democracy with representative leadership, open strategic dialogue, and equal standing of all members.

Each element of that prescription maps to something concrete. Member democracy means the people doing the work have genuine decision-making power — not advisory input, not the ability to organize locally within parameters set centrally, but actual authority over the organization’s direction. Representative leadership means coordinators who serve defined mandates from the people they coordinate — the spokes council model, not the command center model. Open strategic dialogue means the strategic choices are made transparently, debated collectively, and revisable by the membership — not made by a small group and announced as decisions. Equal standing means that every hub, chapter, or group has the same formal relationship to the whole — no inner circle with privileged access to resources, information, or decision-making.

The founders’ prescription is, in structural terms, a description of governance through shared principles rather than imposed rules. The principles are chosen, transparent, and revisable. The leadership serves defined mandates. The strategic direction belongs to the membership. That’s what the AA Traditions, the Quaker Testimonies, and the Food Not Bombs model all demonstrate at scale across decades. And it’s what a shared principles document makes possible for your network — not because the document has magic properties, but because the process of writing it together forces the conversations that hidden hierarchy avoids.

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In Apple TV’s Severance, Lumon Industries’ Board of Directors governs the severed floor through rules the innies didn’t make, can’t question, and don’t understand. The Board is unseen. Its authority is absolute. Its decisions shape every aspect of the innies’ working lives — what they’re allowed to know, who they’re allowed to talk to, what behaviors earn rewards and which earn corrections. The rules aren’t principles. They’re control mechanisms designed to look like organizational structure.

The show’s central tension isn’t between the innies and the Board. It’s between governance imposed from above and governance chosen from below. The innies don’t rebel by breaking rules. They rebel by forming relationships the system was designed to prevent — by choosing to coordinate despite a structure engineered to keep them isolated. Their resistance is structural before it’s dramatic. They build trust across compartments that were meant to stay separate. They share information the system classified as forbidden. They act collectively in a space designed for individual compliance.

The Board’s governance fails not because the rules are harsh but because they weren’t chosen by the people who live under them. They can’t be questioned, so they can’t be improved. They can’t be revised, so they can’t adapt. They have no legitimacy beyond the power to enforce them.

Your network’s principles work differently. They’re written by the people who’ll live by them. They’re revisable by consent. They exist because the network chose them, not because someone imposed them. The difference between Lumon’s Board and your network’s shared principles isn’t the content of the rules — it’s who makes them, who can change them, and whether they serve the people they govern.

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These pages recommend writing your network’s shared principles at a joint meeting using a facilitated process. Not a constitution. Not bylaws. Not a mission statement drafted by a committee of two. A short document — three to seven principles — written collectively, reflecting what the network has learned about itself through the work it’s already done.

The facilitation structure: four questions, discussed in sequence.

What brought our groups together? This is the origin story — not in mythological terms, but in practical ones. What specific concern, connection, or event led to the first boundary-spanner meeting? Name it concretely. Networks that lose track of their origin drift.

What holds us together beyond the original reason? The original concern may have evolved. The network may have discovered shared interests that weren’t visible at first contact. The institutional mapping, the civic monitoring, the joint actions — these may have revealed common ground that the origin story doesn’t capture. Name what’s emerged.

What commitments do we share? Not aspirations — commitments. What does the network actually do, and what does it refuse to do? These should be observable in practice, not just expressible in language. If a principle isn’t reflected in behavior, it isn’t a principle yet. It’s an aspiration, and that’s fine — but name it honestly.

What do we refuse to do? This is often the most clarifying question. Shared refusals define boundaries more crisply than shared aspirations. The network might refuse to endorse candidates. Refuse to share members’ personal information with institutional partners. Refuse to make decisions without all groups represented. Refuse to grow faster than trust allows. The refusals tell you what the principles actually protect.

These pages provide the examples above — AA, Quakers, Food Not Bombs — as reference points, not templates. Your principles should emerge from your network’s experience, not from historical models. The process of writing them together is the point. The document is the artifact of the conversation.

Keep the principles broad enough that groups with different local concerns can live by them. Keep them specific enough that a concrete decision could actually be tested against them. And treat them as a living document — revisable by the same consent-based process the network uses for other decisions. The Quakers revise their Books of Discipline regularly. In November 2023, the Zapatistas dissolved the autonomous municipal structures they’d maintained for nearly thirty years in Chiapas, Mexico, and reorganized into thousands of more localized governance bodies — Local Autonomous Governments where each community directs its own affairs, with regional coordination serving the communities rather than governing them. The reorganization came after years of critical self-evaluation and mounting external pressures, including cartel violence along the Guatemala border. Their communiqué described the new structure as placing the base at the top — communities governing the zones and regions, not the other way around. Governance is never finished. Build the expectation of evolution into the structure itself.

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If your network is ready to grow, these pages provide an onboarding protocol. “Ready” doesn’t mean “wants to.” It means the existing coordination is healthy — the health check from the last phase shows sustainable workload distribution, the governance structures are functioning, and the network has spare coordination capacity rather than operating at its limit.

The protocol follows the same recognition-based approach from the first chapters of Level 3. A boundary-spanner from the new group meets with liaisons from existing groups — the same first-contact protocol, the same behavioral recognition framework. The difference is that the network now has institutional memory. The shared principles document gives the new group something concrete to read and respond to before the relationship deepens. The coalition agreement, the decision domains, the liaison model — these are documented and shareable.

The onboarding sequence: boundary-spanner meetings first, establishing whether the groups’ concerns and practices are compatible. A probationary coordination period — participation in one or two joint coordination meetings as observers before formal inclusion. Review and discussion of the shared principles document — not as a loyalty test, but as a conversation about fit. Does the new group share these commitments? Would they modify them? Those modifications might improve the document. And finally, a consent-based decision by the existing network about whether to formalize the connection.

The emphasis throughout is deliberate growth, not rapid expansion. The research is unambiguous on this point. Sunrise grew from a handful of hubs to over 500 in four years and lost roughly 80% of them. Indivisible spawned 6,000 groups in weeks and retained roughly a third. AA, which has grown for ninety years, builds growth into the program itself — the Twelfth Step requires helping others — but the growth happens through personal relationships, one sponsor to one newcomer, at the speed of trust.

If your network isn’t ready, deepen what exists. The shared principles conversation, the Freeman discussion, the civic monitoring rotation — these strengthen the network’s foundation whether or not a new group joins. Growth is not the only measure of progress.

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Challenge

Three components, adapted to your network’s current situation.

Part 1 — Write your network’s shared principles. At a joint meeting, use the four-question facilitation process described above. Aim for three to seven principles. Write them together — not delegated to a drafting committee. Keep them broad enough for diverse groups, specific enough for real decisions, and treat the document as revisable. Document the result and share it through the liaison channel.

Part 2 — Read and discuss Freeman’s “Tyranny of Structurelessness.” The full essay is freely available at jofreeman.com. Distribute it before a joint meeting. Discuss using the three diagnostic questions above: Where do we see informal hierarchy? Where is structure helping? Where is it constraining? The conversation will surface things the shared principles document should address.

Part 3 — If the network is growing, run the onboarding protocol. Boundary-spanner meetings, probationary coordination period, shared principles review, consent-based admission. If the network isn’t growing, revisit the coalition agreement from Chapter 30 and update it based on everything you’ve learned since you wrote it. The agreement was drafted before the institutional mapping, before the joint actions, before the conflict resolution practice. It’s almost certainly incomplete.

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Field Journal

Two entries for the network’s shared record.

First, document the shared principles themselves. This is the network’s most important document — not because it’s permanent, but because it represents the first time the network articulated what holds it together. Date it. Note who was present. Note any principles that generated significant discussion — the disagreements reveal as much as the agreements.

Second, note what the Freeman discussion revealed about the network’s current structure. Where is informal hierarchy operating? What did the network decide to do about it — make it visible, rotate it, formalize it, or accept it as a productive asymmetry? These observations will inform the conversation in the next chapter about what you’d tell someone who’s just starting this process.

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The principles aren’t the answer. The conversation that produced them is.

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