What does it mean that community schemas evolve slowly?

Shared schemas in teams or cultures change more slowly than individual ones.

Example: You read a paper that changes how you think about system reliability. Within a day, your personal mental model has shifted. But your team still operates on the old assumptions — reviewing outages with the old framework, assigning blame with the old causal model. Six months later, you bring it up in a retro, and someone says 'that's just how we do it here.' The team schema didn't evolve. It calcified.

Try this: Identify one shared schema in your team or organization that you believe is outdated — a process assumption, a decision framework, or a way of categorizing work. Write down (1) what the current shared schema is, (2) what you think it should evolve into, and (3) who would need to change their behavior for the new schema to take hold. Count the people. That number is your coordination cost.