Part of the Collective decision-making area.
A role is an area of accountability – a sub-domain – delegated by a group to an individual, the role keeper, who has autonomy to decide and act within the role’s defined constraints. When this protocol is adopted alongside the rest of the Collective decision-making cluster, roles emerge within circles through consent-based selection. But roles can also be defined in other contexts – wherever a group needs to delegate a bounded area of responsibility to a person. The role keeper is not the role: holding a function is not the same as being identified with it. This distinction – role vs. soul – is central to preventing the accumulation of informal authority.
Accord. Roles are selected by consent, not appointed by a leader. Each role has a defined term, a domain description (what the role is responsible for and empowered to decide), and evaluation criteria. Key roles rotate on defined terms with overlap periods where the outgoing and incoming holders work together. The role keeper develops their own strategy for the role, reviewed collaboratively with those who delegated it.
Ritual. During handover, the outgoing holder shares not only tasks and information but their felt experience of the role – what it cost, what it opened, what they would do differently. This creates a culture of honest reflection about power and burden, keeping the role vs. soul distinction alive in practice rather than only in principle.
Critique & Contemplation. At each rotation, the group asks: Has this role become a “gravity well” that attracts more authority than intended? What does the pattern of who holds this role reveal about our assumptions? Has the role’s domain drifted beyond what was originally consented to?