Leaks and Deposits
Here is the pattern. One person on a team gradually becomes the person who remembers things. They track the deadlines no one else is watching. They notice when a client relationship is going cold. They hold the shape of the project in their head so everyone else can show up to meetings and improvise. Nobody appointed them to this role. It drifted to them — because they were good at it, or because they cared, or because they simply got there first.
Meanwhile, everyone else draws from what that person holds. They schedule meetings that fragment that person’s focus. They ask “quick questions” that cost twenty minutes of re-concentration. They rely on that person to catch the things they dropped. Each individual draw is small. Each one, in isolation, is reasonable. But nobody is watching the total.
For a while it works. The person copes. They might even feel quietly proud of being indispensable. But something is being drawn down. Not just their time — their goodwill. Their willingness to keep carrying what nobody asked them to carry. And because the drawdown happens in tiny, deniable increments, they do not flag it. Not until something minor goes wrong and they react with an intensity that baffles everyone in the room. “It was just a missed email.” But it was never about the email. It was about a shared resource that had been silently emptied while everyone looked the other way.
I call these dynamics leaks and deposits. And the framework that explains them is one of the most useful concepts in systems thinking — not just for personal relationships, but for every team, every department, every organisation where people depend on resources that nobody explicitly owns.
What Is a Commons?
A commons is any shared resource that multiple people draw from. The concept comes from ecology — a shared grazing pasture, a fishery, a water table. Everyone benefits. Everyone has access. And the problem, the structural and almost mathematical problem, is that each person’s incentive to take from the resource is stronger than their incentive to protect it.
Garrett Hardin formalised the idea in the 1960s. Each herdsman adds one more cow to the pasture because the benefit — milk, meat — lands entirely on them, while the cost — overgrazing — spreads across everyone. Rational individual behaviour produces collective ruin. The pasture collapses not because the herdsmen are greedy but because the feedback between the condition of the pasture and the decisions of the people using it is too weak and too slow.
Now look at your organisation. You have pastures. They do not look like pastures. They look like the team’s collective attention. The reliability of your systems. The trust your clients extend to you. The goodwill between departments. These are shared resources that everyone uses and nobody manages. And they degrade by the exact same mechanism that kills fisheries — not through malice, but through a structural gap between who benefits from taking and who bears the cost.
The hidden constraint is running the show. Organisations do not fail because of the things they track. They fail because of the shared resources nobody tracks — attention, trust, reliability, patience between teams — that get emptied because the people drawing from them never feel the cost of the draw.
Attention is like oxygen in a building. Everyone breathes it. Nobody monitors the tank. And the first symptom of depletion is not a warning light — it is people gasping.
How the Commons Gets Depleted
The mechanism is the same whether you are talking about a marriage, a friendship, or a fifty-person engineering team. Four features make any commons vulnerable to overuse.
1. The benefit is private and immediate
When a manager schedules a meeting with eight people, the manager gets alignment on their problem. That benefit is real, concrete, and felt right now. The eight hours of collective attention consumed by those eight people — that cost is somebody else’s problem. It is diffuse, invisible, and will not show up on any dashboard.
2. The cost is delayed and shared
The cost of drawing from the commons does not land on the person who drew. It disperses across the system. It shows up later, in a different form, in a way that seems unconnected to the original withdrawal. The team whose focus was fragmented does not produce a report saying “we lost four hours of deep work to your meeting.” They just deliver late. And nobody connects the delay to the meeting load.
3. Feedback is weak or absent
There is no meter. No dashboard that reads “team attention at 30 per cent.” No alarm that sounds when reliability is critically low. The signals that do exist — people looking tired, a slight increase in errors, a team that seems less willing to go the extra distance — are ambiguous enough to be explained away or attributed to something else entirely. By the time the feedback is unmistakable — a major outage, a key person quitting, a client leaving — the resource is already severely depleted.
4. Overuse becomes the norm
Because each individual draw is small and the cost is invisible, the pattern of overuse becomes the baseline. It stops looking like overuse and starts looking like “just how things are around here.” The reliable person has always been the one who catches everything. The ops team has always absorbed the risky deploys. The support team has always cleaned up after sales. Nobody decided this was fair. It simply became normal — and norms are nearly invisible to the people living inside them.
These four features interact to produce a predictable outcome: the resource degrades slowly, nobody notices until it is critically low, and then a small trigger produces a response that seems wildly disproportionate. But the response is not disproportionate. It is proportionate to the accumulated depletion. The trigger was just the moment the balance finally went to zero.
Example 1: The Meeting-Time Commons
Follow the mechanism through a case that will be familiar to anyone in a knowledge-work organisation of more than about twenty people.
The commons exists. The team has a shared pool of focused attention — roughly forty hours per person per week, minus coordination overhead. This is the resource that produces quality work: deep thinking, careful analysis, creative problem-solving.
People draw from it. Each manager, each project lead, each stakeholder schedules meetings to solve their particular coordination problem. Each meeting is justified. Each one, evaluated alone, is worth the time. Nobody is acting irrationally.
The aggregate stays invisible. From any individual’s perspective, their meeting load is fine. They have four meetings today. What they do not see is that the person they invited also has four from other people, and the person after that has six. Nobody aggregates it because there is nothing to aggregate it into.
Deep work shrinks. Focus time compresses into thirty-minute fragments between meetings. Context switching — which research consistently estimates at fifteen to twenty-three minutes per switch — eats whatever scraps remain. Tasks that should take two days start taking five. Nobody connects the delay to the meeting load because the causation is diffuse.
The symptoms appear. Deadlines slip. Quality drops. People start working evenings and weekends to do “real work” — the thinking that meetings have displaced from business hours. Fatigue sets in. The organisation experiences this as a performance problem.
The response makes it worse. Leadership schedules more meetings to address the missed deadlines. Status updates. Check-ins. Retrospectives on why delivery slowed. Each new meeting further depletes the resource that was already collapsing. The intervention worsens the condition it was designed to fix.
Everyone complains about too many meetings. Everyone continues scheduling them. This is not hypocrisy. It is what happens when a shared resource has no price, no limit, and no feedback loop. The person scheduling the meeting does not feel the eight hours they just imposed on other people. They feel their sixty minutes. And because nobody aggregates the total, the commons drains until it fails.
Example 2: The Trust Commons
The same mechanism, different resource. This version is subtler and often more damaging because trust, once depleted, regenerates very slowly.
The commons exists. Your clients trust you. They give you the benefit of the doubt on pricing changes. They tolerate the occasional hiccup. They recommend you to others. This trust is a shared resource — everyone in the organisation benefits from it, and everyone’s actions affect it.
Different people draw from it. Sales overpromises to close a deal. Product ships a feature that is not quite ready. Marketing makes claims that stretch the truth. Each department captures their benefit — the deal closes, the release date is met, the campaign performs. The cost — a client’s trust eroding slightly — lands elsewhere. Support absorbs the angry calls. Account managers field the disappointed emails.
The cost is invisible to the people spending it. The salesperson who overpromised does not handle the support tickets their promise generated. The product team that shipped early does not sit in the meeting where the client says, “We are re-evaluating our options.” The feedback between “I spent the trust” and “here is the cost of spending it” is structurally severed.
Trust thins. Clients become slightly more sceptical, slightly less forgiving, slightly more likely to take a competitor’s call. The change is gradual. Nobody sounds an alarm because each individual metric — NPS, renewal rate, support volume — sits in a different department’s dashboard.
A small incident breaks the surface. A minor outage that would have been forgiven two years ago now triggers a formal review. A price increase that once would have been absorbed now triggers churn. The organisation is bewildered. “It was just a small thing.” But it was never about the small thing. It was about a trust balance that had been drawn down for years without anyone watching the total.
Notice the structural similarity to the meeting example. Different resource, identical mechanism. Private benefit is concentrated on the person taking. Cost is diffused across the commons. Feedback is weak. The resource degrades. The surface symptoms look like separate problems — sales problems, product problems, retention problems — but they share a single structural cause.
The Common Misread
When a commons collapses — when deadlines are missed, when the reliable person burns out, when clients start leaving — the instinctive response is to treat it as a people problem.
“People are not taking ownership.” “We need a culture of accountability.” “The team lacks discipline.”
These framings feel accurate because they match what is visible on the surface: some people over-functioning, others apparently oblivious. But they miss the structure underneath. The “lack of ownership” is not a character defect. It is the predictable result of a system where the cost of drawing from the commons is invisible to the person drawing. The “over-functioning” is not a personality type. It is someone absorbing costs that should be distributed.
Treating a structural problem as a personality problem does two things, both harmful. First, it concentrates blame on individuals, which makes the depleted person feel more alone and the “oblivious” person feel unfairly attacked — another withdrawal from a commons that is already empty. Second, it prevents anyone from seeing the actual mechanism, which means no structural change occurs, and the pattern repeats.
Systems do not respond to intentions. They respond to consequences. If the structure rewards drawing from the commons and imposes no consequence for depletion, the commons will be depleted — regardless of how many all-hands meetings you hold about “being more mindful” or how earnestly people nod along.
The structural insight changes where you aim the intervention. You do not need better people. You do not need a more committed culture. You need governance — mechanisms that make the cost of consuming the commons visible to the person consuming it, in real time, with consequences that actually change their next decision. This is not cynicism about human nature. It is an accurate reading of how systems work. The herdsman does not overgraze because he is a bad person. He overgrazes because the pasture has no fence, no meter, and no fee. Give him a meter and a fee, and the overgrazing stops — not because he became more virtuous, but because the feedback changed.
Three Levers That Protect the Commons
If the mechanism of depletion is private benefit, shared cost, and weak feedback, then the intervention must target those three elements. None of these levers require anyone to become a different person. They require the system to operate differently.
Lever 1: Make the Resource Visible
You cannot manage what you cannot see. The first step is to name the commons — explicitly, out loud, in language everyone shares. “Team attention is a shared resource that gets drawn down every time we schedule a meeting or send a Slack message that requires a response.” “Client trust is a balance that every department spends from and nobody is tracking.” “Reliability is not free. It is maintained by a small group of people, and every risky deploy draws from their capacity.”
Naming sounds simple. It is genuinely powerful. It takes something invisible — a background condition everyone relied on but nobody acknowledged — and makes it concrete. Once the resource has a name, people can talk about it. Once people can talk about it, they can start to see the draws they were previously making without realising.
Practical step: Pick one commons you suspect is under pressure. For one week, track the leaks and deposits. A leak is anything that draws from the resource: a meeting that could have been an email, a risky deploy without a rollback plan, a promise made to a client without checking with the team who has to deliver it. A deposit is anything that replenishes it: protecting someone’s focus time, fixing something before it becomes an incident, underpromising and overdelivering. You do not need to share the tracking. You just need to see the pattern.
Lever 2: Install Fast Feedback
Visibility alone does not change behaviour. People can see a dashboard and still ignore it, because seeing a number is not the same as feeling a consequence. The second lever closes the gap between drawing from the commons and experiencing the cost of the draw.
- Meeting load made personal. Track total meeting hours per person per week and publish the number where everyone sees it. Not as surveillance — as a commons meter. When the average sits at twenty-two hours out of forty, that number changes the conversation. It converts a vague complaint (“too many meetings”) into a specific reading (“55 per cent of our capacity is consumed by coordination”).
- Cost attribution. When client trust declines, trace it back to the specific decisions that caused it. The salesperson sees the support ticket volume their promise generated. The product team sees the churn that followed their half-finished release. Attribution is not blame. It is feedback. It reconnects the person who drew from the commons with the cost of the draw.
- Incident ownership. When a risky change causes a production problem, the team that shipped the change participates in the resolution — not just the on-call engineer who happened to be holding the pager. The feedback between “I shipped this” and “here is what it cost” must be felt by the same person. Otherwise the incentive to externalise risk remains intact.
The principle: the person who draws from the commons must feel the cost of the draw, in a form specific enough to change their next decision, fast enough that the connection between action and consequence is obvious. Delayed, diffuse, aggregate feedback does not change behaviour. Immediate, specific, personal feedback does.
Lever 3: Agree on Rules of Use
Visibility and feedback handle most of the problem. But some commons are fragile enough that even well-informed, well-intentioned people can deplete them faster than they regenerate. For those, you need hard constraints. Not guidelines. Not suggestions. Rules with teeth.
- Caps. No person may have more than twenty hours of meetings per week. No meeting may include more than six people without director approval. Two days per week are meeting-free. These constraints are enforced by calendar systems, not by willpower. The commons is protected by structure, not by good intentions.
- Budgets. Each team gets a defined error budget — a specific amount of allowable incidents per quarter. Exhaust the budget, and deploys freeze until it regenerates. The team that ships risky changes now carries the consequence directly: not an incident report filed by someone else, but a constraint on their own ability to ship.
- Recovery protocols. When any commons metric crosses a critical threshold, a specific set of constraints activates automatically. No new meetings. No discretionary deploys. No new commitments to clients. The organisation shifts to recovery mode until the resource regenerates. This is the circuit breaker that prevents total collapse.
Rules feel heavy-handed until you compare them to the alternative. The alternative is not freedom. It is collapse. Unregulated commons do not produce liberty; they produce tragedy. The rules are the fence around the pasture. They exist not to punish the herdsman but to preserve the pasture the herdsman depends on.
Governance is not the opposite of autonomy. It is the infrastructure that makes autonomy sustainable. Without it, autonomy consumes the conditions of its own possibility.
Tool: The Commons Governance Charter
Theory without implementation is just an interesting conversation. What follows is a practical tool you can build this week. Pick one commons in your organisation — the one that feels most depleted right now — and give it governance.
The Commons Governance Charter
- Name the commons. What shared resource is under pressure? Be specific. Not “productivity” — that is an outcome, not a resource. Name the resource itself: team attention, platform reliability, client trust, engineering focus, on-call capacity. Write it as a noun you could put a meter on.
- Define the measurement. How will you track the condition of this resource? Choose a metric that is quantifiable, available at least weekly, and understandable without explanation. Examples: meeting hours per person per week. Uninterrupted blocks of ninety minutes or more per person per week. Incidents per deploy. NPS trend. On-call page volume.
- Set three zones. Define what healthy, stressed, and critical look like:
- Green: The resource is healthy. Normal operations. Light monitoring.
- Amber: The resource is stressed. New draws require justification. Awareness increases. Specific mitigations activate.
- Red: The resource is critical. Hard constraints activate. No new draws without senior approval. Recovery actions begin immediately.
- Write the rules for each zone. In green, the rules are light: measure and report. In amber, the rules tighten: new meetings need a stated purpose and end date; new deploys need a rollback plan; new client commitments need a delivery-team sign-off. In red, the rules are hard: all recurring meetings cancelled and must reapply; deploy freeze; commitment moratorium. Write them as specific, enforceable actions — not aspirations.
- Assign one owner. One named person is accountable for monitoring the commons, declaring zone transitions, and enforcing the rules. Not a committee. A person with the authority to say “no” when the commons is in amber or red. Without an owner, the charter is a document. With an owner, it is governance.
- Keep it to one page. If the charter does not fit on a single page, it is too complex to be followed. Publish it where every person who draws from the commons will see it. Review the thresholds quarterly. Adjust based on data, not on complaints.
Example: Meeting-Time Commons Charter
| Zone | Threshold | Rules |
|---|---|---|
| Green | Avg meeting load < 15 hrs/person/week | Normal scheduling. Weekly report published. |
| Amber | Avg meeting load 15–22 hrs/person/week | New recurring meetings require written purpose and exit date. Meetings > 5 people require manager approval. Focus blocks protected. |
| Red | Avg meeting load > 22 hrs/person/week | All recurring meetings cancelled and must reapply. No new meetings without director approval. Two full no-meeting days enforced. Recovery review in two weeks. |
Owner: Head of Engineering. Published: team wiki, reviewed quarterly.
The charter is deliberately simple. One commons, one metric, three zones, clear rules, one owner. You can build it in an hour. The value is not in the sophistication of the design. It is in the existence of any governance at all. Most commons in most organisations have zero governance. Moving from zero to one is the step that changes things.
- Governing the wrong commons. You build a charter for meeting time while the real depletion is happening in client trust. The governed commons improves but performance does not. Fix: before choosing which commons to govern, map all of them. Start with the one whose depletion is creating the most downstream damage.
- Thresholds set too generously. If the red zone never activates, the governance is decorative. Set the thresholds so that amber triggers at least once per quarter. If neither zone has ever been entered, the thresholds are not protecting the commons — they are providing false comfort.
- No enforcement. The charter exists. The owner does not act on it. People continue scheduling meetings in the red zone because nobody says no. Governance without enforcement is a memo. The owner must have the authority and the willingness to enforce constraints — especially when it is uncomfortable.
- Moralising instead of structuring. Sending an email asking people to “be more mindful of meeting load” is not governance. It is a request for voluntary self-restraint from people whose incentives point in the opposite direction. It will produce a brief improvement followed by reversion to the structural baseline. Build the structure. Do not rely on the mood.
The Internal Commons
Everything I have described so far operates between people. But the framework applies just as directly inside a single person.
Your attention is a commons that every demand in your work life draws from. Your patience is a commons that every frustrating interaction depletes. Your willingness to care about quality is a commons that every unrewarded effort erodes. And the tragedy-of-the-commons mechanism operates identically: each individual demand seems small, the cost is delayed and diffuse, feedback is weak, and overuse becomes normal — until you collapse, and a minor trigger produces a reaction that shocks even you.
Burnout is a tragedy of the internal commons. It is not caused by one overwhelming event. It is caused by dozens of individually reasonable demands drawing from the same pool with no rules, no monitoring, and no recovery protocol. Each “yes” is a withdrawal. And because each one is small, you do not notice the depletion until a slow internet connection or a clumsy question from a colleague produces a wave of fury that is entirely out of proportion to the trigger — but entirely proportionate to the accumulated drain.
The three levers work internally too. Make the resource visible: notice what drains you, specifically, for a week. Install fast feedback: check in with yourself daily, not when you are already breaking. Agree on rules: set minimum deposits (recovery, rest, activities that actually replenish) and maximum withdrawals (a cap on commitments, a practice of saying no before the tank is empty rather than after).
Key Takeaways
- Every organisation has commons — attention, reliability, trust, focus, goodwill between teams — that are shared resources consumed by independent people with weak feedback loops. If you do not govern them, they get depleted. Every time.
- The mechanism is structural, not moral. People deplete commons because the benefit is private and the cost is shared. Appealing to accountability does not change the structure. Changing the feedback loops does.
- Most organisational problems that look like “people problems” — burnout, missed deadlines, declining quality, client churn — are actually commons problems wearing a disguise.
- Three levers protect the commons: make the resource visible (name it, track the leaks and deposits), install fast feedback (make the cost personal and timely), and agree on rules of use (caps, budgets, recovery protocols).
- Start with one. Pick the most depleted commons in your organisation. Build a governance charter. One page. One hour of work. The return is disproportionate because you are protecting a resource that everything else depends on.
- The framework applies to your internal commons too. Burnout is the tragedy of the commons operating inside a single nervous system.
The tragedy of the commons is not inevitable. It is the default outcome when governance is absent. The pasture survives when the people using it agree on a carrying capacity, a way of measuring it, and a set of rules. Your organisation’s commons are no different. The question is not whether you have commons. You do. The question is whether you are governing them or watching them drain.
If you recognise the commons dynamic in your organisation and want help building the visibility, feedback, and governance that protects the resource — that is the work.
Request Assessment