The shelf behind this book

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.

Some of the books behind this book are in the notes to each chapter. Others shaped the thinking from further back, long before there was code, and don't fit neatly into any one chapter's footnotes. They're here, grouped loosely, with a line on why each matters and where its influence shows. It's a shelf, not a syllabus.

Organising without a boss

  • Laloux, F. (2014), Reinventing Organizations, Nelson Parker. The book that showed whole organisations already working this way. Its threads of self-management, wholeness and evolutionary purpose run through Parts two and three.
  • Bockelbrink, B., Priest, J. and David, L., Sociocracy 3.0: A Practical Guide, freely available from the authors. A modular, openly licensed take on sociocracy: patterns any group can pick up, including consent and the drivers behind a change. Its spirit of small, separable practices sits close to Chapter 11.
  • Robertson, B. J. (2015), Holacracy, Henry Holt. Roles over people, tensions as fuel, a written constitution. Much of the structure in Chapters 9 and 11 began as a conversation with it.
  • Nixon, T. (2021), Work with Source. Who brings something into the world, and how responsibility is taken rather than given. Chapters 7 and 20 agree with it and part company with it.
  • Semler, R. (1993), Maverick, Century. A Brazilian company where people set their own hours and pay and chose their managers, decades before the word Teal. Proof, early on, that it could be done at scale.
  • Carney, B. M. and Getz, I. (2009), Freedom, Inc., Crown Business. More organisations that took command away and found their people stepped up.
  • Hsieh, T. (2010), Delivering Happiness, Business Plus. The company behind the best-known Holacracy story, in its founder's words, before the story got hard.
  • Mackey, J. and Sisodia, R. (2013), Conscious Capitalism, Harvard Business Review Press, and Kofman, F. (2006), Conscious Business, Sounds True. Business as something that can serve more than its owners.
  • Dethmer, J., Chapman, D. and Klemp, K. W. (2014), The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership, Conscious Leadership Group. Leading from responsibility rather than blame. It sits behind the Clearing, the space kept off the record, in Chapter 23.

Systems, dialogue and the learning organisation

  • Senge, P. M. (1990), The Fifth Discipline, Doubleday. The learning organisation, and the habit of seeing the whole system rather than the part in front of you. Chapter 5.
  • Senge, P., Scharmer, C. O., Jaworski, J. and Flowers, B. S. (2004), Presence: Human Purpose and the Field of the Future, Society for Organizational Learning. Where sensing together, and Scharmer's U, first took shape. Behind the Field in Chapter 10.
  • Jaworski, J. (1996), Synchronicity: The Inner Path of Leadership, Berrett-Koehler. Leadership as creating the conditions for what wants to happen.
  • Bohm, D. (1996), On Dialogue, Routledge, and Isaacs, W. (1999), Dialogue and the Art of Thinking Together, Currency. A group thinking together before anyone decides. Chapters 10 and 11.
  • Capra, F. (1996), The Web of Life, Anchor Books, and (2002), The Hidden Connections, HarperCollins. Life, and organisations, as networks rather than machines. Chapter 5.
  • de Geus, A. (1997), The Living Company, Harvard Business School Press. Why a few companies live for centuries. Chapters 5 and 24.
  • Beer, S. (1972), Brain of the Firm, Allen Lane, and (1979), The Heart of Enterprise, John Wiley. The viable system model: what any organisation needs inside it to stay alive, worked out from how living systems do it, and an alarm that lets pain reach the top without climbing every layer. Chapter 20 leans on it, and parts from it where it needs a centre.

Nature, self-organisation and software

  • Di Marzo Serugendo, G., Karageorgos, A., Rana, O. F. and Zambonelli, F. (eds) (2004), Engineering Self-Organising Systems: Nature-Inspired Approaches to Software Engineering, Springer.
  • Di Marzo Serugendo, G., Gleizes, M.-P. and Karageorgos, A. (eds) (2011), Self-organising Software: From Natural to Artificial Adaptation, Springer. Two collections on building software that coordinates the way colonies and swarms do, without a central controller. They sit behind the idea, in Chapters 4 and 6, that the rules for coordination can live in the system itself.
  • Fukuoka, M. (1978), The One-Straw Revolution, Rodale Press. A farmer who learned to do less and let the land do more. A quiet companion to Chapter 4's argument that much of what we impose, nature already does.

Economy, money and the commons

  • Raworth, K. (2017), Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist, Random House Business. An economy that meets everyone's needs within the planet's limits, with a social floor beneath and an ecological ceiling above. It sits behind the floor in Chapter 17 and the society picture in Chapter 30.
  • Ostrom, E. (1990), Governing the Commons, Cambridge University Press. People governing shared resources well without a ruler or an owner. Chapters 1 and 17.

Integral and developmental

  • Beck, D. E. and Cowan, C. C. (1996), Spiral Dynamics, Blackwell. Clare W. Graves's research on how values emerge as life conditions change. Chapter 3.
  • Wilber, K. (1996), A Brief History of Everything, Shambhala; (2000), A Theory of Everything, Shambhala; (2006), Integral Spirituality, Shambhala. The integral map that carried Graves into the colours Laloux used.
  • McIntosh, S. (2007), Integral Consciousness and the Future of Evolution, Paragon House. The integral view applied to culture and its next steps.
  • Kegan, R. (1994), In Over Our Heads, Harvard University Press. How the mind grows to meet what life asks of it. Chapter 19.
  • Torbert, W. R. (2004), Action Inquiry, Berrett-Koehler, and Rooke, D. and Torbert, W. R. (2005), "Seven Transformations of Leadership", Harvard Business Review. How leaders grow, and act differently as they do.
  • Barrett, R. (1998), Liberating the Corporate Soul, Butterworth-Heinemann. Seven levels of consciousness, read in organisations as well as people.

What people could become

  • Hillman, J. (1996), The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling, Random House. The idea that each person carries a calling. It sits behind seats chosen rather than assigned, in Chapter 7, and behind members saying, in their own words, which open seat they'd like, in Chapter 10.
  • Eisenstein, C. (2007), The Ascent of Humanity, Panenthea Press. A long argument that our crises grow from a story of separation, and that a story of connection is possible. Chapters 1 and 30.
  • Macy, J. and Brown, M. Y. (2014), Coming Back to Life: The Updated Guide to the Work That Reconnects, New Society Publishers. Turning grief for the world into the energy to act, together. The tone of Chapter 30 owes it something.
  • Vaughan-Lee, L. (ed.) (2013), Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth, The Golden Sufi Center. Essays on the inner side of the ecological crisis: that how we see the world shapes how we treat it.
  • Hubbard, B. M. (1998), Conscious Evolution: Awakening the Power of Our Social Potential, New World Library. The social potential movement: the question of human potential asked of people together. Chapters 1 and 30.
  • Gladwell, M. (2005), Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Little, Brown. How much of what we know, we know before we can explain it. A small piece of the case in Chapter 30 that thinking isn't our only intelligence.
  • Maslow, A. H. (1971), The Farther Reaches of Human Nature, Viking. What people reach for once their needs are met. Chapter 30.
  • Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990), Flow, Harper and Row. What it feels like when work and self line up.
  • Covey, S. R. (1989), The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Free Press. Responsibility taken, not given, long before it reached organisations.
  • Dilts, R. (1996), Visionary Leadership Skills, Meta Publications, and (2003), From Coach to Awakener, Meta Publications; Bandler, R. and Grinder, J. (1979), Frogs into Princes, Real People Press; Robbins, A. (1986), Unlimited Power, Simon and Schuster. Neuro-linguistic programming and its descendants: a practical grasp of what makes people tick, and what keeps them stuck.
  • Pink, D. H. (2009), Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, Riverhead Books. For thoughtful work, people are moved by autonomy, mastery and purpose, and rewards tied to performance can make it worse. The research behind no scores on people, the floor, and seats chosen rather than assigned. Chapters 12 and 17.
  • Sinek, S. (2009), Start with Why, Portfolio. Purpose before method, put plainly. Chapter 8.

Building a venture

  • Ries, E. (2011), The Lean Startup, Crown Business, and Osterwalder, A. and Pigneur, Y. (2010), Business Model Generation, Wiley. A venture as a set of guesses to test, not a plan to execute. Chapter 14.

  • Christensen, C. M. (1997), The Innovator's Dilemma, Harvard Business School Press. Why well-run incumbents miss the new thing growing underneath them, and can't follow it without undoing what makes them who they are. The business case for building around the tower. Chapter 30.

Consciousness and spirit

  • Walsch, N. D. (1995), Conversations with God, Book 1. One of the books that set the search going, long before any of this had a shape.
  • Tolle, E. (1997), The Power of Now, Namaste Publishing; (2005), A New Earth, Dutton. Presence, and the ego seen for what it is.
  • Eisenstein, C. (2011), Sacred Economics, Evolver Editions. An economy of gift and connection. Chapters 17 and 30.
  • Hoffman, D. (2019), The Case Against Reality, W. W. Norton. That what we perceive is an interface, not the world itself: a humbling thought for anyone who believes their map.

AI and the future

  • Bostrom, N. (2014), Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, Oxford University Press. The serious case for caution about capable AI. Part of why, in Chapter 22, Wise-Eye's limits are held in structure rather than in instructions.
  • Harari, Y. N. (2018), 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, Jonathan Cape. What work, meaning and freedom become as algorithms take more of each. Chapter 30 answers some of its questions differently.
  • Davidson, J. D. and Rees-Mogg, W. (1997), The Sovereign Individual, Simon and Schuster. A very different use of the word sovereign, built on the individual rather than the relationship. Chapter 1 explains why this book doesn't share it.

If a book shaped how you think about any of this, and you think it belongs here, tell us.