When Safety Becomes a Script

How Group Agreements Can Be Harmful

Recently, my friends Celia Kutz, Shilpa Jain, Erika Sasson, and I co-authored a series of articles on cancel culture, co-published by The Forge Organizing and Convergence Magazine. These writings emerged from the last few years of work bringing movement leaders together to examine the toxic ways conflict is often held in our organizing spaces.

I’m proud of us—not just the four of us who wrote the series, but of our broader movement, for the growth we’ve made over the past five to ten years. It feels like we’ve passed the peak of the dynamic often called “cancel culture,” and are now beginning to have more nuanced conversations—about the pattern itself and the individual conflicts that emerge within it.

Not long ago, simply naming “cancel culture” could get you pushed out of a space. And whether harm was being called out on social media or not, people were being ejected from community left and right.

Now, more and more resources are helping us face these dynamics with clarity and care. adrienne maree brown’s We Will Not Cancel Us and Loving Corrections, Loretta Ross’s Calling In, podcasts like Fucking Cancelled, Maurice Mitchell’s article Building Resilient Organizations, and countless private conversations I’ve been part of are helping us look more deeply into the roots of these conflicts, heal from their impact, and experiment with new ways forward.

And… we still have a long way to go. I continue to hear stories—almost weekly—of ruptures in community and movement spaces. Minor disagreements or misunderstandings spiral into entrenched conflict. People refuse to listen. Someone gets pushed out. All this in spaces meant to foster healing and build community.

I get it. These are traumatizing times. Our old and ancestral wounds are constantly activated. Many of us are on high alert, scanning for danger, constantly looking to respond to the next threat.

And I grieve every fracture I hear about or witness.

This grief shapes how I show up to every community-building event. I ask myself: Am I stepping into a space that could explode at any moment? How can I support the group to build a space safe enough for people to lower their guard, risk vulnerability, and deepen together?

I Hate Group Agreements

I’ve been facilitating group spaces for 25 years. Early on, I learned that one of the first steps to “create a safe container” is to come up with a list of group agreements. But over the past decade, I’ve come to question this practice. I now wonder if the way we use group agreements might actually be contributing to harm.

In many workshops and community spaces, facilitators offer or solicit a list of agreements. Common ones include: "One Mic" (only one person speaks at a time), "Step Up/Step Back" (encouraging balance in participation), and "Try It On" (an invitation to experiment with new ideas).

The idea is that if we all follow these agreements, the space will feel safe enough for growth and learning.

And I hate this exercise. In fact, I’ve stopped doing it in spaces that I facilitate. And I’m not alone. Many facilitators I know have quietly let go of this practice.

That’s not to say group agreements have no value. They can offer a facilitator something to reference when navigating tense moments. But in practice, the way they are often presented is full of pitfalls.

What If We Break the Rules?

The biggest issue I see with group agreements is that we rarely discuss what happens when they are inevitably broken.

Most group agreements are aspirational. Many ask us to unlearn habits we’ve spent a lifetime building. For example, when teaching the value of "speaking from the I," I’ve found myself saying, "Speaking from the I is important because we so often don’t speak from our own experience." In that moment, I broke the very agreement I was trying to teach.

We are imperfect beings. We will break agreements.

And most of us were raised in a carceral culture. When someone breaks a rule, we’re taught to see them as wrong, and to seek punishment. Even if we call them "agreements" and co-create the list, they inevitably feel like the rules we are so familiar with.

Without a shared commitment to slowing down and leaning into conflict, group agreements can become a checklist for exile rather than a compass for community. They can become a list of all the ways someone can “mess up.”

Instead of relying solely on group agreements, I’ve shifted to guiding groups toward shared values, commitments, or considerations—especially for how we want to move through conflict, tension, or harm.

For example, you can check out the list of "Considerations for Conflict Engagements" that invites groups to name and commit to ways of showing up when conflict arises. Whether it’s sending this handout to people ahead of time or spending some time in person to talk about how we want to hold each other through the hard moments, I have found that getting on the same page about what to do after an agreement has been broken to be more supportive than simply listing off agreements and moving on.

A False Sense of Safety

Another reason I avoid group agreements is that they can give the illusion that a space is now "safe."

What does that even mean?

If we spend five minutes naming agreements and then move on, we risk creating the false impression that the space is now free of conflict, discomfort, or harm. But that’s a promise no space can keep.

After the Buddha’s enlightenment, his first teaching was the Four Noble Truths. The first is the truth of dukkha. While often translated as "suffering," I once heard a teacher describe it as "the inevitability of unwanted events."

Despite our best efforts, it is simply inevitable that we will experience unwanted events. People will offend each other. Boundaries will be crossed. Agreements will be broken.

And besides, a space free from discomfort isn’t necessarily what we should be striving for. If we’re hoping for growth and healing, we need spaces resilient enough to hold discomfort—not avoid it.

My partner LiZhen once reflected to me that creating a safe container is not about creating a space where nobody experiences harm. It is about creating a container where people feel safe enough to re-engage with their hurts.

When we confuse safety with the absence of harm, we create cultures of avoidance instead of transformation. True safety comes not from the absence of rupture, but from knowing that when rupture happens, we have the tools, relationships, and commitments to move through it with care.

Different Understandings

Another issue with group agreements is the assumption that we all understand them the same way. Too often, a facilitator reads off the list of agreements and moves onto the next portion of the agenda. This entire activity usually takes 5-10 minutes, max.

On paper, things like Moses’ 10 commandments or the 5 precepts in Buddhism are fairly simple to understand – at least on a surface level. But any practitioner of those faith traditions will tell you that understanding the depth of those agreements is a lifetime of work. And learning to embody them and practice them on a daily basis will take lifetimes of practice.

The same goes for our group agreements.

There are also cultural assumptions built into many common agreements. Take "One Mic." In some cultures, overlapping speech signals passion and connection. In others, it's considered deeply disrespectful. So whose norms are we elevating?

Or take “I messages.” It can be a powerful practice to speak from the “I.” I might sometimes say things like “we are all so scared these days” as a way to distance myself from the fear that I am feeling these days. Speaking from my own personal experience can keep me connected to my own emotions, in addition to ensuring that I am not speaking on behalf of someone else’s experience.

But there is also power in speaking from the “we,” in reclaiming our collectivity. In many cultural and spiritual traditions, the self is not seen as separate from the group. Speaking from “we” can be a way of honoring that interconnectedness, of acknowledging that our emotions and struggles are not just personal—they are shared.

Sometimes, speaking from “I” can feel isolating or individualistic, as though our suffering is ours alone to carry. But when someone says, “we are grieving,” or “we are hurting,” it can open a doorway to solidarity, to the comfort of knowing we are not alone.

There is nuance in all of these agreements, and while it may make sense for us to practice one way of being with each other within a set container, the way we utilize agreements do not always create space for these nuanced discussions. We may be, inadvertently and with the best intentions, creating a culture that values one way of being in relationship and dismissing other equally valuable ways to build community.

How They Can Help

I'm not saying group agreements have no place. They can be helpful under the right conditions. Here are a few ways they can be more effective:

1. Shared Commitments: In addition to having agreements, try to build a shared commitment to staying in relationship when those agreements are broken. Do not let a lack of shared commitment weaponize the very agreements meant to build community.

2. Revisit Them Regularly: If you are part of a group that meets regularly, then having the same list shared over and over and over again can begin to build an embodied culture. Even if your group is not meeting regularly over a long-term, try to come back to the group agreements as often as you can during your time together. Do not just present them at the beginning of your time and never mention them again.
   
   East Bay Meditation Center’s Agreements for Multicultural Interactions, originally created by Visions Inc., is a good example of this.

3. Keep Them Simple: Select a few key agreements, and do not offer a long list that people are never going to remember. I appreciate that in Jams, some of the safest containers I have ever experienced, uses only 4-5 agreements each time. It’s a small enough chunk that we can really focus on actually practicing them during our time together.

4. Tell Why They Matter: Make room to explore the stories behind the agreements. Instead of only stating the agreement, share the reasons why it’s there, what it’s trying to protect or invite, and how different people might relate to it. Engage in discussion about them. This creates space for deeper understanding and reduces the risk of shame or misunderstanding when someone struggles with a practice.

5. Practice them out loud and in real time: Don’t just name agreements—embody them. If “assume good intent, and attend to impact” is one of your agreements, model what it looks like when someone unintentionally causes harm and the group moves through it with grace. Agreements should not just be referenced but lived.

At their best, group agreements can support us in weaving a shared culture of care. But they are not magic spells that ward off harm. Without a deeper commitment to relationship, repair, and reflection, they risk becoming rigid scripts that flatten our complexity and silence the very aliveness we are trying to invite. Safety cannot be mandated; it must be cultivated—through trust, through time, and through our willingness to stay with each other when things get hard.

So rather than asking, What are the rules of this space? I’ve started asking:

What are the relationships that will hold us when the rules fall short?

What are the practices we can return to—not just in our best moments, but in our hardest ones?

And how do we build a culture that knows conflict is not the end of belonging, but at our best, the beginning of it?

UPDATE: After posting this article, my friend Celia, a long-time trainer with Training for Change, sent me a link to an article they published by Daniel Hunter which speaks to many of these points and more. I’d recommend people check it out here.