Do you mean during Respect Games or for a community-wide decisions?
In Respect Games, nobody receives Respect if the group can’t form consensus.
There is some interesting logic related to this and ‘Ultimatum Games’ that you can find in the ƒractally whitepaper on page 24.
There is also an interesting alternative ‘shared consensus algorithm’ proposed where breakout groups don’t need to reach consensus to receive Respect and instead participants just receive more Respect when there is stronger consensus. You can read about it in this article by James Mart if you’re interested.
This shared consensus algorithm has some interesting benefits and a different set of tradeoffs compared to the traditional Respect Game. James suggested integrating this feature into a front-end UI and I think that it would be good to eventually have this option as another ‘game mode’ of the Respect Game, though I don’t think it’s a very high priority right now. This consensus algorithm has been discussed deeply in other fractal communities and I can share more details about this if anyone would like.
In terms of community-wide decisions, a proposal doesn’t get approved by the council unless a sufficient threshold of consensus has been formed according to the approved process. Similarly if we adopt OREC for executing actions on community accounts, then there is a predefined threshold for reaching consensus and if consensus cannot be reached then an action would not be executed.
Of course, there is always the opportunity for thoughtful discussions to sort out differences in perspectives, align opinions, and form consensus. There is also the possibility that the status quo remains and no changes are made until a new council or OREC is formed with different participants who are able to form consensus.
If none of that is satisfactory for some participants, then there is always the option to stop participating or fork the software, protocols, and/or respect distribution of a community as they wish. This is relatively easy to do because all the software is open-source, the Respect distribution is publicly available onchain, and the community culture respects the rights of others to leave or fork if they wish.