Chapter 17. Money and value

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 "whoever pays decides" could undo everything else, and what it costs
• How trust and money are kept apart as two currencies, so funding never buys a say
• How revenue flows into a shared commons and out to branches by need, with evidence
• How payments are checked, how pay is shared by dials, and what the floor is
• What we're building towards for people who automate their own role, and what value can't be taken

Everything in this book so far could be undone by one old rule: whoever pays decides.

A thoughtful sceptic will put it plainly. You can spread decisions across forums, offer seats instead of assigning them, read the organisation like a living thing. Fine. But follow the money. The part of the organisation that brings in the revenue will end up with the loudest voice, because it can threaten to leave. The investor who funds the next stage will want a seat at the table, and will get one. The person who signs off the budget is the boss, whatever the org chart says. Self-management is a lovely idea until the bills arrive.

It's a fair point, and history is on its side. Plenty of cooperatives and flat organisations have found that the real hierarchy was hiding in the finance spreadsheet all along. If money buys a say, then any structure for sharing power is decoration.

This chapter is about how organisations on The Grove keep money from buying a say, without pretending money doesn't matter.

What the usual arrangement costs

In most organisations, money and voice travel together. The division that earns the most gets the biggest budget and the most attention from the top. The person who controls spending controls the work, because nothing happens that isn't funded. And outside capital comes with strings: a board seat, a veto, a say in who gets hired and what gets built.

The business cost is that decisions get made by whoever holds the purse, not whoever holds the knowledge. The salesperson who closes the deal outranks the engineer who knows it can't be delivered. The investor three steps removed from the customer shapes the product. Organisations drift towards what can be measured and billed, and away from what keeps them healthy.

The human cost is quieter. Some of the most vital work in any organisation earns nothing directly. The person who notices that a colleague is struggling. The mentor who brings a new starter up to speed. The one who keeps saying, months early, that the market is turning. In an arrangement where money follows revenue, that work is invisible at best and a cost centre at worst. The anthropologist David Graeber went further, arguing that across whole economies there's a striking tendency for the most socially useful work to be the worst paid.¹ Whether or not you accept all of his argument, most of us have seen a version of it at work.

And when voice follows money, people learn the lesson fast. If you want a say, get close to the revenue. The carers, the sensers, the quiet builders of things that will matter in three years either leave or stop speaking.

Two currencies

Here's the turn. The sceptic's rule assumes there's only one currency, and that whoever holds it holds everything. But there's no law of nature that says voice and money have to be the same thing. That's a design choice, and it can be made differently.

Organisations on The Grove run on two currencies, and keep a firewall between them.

The first is trust. Trust is what gives someone a voice in decisions. It's earned from peers, through the work people see you do. It lasts only while peers keep giving it. And it can never be bought. There's no exchange rate from money to trust, in either direction.

The second is value: money. Money pays for the work. It funds a branch, pays the people doing the work, settles a supplier's invoice. What it never does is buy a say. A funder gets no vote by funding. A part of the organisation that brings in a great deal of revenue gets no extra weight in a forum because of it.

That one separation does most of the work in this chapter. Once money can fund without buying a say, the rest becomes a question of how to move money fairly, and how to stop it leaking power through the side door.

It's worth saying that this isn't a new idea. The economist Elinor Ostrom spent decades studying communities around the world that had looked after shared resources, fisheries, forests, irrigation systems, for generations, without either a private owner or a state in charge.² What made them last wasn't the absence of rules. It was rules made by the people affected, with clear boundaries, open monitoring and ways to settle disputes. The shared money of an organisation is a commons in exactly her sense. It can be governed well by the people who depend on it, if the rules are right.

The bloodstream

In an organisation on The Grove, revenue isn't split at the point where it's earned. It flows into the organisation's shared treasury, which we call the commons, and from there it's allocated by need.

The picture we keep coming back to is a bloodstream. The gut takes in food, but it doesn't keep the food for itself. It passes it into the blood, and the blood carries it to every part that needs it, including parts that never touch food at all. The part of the organisation that earns doesn't hoard what it earns. And the parts that earn nothing but are vital, the care, the sensing, the long view, are still fed.

So a branch that brings in revenue doesn't get richer or more powerful because of it. That can sound unfair at first, especially to the people in that branch. But consider the alternative. If each part kept what it earned, the organisation would become an internal market, and every part would be pushed to show a profit. The work that can't show a profit would be starved first, and it's often the work the whole depends on.

Money moves from the commons to a branch by a proposal, heard in the root's forum and raised by someone who sits in it. It's a bargain the forum strikes, never a parent's say handed down. And since 1 November 2026, a budget proposal carries its evidence with it: the branch's pressure to grow, the load of work it's carrying, and what the money is actually for. We added that after simulated runs showed allocations passing with nothing attached but an amount. A forum can't weigh a number on its own. It can weigh a reason.

A budget, not a wallet

The Grove doesn't hold the organisation's money or move it. The money stays in the organisation's own bank, and The Grove keeps the books beside it. Once money is allocated to a branch, it's a budget, not a wallet anyone can drain. Each payment is recorded against it, with a named payee.

A payment counts at once on the word of the person who records it, seen by everyone with its evidence, and any member can question it for a week. A questioned payment comes out of the books until it's settled. A second look, any other member's yes, is needed before it counts when there's no evidence attached, or when the amount is over a limit the organisation sets. There's no limit unless it sets one.

We've worked through a playbook for paying a supplier, and we're building towards it. A known payee, an amount under the ceiling, within budget: it goes through as routine. A new payee, changed bank details, or an amount over the ceiling: it goes to a proposal, and waits out a timelock before the money moves. An invoice never authorises its own payment, however official it looks.

This is where self-dealing gets stopped. We chose to put the gate in the payment layer rather than in the vote, because that's where money actually moves. A vote can be captured by a friendly forum. Once that playbook is built, a payment to a brand-new account, for an unusual amount, will get a pause and a second pair of eyes regardless of who approved what. Until then, the checks are the open week and the second look.

Pay, the floor and the dials

Pay is a share of what the work earned. Each period's profit is divided by dials the organisation agrees: hours given, roles held, contribution, and equal shares. The roles part follows the seat, not the person, so if you hand a role on, that part of the pay goes with it. Fixed stipends for roles are designed but not yet built.

Beneath that sits the floor: an equal amount for each member, each period, never earned by work. Its level is each organisation's own choice, set by a pay proposal, and it starts at nothing. Today it's paid from the period's profit, so a period with no profit pays no floor. We designed the floor to rest on presence alone and to be beyond any forum's vote. We're building towards that. As built, a pay proposal can set it to nothing. A small, early organisation may only manage a modest floor. What matters is that it doesn't depend on output.

Above the floor, an organisation sets one allocation, by a proposal in the root's forum: how much of each period's profit is kept for growth, how big the floor is, and how the rest is shared between hours given, roles held, contribution and equal shares. Until that proposal is agreed, nothing is paid. A share of the upside for those who built it is designed but not yet built. It's a set of dials, and where an organisation sets them shows where it sits. A lean, performance-minded organisation and a generous one run the same machinery with different settings. Neither has to pretend to be the other.

The contribution share, when an organisation turns it up, follows how peers see each person's contribution: recognition from peers and how the work turned out. Out of the box it's turned off, and everything is shared by hours given. It's never shared by revenue booked to a part of the organisation. Value added isn't the same thing as revenue generated. That's how the mentor, the carer and the person who saw the turn coming get paid something real, rather than nothing. And none of this becomes a ranking of people. Recognition is a thread through the work, not a league table.

Automating your own job

There's one case that tests all of this, and it's becoming common. What happens when you teach the AI to do your role?

In most organisations the honest answer is: you've just made yourself redundant. So people quietly don't. They keep the clever automation to themselves, or don't build it at all.

In an organisation on The Grove, automating your own role shouldn't fire you. We're building towards a taper: as the AI takes over, your share for that role tapers towards a lasting thread of recognition. The arithmetic is written and tested, but the running system doesn't use it yet. The pace of the taper is set by how much human oversight the role still needs, not by a clock and not by a vote. The floor, where an organisation sets one, holds you while you move into new work. And the saving goes back to the commons as a dividend, so the whole organisation benefits from what you built.

What can't be taken

Some value is locked to a purpose, and that lock holds even if every member agrees to break it. A locked asset is never sold, given away or written off. It can move between branches, still locked, and there's no unlock. And assets that people depend on, a home, a tool someone earns their living with, can't be disposed of unless the proposal says how each person who relies on them will land. The system checks that every landing is there. Whether it's good enough is for the forum and the people who depend on it.

Two quieter pieces of plumbing sit underneath. Members never pay transaction fees or handle cryptocurrency, and the organisation's money never passes through the blockchain at all. And we're building towards a way for outside capital to back the work: revenue-share tokens that are capped and retire once paid out, carrying no governance rights at all. Their rules are written and tested, but organisations can't issue them yet. An investor buys a share of the flow, not the stock. They get a return. They don't get a say.

Some of this is built and some isn't. The allocation's dials, the open week on payments and the purpose lock are built. The taper, fixed stipends, the supplier playbook, a floor no forum can vote away and the revenue-share tokens are designed but not yet built. None of it has been tested with real organisations. We expect some of it to change once it is.

How we decided

Our first model split revenue at the point of earning. It seemed fair and it was easy to explain: you earn it, your part keeps a share. When we looked harder, we saw it would create an internal market, and an internal market rewards what can be measured over what can't. The invisible work would lose every time. We corrected it, and moved to the commons and allocation by need.

We considered offering several pay schemes, one for each kind of organisation. We chose a single set of dials instead, so that organisations with very different temperaments could use the same system honestly, and so that their choices would be visible rather than buried in the scheme they happened to pick.

We kept allocation as a forum's decision rather than giving it to a treasurer. In any commons, allocation is where power gathers. Leave it with one person and you've rebuilt the boss, just with a different title.

And we chose to gate money in the payment layer, not in the vote. Votes matter, but self-dealing happens where money moves, so that's where we put the checks.

What's still uncertain is a lot. Whether a forum will weigh budget evidence well under real pressure. Whether a thin floor feels like security or like a gesture. Whether people will trust the taper enough to automate their own work. Those questions need real organisations, and real months, to answer.

What you might take from this

The rule that whoever pays decides isn't a law. It's a habit, built into most organisations by letting money and voice travel together. Separate them, run the money through a shared commons, and put the checks where money actually moves, and funding stops being a quiet route to power.

Money can fund the work without buying a say in it.

Notes and further reading

On how self-managing organisations have approached pay, transparency and the separation of money from hierarchy: Laloux, F. (2014), Reinventing Organizations, Nelson Parker. On economics that serves people and the living world rather than growth for its own sake: Raworth, K. (2017), Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist, Random House Business. On why rewards tied to performance can make thoughtful work worse, and what drives people instead: Pink, D. H. (2009), Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, Riverhead Books.