Scenario. For ten years, a small philosophy department has ended its Friday seminar with a half-hour drink in the common room where nobody is allowed to keep arguing about the paper — you can only talk about what the paper made you think about elsewhere, or something you're stuck on. Junior faculty credit that half-hour with most of what they learned about doing philosophy well. This fall, a new dean has restructured space, and the common room is gone. The department is meeting on Thursday to decide whether to fight for it or let it go. The chair, Paolo, is realizing the fight is not really about the room; it is about a practice that kept the department honest about what it was for.

Challenge: Design a set of informal practices — rituals, conversations, shared habits — through which a group keeps the question of its purpose alive in the register of norms rather than rules. Produce the practices themselves plus the triggers, ownership, and scaling rules that keep them from decaying into compliance theater.