Chapter 1. A society of sovereigns

A working draft, November 2026. This book is being written while The Grove is being built; expect it to change. Checked against the build as it stood on 1 November 2026.

In this chapter

• Why today's crises share one trap underneath: a failure to coordinate, not a moral failing
• Why the organisation, between the individual and the state, is where change can start
• What Elinor Ostrom found about commons, and which two of her principles we set aside
• What "sovereign" means here, for people, for organisations and for a whole society
• How AI could leave people the human part, and what that depends on

Open any news feed and it doesn't take long to feel small.

The climate is shifting faster than many of us expected. Wars that seemed unthinkable a few years ago are on the evening news. Artificial intelligence is arriving in every corner of life, and nobody quite knows what it will do to work, to truth, or to us. Trust in institutions is thinning. Inequality keeps widening. Every few weeks something new lands on the pile before the last thing has been dealt with.

It can feel like a game of Tetris that's speeding up. The blocks keep falling, faster each time, and the rows pile higher than we can clear them.

Faced with all that, a reasonable person might conclude that the problems are simply too big. Too big for me, too big for my team, too big for the organisation I work in. These are problems for governments and global treaties, or perhaps for no one at all. The best I can do is look after my own corner and try not to make things worse.

We want to take that feeling seriously, because it's honest. And then we want to question it.

The trap underneath

People who study these crises have started to notice that they aren't really separate problems. They share something underneath.

Some call it the polycrisis: many crises tangled together, each making the others worse. Others, like the thinker Daniel Schmachtenberger, use the word metacrisis: a single pattern that keeps producing new crises, whatever the surface looks like.¹ The pattern goes something like this.

Imagine a lake shared by a dozen fishermen. Each one knows that if everyone fishes less, the lake will stay healthy for years. But each one also knows that if he holds back and the others don't, he'll go hungry and the lake will be emptied anyway. So each one, acting sensibly for himself, fishes as hard as he can. The lake dies, and nobody wanted it to.

The ecologist Garrett Hardin called this the tragedy of the commons.² Game theorists call a version of it the prisoner's dilemma. In recent years it has picked up a darker name, Moloch, after an essay that described it as the god of races to the bottom: the force that makes everyone do what nobody wants, because nobody can afford to stop first.³

Once you see it, you see it everywhere. Companies cutting corners because their competitors do. Countries that won't cut emissions until others go first. Social media platforms that know their designs harm people, but can't stop competing for attention. Arms races of every kind. It isn't that the people involved are wicked. Most of them would choose differently if they could. It's that the way we're organised rewards the wrong move.

That's the part worth holding on to. The trap isn't a moral failing. It's a coordination failure. And coordination is something we can design.

Too big for one person, too slow for governments

When problems feel this large, we tend to reach for one of two answers.

The first is the individual. Fly less, eat less meat, recycle, donate, buy the ethical brand, march. All good things. But the burden lands on people who are already stretched, and it quietly suggests that the solution lies in each of us trying harder on our own. It's convenient for some to keep the conversation there, because it leaves the larger patterns untouched. And it leaves a lot of good people exhausted and guilty, carrying a weight no one person can carry.

The second answer is the state. Pass laws, sign treaties, regulate. Also necessary. But governments move slowly, they're caught in their own races to the bottom, and they too are organised in ways that send information up and decisions down, long after the moment has passed.

Between the individual and the state there's a layer that often gets overlooked. It's where most adults spend more of their waking hours than anywhere else. It's where we learn, every working day, how power works: who gets heard, who decides, what happens to the person who speaks up. It's where money, effort and attention actually get coordinated.

It's the organisation.

For as long as I can remember, I've been drawn to one question: what could people become? Not just one person, but teams, organisations, whole societies. My working life wandered, from code to boardrooms to coaching to facilitation and somatic work, but it kept circling back to that question.

I can't tell you where that kind of search comes from. I knew in my heart that the way we organised was wrong long before my head could explain why, and I refused to let the feeling go. I let it steer my life, which some would call foolish, and it has turned out fine. What I came to believe is simple: people are beautiful, loving creatures caught in a trap of the mind. Given half a chance, they're extraordinary.

I felt that half chance for myself when I worked inside a Holacracy organisation, and again as a solo founder. I have a phrase I live by: I am life as it meets me. It means meeting whatever comes with agency, not waiting for permission. My own life has been the experiment.

Organisations as the practice ground

Organisations are where we practise the habits a society runs on.

If every working day teaches you that someone above you decides, that speaking up is risky and that your job is to comply, it would be surprising if you brought anything different to your community or your vote. If every working day teaches you that you can sense what's wrong, raise it, and change how things are done, that habit travels too.

Organisations are also where coordination either works or fails. Within one, a race to the bottom can be stopped: people can agree to hold back together, because they can see each other and trust that the agreement will hold. Between organisations, the same thing becomes possible once they have a way to commit together: to act only when enough others act too. That's one of the things we're still building towards. Much of what's broken at the scale of societies could be practised, tested and mended first at the scale of organisations.

And organisations are where the change can start now. You don't need a treaty to change how your team makes decisions. You don't need a new government to change who in your organisation gets heard.

There's evidence it can work

This isn't just hope. For decades, people assumed shared resources had only two possible fates: either a government took control, or the resource was divided up and privatised. Anything else would end like Hardin's lake.

The political economist Elinor Ostrom spent her career showing that this wasn't true. She studied fisheries, forests, irrigation systems and grazing land around the world, some managed by local communities for centuries, and found many that thrived without either a central authority or private ownership. What they had in common were well-designed rules made by the people who used the resource: clear boundaries, ways to monitor what was happening, fair consequences for breaking the rules, and ways to resolve conflict that everyone could reach.⁴ In 2009 she became the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize in economics, largely for this work.

Ostrom's commons weren't utopias. They were ordinary people who had found a way to coordinate without being ruled. That's the kind of thing we mean.

Most of what she found has a counterpart later in this book: clear boundaries, rules made by the people they bind, nested levels that each run their own affairs, and a way to resolve conflict that anyone can reach. Two of her principles we've chosen not to follow, and it's only fair to say so. In her commons, people watched each other, and those who took too much faced consequences, small at first and growing. We don't want an organisation where colleagues police each other. So in an organisation on The Grove the watching is turned on the organisation rather than the person: the work shows where things are going wrong without naming who. And there are no sanctions on people at all. What does that work instead is trust that has to keep being renewed, a concern that holds a change until it's met, and a look back at every decision to see whether it did what it said. Whether that's enough is one of the things this book exists to find out.

What we mean by sovereign

We use the word sovereign a lot in this book, and it needs care, because it has other uses.

We don't mean the lone individual who owes nothing to anyone, or the strongman who answers to no one. We mean something closer to self-authorship: the capacity to sense your own situation, decide what matters, take responsibility for it, and stand in honest relationship with others who are doing the same. A sovereign person isn't isolated. They're the opposite of a cog.

Barbara Marx Hubbard had a name for the person we're reaching for: the universal human. She meant someone whose sense of self has widened from the separate self to the whole they're part of, and who finds their fullest expression in giving their own part to it. That's the sovereign we mean. Not a smaller self dissolved into the group, but a self wide enough to hold its connections.

Otto Scharmer describes the same widening at the scale of whole systems: a shift from ego-system awareness, where each part looks after itself, to eco-system awareness, where each part acts with the well-being of the whole in view. My own shorthand for it, ego to eco, comes straight from him. It's also what the fishermen at the lake were missing.

For me, being sovereign means being the author of my own life. Life is chaotic and unpredictable; what I make of it is mine to answer for. Nobody else can take that from me, and nobody else should have to carry it for me.

Three levels of it run through the book.

Sovereign people. It starts here, and it belongs to the person. Nobody grants it, and no organisation can take it away. What an organisation can do is give it room or crowd it out. The organisations we mean give it room: people can see the whole of what they're part of, raise what they sense, take up the work they're drawn to, and leave when they need to. Not managed, not assigned, not scored.

Sovereign organisations. Organisations that answer to their own purpose, not to whoever funds them, hosts them or owns the ground they stand on. Nothing they depend on can be taken away, or used as leverage, by anyone outside. That independence is what makes an organisation sovereign. Keeping a boss from growing inside is a separate matter. An organisation where money can fund the work but never buy a say, and where no single person can capture the whole, is one that leaves its people room for their own sovereignty. That's what The Grove's guardrails are for.

A sovereign society. A society made of many such organisations, able to work together and commit together without one of them ruling the rest. Self-sustaining, not because someone at the top holds it together, but because its parts can sense, respond and coordinate.

Put like that, it can sound grand. In practice it starts small: one team that decides for itself, one founder who doesn't become the boss, one organisation that keeps its promises without anyone cracking a whip.

Three lines have guided us since the start, and they say the same thing more briefly. Flow is the new force. Unfolding is the new invention. Collaboration is the new competition. Force gives way to flow, the master plan gives way to what unfolds, and winning alone gives way to winning together.

A society that leaves us the human part

There's one more thread, and it matters more each month.

Artificial intelligence is going to take over a great deal of work. That can go two ways. It can make the old pattern stronger: fewer people, more control, faster races to the bottom. Or it can take on the survival work, the admin, the routing, the chasing, the paperwork, and leave people free for what only people can do: sensing what matters, caring for each other, imagining, creating.

We think the second is possible, but it won't happen by default. It depends on how organisations are built. An AI added to a command-and-control organisation will mostly make the commands faster. An AI working inside an organisation where people hold the purpose and make the decisions can carry the load while people keep the say.

That's the future this book is reaching for. People as the sparks, the sensing organs and the heart of their organisations. Organisations as living things that can see themselves and change. A society built from many of them, each sovereign, all connected.

How we decided

We had to decide where to begin. The obvious place was the product: here's what The Grove does, here's how it works. We chose not to, because a tool without a reason is just another tool, and most readers have seen plenty of those.

We also weighed where to aim. Policy and politics were tempting, because that's where the big levers seem to be, but they're slow, contested, and not where most people can act tomorrow. Individual change was the other pull, but it puts the weight on the people least able to bear it. We settled on organisations because they sit in the middle: big enough to matter, small enough to change, and the place where most of us spend our days.

And we argued about the word sovereign. We considered autonomous, self-managed and free. Autonomous sounded like machines. Self-managed sounded like a management technique. Free promised too much. Sovereign carries baggage, and we know some readers will hear politics in it that we don't intend. We kept it because it's the only word that holds both freedom and responsibility at once, and because it scales: it means something for a person, an organisation and a society.

We may still be wrong about that. If so, we'll change it.

What you might take from this

The problems of our time feel too big because we're looking at them from the two places where we have least power: alone, or waiting for governments. Between the two sits the organisation, where we spend our days, where we learn how power works, and where coordination either fails or succeeds.

If we can learn to organise differently there, we're practising the society we want.

Notes and further reading

For the feeling of acceleration and what it does to us: Rosa, H. (2019), Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World, Polity. For a lively conversation about these ideas from the self-management world, the podcast Islands of Resonance, hosted by Dennis Wittrock and Tobias Klose. For the universal human, a self that has widened to include the whole: Hubbard, B. M. (1998), Conscious Evolution: Awakening the Power of Our Social Potential, New World Library. For the shift from ego-system to eco-system awareness: Scharmer, C. O. and Kaufer, K. (2013), Leading from the Emerging Future: From Ego-System to Eco-System Economies, Berrett-Koehler. For a different, more individualist use of "sovereign" that this book does not share: Davidson, J. D. and Rees-Mogg, W. (1997), The Sovereign Individual, Simon and Schuster.