Before we begin

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 opening

  • A short video tour of the page people use, in a simulated organisation
  • Why the book is written in public while the system is still being built
  • How "is", "building towards" and "we don't know" mark what's built and what isn't
  • The road from here: closing the gaps, the test bench, the sandpit, going live with the Steward, early adopters, and scale
  • Who the book is written for, and why every chapter starts with a doubt
  • Four ways in, for readers coming from agentic AI, self-management, DAOs or living systems
  • How the six parts run, and the shape each chapter follows
  • Why "I", "we" and "us" all appear, and who each of them is

See it first

A tour of the page people use, about ten minutes long, seen from inside Still Water, a simulated organisation on the test bench. Its people, its work and its decisions were all grown and run by AI people. The rest of the book explains what you're looking at.

This book is being written while the thing it describes is still being built.

That's worth saying first, because most books about organisations arrive finished. The research is done, the case studies are polished, the model has a name and a diagram, and the author's job is to convince you it works. This isn't that book. It's closer to a field journal kept on the way up a mountain nobody has quite climbed before. Some chapters will be written from solid ground. Others will be written from a ledge, looking at the next stretch and not yet sure of the route.

So, plainly: this book isn't complete, and we don't claim that what's in it is right. Some of it will turn out to be wrong. We'd rather tell you that now than have you find out later and wonder what else we kept quiet.

What we can promise is that it's honest about where it stands.

One convention helps with that. When we say something in the system is so, it's built and working as the book is written. When something is decided but not built yet, we say we're building towards it. When we don't know, we say that too. Each chapter notes the build it was checked against, because the build keeps moving. One more thing about where things stand. The organisations on The Grove today are simulated: seeded, grown and run by AI people, while we test the design, the experience, scale and security. That isn't the shape The Grove goes live in. When it's open to anyone, each organisation will be its own independent DAO, running its own copy of the operating system, with its own DNA growing in it. Until then, the way to try it is a sandpit: a simulated organisation at a key moment in its life, where you take the part of one of its people and see it from the inside. A place to play before anything is at stake. And the system has a lot of named parts. If a word stops you, the page at the back, The parts and what they do, says what it is and which chapter explains it.

The road from here

So you can place what you read, here's the order we expect things to happen in. It's a direction, not a timetable, and it may change as we learn.

  1. Closing the gaps. Finishing what's still missing, until the system is as complete as we can see it being on our own.
  2. The test bench. Alongside that, organisations seeded, grown and run by AI people, so we can test the design, the experience, scale and security, and change things quickly.
  3. The sandpit. The first people to use it beyond the one human who built it: step into a simulated organisation at a key moment in its life, take the part of one of its people, and play. We expect more fixes from that, and rounds of it, until it's stable.
  4. Going live. Each organisation its own independent DAO, running its own copy of the operating system, with its own DNA growing in it, and free to take a legal form when it needs one. The Steward is there from the first day: an organisation like any other, looking after the code for the organisations that run it. From then on, everything is formal: releases, changes and how the system itself is looked after all go through the Steward's own decisions, in the open.
  5. Early adopters. The first organisations to come on, with plenty of hand-holding.
  6. Scale, and working together. More organisations, and organisations working with each other: services, agreements, and in time the ability to commit together.

Each chapter says which of these the thing it describes belongs to: built and working on the test bench, or still to come.

Why write it now

We're writing this now because the time is right. In about two months we built an operating system for organisations, and almost none of it is new. The answers have been around for years, in self-management, in systems thinking, in the way living things organise themselves. What's changed is that the technology to make them work is finally here.

The hard part was never the code. It's us. If we all woke up tomorrow having somehow forgotten that hierarchy ever existed, I think we'd build something very different. We can't forget, of course. So this is one example of what we could build instead, offered in the hope that it opens a door onto what's possible.

For years before that, the idea was mine to carry, and it was too big to hold alone. The thinking alone was a lifetime's work, and the code was more. Then the tools changed. It became possible to try an idea, throw it away and start again in days rather than years. So I brought the idea to the "we", and we started building. Years of solo work were compressed into weeks.

The result is an operating system for organisations that run without a boss. Not without leadership, and not without structure, but without someone at the top who has to know everything, decide everything and tell everyone. It's a system of means and guardrails. The means are what an organisation needs to run: ways to sense, decide, route work, keep promises and see itself. The guardrails are what stop it drifting back to the old ways when people are tired or under pressure. What it doesn't do is dictate how an organisation should be shaped. Each organisation's shape, its purpose, its parts and its agreements, is its own, held as data. We think of that as the organisation's DNA. The code underneath is only the substrate it grows on.

The system itself doesn't have a name. The first network of organisations running on it is called The Grove, and that's the name you'll see most in these pages.

We could have waited until it was finished and then written it up. We chose not to, for three reasons.

The first is that it will never be finished. A system built to let organisations sense and respond has to keep sensing and responding itself. A book that waited for the last word would wait for ever.

The second is that the thinking matters as much as the result. Every part of The Grove came from a choice between options, and most of those choices were hard. If you only see the answers, you can't judge them. So in every chapter you'll find a section called How we decided: what we weighed, what we chose, and why. Sometimes you'll disagree. That's the point.

The third is that we need you. The ideas in this book stand on the shoulders of a lot of people who have thought carefully about how humans organise: in self-management, in systems thinking, in biology, in economics, in the study of how people grow. Some of them will read this and see things we've missed. We'd rather hear it while there's still time to change course.

One of those people deserves naming here, at the start, because so much of what follows is her work carried forward. Barbara Marx Hubbard, who lived from 1929 to 2019, spent most of her long life on the question that has run through mine: not only what one person could become, but what we could become together. She called her answer conscious evolution: the idea that humanity can now take part, knowingly and by choice, in its own next step. She saw humanity as one organism in the middle of being born, and read our crises not as the end of the story but as birth pangs. And she saw that the human potential movement, which asked what a single person could grow into, needed a next step. She called it the social potential movement: the same question, asked of groups, organisations and whole societies.

Looking back at what we've built, I can see her everywhere in it. An organisation treated as something alive, born and changing. People drawn towards their own part rather than placed in one. Concerns met and woven in rather than outvoted. Attention paid to what's working. These are her ideas, given a structure and some code, and where they surface in the chapters that follow, I've tried to say so. She was a dear soul, and a brave one, and this book owes her more than a footnote can carry.

She isn't the only one. Otto Scharmer's books, which I devoured one after another, taught me to sense before deciding, to listen from the whole rather than from my own corner, and to try the future in small pieces rather than plan it whole. You'll find him in how an organisation on The Grove senses together and tests its vision. And the research of the psychologist Clare W. Graves, carried into the world by Don Beck and Christopher Cowan as Spiral Dynamics, gave me a way to understand why people and organisations see the world so differently, without ever needing to rank them.

Life is an experiment

There's a phrase we keep coming back to: life is an experiment.

It isn't meant casually. It's how we've tried to build. A founder's vision, in The Grove, is treated as a hypothesis, not a plan. A proposal says what it expects to change and gets looked back on to see if it did. Structure grows where the work proves it's needed and fades where it doesn't. Nothing is assumed to be true just because someone important said it.

It would be strange to write a book about that and then pretend the book itself was settled truth. So this book is an experiment too. Each chapter is our best current understanding. When we learn something that changes it, we'll change it, and say so.

Who this is for

We've written for a particular reader, and it helps to say who.

You're thoughtful, and a little tired. You've been through restructures that changed the boxes but not the work. You've sat in workshops where everyone agreed something important and then nothing happened. Perhaps you've tried self-management, or agile, or some other promise of a better way, and come away with scars as well as insights. You don't need convincing that something is wrong. You need convincing that anything else could actually work.

You might be doing the work in a traditional organisation, and wondering why the people who know the customer best have the least say. You might be a founder who doesn't want to become the boss you left behind. You might be a coach or consultant who has seen the dark side of transformation programmes. You might be a practitioner of Holacracy or sociocracy, curious about what changes when software and AI can carry what people used to carry by hand.

Wherever you're starting from, we'll assume you're a sceptic. Each chapter begins with a doubt, stated as fairly as we can, and tries to move one step from "that can't work" towards "that might work here". If a chapter doesn't move you, it hasn't done its job, and we'd like to know.

How the book is built

The book runs in six parts.

Part one looks at the world we're in: the crises that seem too big to touch, what all our small actions add up to and hand back to us, the habit of putting someone in charge, and what nature does instead.

Part two asks what an organisation would look like if we took nature seriously, why that needs an operating system, and where people fit.

Part three goes inside, piece by piece: purpose, the building blocks of an organisation, how decisions get made, how trust is earned, how work finds its way, how vision gets tested, how promises are kept, how the organisation meets people at its front door, how money moves, and how the organisation takes a legal form so it can act in the world.

Part four is about an organisation that can see itself: how it reads its own state, how it holds the whole without a centre, the sense of itself we're building towards, the role of AI, and what it remembers.

Part five goes beyond one organisation: how they're born, divide and end; how they work together; how the system itself is kept out of anyone's grip; and a strawman for how a network might grow towards needing less of the outside world.

Part six comes back to where we started: how we test all this before people live it, and what might become possible if it works.

Every chapter follows a similar shape. It starts with a doubt, looks at what the current way costs, offers something that loosens the doubt, shows what changes, explains how we decided, and ends with one thought you could take to a colleague. Footnotes point to the people whose work we've leaned on, and to further reading for anyone who wants to go deeper. You can skip them entirely and lose nothing of the argument. They're there for the curious and the doubtful.

Ways in

Not everyone arrives from the same place, and the book doesn't have to be read in order. If you come with a particular interest, these short pages say what The Grove looks like from where you stand, and which chapters to read first:

Measured against others

We also hold the design up against the work of networks whose ideas we respect, and set out where we think it lines up, where it takes a different road, and where we might be wrong. These pages sit at the back of the book. So far: the P2P Foundation, Enspiral, Sensorica and the Platform Cooperativism Consortium. More will follow.

Two kinds of language

People who think about organisations for a living have their own vocabulary: words like holarchy, stigmergy, consent, viable systems. They're useful words. They name things that otherwise take a paragraph to describe. But they can also make a book feel like a closed room.

We've tried to keep the door open. Where a field's word earns its place, we use it, and explain it the first time it appears. Where a plain word will do, we use the plain one. If you're new to all this, you shouldn't stumble. If you've spent years in it, you shouldn't feel talked down to. We won't always get the balance right.

A note on "I", "we" and "us"

You'll see all three, and the lines between them are deliberate.

"I" is Mark. It's the years before The Grove existed: the experiences that shaped the question, the things that failed and the things that kept nagging. And it's the future I hope for, wherever the book looks ahead to what might become possible. Those are beliefs before they're designs, and a belief is one person's to own.

But even my "I" isn't mine alone. For thirty years I've read the people who thought about these things before me: about organisations and systems, about how people grow, about consciousness and what we might become. The shelf at the back of this book names many of them. I couldn't have come to any of the ideas I've put an "I" to without them. Where they surface in a chapter, I've tried to say so.

"We" begins the moment the idea was shared. From then on, The Grove was conceived, argued over, designed, tested and built by one human working alongside AI collaborators: in conversation, in code, in long sessions of testing and rethinking. Every decision was a person's. Very little of the work was done alone, and claiming it as "I" would be untrue.

The "we" is wider than that, though. Many people have shaped this through conversation: practitioners, friends, people who pushed back, people who asked the question I hadn't thought to ask. They aren't named here, but they're part of it, and their mark is on more pages than they know. I needed the AI to get going. The "we" deserves more humans, and it will grow as others add what they see. If you take part, whether by disagreeing, by trying it, or by telling us where it breaks, you're in it too.

That, as it happens, is also one of the book's arguments. An organisation where people are the spark, the ones who sense, care and decide, and where AI carries much of the load. We've been living a small version of it while writing.

And "us" is who it's for. Not for me. This is my offering, in a shape I think is needed, and it belongs to whoever can use it. It's for us. All of us. We deserve it.

What we hope you'll take from this

Not agreement. Agreement is cheap, and it rarely changes anything.

What we hope for is that, somewhere in these pages, a question you've carried for a while gets a little sharper. That you see something in your own organisation you hadn't quite named. That you try something small and see what happens.

And if you think we've got something wrong, tell us. That's how experiments work.

Notes and further reading

For readers who want a way into the traditions this book draws on, six starting points:

  • Laloux, F. (2014), Reinventing Organizations, Nelson Parker: the most widely read survey of organisations that work without traditional hierarchy.
  • Robertson, B. J. (2015), Holacracy: The New Management System for a Rapidly Changing World, Henry Holt: the practice that gave authority to roles rather than people.
  • Meadows, D. H. (2008), Thinking in Systems: A Primer, Chelsea Green: a clear, short introduction to seeing organisations and societies as systems.
  • Hubbard, B. M. (1998), Conscious Evolution: Awakening the Power of Our Social Potential, New World Library: the clearest statement of the idea that humanity can take part knowingly in its own evolution, and of the social potential movement this book tries to carry into organisations.
  • Scharmer, C. O. (2016), Theory U: Leading from the Future as It Emerges, second edition, Berrett-Koehler; first published in 2007: sensing together, letting go and letting come, and learning the future by prototyping it. For a shorter way in: Scharmer, C. O. (2018), The Essentials of Theory U, Berrett-Koehler.
  • Beck, D. E. and Cowan, C. C. (1996), Spiral Dynamics: Mastering Values, Leadership, and Change, Blackwell: Clare W. Graves's research on how human values emerge as life conditions change, carried into practice.